According to scientists if HIV-infected infants are given therapy early on, regardless of whether they are healthy at present, their chances of survival drastically increase.

Hundreds of thousands of babies around the world are born each year with HIV--more than half a million in 2006 alone. Caring for these children is complicated by the fact that their immune systems are not fully developed in the first year of life, which makes them especially susceptible to rapid HIV disease progression and death.

The current standard of HIV care in many parts of the world is to treat infants with antiretroviral therapy--but only after they show signs of illness or a weakened immune system. Now the initial results of an ongoing clinical trial sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), suggests that more HIV-infected infants survive if they are given therapy early on.

This trial, called the “Children with HIV Early Antiretroviral Therapy” (CHER) study, is a phase III, randomized clinical trial led by Avy Violari, M.D., FCPaed (SA), of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and Mark Cotton, MBChB, MMed, of the University of Stellenbosch in Cape Town, South Africa.

Dr. Violari will present these findings on Wednesday, July 25 at the 2007 International AIDS Society Conference in Sydney, Australia. “Children with HIV infection frequently show rapid disease progression within the first year of life due to their developing immune systems and susceptibility to other serious infections,” says NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D. “This is the first randomized clinical trial that shows that infants treated before three months of age will do better than infants who have their treatment delayed.”