The Latest in HIV Treatment… Breast Milk?!

No wonder babies are so happy all the time. Cheery little AIDS-immune monsters.

Breast milk has been known to have anti-viral properties for a while, but researchers were wondering whether this applied to HIV. So, they made mice with human bone marrow, liver and thymus issue (let’s not linger on the creepy implications of that, shall we?) and infected them with HIV.

One problem: in all cases where they attempted to infect the rodents with HIV in breast milk, they didn’t get infected.

If you were wondering how fifteen percent of children born to female AIDS sufferers get HIV, the short answer is they’re exposed to their mother’s blood in some other way.

This is big news, though. First of all, that lady in your office calling herself a lactivist is never going to shut up about this. Secondly, it means that there’s some property in breast milk we haven’t identified that may prevent HIV transmission.

In other words, a major step for the cure to HIV can be found in boobs. Hooray for boobs!

image courtesy baskyes on Flickr

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