Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1989. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Miami Herald, - THU December 14 1989
Herald Staff
Dr. David Ho and colleagues at the University of California at Los Angeles measured levels of the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, in the blood of 54 infected patients.
In a report that will be published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, the researchers say they found much higher levels of the virus in the blood of all the patients than had been previously reported -- about 250 times higher.
Infected patients without symptoms had the virus in one out of every 50,000 blood cells, while those with symptoms had the virus in at least one out of every 400 cells, the study found. In some people, one in 200 cells was infected.
Until now, scientists believed that people with AIDS had the virus in one of every 100,000 blood cells.
The findings mean that one pint of blood from someone with AIDS contains enough virus to cause nearly two million infections, which helps explain why people who accidentally get tainted transfusions almost always catch the virus.
The study also found that, even when infected people are outwardly well, the virus produces new copies of itself that float freely outside of blood cells in the plasma. This finding challenges the widely held belief that the infection frequently lies dormant for years after infection.
The amount of virus found dropped sharply in patients taking the drug AZT, the researchers said.
The findings indicate that infection with the virus alone could be enough to cause the devastating destruction of the immune system that AIDS patients experience. Researchers had speculated that some other factor might be necessary to cause AIDS.
"This proposes a more direct mechanism by which the virus does its damage," Ho said. "One of the major dilemmas has been that there's a lot of immune destruction, but there was very little virus to account for that."
Nobel laureate David Baltimore, the director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass., said, "The data should dispel any lingering doubts about whether HIV is the true culprit in AIDS."
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