Countywide : Expert Downplays AIDS-Like Ailment

An AIDS expert attending a national convention in Anaheim said Tuesday that a newly found, AIDS-like syndrome is not being spread by an infection, is very low in incidence and is no cause for public alarm.

Dr. Scott Holmberg, chief of the AIDS special study section of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, said federal studies have found very few cases of the recently discovered ailment. The malady is like AIDS in that victims lose their immune system. But the victims of the new illness, called ICL for idiopathic CD4-positive lymphocytopenia, do not test positive for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

Disclosure of the new syndrome last summer caused a great stir at an international AIDS conference in Amsterdam. Since then, however, some AIDS researchers have said they doubt a new virus is causing ICL or that it is being rapidly spread.

Holmberg emphasized the same message Tuesday while on a panel of the 32nd Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy at the Anaheim Hilton and Towers.

“There is no evidence of an infectious etiology (cause of disease) for ICL,” Holmberg told an audience of thousands of doctors and researchers. About 15,000 delegates are attending the convention.

Much of the controversy about the new, AIDS-like malady stems from research of a UC Irvine immunologist, Dr. Sudhir Gupta. In July, Gupta announced that he had found a previously unrecognized virus in a woman with AIDS-like symptoms.

Subsequently, Dr. David Ho, director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York City, studied 17 of the AIDS-like illnesses but found no virus as its cause.

Ho on Tuesday joined Holmberg here to discuss ICL, the AIDS-like malady. Ho, like Holmberg, said that no infection seems to be causing the AIDS-like sickness. “I think what we call ICL is a mixed bag (of various ailments),” Ho said.

Holmberg, in the interview, said ICL “has many, many different features” from AIDS.

“We’re not finding any clustering of (ICL) cases, and we’re not finding any connection between cases,” Holmberg said. “So far, we’re not finding in laboratory epidemiological investigations any good evidence of a new infectious agent, such as a virus.

“ICL is a syndrome, which includes many, many different clinical, immunologic conditions.