Dr. Mike Blyth is the Pediatric Consultant at ECWA Evangel Hospital in Jos, Nigeria. The following is cross-posted from his blog:

The happiest event of the week was learning on Friday that one of our HIV clinic patients, Mary S., was free of HIV. Not that she had been infected and cured, but rather that she tested negative for HIV. We had been following her from birth to an infected mother, giving her preventive treatment with an antibiotic (cotrimoxazole) in case she was infected, following her weight and development, and so on.

At birth, all babies of infected mothers will “test positive” for HIV antibodies because they have received the antibodies from the mother, whether or not they themselves have been infected. Normally we wait until 18 months to test the children for their own antibodies to HIV, to be sure that the mother’s antibodies have disappeared from the blood, but most uninfected babies will have negative antibody tests by one year.

Mary had progressed perfectly through her first year of life, with no serious illnesses and with a normal CD4 count, so I decided to test her at one year. The result was negative, a cause for celebration.

I’ve never talked with these mothers specifically about what it’s like to have to wait 18 months to learn whether their babies are infected, and indeed they seem to cope very well with the uncertainty. Still, I am sure it is hard, and since most babies will not be infected, this long period of uncertainty is unfortunate.

We are hoping that we will soon have access to tests that will allow us to know, within a few weeks of birth, whether a baby is infected. These tests are based on detecting the virus itself, by DNA or RNA, rather than the antibodies formed in response to an infection. That will not only help us to focus on the babies that are actually infected, but will greatly reduce the families’ wait to know the status of their child.

Meanwhile, it has been wonderful to see the progress of nearly all the 100 or so children now in our program. It is amazing to see the recoveries when the children start taking the anti-HIV and/or the anti-tuberculosis drugs. One hundred children is such a small number in view of the need, so we’re hoping that some of what we’re doing and learning will also contribute to the treatment of far greater numbers of children throughout Nigeria in the future.

Read more from Mike 's blog