Estimated worldwide HIV infections: 48 411 523 at 12.33pm on Thursday September 5 2002
This is the decade in which the world’s scientists will find a cure for Aids, said Stephen Fuller, a professor with the School of Clinical Medicine at Oxford University.
Fuller said he had no doubt that a breakthrough in the treatment of Aids would be found, given that thousands of scientists worldwide were probing the HI virus and also searching for a vaccine.
He said the tragedy of the onset of Aids in the past decades had been accompanied by a flowering of new technical advances and techniques in light and electron microscopy for the study of the virus.
He said that the understanding by the scientific community of the virus had profited from the use of recent methods in light microscopy.
A second strain: Swiss researchers have documented a rare case of a patient contracting a second HIV infection years later with a different strain of the virus.
Doctors once assumed that patients’ natural immunity would keep them from getting the virus more than once. But in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine researchers describe the case of a 38-year-old man who acquired a second strain through unprotected sex more than two years after he was first infected in 1998.
The researchers said the case could have implications for the development of an Aids vaccine and supports the practice of safe sex even among HIV-infected partners.
Source: www.redribbon.co.za, Sapa