AIDS Cured In Newborn

A baby in Mississippi appears to have been cured of AIDS!  As with any extraordinary claim, they’ll need to get some backup to see if it’s actually true or not, but what a breakthrough if it’s true!

If it’s true, this will be only the second human to have successfully been cured of AIDS.  The first was a man in Germany who got a bone marrow transplant in 2007 from another man who had an HIV resistant mutation.  Obviously, that needs to be taken with a grain of salt as well.

Some things that I didn’t know.  The United States has been very successful at limiting the transmission of HIV from mother to child through pregnancy and birth.  Thanks to a wonderful prenatal medicine operation, only 200 children a year are born HIV positive in the U.S.  Compare that to the rest of the world where there are more than 300,000.

Prenatal medicine is vastly important.  Medicaid is a primary source of prenatal medicine funding for poor people.  Think about that if you think we should cut Medicaid.