Headline buries the lede. Antiretovirals often do nowadays result in no viral load. But not for people who stopped therapeutics.
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2025
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Did we read the same article? The point is that for some people it resulted in no viral load even without drugs over a prolonged time.
In a study published last year, Goulder described how all five remained in remission, despite having not received regular antiretroviral medication for some time, and in one case, up to 17 months. In the decadeslong search for an HIV cure, this offered a tantalizing insight: that the first widespread success in curing HIV might not come in adults, but in children.
Instead, like Goulder, pediatricians have increasingly noticed that after starting antiretroviral treatment early in life, a small subpopulation of children then seem able to suppress HIV for months, years, and perhaps even permanently with their immune system alone.
Just pasting the relevant bit:
After putting the children on antiretroviral drugs early in their lives to control the virus, Goulder and his colleagues were keen to monitor their progress and adherence to standard antiretroviral treatment, which stops HIV from replicating. But over the following decade, something unusual happened. Five of the children stopped coming to the clinic to collect their drugs, and when the team eventually tracked them down many months later, they appeared to be in perfect health.
“Instead of their viral loads being through the roof, they were undetectable,” says Goulder. “And normally HIV rebounds within two or three weeks.”