HIV gets deadlier: virus rooted in America, not Africa

Researchers have found that the HIV virus has its roots in the United States, rather than Africa which has so far borne the opprobrium for the spread of the disease.

Scanning electron micrograph of HIV-1, colored green, budding from a cultured lymphocyte [Image: Wikipedia].

Alarmingly, the new research also suggests that the deadly virus is slowly adapting to human defence systems, creating new challenges for health professionals.

"Much research has focused on how HIV adapts to antiviral drugs. We wanted to investigate how HIV adapts to us, its human hosts, over time," lead author Zabrina Brumme, an assistant professor in Simon Fraser University's Faculty of Health Sciences, said in a press release on Monday.

"HIV adapts to the immune response in reproducible ways. In theory, this could be bad news for host immunity-and vaccines-if such mutations were to spread in the population. Just like transmitted drug resistance can compromise treatment success, transmitted immune escape mutations could erode our ability to naturally fight HIV," she added.

During the study, Brumme and her team looked at HIV sequences from patients as far back as 1979, when the epidemic was first noticed. The ancestral DNA of the virus was characterized by the researchers and then they looked at how "immune escape mutations" spread through society.

"Overall, our results show that the virus is adapting very slowly in North America," Brumme said. "In parts of the world harder hit by HIV though, rates of adaptation could be higher," Brunne said.

The researchers completed the laborious task of extracting viral RNA and culturing them in a laboratory setting to come up with this conclusion.

"It was painstaking work," health sciences student Laura Cotton said in the news release. "But it was fascinating to study these isolates in the lab, knowing that they had played an important role in the history of HIV on our continent," she added.