The New York Case

These thoughts come to mind with the huge controversy that has been built up around last February’s announcement by a New York team that they had "discovered" the existence of a super-virus, which was multi-resistant to the current treatments and caused a rapid progression to AIDS. To give an overview of the case: a 46-year old New Yorker claimed he had had hundreds of sexual encounters over the last two years, most of the time casually, and frequently accompanied by the use of the drug known as "crystal meth" or methamphetamine, a strong narcotic causing behavioral desinhibition and sexually stimulating. This man was diagnosed with HIV for the first time in December 2004, and it was said that two months later he had developed full-blown AIDS.

We were up against a very virulent and dangerous strain, insisted the authorities, which justified the call for public alarm and the frantic search for this man’s former sexual partners so as to test for HIV and analyze their strains, to check if they were identical.

Let’s go step by step. This man’s last HIV negative test was in March 2003. This means there was a window of 20 months until December of 2004, which would allow us to question the rapid progression. Yet even if it was true, this is not a really new case: for some time now there have been documented cases of rapid progression, people in which the HIV virus destroys the immune system more efficiently than usual –a similar thing happens in the case of slow progressors, whose progression to AIDS is slower than the average. Although it is open to debate, the majority of scientists believe that rapid progression is due to a combination of various factors, most importantly genetic and biological characteristics of the host, which can facilitate resistance to drugs.