Experts have identified a second case of a person's self-recovery from HIV infection.
After infection, HIV produces its copies and embeds them in the DNA of the patient. In this way, the virus creates a kind of reservoir, allowing HIV to hide from treatment.
Experts were analyzing HIV among patients at Massachusetts TI when they did not find HIV in the human genome in one of the girls. The so-called "Esperanza patient," named after her hometown in Argentina, was first diagnosed with HIV-1 in 2013. But after eight years of further tests and a total of 10 commercial viral load tests, signs of active viral infection in her body probably completely disappeared. This indicates that the patient's immune system was able to eliminate the HIV reservoir on its own.
Scientists also examined millions of the patient's cells to look for sequences that could lead to the formation of new strains of HIV. But they couldn't find anything.