New AIDS Strain

[aztecking6010]

I read just recently that there is a new AIDS strain that the government doesnt want the public to know about. This new strain is total unsecepible to medication and treatment and that it is affecting a substantial amount of people. What makes me mad is that the government knows but doesnt want the public to find out for fear of mass histeria. I guess they believe if they dont talk about it ...it will go away. That is total and irreconcileable crapola.Any responses

[Jodie.Lynne]

any sources, other than just "I heard..."?

[Angelofmercy]

i did hear about this too, can't remember where though

I think it's happening in NY. However, it's not attacking lots of people. It's just 2-3 people who have passed this strain onto each other.

I don't think it's that big a deal and the gov't isn't hiding it from us, i will try to find a link, but i think it was in a newspaper

[Angelofmercy]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/artic...-2005Feb24.html

Drug-Resistant AIDS Case Remains a Puzzle

By David Brown

Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, February 25, 2005; Page A10

BOSTON -- The mystery of the rapidly progressing case of drug-resistant AIDS in New York City remained unsolved yesterday despite the attention of several thousand AIDS researchers from around the world.

The physicians investigating the case offered a few new details to researchers attending the 12th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, the annual midwinter AIDS meeting in the United States.

Experts in drug-resistance and rapid-progression in AIDS provided data from other studies showing that whatever else it may be, the unnamed gay New Yorker's experience is very rare. However, it is clear that only further study, particularly of the man's sexual partners, will reveal whether he is carrying a "super strain" of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), as some people fear.

Two weeks ago, New York City's health commissioner, Thomas R. Frieden, announced that a gay man in his forties had been found infected with HIV resistant to three of the four families of antiretroviral drugs. He was suffering from advanced AIDS, but had become infected at most 20 months -- and possibly only three months -- earlier. In either case, his decline was unusually rapid, as most people carry the virus for eight to 10 years before progressing to his advanced stage.

"The investigation is ongoing and will most likely continue for many weeks," said Lucia Torian, New York's director of HIV surveillance and epidemiology.

The man has given health department investigators names of his sex partners -- the number is "in the teens," Torian said -- and about two-thirds have been contacted. The investigators are asking them to get HIV tests or, if they know they are infected, to have the virus in their blood tested for drug resistance. She would not provide any results to date.

In addition, she said, Frieden will soon send letters to six large commercial labs, and several smaller ones, that do most of the country's HIV testing and request that they report to his department all samples of multi-drug resistant virus drawn from New York City residents. Health regulations give Frieden this power during disease outbreaks. The order will run through May 31, and can be extended, Torian said.

At the meeting yesterday, David D. Ho, head of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center, said the patient believed he was infected in the third week of October after having unprotected *spam filter* with several men. In early November, he was fatigued, had a sore throat and malaise, which are often seen immediately after HIV infection. In late December, his CD4-cell count was 80 (down from the normal count of about 650), and by early this month he had lost 10 pounds -- both signs of advanced AIDS.

In a symposium hurriedly added to the conference schedule, a Johns Hopkins researcher named Stephen Gange said that records from a large group of gay men observed since the late 1980s showed that in seven out of 10,000 cases, a person developed AIDS within six months of infection -- as would be happening here if the man became infected last fall.

What is not known is whether the explanation for the rapid decline lies in the patient or the virus -- or some combination of both. Ho told the group the patient has none of the obvious immunological defects or quirks that can make HIV infection progress rapidly, but that subtle "host" abnormalities have not been ruled out.

If it turns out the man infected other people -- or that others were infected with the same strain when he was -- and their health is rapidly worsening, that will be strong evidence the virus is unusually virulent and dangerous, doctors say.

[Angelofmercy]

http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9806/30/aids.resistance/

New drug-resistant AIDS strain spreading, doctors warn

June 30, 1998

Web posted at: 10:08 p.m. EDT (0208 GMT)

GENEVA (CNN) -- Doctors reported for the first time Wednesday the ominous spread of a strain of the AIDS virus that is resistant to protease inhibitors, the medicines that have revolutionized care of the disease.

At the 12th International AIDS Conference, San Francisco doctors reported one new infection with a highly resistant virus. A Swiss team said it has seen several more. No one knows yet how frequently these strains are spreading.

AIDS viruses impervious to AZT and other, older AIDS medicines have long circulated. But now people are beginning to catch viruses that are also resistant to protease inhibitors, which are the pivotal ingredients of the drug cocktails that have made AIDS a survivable disease.

The infections will almost certainly be difficult and perhaps impossible to treat, at least with the medicines on the market now.

"This is a wake-up call to people who assume that since we have adequate therapy, if they get infected they will be easily treated," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

"It's like going back to the early 1980s when we had no therapy, because when a virus is resistant to everything, it's just like it was when we had no therapy."

The San Francisco case was described by Dr. Frederick Hecht of the University of California, San Francisco. A report on it will be published later this month in the New England Journal of Medicine.

"What happened here is somebody who was on therapy and who was not properly treated, (was) inconsistently treated, developed a resistant virus and transmitted this virus to another person," said Tom Coates of the UCSF AIDS Research Institute.

The new patient, a middle-aged San Francisco man, caught the virus last fall. He was infected by a man whose own infection was diagnosed in 1990 and had taken many different AIDS drugs on and off, including protease inhibitors.

The San Francisco man's virus is resistant to four different protease inhibitors as well as the drugs AZT and 3TC.

Hecht said doctors first became concerned about the patient after he responded much more slowly than usual to drug treatment. The man stopped therapy entirely after learning his virus was resistant, but he is still healthy.

The Swiss cases were reported at the conference by Dr. Sabine Yerly and others from University Hospital in Geneva.

Since the beginning of treatment with three-drug cocktails, doctors have been concerned about the spread of resistant strains. Following the regimen means taking 15 or 20 pills a day on a precise schedule, and missing even a few doses allows mutant viruses resistant to protease inhibitors to emerge.

Another AIDS expert cautions that the appearance of the resistant strain is not a cause for panic.

"It's happening but it's rare, and it would be wrong to say that this is a rampant phenomenon. It's not, but it's the beginning," said Dr. David Ho of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center.

[DarkSinister]

Bad news... hopefully this doesn't become an epedemic.

[Guest Lottie]

Surely its like anything. Sooner or later viruses become immune to drugs and change their structures etc, this is not really that suprising.

I know that alot of HIV in the past has been passed through blood transfusions. However it suprises me that people even now are so blase about this deadly virus. Maybe its time to bring back the AID's Campaigns from the 80's.

Wear a condom and don't take unneccesary risks!

Edited March 13, 2005 by Lottie

[jessicalawes11]

Scary. Aids scares me because you can't cure it properly. They make a vaccine, and it changes so that vaccine won't work anymore.

[__Kratos__]

Is there any source or evidence to your claim? If so would you please post it for us all to see?

[absinthegreen329]

Scary. Aids scares me because you can't cure it properly. They make a vaccine, and it changes so that vaccine won't work anymore.

523845[/snapback]

There is no vaccine for AIDS, or HIV

If you have HIV, they can put you on a drug cocktail to suppress it, but that's about it.

Edited March 14, 2005 by absinthegreen329

[aztecking6010]

the bad thing with the cocktail however is that even though it suppreses the disease it gives you chronic diarrhea, stomach aches, low immunity, and like the new aids strain suggests, will become noneffective, thats crap. And by the way i think that one of the other members that read the article posted some pretty good articles about this exact topic, so read away

[Yona]

Wow, that sucks, but I know one thing that might take care of aids spreading all together. Remember leper colonies? I think we sould by a country somewhere, and every six months, everybody is tested for aids, and when someone is found with it, they ship them over to this island,country, whatever. in ten years, there would be little to no aids left.

[riotboy555]

i don't think the government is trying to cover this up. i saw it on CNN and other tip news stations on the tv.

and Yona, that's a smart idea.

[Yona]

Thanks, but I didn't invent the thought, I merely eloborated on the premise of a leper colony, but instead, an AIDS colony.