Newsday - February 7, 2001
Laurie Garrett
Chicago-Some women may be making a chemical in their bodies that blocks HIV infection, despite years of sexual exposure to the virus.
Three separate studies of uninfected wives of HIV-positive men, presented at this week's eighth annual Retroviruses conference here, indicate that an as-yet unidentified protein is protecting the women from their spouses' viruses.
Two of the studies were performed in England and the third was done in Thailand.
Susana Frazo Pinheiro led an Oxford University study of nine couples in which the man was HIV-positive, but the woman had remained HIV-negative for four years or more, despite her husband's failure to use a protective condom.
Ruth Braganza of Imperial College in London ran a similar study of eight couples for more than four years.
And Dr. Ann Duerr of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention collaborated with Thai colleagues at Chiang Mai University in studying 24 HIV-negative wives of infected men.
Though the three teams worked independently, their conclusions were remarkably similar. None of the wives in the three studies carried the delta-32 gene, a rare mutation that protects about 1 percent of human beings from HIV infection. Nor were any known protective antibodies present at atypical levels.
All three groups saw elevated levels of CD8-type white blood cells in their seemingly HIV-resistant women. Duerr also found that a "soluble suppressive factor" isolated from the blood of the Thai wives blocks HIV growth in test tubes. Based on analysis of protein markers on the surface of the cells that secrete this mysterious factor, Duerr said in an interview, they are macrophages. That means two arms of the immune response are actively fighting off HIV in these women: CD8 lymphocytes and macrophages that excrete some chemical that blocks the viruses' ability to reproduce.
In a previous study that will soon be published in the journal AIDS, Duerr found evidence of the same two- pronged immune defense protecting Thai prostitutes who remained uninfected for years.
Years ago Canadian researchers discovered apparently HIV- resistant prostitutes in Nairobi, Kenya. Exactly how those women were protected was never determined. The researchers reported last year that some of the Nairobi women had become infected when their partners started using condoms. This seemed to indicate that whatever immunity they had required constant re-exposure to HIV.
The British and Thai researchers hope to isolate the protective chemical, analyze it and determine whether it might offer clues for effective HIV treatment or vaccination.
Also at the conference yesterday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention unveiled details of a new campaign, called SAFE-for Serostatus Approach to Fighting the Epidemic -designed to halve the number of new HIV infections by the year 2005. The target are Americans who carry HIV but do not know it.
The agency believes that if these people knew they were infected, they would be more careful to protect others, and they would also take AIDS drugs that would probably make them less likely to transmit the virus.
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