Researchers published a study Thursday in the journal
Sciences
where they claim to have identified a very virulent variant of HIV.
The information may be a little scary like that, but there is actually "no reason to be alarmed", assured Chris Wymant, researcher in epidemiology at the University of Oxford.
According to the scientists, this variant would have started to circulate in the Netherlands in the 1990s. If there is no cause for concern according to them, it is because this variant responds to existing treatments and has been in decline since. 2010.
This rare discovery could on the contrary help to better understand how the HIV virus, which causes the disease AIDS, attacks cells.
This work also demonstrates that a virus can evolve to become more virulent.
A scientific hypothesis that has been extensively studied in theory, but of which there were only a few examples until then.
The Delta variant of the coronavirus has recently been another.
A variant with more than 500 mutations
The HIV virus is constantly changing, so each infected person has a slightly different version of it, which mostly doesn't matter.
But the variant discovered has more than 500 mutations.
“Finding a new variant is normal, but finding a new variant with unusual properties is not.
Even less so with increased virulence,” said Chris Wymant.
In total, the researchers found 109 people infected with this HIV variant, only four of them outside the Netherlands (in Belgium and Switzerland).
It has been named "variant VB", for "virulent variant of subtype B", the most common subtype in Europe.
The people identified with this variant within the framework of the study, once treated, do not present a greater risk of complications than the others.
And this story of increased virulence?
Disease progression is usually measured by the number of CD4 T cells in the blood.
However, people infected with the variant had a lower CD4 count than others at the time of diagnosis, with a decline estimated to be twice as fast.
The researchers calculated that, without treatment, the dangerous threshold of 350 T-CD4 lymphocytes per microliter of blood would be reached in 9 months with this variant, compared to 3 years for the other patients.
In addition to its virulence, researchers have also shown that it is highly transmissible.
The researchers could not explain which specific mutations of the VB variant caused its high virulence, or by what mechanism.
They hope that future studies can do this.
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