For the first time in 19 years, a team of scientists has detected a new strain of HIV. Sunday, December 1, being the commemoration of the global Worlds AIDS day, HIV continues to be a major global public health issue, having claimed more than 32 million lives so far.
About 36.7 million in the world are living with HIV, according to the World Health Organization. UNAIDS estimates that in 2018, some 1.8 million people became newly infected.
However, with increasing access to effective HIV prevention, diagnosis, treatment and care, including for opportunistic infections, HIV infection has become a manageable chronic health condition, enabling people living with it to lead a normal life.
The strain is a part of the Group M version of HIV-1, the same family of virus subtypes to blame for the global HIV pandemic, according to Abbott Laboratories, which conducted the research along with the University of Missouri, Kansas City. The findings were published Wednesday in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes.
"It can be a real challenge for diagnostic tests," Mary Rodgers, a co-author of the report and a principal scientist at Abbott, said. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said current treatments for HIV are effective against this strain and others. However, identifying a new strain provides a more complete map of how HIV evolves.
"There's no reason to panic or even to worry about it a little bit," Fauci stated. "Not a lot of people are infected with this. This is an outlier."
For scientists to be able to declare that this was a new subtype, three cases of it must be detected independently. The first two were found in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the 1983 and 1990.
The two strains were "very unusual and didn't match other strains," Rodgers said. The third sample found in Congo was collected in 2001 as a part of a HIV viral diversity study.
The sample was small, and while it seemed similar to the two older samples, scientists wanted to test the whole genome to be sure. At the time, there wasn't the technology to determine if this was the new subtype.
They were able to fully sequence the sample, meaning they were able to create a full picture of what it was and determine that it was, in fact, subtype L of Group M.
It's unclear how this variant of the virus may impact the body differently if it does act differently at all. Current HIV treatments can fight a wide variety of virus strains, and it is believed that these treatments can fight this newly named one.
“This discovery reminds us that to end the HIV pandemic, we must continue to out-think this continuously changing virus and use the latest advancements in technology and resources to monitor its evolution," study co-author, Dr. Carole McArthur, a professor in the department of oral and craniofacial sciences at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, said in a statement.
But the discovery of this strain - and all others of HIV - could be a step forward in their understanding of how the virus evolves, how to diagnose and treat it and to the development of a potential vaccine to end the pandemic for good.
In June 2019, 24.5 million people were accessing antiretroviral therapy. Approximately 79% of people with HIV globally knew their HIV status in 2018. The remaining 21% (about 8.1 million people) still need access to HIV testing services.
People are also urged to remember and honour all those lost along the way as well as activists that challenge the silence and bring life-saving services to their communities.
