Researchers Rediscover How AIDS Virus Attacks Victims

For years, scientists have thought that HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, begins it’s initial attack in the blood of the victims. But then the traces of virus disappear from blood tests and patients often live without HIV symptoms for up to 10 years. HIV appears to move in slow motion, taking years to explode, followed by death from some opportunistic infection. For twenty years that scientists have been studying AIDS, it was a puzzle to them why this process inevitably progressed and occurred, actively replicating even when there is little or no virus activity in the blood.

The answer may lie in the gut, not in the blood. One study has a new discovery that may answer one of the key mysteries about the course of the AIDS virus disease. Far from being slow , this new study indicates that HIV initial attack is in the gut and that the attack appears to be swift and deadly, destroying cells in the gut. In their monkey model study, about 80 percent of cells in the gut are wiped out within the first four days of infection.

“We have ended up with a completely new view of HIV infection,” says Daniel Douek of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “There’s been a complete turnaround. This has changed people’s attitudes, from thinking that this disease is slow and indolent to thinking that it is extremely aggressive.”

Douek said that “The work on the acute infection has led to a massive reappraisal mechanisms of disease pathogenesis, has helped refocus our views on where and when therapies should be instituted, and has led to the search for vaccines that elicit robust mucosal immunity.”