A more virulent and contagious variant of HIV was found in the Netherlands. According to research, it seems that this variant has been around for decades. On the other hand, this finding is a code red for the COVID-19 pandemic.
"While there is no new mutation in the HIV variant that makes it resistant to widely used therapies, these findings are a warning about how the COVID pandemic may continue in the coming months: the virus does not always evolve to be milder," wrote Marla Broadfoot, Ph. D. in genetics and molecular biology, quoted from Scientific American.
Without treatment, people infected with the newly identified variant of HIV have more than three to five times higher levels of the virus in their blood, making them more infectious.
In addition, their immune systems deteriorate twice as fast, leaving them potentially developing AIDS many years earlier than people with other versions of HIV.
The findings, published this month in the scientific journal Science, show the newly discovered variant carries more than 500 mutations spread across its genome, although it's not clear how they allow the virus to cause more severe disease.
William A. Haseltine, an infectious disease researcher who founded the department of cancer and HIV/AIDS research at the University of Harvard and now heads ACCESS Health International, has written extensively about the potential for SARS-CoV-2 in a more dangerous form.
To Scientific American, Haseltine spoke about why a more virulent variant of HIV, a virus that has been known for nearly half a century, is only now in focus. While the new Corona virus has given birth to several worrying variants in a matter of months.
New variant of HIV is more virulent, SARS-CoV-2 too?
According to Haseltine, we know that all viruses adapt. The way they adapt is very similar to how we use artificial intelligence to solve complex problems. The machine will give a lot of random combinations, and the most successful is the one that survives.
With HIV, its evolution was a long and drawn-out process because the virus is difficult to transmit. It takes an average of 100 sexual contacts for a man to pass it on to a woman and 200 contacts for a woman to pass it on to a man.
"The process is progressing more slowly, not because the virus doesn't change, but because the replication cycle can be very long. For Omicron, the cycle can take hours or days at most. Viruses can be transmitted by a person simply by breathing in the air that a person breathes. another half an hour ago," he said.
In the past year or so, SARS-CoV-2 has produced several different variants with different concerns as well. So how worrying is another possible SARS-CoV-2 variant?
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First of all, it should be noted that the virulence of SARS-CoV-2 is very stable (except for Delta), which is twice as likely to subject the patient to hospitalization. Delta is the first warning in the COVID-19 pandemic to suggest the virus could become more infectious and more deadly.
There's nothing we know about anything that keeps this virus from being as deadly as its cousin SARS-CoV-1. We also still don't know whether one genetic change or many could make SARS-CoV-1 so much more virulent than SARS-CoV-2.
"As long as we don't know what determines the virulence of the virus, we don't know which direction the next variant will come from. So scientists are telling policy makers to be optimistic about the upside, but warn to stay prepared for the downside," he said.
"For SARS-CoV-2, the existence of the virus depends on re-infecting people who have been infected in the previous year. We are fighting millions of years of evolution in organisms that know how to fool our immune systems and get into us again and again."
One thing they saw that the Corona virus variant did was that its transmission capability was getting faster. Delta is faster than Alpha, Omicron is faster than Delta, and BA.2 Omicron is faster than BA.1 Omicron.
"There are many ways for this virus to mutate to increase its transmission. Whether any of them will affect virulence or not is not known clearly," he concluded.