

Mississippi Child Thought Cured of HIV Shows Signs of Infection - esalazar
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/07/10/330538734/mississippi-child-thought-cured-of-hiv-shows-signs-of-infection?ft=1&f=1001

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xanadohnt
"But blood tests showed that the baby had an active HIV infection. The virus
had emerged from some mysterious hiding place in her body." Could the child
not have just simply been re-infected? The mother has a demonstrated history
of lacking healthy habits.

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pdkl95
"mysterious hiding place"

Mysterious? Do they not understand what a _retrovirus_ is?

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dekhn
Nono, the point is that viruses like HIV infect a tiny subset of cells and
"hide out" there. I think you're referring to genomic integration, and they're
referring to cell type.

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PhantomGremlin
In the mid 20th century the polio virus was a serious health problem. But then
came several different simple vaccines. They were highly effective, and polio
quickly disappeared.

Now, after 50 years of incredible advances in medicine, we're still struggling
to eradicate HIV. Incredibly tenacious bugger, isn't it?

~~~
sdrothrock
Isn't everything? I don't think we've completely eradicated ANYTHING other
than smallpox.

~~~
mikeash
It's a different problem, though. The solution to polio is known, and has been
for decades. It's just ("just") a problem with implementation. Given
sufficient resources, not all that much really, and polio could be gone in a
year.

HIV, on the other hand, still has no cure nor vaccine. Even given, say, the
entire GDP of the United States put towards solving it, there's no guarantee
it could be wiped out.

~~~
serge2k
HIV has very preventable transmission.

Given resources properly allocated you could potentially drastically lower the
transmission rate.

~~~
mikeash
Indeed, but i think it would be really hard to actually eliminate it entirely.
Infected people can still live for decades with it and slip-ups happen,
especially if the disease becomes much more rare and people stop thinking
about it. In contrast, most of us will never be able to contract polio no
matter what we do, because we're immunized.

~~~
hga
There are also occasionally mass casualty events where some of the rigorous
safety protocols are ignored in favor of saving lives. My home town of 55K was
hit by an EF5 tornado, killing ~155, hospitalizing over 1,000, with I don't
know how many outpatient wounded. And it trashed one of our two hospitals....

Read [http://stormdoctor.blogspot.com/2011/06/first-response-
mode-...](http://stormdoctor.blogspot.com/2011/06/first-response-mode-
may-22-2011-joplin.html) for the ugly details, the relevant parts are:

" _Almost all patients were covered in some form of debris which tended to
accumulate in skin folds or in the ears or mouth. On more than one occasion,
shards of glass cut my gloves (but thankfully, never me). The floor was
covered in so much blood in places, that it was a matter of throwing down
towels to minimize the risk of slipping and falling. All my career I’d been
trained about fluid precautions to avoid transmission of disease, yet in
Joplin that night, the ER was a fine mist of all kinds of fluids—infectious
and non—and the only thing that mattered was forward motion._ "

Finished with an intense shift in ER, on his way to deal with uninjured
patients evacuated from the other hospital:

" _[...] then we hit the waiting room. There were hundreds of people, blood on
every surface, bandages outnumbered clothes...._ "

And there were other places probably like that, e.g. lots of the personal of
the other hospital set up operations in one of our main event venues.

~~~
sdrothrock
> There are also occasionally mass casualty events where some of the rigorous
> safety protocols are ignored in favor of saving lives.

This is an old comment now, but I remembered it when I read about the Ebola
specialist contracting Ebola. It just goes to show that bad things can happen
even to experienced experts in the field.

