2 AIDS-Causing Viruses Found in Same Patient

AIDS researchers at UC San Francisco have isolated two types of AIDS-causing viruses, HIV-1 and HIV-2, from a West African AIDS patient, providing the first definitive proof that both viruses can infect the same individual.

Scientists have long suspected that such double infections are possible, but there had been persistent doubts. This is because standard blood tests are often unable to distinguish between HIV-1 and HIV-2 infections, and many patients suspected of having a double infection turned out to only harbor one of these viruses.

UC San Francisco researchers, collaborating with Drs. Jacques Moreau and Koudou Odehouri from the Ivory Coast, isolated HIV-1 and HIV-2 from the blood of a 37-year-old West African woman who died from parasitic infections and extreme weight loss. Their study was published in the Dec. 17 issue of the British medical journal Lancet.

The woman, who was treated at Treichville Hospital in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, also had other AIDS-related symptoms, including a diminished number of disease-fighting white blood cells.

HIV, or human immunodeficiency virus, causes a variety of diseases, including AIDS. While HIV-1 has caused almost all the AIDS cases in the United States, HIV-2 to date has been mostly confined to West Africa and parts of Europe.

Jay Levy, a professor of medicine at UC San Francisco and an investigator at the university medical center’s Cancer Research Institute, said the isolated HIV-2 had a great ability to kill cells it infected, unlike an earlier strain of HIV-2 identified by the UC San Francisco-Abidjan team earlier this year.