Scientists Discover New HIV Strain In 20 Years

All images are courtesy of Blackdoctor.org

Article published originally for Blackdoctor.org

As if HIV and AIDS wasn’t scary enough… The disease has stricken the Black community for decades and was starting to see some action against the disease, but for the first time in nearly 20 years, a team of scientists has detected a new strain of HIV.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that mutations in a virus can significantly change a pathogen’s infectiousness and severity of disease.

Now, new research from the University of Oxford finds a new variant of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, that is potentially more infectious and could more seriously affect the immune system.

So far, 109 people, most of whom live in the Netherlands, have the variant.

New HIV variant causes illness twice as fast

The new strain, called the VB variant, damages the immune system, weakening people’s ability to fight everyday infections and diseases much faster than the previous HIV strains, scientists say.

It also means that people who contract the new variant may develop AIDS faster.

Researchers also found that VB has a viral load (the amount of virus detected in blood) 3.5 to 5.5 times higher than the current strain, indicating that it could also be more infectious.

Other HIV Strains

The last strain that was found, called HIV-1 group M subtype L, is extremely rare and can be detected by Abbott Lab’s current screening system. The company’s tests screen more than 60 percent of the global blood supply, she adds, noting it must detect every strain and “has to be right every time.”

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