HIV infects, attacks body faster than thought

By The McClatchy-Tribune News Services

Published: July 25, 2008

RALEIGH, N.C. — HIV infects and attacks the body within days — much faster than previously thought — drastically narrowing the window of time when intervention is possible, Duke University researchers have found.

This means clinicians must test more and sooner if they hope to catch an infection before it can be transmitted to someone else. "We're just going to have to be much more aggressive in identifying the infection early on,” said Dr. Peter Leone, the state's HIV/AIDS health director and an associate professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill schools of medicine and public health.

Knowledge of what goes on immediately after transmission of the virus is essential to understanding what kind of vaccine will be effective, a discovery important in the wake of two recent failed attempts to find a shot that works.

On Thursday, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, the main federal agency in charge of AIDS research, called for scientists to return to a basic question: what happens when the virus is transmitted?

"Design of a vaccine that blocks HIV infection will require enormous intellectual leaps beyond present day knowledge,” concluded a broad team of institute researchers writing in today's edition of the journal Science. The team said the focus of research should be on discovering a vaccine rather than on clinical trials for evaluating medicines that may or may not work.

The Duke results, which will be published in the August issue of the Journal of Virology, exemplify that type of scientific inquiry.

The research team was led by Dr. Barton Haynes, director of the Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology. The center's research has changed the way scientists look at HIV.

The Duke team has whittled the time frame for when the virus can be detected to five or seven days after infection.

Doctors are going to have to start screening patients for the HIV virus even if they come in with what seems like a headache or a common cold, Leone said.

"We can narrow that window down, but we're never going to be able to identify all of these folks,” Leone said. "We just can't.”

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