STDs and Their Effect on HIV Infection Rates

With a war taking place, gas prices going through the roof, people losing their homes left and right and a heated presidential election right around the corner sabotaging the daily news reels, it is easy to lose sight of other important issues that are still critical to millions of people around the world. In fact, only one month ago, the International AIDS Conference took place in Mexico City where participants learned about new scientific research and spoke on the challenges of responding globally to the AIDS crisis. As one who watches and reads the news quite frequently, I do not recollect hearing any major headline on this very important event. No doubt it was glossed over due to more important issues like which celebrity was sporting the latest baby bump.

One of the more recent developments to be issued concerning the HIV epidemic concerns its relation to other sexually transmitted diseases like chlamydia, gonorrhea, genital herpes and syphilis. According to studies conducted, those people who are currently afflicted with these sexually transmitted diseases are at a heightened risk of also becoming infected with HIV through sexual relations to somebody who is an HIV carrier. As if that was not scary enough, even women who are battling a bacterial or yeast infection at the time of exposure to HIV through sexual relations has an increased risk of contracting the virus. Despite extensive research into why these specific sexually transmitted diseases and vaginal infections would cause the increased risk of contracting HIV through sexual contact, there has not been a definitive explanation that scientists and researchers can agree on.

However, lead researcher Teunis B.H. Geijtenbeek and other colleagues at VU University Medical Center in the Netherlands may have pinpointed how these sexually transmitted diseases increase the risk of a person acquiring HIV-1. Their research used an “ex vivo human skin explant model” which helped them come to their recent conclusions and which they anticipate to help in further research in preventing HIV transmission. In their ex vivo human skin explant model, they focused on cells called the Langerhans cells or LCs. Langerhans cells are essentially the immune cells that have not yet matured. In their extensive studies, they demonstrated that while these LCs did get HIV, they were not able to effectively pass on this virus to the T cells. Transmission of the virus to the T cells is vital in HIV transforming into the full disease.

On the other hand, if these Langerhans cells were affected by outside stimuli that were inflammatory, the LCs were able to effectively transmit the virus. This explains how STDs can affect the infection rate of HIV. Consider the fact that sexually transmitted diseases like gonorrhea and thrush were able to activate those outside inflammatory stimuli in both the skin and vaginal explants. Researchers have thus deduced that when an STD agent is present in a patient, this causes the Langerhans cells to be activated and, in turn, increases the patient’s chance of acquiring HIV. In addition, this research proposes that anti-inflammatory medications and therapies may help in preventing the transmission of HIV.