AIDSWEEKLY Plus; Monday, November 3, 2003
Staff Medical Writers

"Infectious human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) is difficult to detect in female genital secretions by standard virus culture techniques," noted scientists working at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

"To improve detection of cell-free HIV-1 in female genital secretions," J.E. Cummins and colleagues at the National Center for Infectious Diseases "adapted a short-term assay that uses the multinuclear-activation galactosidase indicator (MAGI) assay."

"When vaginal lavages from HIV-1-infected women were tested with the adapted MAGI assay, 25 (64%) of 39 lavages with detectable, cell-free HIV-1 RNA were shown to have infectious virus," they wrote in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology. Conversely, "no infectious virus was found in 10 vaginal lavages from HIV-1-infected women with undetectable vaginal viral loads."

"Significantly (p<0.01) more lavages from HIV-1-infected women tested positive for infectious virus by the MAGI assay than by standard peripheral blood mononuclear cell (PBMC) coculture, which detected infectious virus in only 6 (17%) of 35 vaginal lavages," published data showed. "Lavages with viral loads of >10,000 copies per lavage yielded significantly (p<0.01) more positive cultures than those with <10,000 copies by using the MAGI assay."

"Detection of infectious HIV-1 in vaginal lavages was not associated with the presence of genital tract infections or CD4+ T-cell counts," according to the report. "However, although the results were not significant (p=0.08), the MAGI assay detected infectious virus from more vaginal lavages at a vaginal pH of greater than or equal to4.5 than at a pH of <4.5."

"These results indicate that the MAGI assay is more sensitive than PBMC culture methods for detecting infectious virus in female genital secretions," the researchers concluded. "Accurate measurements of infectious virus in genital secretions will improve studies that evaluate sexual transmission of HIV-1."

Cummins and coauthors published their study in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology (Detection of infectious human immunodeficiency virus type 1 in female genital secretions by a short-term culture method. Clin Microbiol. 2003 Sep;41(9):4081-8.

For additional information, contact C.S. Dezzutti, NCID, HRB, Division of AIDS, STD, and TB Laboratory Research, 1600 Clifton Rd., Mailstop G19, Atlanta, GA 30333 USA.

Publisher contact information for the Journal of Clinical Microbiology is: American Society for Microbiology, 1752 N St. NW, Washington, DC 20036-2904 USA.

The information in this article comes under the major subject areas of AIDS & HIV, Diagnostics, Virology and Women's Health.

This article was prepared by AIDS Weekly editors from staff and other reports.

Reference

Cummins JE Jr, Villanueva JM, Evans-Strickfaden T, "Detection of infectious human immunodeficiency virus type 1 in female genital secretions by a short-term culture method", Clin Microbiol. 2003 Sep;41(9):4081-8

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