Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1998. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
The Associated Press; August 31, 1998
Joseph B. Verrengia, Associated Press
It's a reminder, they said, of how genetically flexible and cunning the human immunodeficiency virus can be.
The new strain so far has been found only in one patient, a 40-year-old woman in Cameroon who died of AIDS in 1995.
French and African officials have launched a public health investigation in Cameroon and neighboring Gabon to determine if the new strain is being widely transmitted.
Infectious disease experts are publishing a report on the new strain in the Sept. 1 issue of Nature Medicine. They said they do not expect it to become prevalent, but it could escape detection by current diagnostic methods used in laboratory screening programs.
"The present isolate is rather a rare bird," said Simon Wain-Hobson of the Institute Pasteur in Paris, who did not participate in the study. HIV constantly evolves into new strains, even as researchers develop new combinations of therapies to control its proliferation.
The World Health Organization estimates there will be upwards of 40 million AIDS cases caused by many HIV strains by the end of the century.
On a global scale, there are two simultaneous epidemics, HIV-1 and HIV-2. HIV-1 is the more widespread of the two viral groups; HIV-2 is mainly in Asia and east Africa.
Most of the strains in HIV-1 belong to a group designated as M, for major strains. There is also an O group for minor, outlying strains that appear to be clustered in west Africa.
The new strain in Cameroon is HIV-1 but is neither an M or an O. Instead, the study's lead author, Francois Simon of the Hospital Bichat in Paris, said the new strain veers noticeably from both established groups and deserves the new label of N.
The researchers said the genetic profile of the new strain is closer to the genes of versions of the viruses found in chimpanzees and other non-human primates. It is not certain how the Cameroon woman contracted the strain, but the genetic profile suggests it may have been transmitted from another species, they report.
Infectious disease experts cautioned that the possible monkey-to-human connection should not be overinterpreted. Even in cultures where such animals are a food source, HIV is not as easily transmittable as other illnesses.
However, researchers and animal handlers and breeders already understand that Ebola, monkey herpes B, and other viruses can "jump" to humans. "The upshot is that cross-species transmission probably occurs far more frequently than we care to know," Wain-Hobson said.
In the past two years, new HIV strains also have been discovered in Thailand and India. However, they were more conventional variants that did not have close links to non-human primate viruses.
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