AIDS, the deadly disease caused by the HIV virus, which is known to be present in more than 30 million people worldwide, unfortunately still does not have a treatment that allows it to be completely eradicated. Although the developed methods enable to keep the disease under control today, the work to find a vaccine against AIDS has not yielded any results for many years.
Recently, an extremely important finding was revealed about the HIV virus that causes AIDS. A much more damaging and contagious variant of the HIV virus had been circulating in the Netherlands for decades, according to the study published in the journal Science. The variant increased the possibility of infecting the infected people, and accelerated the development of AIDS by reducing the number of immune cells called CD4 T.
Makes AIDS develop twice as fast
According to the study, people with the new variant discovered carry 5.5 times more HIV virus in their blood than other variants. In addition, these people’s CD4 T cells are declining almost twice as fast. Scientists made a calculation with this data and revealed that people with this variant could develop AIDS within 2-3 years if no treatment was given. In other variants, this period was on average 6-7 years.
According to the scientists’ statement, the newly discovered variant of the HIV virus emerged in the Netherlands in the 1990s. But the prevalence of the virus has fallen sharply, especially since 2010, with the initiatives taken to curb HIV in the country. The variant was seen in a total of two individuals, except the Netherlands, only in Switzerland and Belgium.
Although the scientists who conducted the research described the discovered HIV variant as “a reason to be careful”, they stated that it is not a public health crisis. According to the study, mutations in the variant do not serve to make it resistant to existing HIV drugs. In other words, today’s drugs do not lose their effectiveness against this variant.
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