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December 02, 2002

U.S. IMMUNIZATION NEWS

"Docs Report AIDS Setback; Hub Patient's Reinfection Suggest Flaw in Vaccine" Boston Herald (www.bostonherald.com) (11/28/02) P. 002; Lasalandra, Michael

Boston researchers report that a patient who had successfully combated one strain of HIV without medications has now succumbed to a second strain. The theory behind the man's treatment is to bombard the patient with AIDS drugs immediately after infection, and then to cease the drugs and see if the patient's immune system kicks in and controls the virus.  Until recently, the strategy was working in this patient; but with the appearance of a second but similar HIV strain which apparently the immune system cannot fight, researchers now doubt that a successful AIDS vaccine will be found any time soon.  Dr. Bruce Walker, head of the Partners AIDS Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, noted that this case is evidence of something that doctors and patients had long believed impossible: superinfection.  Researchers had hoped that a vaccine effective against the most prevalent HIV strains would also be effective against slightly altered strains as well, but this case shocked researchers into realizing the opposite.  Walker noted that although the patient's immune system was ineffective against the second strain, it did generate some new responses to the components that differentiated it from the first virus.

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