The discovery of a new HIV AIDS type demonstrates that the virus may mutate to become more dangerous and spread.
The results, which were published on Thursday in the journal Science, show how HIV may change to cause more severe illness and faster transmission.
Even after 100 years of infecting humans, HIV still has the ability to evolve and change, says Joel Wertheim, an associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the study but wrote a commentary on the findings, which was also published in Science on Thursday.
The hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 is growing milder has been debunked.
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Soda and goats
The hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 is growing milder has been debunked.
In the era of COVID variations, the research serves as a warning that viruses don’t necessarily degrade with time. “The potential for viral evolution should never be underestimated,” Wertheim argues. Let this research stand in sharp contrast to the idea that all viruses will eventually develop into benign forms.
A new discovery that is spreading like wildfire
A strange group of samples led to the finding of the HIV variant.
Chris Wymant, the study’s lead author and a senior researcher at the University of Oxford’s Big Data Institute, noticed something interesting in a database for the BEEHIVE project, which collects HIV samples from Uganda and several European countries to help scientists understand how the virus is evolving.
According to him, there was a recent cluster of 17 samples that revealed a lot of odd mutations, 15 of which originated from the Netherlands.
Wymant and his co-authors were curious, so they looked into another Dutch study that had additional information. They uncovered a total of 109 people with this variation who had no idea they had it, going back to 1992. According to Wymant, the variety first appeared in the late 1980s, gained traction around 2000, and then slowed around 2010.
This variation has a viral load that is three to four times greater than the average HIV patient. This property causes the virus to grow twice as quickly into severe sickness, as well as making it more infectious, according to Wymant.
The good news is that existing drugs may effectively cure even the most virulent varieties, such as this one, thus minimising transmission and the risk of severe sickness, according to him.
“There’s no need to be concerned,” Wymant argues. “It reacts to therapy in the same way as HIV does.”
He goes on to say that no particular therapy is required for this variety. It displays no symptoms of drug resistance, as several HIV strains do. However, since the variation spreads swiftly, patients must undergo treatment as soon as possible.
How can the variation be slowed down?
Adeeba Kamarulzaman, president of the International AIDS Society and professor of medicine at the University of Malaya, who was not involved in the study, says it was “nicely done” and “well-designed.”
She also points out that it helps to solve a crucial topic in HIV research. Researchers have questioned whether how people’s immune systems react to the virus causes them to become worse or more infectious. Individual reactions are part of it, but not all, according to the research. It may also happen if a virus develops to create more severe sickness and readier transmission.
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A mutation like this, Kamarulzaman says, might occur elsewhere. If a large proportion of HIV patients in a given location have this mutation but aren’t taking treatment, she adds, “you’re going to have a lot more individuals with advanced illness a lot faster.”
To avoid this, “early tests or regular testing and prompt beginning of medication is the way to go,” she explains. The objective isn’t to find a particular variety, but to detect new HIV infections as quickly as possible so that treatment can begin. However, certain nations are still having difficulty doing so, and they need further assistance, she says.
That’s how, in the Netherlands, this version slowly slowed down before researchers even noticed it.
Even though we didn’t know it existed, Wymant says, “the public health intervention that’s been rolled out and expanded in the Netherlands over the last decade or so—improving access to treatments, getting people tested as soon as possible, getting them on treatment as soon as possible—has helped reduce the numbers of this variant.”
Rapid treatment also helps to reduce viral evolution, reducing the likelihood of variations like this emerging.
“This does not need a shift in approach,” Wertheim argues. “All that implies is that we need to do even more of what we’re currently doing.”
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source: npr
