Newsday - Tuesday, July 9, 2002
Laurie Garrett, Staff Correspondent

The reports require confirmation, but at first glance were signs that it's possible to build immunity against the virus -- a long-sought goal of AIDS research.

Dr. Anthony Kebba of the Uganda Virus Research Institute in Entebbe described the cases of eight couples he has studied. All involved husbands infected for many years with HIV and wives who have never contracted the virus. The men had what are considered active infections, with a viral load high enough to pose considerable risk of infection to the wives.

Kebba's team examined samples of tissue taken from the wives' vaginas after three days of sexual abstinence. In five of the women, vaginal tissue samples were found to contain antibodies. In test tubes, those antibodies attacked HIV viruses.

"Our results confirm that heterosexual exposure to the virus does not always lead to infection," Kebba said.

A Pasteur Institute team led by Dr. X. Truong in Ho Chi Minh City found similar results in long-time intravenous drug abusers in Vietnam. Drug abuse accounts for 61 percent of all HIV cases in Vietnam, Truong said. She analyzed blood samples from 45 IV drug users who had been injecting narcotics for more than 10 years, but who had never become infected with HIV -- even though they had contracted other infections: 82 percent had hepatitis B; 100 percent had hepatitis C; and 80 percent had the rare HTLV cancer virus. But they did not have HIV.

When Truong compared their immune systems with those of 50 healthy individuals who did not inject drugs, she found that even when she drowned the cells of the drug users with HIV they did not become infected. She found that the drug users were making large numbers of immune system cells, called CD8 suppressor cells, which aggressively destroyed any cell infected by HIV.

One researcher pleased with the results -- and their implication for vaccine development -- was Dr. Jay Levy of the University of California, San Francisco. The findings confirm his long-held position that CD8 cells secrete potent chemicals that control or destroy HIV.

Dr. Robert Siliciano of Johns Hopkins University reported that people taking treatment cocktails of anti-HIV drugs who appear to be doing well still have ample viruses in some of their immune cells to cause AIDS -- and those cell populations will last for more than 70 years. They form a sort of archive, he explained, of every type of virus the individual has ever had.

At any point in an individual's life these old archived viruses may pop up, causing new problems that challenge treatment. But treatment from the very beginning of infection, Siliciano argued, can prevent storage of resistant forms of HIV and will "stop virus evolution."

"In principle," Siliciano continued, "this makes it possible to offer everyone with HIV infection the chance for a normal life."
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