At the moment no one knows what’s causing the strange condition, let alone whether it’s transmissible through blood and other body fluids. Because many of the patients report risk factors, such as needle-sharing or unprotected sex-and because their malady runs the same course as HIV disease-many experts suspect an infectious agent is at work. But there’s no evidence that a new agent is spreading rapidly, or that the blood supply is in immediate danger. If a new virus is involved, it’s still exceedingly rare compared with HIV, which has caused more than 230,000 cases of AIDS in the United States alone. True, today’s HIV antibody tests wouldn’t identify infected blood donors, but many would be disqualified because of their HIV risk factors. And if a new virus were identified, developing a blood test would be a fairly routine task.
Several teams of scientists are now studying viral suspects. The group that released its findings last week was led by Dr. Sudhir Gupta of the University of California, Irvine. In a study to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Gupta reports finding an unusual virus in the blood of a 66-year-old woman who suffers from an AIDS-like condition but tests negative for HIV and has no known risk factors. In additional tests, Gupta placed the woman’s infected cells in serum samples taken from 11 other HIV-negative AIDS patients. Eight samples yielded antibodies to her virus, suggesting the patients had experienced a similar infection. Serum from healthy volunteers and from HIV-positive AIDS patients produced no such antibodies.
Gupta doesn’t claim to know whether the virus, which he calls HICRV (human intracisternal retrovirus), is the cause of the strange illness or just a marker for it. But he believes it is different from any previously identified microbe. Robert Garry disagrees. Garry, a retrovirologist at Tulane University Medical School in New Orleans, suspects Gupta is seeing the same virus that he himself isolated two years ago in people suffering from Sjogren’s syndrome, an autoimmune disease that destroys the tear ducts and salivary glands. Garry is now testing HIV-negative AIDS patients for his own virus and hoping to find a connection. The mystery is far from solved. But given the possible stakes, it’s reassuring to see the medical world take it so seriously.
