HIV is evolving rapidly to escape the human immune system, an international study has shown.
The Nature study highlights just how tough it could be to develop a vaccine that keeps pace with the changing nature of the virus.
The researchers showed HIV was able to adapt rapidly to counter human genes controlling immune system molecules that can target it for destruction.
However, they stressed this would not affect the impact of anti-HIV drugs.
An HIV patient with leukemia appears to have no detectable traces of HIV in his blood after getting a transplant of stem cells from a donor carrying a rare gene variant known to resist the disease, according to a report published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The 42-year-old American living in Germany received the transplant to treat his leukemia, not the HIV itself.
But, it appears the transplant has wiped out the deadly disease.
Twenty-five years ago, a diagnosis of AIDS was a nearly immediate death sentence.
But now that patients with the AIDS virus are living longer, doctors are discovering a new set of complications: People with HIV have a much higher risk of developing certain cancers — lung, liver, head and neck, to name a few — and doctors fear a cancer epidemic among this group could be coming.
Researchers in Maryland, home to one of the nation’s largest AIDS populations per capita, are among the leaders in an effort to solve what has become something of a medical mystery.
SANTIAGO, Chile — Chile’s health minister said Thursday that the country’s public health system had failed to notify at least 512 people that they were infected with H.I.V., and that private-sector services did not inform an additional 1,364 that they were carrying the virus, which causes AIDS.
Speaking to lawmakers in Santiago, the health minister, Álvaro Erazo, said that in about half of the cases there was no evidence that anyone tried to reach the patients. “There is no justification for that,” Mr. Erazo told members of Chile’s Congress.
The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is a pathogen so wily and protean that researchers rarely talk about curing infected patients, focusing instead on treatment and prevention. But in an announcement that caused a flutter of excitement and a wave of prudent skepticism, Berlin-based hematologist Gero Huetter claimed on Thursday that he has cured an HIV infection in a 42-year-old man through a bone-marrow transplant.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Genetically engineered immune cells can spot the AIDS virus even when it tries to disguise itself, offering a potential new way to treat the incurable infection, researchers reported on Sunday.
The killer T-cells, dubbed “assassin” cells, were able to recognize other cells infected by HIV and slow the spread of the virus in lab dishes.
If the approach works in people, it might provide a new route of treating infection with the deadly human immunodeficiency virus, the researchers in the United States and Britain said.
Male circumcision has been shown to protect men from acquiring H.I.V. infection during sex with women — it has reduced female-to-male transmission rates by 48% to 60% in sub-Saharan Africa — but that protective effect appears less reliable among men who have sex with men, according to a new meta-analysis published Oct. 7 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (J.A.M.A.).
The review is the most comprehensive analysis of the subject to date. It encompasses data from 15 studies conducted in seven countries, involving more than 53,000 men, most of whom were Caucasian and approximately half of whom were circumcised. The authors concluded that being circumcised reduced a man’s risk of acquiring H.I.V. by 14%. That finding was statistically nonsignificant, but the authors say it should be regarded as a launching point for future trials. “This study gives us a more complete picture than we’ve ever had before,” says Gregorio Millett, the study’s lead author and a senior behavioral scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). “The next step is to design better quality studies to see if there is an association we aren’t detecting.”
The rate of HIV infection among injecting drug users appears to be rising, researchers say.
The report, published in the British medical journal The Lancet, says 3m self-injecting drug users worldwide could now be HIV-positive.
In nine countries, more that 40% of drug users were infected.
The authors are concerned about the lack of data from Africa and say the risk factors that have helped spread HIV in this way exist on the continent.
There are 33 million people infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) worldwide with 25 million lives having been claimed by it. There is still no cure and no vaccine available for the prevention of HIV although there are drugs that can help control the infection.
The last stage of HIV infection is AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome). The AIDS virus is transmitted in bodily fluids such as blood, semen and breast milk with sexual contact being the most common method of transmission. The use of contaminated needles and blood transfusions can also cause infection.
