Posted on 03/18/2005 6:21:08 AM PST by Mother Abigail
March 18, 2005
Rare AIDS Strain Is Very Aggressive, Study Says
By MARC SANTORA
A genetic study of a rare strain of AIDS that led New York City health officials to issue a public warning last month will be published today, allowing experts from around the world to more accurately evaluate the scientific basis of the alert.
The study, appearing in The Lancet, a medical journal, shows the virus to be resistant to nearly all licensed drugs and particularly aggressive. Most of the study's details were disclosed earlier during an AIDS conference in Boston. The report is based on the work of a team of researchers from the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in Manhattan led by Dr. David D. Ho and Dr. Martin Markowitz.
There has been debate about the importance of the discovery of the rare strain since the city went public with the case on Feb. 11, with some scientists saying that a single case did not warrant much concern. Some gay activist groups also reacted skeptically, saying public health officials exploited the case to scare gay men into practicing safe sex.
The City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has repeatedly defended its decision, but has remained silent about how its investigation is proceeding. For a month, investigators have been working to track down the sexual partners of the man infected with the strain, a difficult job because he does not know the names of many of his partners.
Health workers took more than a dozen blood samples from people believed to have had sex with the man, according to one official involved in the case. They are testing those samples to determine if the virus was transmitted to others, but testing is not complete, the official said.
The case involves a gay man in his late 40's who tested positive for H.I.V. in December. The virus was resistant to nearly every drug treatment and progressed rapidly from infection to fully developed AIDS.
The man last tested negative for H.I.V. in May 2003 and was said to have engaged in unprotected sex with multiple partners in the fall of 2004 while he was using crystal methamphetamine. The man had developed AIDS by January, meaning that he had been infected for as long as 20 months or, according to the scientists familiar with how the virus progresses, as little as 4 months.
On average, it takes 10 years to develop AIDS after infection, but some people develop AIDS after about 20 years, and others within a year or so.
Drug resistance and rapid progression of the virus have both been seen at different times, but the intersection of the two is what the scientists found alarming. "The public health ramifications of such a case are great," the scientists wrote in the journal. Specifically, the genetic study of the virus shows it to be particularly effective at penetrating the human immune cells by being able to latch onto its target at two separate places, called receptors, on the cell's surface. Typically, the virus latches onto only one receptor.
In an accompanying editorial, The Lancet commented, "This case serves as a reminder that H.I.V. remains a frighteningly versatile foe, one that can mutate to escape immune attack or to acquire drug resistance with surprising speed."
Yet, curiously, although infections can happen with heterosexual anal sex, AID does not.
I do believe that in both cases, that is acurate.
btt
"This is the new CIA contrived edition"
Ahh...but who pushed the recombination?
What year was Reagan elected in again? I saw a case in '79 that was hush, hush...hidden in an annex. The patient was a male prostitute.
They pinpointed who that was?
The Appalling Saga of Patient Zero
A stunning book traces the mishandling of the AIDS epidemic
By WILLIAM A. HENRY III
Oct. 19, 1987 Club Baths, San Francisco, November 1982 . . . When the moaning stopped, the young man rolled over on his back for a cigarette. Gaetan Dugas reached up for the lights, turning up the rheostat slowly so his partner's eyes would have time to adjust. He then made a point of eyeing the purple lesions on his chest. " Gay cancer," he said, almost as if he were talking to himself. " Maybe you'll get it too." -- Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On Since the early days of the AIDS epidemic, researchers have reasoned that a handful of people -- maybe even a single individual -- bore the unknowing responsibility...
http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,965791,00.html
The Columbus of AIDS - Gaetan Dugas said to be first to bring AIDS to U.S
National Review, Nov 6, 1987
The Columbus of AIDS
GAETAN DUGAS, a handsome French-Canadian airline steward, seems to have won the honor of being the first man to bring IADS to the American continent, according to an impressively researched new book by Randy Shilts, himself a gay, entitled And the Band Played On (St. Martin's). There is much that is important about this book, involving as it does the etiology of the epidemic, the ideological coverups among gay spokesmen and organizations, and federal policy.
Shilts's research has been examined, and its results confirmed, by Professor Marcus Conant of the University of California at San Francisco, who, however, advises that if Dugas had not introduced the virus here, some other homosexual undoubtedly would have.
Dugas, known to medical researchers as "Patient Zero,' picked up the disease in Europe through sexual contact with Africans. Traveling on his airline-employee privileges, he spread it here from coast to coast, through sexual practices that involved some 250 partners a year. Even after he was diagnosed in 1980 as communicating a possibly fatal sexual disease, he refused to restrict his sexual activity, claiming he could do what he wanted with his own body. Toward the end he showed his bath-house sexual partners his purplish Kaposi's sarcomas. "Gay cancer. Maybe you'll get it,' he would say. Dugas died in 1984.
AIDS's primary tie is to homosexuality, as one of NR's editors somberly reflected while witnessing thousands of gays protesting in Washington last week. But there's more to it than that. Presumably two homosexual men, in a long-term monogamous relationship, would not be especially liable either to contract or to spread the disease. AIDS is connected with promiscuity, of the sort that figures in the sexual career of Dugas. Yet promiscuity is part of the standard behavior of a great many homosexuals, though data are sketchy.
In 1980, public health specialists were worried about the spread of such venereal diseases as gonorrhea, syphilis, and herpes--a direct result of the so-called Sexual Revolution. Medical researchers wondered what would happen if a new element were dropped into the disease equation. Now they know.
COPYRIGHT 1987 National Review, Inc
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_n21_v39/ai_6127114
JUST ANOTHER LIE
UNITED STATES:
"AIDS Alert Draws Criticism"
Newsday (02.13.05)::Kathleen Kerr
On Saturday, New York health officials were criticized as having acted too hastily in alerting the public that an antiretroviral-naive city resident recently contracted HIV resistant to three ARV drug classes and quickly progressed to AIDS.
Just one case "was not enough to warrant a public health alert," said Dr. Robert Gallo, a leading virologist at University of Maryland. "It's irresponsible and outrageous. We've already heard past claims about superviruses that all turn out to be nonsense. From the science, I would say the probability is very high that you won't see this virus again," he said. Gallo noted that other HIV patients have quickly developed AIDS before responding to treatment and said that officials should have waited to see if a cluster of cases similar to the man's developed.
Asked whether the city overreacted, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said: "We have first and foremost a responsibility to educate the public as to what they can do to save their lives."
Gallo's remarks are "a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of public health," said Dr. Thomas Frieden, commissioner of New York's health department. "This has occurred in a man who was using crystal [methamphetamine] and probably got it from somebody he had sex with." Since the infected man had unprotected sex with numerous partners, Frieden said the city could not wait to see if a cluster emerged.
_____
The man behind the NY Super virus scare
Ho, meanwhile, was coming under heavy criticism."When I first heard this, I said, Holy shitthere is no evidence, says Dr. Robert
Gallo, an eminent virologist. ?Clearly, conclusively, scientifically, it was inappropriate to make that statement.
Gallo and other leading figures in the field including Dr. Tony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases believe the new case report, while unfortunate for the patient, is likely a statistically predictable outlier.
Unfortunately, according to data generated by Ho's institute, drug-resistant HIV is now commonplace: Nearly 30 percent of newly
diagnosed HIV cases are resistant to at least one AIDS drug, and 11 percent are resistant to drugs in two or more drug classes.
In much of the criticism, there was an undercurrent of resentment toward Ho. Many saw the announcement as grandstanding. Michael
Petrelis, an AIDS activist and blogger from San Francisco, fanned the flames with revelations about Ho's links to Frieden (who sits on
the Aaron Diamond Board of Directors) and the San Francisco laboratory that does the resistance testing, ViroLogic (as a scientific adviser, he receives a stipend and stock options).
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