A misleading «genius»

David Ho, the head scientist of the team that discovered the NY case, claimed that the uniqueness of the rapid progression was due to the fact that it appeared in a multiresistant strain, something never seen before. It is a bit shocking that Ho spilled the beans on this issue, since it has already been documented by Julio Montaner, of Vancouver, in two similar cases in the Retrovirus Conference in 2001, and even more so other cases were published after that. Ho pretended he ignored these facts: something that is a little surprising coming from a "genius" in the area of viral investigation.

Also it has come out that the investigators had come to the conclusion that the New Yorker had AIDS based only on the fact that his CD4 count was less than 200 cells/ml (first 80 and later 28), this without the appearance of any opportunistic infection. It is true that this is a level where maybe all the international directives advise starting treatment, but it is slightly absurd to claim that it is a clear-cut case of AIDS. In the first months of HIV infection it is not strange to have large variations in the CD4 cell counts in the peripheral blood, as a result of the interaction of the HIV virus with the immune system. The possibility cannot be thrown away that this individual was in a phase of immune suppression that his system would have overcome in a few weeks. However Ho and his teem insisted that this was not the case.

As for the strain itself, the team never clarified at any time what they meant with the terms "super-virus" or "super-strain". These expressions, which are quite uncommon in the usually sober world of medical literature, evoke ideas that either this virus is more aggressive and destructive than others against the immune system, which as we have stated before is more than questionable, or that it can be transmitted easier from person to person. This point here would be very important to highlight, given that resistant viruses tend to be less transmittable (if this is what is meant by "less aggressive", a phrase that has been repeated to satiety by the media without really understanding what it meant): this is what it is, a multi-resistant virus that is transmitted easier than others. Yet at the moment of writing this article Mr. Ho has not found any other person with the same strain as our man from NY, and this even though there have been abusive man hunting and interrogation techniques used in the search.