Time Magazine’s 2013 listing of the 100 most influential people in the world included two Filipinos: President Benigno Aquino and Dr. Katherine Luzuriaga, a pediatric immunologist from the University of Massachusetts.
And yet, despite the groundbreaking impact of her work, she remains largely unacknowledged in her own country.
Luzuriaga —whose father is Filipino and who still does, in fact, speak Filipino— was part of an all-woman medical team acknowledged for the first cure of a baby with Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), the cause of AIDS.
The cured baby was born in Mississippi more than two years ago to a mother who had HIV but was not diagnosed until she had gone into labor. The mother apparently did not have prenatal care because if she did, she would have been diagnosed early and given three drugs to prevent the fetus from being infected.
In this case, the child was first given the drugs 30 hours after she was born. Right before being given the medicines, the baby was tested for HIV, the results of which came back positive. Within the first month of therapy, tests could no longer find the virus. However, doctors kept the child on the drugs, standard practice in the United States and developed countries because of the possibility of reservoirs or “hideouts” for the virus that allow it to continue to replicate.
With time though, the mother began to become irregular with her hospital visits for her child. When the child was brought in for a check-up around the age of two, the mother admitted that the child had missing out on the drugs. Yet when tests were conducted, the child’s HIV levels still remained undetectable, which means a “functional cure”.
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