HIV Infection: March 2007 Archives

Science Daily — A new study led by McGill University researchers shows that half of all HIV transmissions happen when newly infected people don’t know they are carrying the virus and may not even test positive for it.

The study, published in the April edition of the Journal of Infectious Diseases and already available online, followed 2,500 patients in eight Montreal HIV clinics over eight years. It showed that newly infected patients are eight times more likely to transmit the virus than those in the chronic stage of AIDS given the same behaviour.

LOS ANGELES, Feb. 28 -- Like the traditional HIV-associated opportunistic infections, the toll of conditions such as heart and liver disease is also affected by the immune status of a patient, researchers reported here.

Most of us have previously assumed that prolonged survival and advancing age explain much of the increase in these common end-organ diseases" among HIV patients, said Jason Baker, M.D., of the University of Minnesota at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections here.

But in fact, he told an oral abstract session, the increase is related to a patient's CD4 count.