Aids researcher Dr David Ho - of the Aaron Diamond Aids Research Center in New York, and was a key figure in the development of current anti-HIV medications - said he has agreed to begin work on potential therapies and vaccines to treat Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). He was invited by Hong Kong’s government, which has been helping to create a state-of-the-art lab for work on HIV vaccines, to help the city’s researchers develop SARS therapies. “Given all the lessons we’ve learned from HIV,” Ho said, “this one looks easier.” While most strategies would take years to bear fruit, he has ideas about “some therapeutics that could be developed in the short term.” Several other well-known virologists are also working on the SARS threat, including Peter Jahrling, who rose to prominence as a researcher of the Ebola and smallpox viruses.
Dr Luc Montagnier - the biologist who discovered HIV - voiced fears last month that the death rate SARS would be “much higher” among people with HIV/Aids. “SARS is caused by another virus, and it does not kill lots of people - around four per cent of those infected. But if the immune system is depressed by Aids, the toll will be much higher,” Montagnier said. “It would be very alarming if people would be infected with both HIV and SARS, and is a concern especially for southern China where you have both Aids infection ongoing and SARS starting.”
Another possibility, however, is that having Aids could actually protect you against developing SARS, according to Dr Zhang Fujie, China’s Aids chief. In People’s Hospital No 8 in Guangzhou, China, SARS and Aids patients were placed in two adjoining wards. While doctors and nurses working in both wards came down with SARS, none of the Aids patients did. One possibility is that the lung destruction observed in SARS is caused by a heightened immune reaction to the infection. The weakened immune system of Aids patients could not cause such an ‘autoimmune’ reaction.
On 28 April the Chelsea & Westminster Hospital launched a free one-hour HIV testing service at selected clinics and HIV centres. With recent research indicating that over half of gay men have never tested for HIV, the launch aims to combat the issue of long waits for HIV test results, which is believed to be one of the key barriers stopping men from testing. The programme is run in association with the gay men’s HIV testing campaign www.youchoose.org.uk
A study of 8,400 HIV patients has revealed that since the start of HIV combination therapy, lung cancer has emerged as one of the diseases far more common in people with HIV than in the general population. The national lung cancer rate is 0.75 cases per 1,000 people per year, but since HIV therapy started, the rate in patients attending the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital has increased to 6.7 cases per 1,000 patients per year - in other words, a 10 per cent chance of getting lung cancer at some point in the next 15 years.
Drug-resistant HIV infections are on the rise in Japan, according to Setsuko Ida of the International Medical Centre. Dr Ida surveyed 205 treatment-naïve people in 2002 and, of those surveyed, eight had a drug-resistant strain of HIV. “The more recently patients were infected with HIV, the higher probability they have of being infected with drug-resistant HIV. We should pay close attention to the trend,” Ida said.
Researchers reported last month that a Californian man has been infected with two different strains of HIV, picking up a wild-type (or drug-sensitive) strain of HIV after initially contracting a drug-resistant strain of the virus. The ‘superinfection’ was confirmed after scientists carried out genetic tests showing the second strain not to be resistant to reverse transcriptase inhibitors.
