new studies prompt rethink of strategies to fight
[Health News] New York, March 28 : Scietists are rethinking about strategies to combat HIV virus that causes AIDS after new studies revealed that the virus slaughters swathes of vulnerable immune cells from the moment it enters the body.
"The two new studies are helping to fuel a rethink of strategies to predict patients' prospects and to design vaccines and drugs," Nature magazine says.
"Doctors," the report says, "long thought that HIV takes years to inflict real damage on the body, partly because patients can lack symptoms for a decade or more. But researchers have begun to suspect that the virus wreaks havoc within the first few days." The two separate research groups studied monkeys in the days after they were infected with SIV, a virus similar to HIV.
Within a few days of infection, SIV infects up to 60 per cent of a particular type of immune cell, called memory CD4+ cells, and it goes on to kill about half of them, report Mario Roederer and his team at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland. These cells are responsible for remembering infectious agents and triggering the immune system to attack them.
The findings, Nature says, add to mounting evidence that the onslaught of HIV is much fiercer than doctors once thought.
In the other study, Ashley Haase of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and his colleagues argue that the virus also triggers cell suicide in many cells without actually invading them. PTI
