Word: hiv
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...problem, of course, is that HIV takes no such breaks. When the pills stop, the virus roars back--except sometimes it doesn't. Last week researchers at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center reported on four patients who started taking cocktail therapy early and then took a cocktail break. In two of the patients, the virus rebounded and remained at high levels until they went back on their medications. But in the other two, intriguingly, the virus spiked briefly and then went into hiding--staying below detectable levels for at least 14 months...
While patients like these are rare, their cases raise interesting questions. Could it be that the HIV spikes function as booster shots, priming the body's immune system to rally against the virus? Already, several aids-research teams have begun systematically weaning a few patients off their cocktail therapies to see whether the brief drug holidays might somehow be stretched into a permanent vacation...
Nobody is saying the scientists who presented their findings at the big retrovirus conference in Chicago last week had anything but the noblest of intentions. Their target was HIV, the AIDS virus, and their focus was on its smallest victims: babies born to infected mothers. Doctors knew that months of intravenous drug treatment during pregnancy can keep HIV from passing from mother to child, but the $1,000-a-day regimen is out of the question in Third World countries, where basic medical care and even clean drinking water are hard to come by. So the researchers launched a study...
Scientists from the U.N. AIDS Program, which organized the experiment, argue that the situations are hardly comparable. Yes, an anti-HIV treatment was available, but at a cost that would have kept the study from being carried out at all. Unlike the Tuskegee victims, moreover, the African women were told about the nature of the research, in some cases by African health officials who had helped design...
...genetic makeup with that of other chimps, they determined that she belonged to a different subspecies than the chimps that harbor the other SIV strains; those kindred chimps live farther east in the equatorial African rain forest. More important, Marilyn's virus closely matched the three major groupings of HIV-1 strains, whereas the other simian viruses appeared only remotely like the human virus...