Associated Press - Friday, April 20, 1984
Paul Raeburn, Associated Press Writer

"I think it looks very good," said Dr. Donald Francis, coordinator of AIDS laboratories activities at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

"It's the best game in town right now. You've got to go with it, you've got to push very hard and learn more about it," said Dr. Malcolm Martin, a virologist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Md.

The discovery of the cause of AIDS would not constitute a cure but it is a necessary first step that could vastly speed the development of a treatment or an anti-AIDS vaccine.

Martin, who visited French AIDS researchers last week, said they have found the virus, which they call lymphadenopathy virus or LAV, in 11 patients -- six with AIDS and five with a pre-AIDS immune disorder called lymphadenopathy.

"I'm convinced it has a role in AIDS," said Luc Montagnier, head of the French group at the Pasteur Institute in Paris that identified the new virus. "But we have to convince the scientific community," Montagnier said.

In the most recent tests, the French have found evidence of the virus in 80 percent to 90 percent of American AIDS patients whose blood samples were sent to Paris by the CDC, Martin said.

Ninety percent of Americans with the pre-AIDS disease also carried the virus, Martin said.

He cautioned that this does not prove the virus is the cause of AIDS. Many viruses are found in AIDS patients, whose broken-down immune systems leave them prone to infection, Martin said.

But one argument that the French virus is the cause of Acause of AIDS is that the virus appears in patients with the pre-AIDS disease, who generally do not develop all the so-called opportunistic infections found in AIDS victims.

Francis at the CDC said further persuasive evidence is that the virus attacks precisely the white blood cells that are defective or missing in AIDS patients.

These cells, called helper T-cells or OKT4 cells, are where the new virus grows and reproduces, Francis said.

He said the virus was, therefore, "biologically plausible" as the cause of the disease.

"The French work is very exciting because the virus kills OKT4 cells very rapidly," Francis said. "As far as we can tell, that is AIDS -- destruction of the T helper cells."

In the April 7 issue of The Lancet, the French researchers reported evidence of the lymphadenopathy virus in two brothers with hemophilia, suggesting that the virus can be transmitted by plasma products.

That could explain the transmission of AIDS by way of blood transfusions.

AIDS, or acquired immune deficiency syndrome, is marked by failure of the body's immune system. As of April 16, the CDC had reports of 4,087 cases of AIDS and 1,758 deaths in the United States.

The virus is different from the human leukemia virus that Dr. Robert Gallo of the National Cancer Institute and others have suggested is a possible cause of AIDS, according to both Martin and Francis.

Researchers at the CDC and Gallo's group at the cancer institute have, however, subsequently isolated from their AIDS patients viruses that they believe are identical to the French virus.

The latest findings strengthening the case that this virus is the cause of AIDS will be published perhaps as soon as next week in the journal Science.

The ironclad proof -- injecting the virus into a healthy person and seeing the disease develop -- obviously cannot be obtained.

But Francis and colleagues at the CDC have injected the virus into rhesus monkeys and chimpanzees. That was done in September, Francis said, and it is too soon to know whether the animals are going to develop an AIDS-like disease.

The virus is different from the virus that was recently identified as a cause of the disease referred to as monkey AIDS, or simian AIDS.

For some time, Gallo at the cancer institute has argued that the leukemia virus that he calls human T-cell leukemia virus, or HTLV-1, is a likely cause of AIDS.

Francis said that HTLV-1 is similar enough to the new virus to make it difficult to separate the two, and he thinks that was the source of the confusion. The new research, Francis said, strongly suggests that HTLV-1 is not the cause of AIDS.

The French researchers who found evidence of their virus in 80 percent to 90 percent of AIDS victims found no evidence of HTLV-1, Martin said.
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