US HIV baby 'cured' by early drug treatment

A baby girl in the US born with HIV appears to have been cured after very early treatment with standard drug therapy, doctors say.

The Mississippi child is now two-and-a-half years old and has been off medication for about a year with no signs of infection.

More testing needs to be done to see if the treatment - given within hours of birth - would work for others.

If the girl stays healthy, it would be the world's second reported 'cure'.

Dr Deborah Persaud, a virologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, presented the findings at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Atlanta.

"This is a proof of concept that HIV can be potentially curable in infants," she said.