New strain of AIDS found in Black faggot: it’s a killer
By Sinclere Lee
WASHINGTON (BNW) – Just when I thought it was safe to start back dating and getting my freak on again, here comes this Black faggot in New York with a new stain of AIDS that has no cure! As a result, I am back on my homophobia trip — loathing this fag.
AIDS experts sounded the alarm last week of a case where a man infected with a uniquely dangerous mutant of HIV has passed the virus on to others. I am mad as hell; here science is coming close to a treatment for the old AIDS, and here this faggot is coming-up with some new shit.
To make a bad situation worse, the AIDS patient was a methamphetamine user who said he had unprotected sex with at least 10 partners before he knew he was infected, which means this difficult-to-treat version of the virus is spreading to others.
The case is important because the patient has a form of the virus that is both resistant to several classes of drugs and because it seems to be unusually virulent, Dr. David Ho of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York and colleagues stated in a report.
"This infection has resulted in progression to symptomatic AIDS ... over a course of four to, at most, 20 months," Ho told a special evening session of the 12th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections being held in Boston.
Some activists and HIV specialists criticized Ho and the New York Department of Health for publicizing the case, saying it was a sideshow when 40,000 people become infected with the incurable virus in the United States alone every year.
They pointed out that ordinary HIV is bad enough, destroying the immune system with no hope for a cure of vaccine in sight. More than 39 million people globally are infected and more than 28 million have died.
And they worried about a backlash against gay men because they are back at that shit again. Drugs do not stop the patient’s virus in three of the four licensed classes of HIV antiretrovirals, Ho said.
This is not unusual in and of itself, researchers told the conference. But on top of this, the virus gets into the CD4 immune cells it targets using two separate molecular doorways called receptors -- the CCR5 and CXCR4 receptors.
"Early in infection that is unusual," agreed Dr. Ron Valdiserri, a top AIDS expert at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"That is associated with more rapid destruction of CD4 cells and hence a more rapid course (of disease)."
Valdiserri and other experts expect that as more people take drug cocktails to control HIV, more drug-resistant strains of virus will turn up. That is because if patients do not take drugs precisely on time without missing a dose, the virus will eventually mutate to resist drugs.
So the experts gathered to try to determine just how unusual and scary this case really is.
Stephen Gange and Alvaro Munoz of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore studied more than 10,000 men and women at risk of HIV between 1984 and 2003 and found it took anywhere between 6 months and 20 years for patients to develop symptoms after being infected.
While rapid progression to full-blown AIDS is rare, it is not new, they told the meeting.
Ho's team said its members were worried because mutated HIV strains usually are weak and this man's strain is not.
But Andrew Leigh Brown of Britain's University of Edinburgh reviewed several studies that had detailed transmission of drug-resistant HIV from person to person.
Most drug resistant strains never get transmitted, he said. Those that do get passed along are strong.
Dr. Harold Jaffe of Britain's Oxford University said the case highlighted a big problem. "More than two decades into the HIV/AIDS epidemic, why are some persons still placing themselves at high risk for infection?" he asked.
People have lost their fear of the virus; some groups are hard to reach with health education messages, and people incorrectly believe patients taking HIV cocktails cannot spread the virus, he said.