New Strain of HIV

In an alarming new discovery, a woman who hails from Cameroon, a nation in Africa, was recently diagnosed with a new strain of HIV that has researchers and scientists scrambling to find the source. Currently, there are three known strains of this virus, all of which are related to a simian version of the virus that chimpanzees sometimes carry. According to a new report published in the journal “Nature Medicine, this new strain seems to resemble a form of the simian virus that was recently documented in wild gorillas.

Jean-Christophe Plantier who comes from the French University of Rouen states that this new discovery “highlights the continuing need to watch closely for the emergence for new HIV variants, particularly in western central Africa.” Plantier and his team believe that the new strain is a product of a transmission from gorilla to human; however, as this is just a theory, they also speculate that the new strain could also have been the by-product of a transmission from chimpanzees to gorillas to humans or a transmission from chimpanzees to both gorillas and humans around the same time.

The subject of this new strain is a 62-year-old woman who was tested and declared HIV-positive in 2004. She had just made the move from Cameroon (near the capital city of Yaounde) to Paris. When interviewed, the patient stated that she never came into contact with gorillas (or any other apes) or bush meat (wild animal meat). While she is HIV-positive, the virus has not transformed to full-blown AIDS and she currently receives no treatment for the virus.

As she is the first known case of this new strain, the researchers do not know if this strain has become widespread yet. They theorize that other cases exist in Cameroon or nearby areas since one portion of their research determined that the virus seems to have adapted to human cells which is evidenced by its ability to replicate quickly.

In a separate but related study also found in “Nature Medicine,” researchers have some bad news for those people living with genital herpes. Their studies determined that those who are infected with genital herpes have a higher risk of contracting HIV not only when they have visible sores, but even once the sores have completely healed and the area appears to be sore-free. The research was headed by Dr. Jia Zhu and Dr. Lawrence Corey from Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. In their research, it was realized that even after a flare-up of herpes sores has subsided and the skin looks to be clear, the area where the sores had existed has an immune-cell activity that gives the person an increased risk of contracting HIV.

Researchers had previously believed that those with genital herpes had a higher risk of contracting HIV because during an outbreak, the skin can form several lesions with breaks which would allow HIV an easier entryway; however, in a separate study, it was determined that even amongst those patients with genital herpes that were treated with drugs, there was no difference in terms of HIV risk when compared to those not treated with drugs. In this study, the researchers did several tests of the skin area of patients whose sores had already healed over; in the many weeks after the skin had healed, that skin had up to 37 times more immune cells remaining in the area compared to regular skin. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, states, “Understanding that even treated (herpes) infections provide a cellular environment conducive to HIV infection suggests new directions for HIV prevention research.”