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Superinfection: second HIV infections happen as often as first ones
Gus Cairns, 2012-03-10 05:20:00
Two studies of people with HIV in Rakai, Uganda and Mombasa, Kenya presented at the 19th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections show that the rate at which they acquired second, subsequent strains of HIV was about the same as the HIV incidence rate in the general population.
This is called superinfection. It needs to be distinguished from dual infection, where a person acquires two different strains of HIV at the same time (this is quite common) and viral divergence, which is when a person acquires one strain of HIV but it diversifies into different strains during chronic infection because of ‘copying mistakes’ during replication, which happens in all untreated chronic infections.
Superinfection is of particular interest to vaccine studies because it shows that HIV infection does not confer any general immune protection to infection with other HIV viruses, though some studies have shown that some people develop a degree of immunity to their partner’s specific virus.
There has been little consensus on how often superinfection happens and, if it does, whether it has any consequences for the health of people living with HIV.
The first cases of superinfection were detected because in individual cases something clinical did happen, usually a jump in viral load or drug failure because the second virus was a drug-resistant strain, and for a while such cases were used as a warning to HIV-positive people not to stop using condoms with other HIV-positive partners.
Until recently, however, we have not had the genetic equipment to show how common superinfection is, and therefore how common adverse consequences are.Source:1
