An aggressive form of the HIV virus has been identified in Cuba. The new strain mutates into AIDS in just three years, so rapidly that the patients may not even know they are infected until it’s too late. On average, people infected with HIV develop AIDS in six to 10 years, which gives them time to seek antiretroviral therapy.
According to scientists, a person can contract multiple strains of HIV by having unprotected sex with multiple infected partners and these sub-types, once inside the new host, will recombine into a different form. These mutant forms raises concerns among the researchers because they are more difficult to diagnose and resistant to therapy.
Usually, HIV anchors itself to proteins on the membranes of cells before the virus is able to penetrate the cell and stays there for a number of years. Then, the virus switches to the anchor point, which results in a fast progression to AIDS. But in the strain identified in Cuba, the virus makes the transition to this anchor point shortly after infection. The tests showed that the patients with the new form of HIV have abnormally high doses of the virus and defensive molecules which force the recombinant HIV to bypass its usual anchor point.
Also, one of the HIV sub-types that led to the recombinant form contains an enzyme that splits proteins in new viruses and this helps the virus to replicate faster. An international team of researchers studied the blood of 73 patients recently infected with HIV – 52 who had been diagnosed with AIDS and 21 without AIDS – and compared the results with those from 22 patients who lived with HIV for more than three years. None of them had received any therapy, but the patients with the new mutant form of HIV developed AIDS within three years.
The aggressive HIV mutation has also been observed in Africa, but it’s more common in Cuba, where some of the patients infected with AIDS were even tested negative in the last two years. However, some scientists consider that the group from Cuba was not big enough to extrapolate the findings.