Why Don't All HIV-Infected People Get AIDS?
During the early years of the AIDS epidemic, infection with HIV, the AIDS virus, was considered a death sentence. But now scientists know that not everybody who's infected with HIV gets the disease. In fact, 10 percent to 17 percent of HIV-infected people don't show signs of AIDS after as long as 20 years of infection (see "Toward an Understanding...").
And there are even people who, despite one or more exposures to HIV, don't even get infected with the virus.
And in a new report in the medical journal Lancet, European doctors described a study of 219 children who were born infected with HIV. Surprisingly, 6 children, or 2.7, showed no sign of the virus, or of AIDS. The oldest children were 9 years old; none had been treated for HIV.
What's going on? What are the therapeutic implications of this resistance to HIV and AIDS? Do some people's immune systems know something we should know??
That's a gathering impression in the community of scientists who study the frustrating disease. They're trying to figure out how to exploit natural immunity in the majority of AIDS patients who don't benefit from it.
There is a chance, of course, that "natural resistance" to HIV is just a sign of being infected with a weak strain of HIV. But it's also possible that natural resistance signals a superior immune response.
If so, then AIDS could be treated by transplanting bone marrow from people with the immunity to people who need it. That speculation comes from Anthony Fauci, head of the federal AIDS effort, and his colleagues (see Toward an Understanding...).
