The discovery of these proteins could ultimately lead to an improved design of vaccines and drugs to treat the virus.
When researcher Adam Burgener and colleagues were studying 2,000 sex workers in Nairobi, Kenya they found that 140 of the women appeared to be resistant to the virus that has infected an estimated 40 million people worldwide.
There was some evidence that these women have certain biological factors in their vaginal fluid that plays a role in resisting the virus. It is not clear yet though as to the exact identity of what these substances are.
The researchers tested the vaginal fluids of the 2,000 women using a high-tech analytical method to compare differences among proteins. The 140 women that were HIV-resistant all had higher levels of proteins with anti-viral and anti-inflammatory actions.
Scientists believe that these proteins could be used as a base of new medications that could prevent infection.
this is wonderful news!!!!!!
it would be beautiful if a group of prostitutes were what brought about the end of such a difficult disease.
that is really friggin cool… but knowing DuPont and Pfizer… nothing will ever come to market out of this…
what a shame that so much skill and research is scrapped as “collateral damage” in the quest for the almighty pharmaceutical dollar….
great news though…
one love,
rev m
Such claims of resistance have been made before – only for the resistant women to fall ill and die from the deadly virus. One key problem is that the virus mutates at unbelievable speeds, making any actual resistance to one strain useless even just a short time later.
(That’s also part of why vaccines have proved so troublesome. In fact, the virus is so unstable that early efforts to make a vaccine using “normal” methods of deactivating the virus didn’t work – it kept reactivating itself.)
I wish neither these women nor anyone else who could be considered “at risk” ill, and hope that a genuine vaccine or even a cure can be found – and soon.
I suspect it will be faster to improve the standing and opportunities of African women, rather than mitigate the risks they currently endure. Whether it would be more ethical – well, that depends on how that was done. Most attempts have been an outright disaster due to miscommunication, culture clashes, poor understanding by all sides and all kinds of prejudices.
Please remember, it has taken about one and a half million years to create the current mess we call a world, and probably about three or four hundred years to turn SIV into HIV, if current genetic research is reliable. That’s ten times as long as us humans have admitted HIV was even real, and closer to twenty times as long as the general world population admitted HIV was anything more than a minor annoyance.
And thee is of course the speculation about Africa, monkeys, and some very horny men (it isn’t unknown, I understand). There were rumors of “black syph” during the Vietnam war. The first speculation arose mainly because of certain characteristics in common with a virus carried by the monkeys as my limited understanding had it.
–Glenn
interesting post!
[...] Canadian scientists have found that a small group of prostitutes in Kenya are resistant to HIV. Check out the blog I read, here. No Comments so far Leave a comment RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI [...]
Sounds good to be true. What a grinning news!
In Northern Europe there’s also a small percentage of population who can’t be infected with HIV due to a genetic mutation which occurred after the outbursts of plague. It had something to do with the virus not being able to enter the body cell.
This is actually rather old news. And it is, like other readers have pointed out, too good to be true. There is quite a simple explanation for the women’s resistance.
They are continually infected with HIV on a day-to-day basis. The immune response is highest during the few days following initial infection. The immune response continues to rage until the concentration of HIV has been beaten down to a point where it is for all intents invisible to the immune system.
Since the women keep getting infected, their immune systems are continually on the warpath. Thus, they remain alive.
However, as soon as said women stop working as prostitutes, they die of AIDs.
This explains the high concentrations of anti-viral and anti-inflammatory proteins.
HIV is also mutates so swiftly that a vaccine or cure based on these proteins would be utterly useless.
A hopeful news post, but sadly erroneous.
Conclusion
The identification of novel protein biomarkers that are associated with HIV-1 resistance is important to understanding what mediates protection against infection. This study found that HIV-1-resistant sex workers differentially express proteins in cervical mucosal fluid compared to HIV-1-infected and HIV-1-uninfected counterparts. The most biologically interesting of these include those from the serpin B family, alpha-1 macroglobulin-like 1, and cystatin A, which have antiprotease and/or anti-inflammatory properties. Cystatin A is known to have anti-HIV-1 activity in vitro and it may be contributing, by itself or in concert with other factors, to a protective environment against HIV-1 infection. The hope is to use this information to aid in the design or improvement of microbicides against HIV-1. This technique will be carried out on a larger sample of individuals to confirm their association with resistance to HIV-1 infection. The potential role these proteins play in HIV-1 infection is currently under investigation.
That is the conclusion of this study. It is a newer study and it does not say that they have the virus, in fact it says that they do not.