Miami Herald; Tuesday, November 5, 1991
Elinor Burkett, Herald Staff Writer

Dr. Luc Montagnier, the French virologist who discovered the human immunodeficiency virus, cast doubt on three of the major tenets of thinking about AIDS.

* Is HIV a lethal virus? "An open question," Montagnier said.

* Is the decline of a person's T cells -- the backbone of the immune system -- an accurate predictor of the onset of AIDS? "Some patients live for years with very low T cells, although they are at high risk," Montagnier said.

* Are so-called opportunistic infections like pneumonia, brain infections and cancers the result of the damage done by HIV infection? "They are a consequence of immune damage, but they also accelerate progression to AIDS."

Montagnier moved to the forefront of AIDS research in 1983, when he first isolated the virus believed to cause the disease.

But over the past two years, he has challenged mainstream views by insisting that he might have been wrong in his early assumption that HIV was the sole cause of AIDS.

"We were naive," he said. "We thought this one virus was doing all the destruction. Now we have to understand the other factors in this."

Montagnier is studying mycoplasmas, a common type of bacteria he believes throws the immune system off balance, causing many of an HIV-infected person's blood cells to die prematurely. He believes that helps activate HIV.

Montagnier's mycoplasma theory excited AIDS patients and activists, especially when the French scientist began to test common antibiotics to treat AIDS.

Montagnier acknowledged Monday that those experiments were "not very successful," both because the bacteria quickly became resistant to them and because he and his research team had not yet developed tests to monitor the amount of mycoplasma in a person's system.

Such tests have now been developed, he said, and testing with antibiotics that provoke less resistance is under way.

Montagnier's lecture was one of three presented by researchers from the Pasteur Institute in Paris. The visit was sponsored by the Community Alliance Against AIDS, which raises funds for education and research.

Dr. Marc Girard, a virologist at the institute, spoke about the search for an AIDS vaccine.

"We are far from having a vaccine," he said. "We have made fantastic progress in three years, but there are major obstacles. We are quite far from our goal."

CAPTION: PHOTO Dr. Luc MONTAGNIER talks with Drs. Carl Eisdorfer and Joseph Berger and J. Wayne Streilein of UM

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