Study Gives Clues to AIDS Virus Selectivity

Clues to why the AIDS virus causes some people to develop the disease and die but spares others may be found in a new Swedish study.

Scientists in Stockholm say they have found vital biological differences in the virus in patients with AIDS and in people infected by the virus but who have not developed the disease itself.

In a report in the British medical journal Lancet, the scientists said they were not able to determine if the virus affecting AIDS patients was a completely different strain from that affecting non-sufferers, or whether it was the same virus in a more dangerous form.

But the discovery of biological differences in the virus raises the hope that it may be easier to predict which of the world’s millions of AIDS virus carriers are at risk of developing the immune crippling disease and which are not.