New
York Warns of Fast, Resistant Strain of HIV
Reuters
FEBRUARY 21, 2005
A new strain of the AIDS virus that is drug-resistant and also causes a quick onset of the disease has been discovered in New York, prompting an alert to city health providers, officials said on Saturday.
Use of the illegal drug crystal methamphetamine was probably a contributing factor in transmission of the virus, which infected an unidentified man in his 40s who had multiple male partners and unprotected anal sex, the officials said. The New York Times quoted two other AIDS specialists as saying the case, discovered on Jan. 21, may have been an isolated incident.
But Dr. Thomas Frieden, commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, called the case a potential major problem and issued an alert to hospitals and doctors to test for evidence of the strain of HIV. It was the first time in New York that a strain of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, was diagnosed that was both highly resistant to major anti-AIDS drugs and progressed rapidly, officials said.
"It's a wake-up call to men who have sex with men, particularly those who may use crystal methamphetamine," Frieden said in a statement on the department's Web site (www.nyc.gov/health). Methamphetamine is a powerful stimulant often used in conjunction with sex.
The new strain of the AIDS virus -- named 3-DCR HIV -- was resistant to three of the four classes of drugs used to treat HIV, and the unnamed man may have developed AIDS in as short a time as 2 to 3 months and at most 20 months, the city health officials said. Dr. Robert Gallo, director of the University of Maryland's Institute for Human Virology and a co-discoverer of the AIDS virus, was cited in The New York Times as saying it was prudent to follow the New York case, but there was not necessarily cause for alarm.
It was well known that some AIDS cases progress rapidly from initial infection to disease, but that this was usually because patients were highly susceptible, he said. Instances of an HIV virus being both drug-resistant and rapidly progressing were rare, he said.
He said "My guess is that this is much ado about nothing," he told the newspaper.
Asked about the skepticism, New York health department spokeswoman Sandra Mullin told Reuters, "It's not an announcement we made lightly."
"We asked a lot of questions, we did a lot of laboratory tests, we did a lot of checking," including discussing the issue with other leading AIDS and health authorities, she said.