Just as the world inched closer towards an HIV vaccine, researchers have identified a new disease with Aids-like symptoms.
The discovery is unlike anything the medical field has seen before, says Dr Sarah Browne of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and who led a team of scientists in identifying the new condition.
“What we know is that this is not HIV, is not transmitted from one person to the other, but weakens the body’s capacity to fight infections just like HIV does,” Dr Browne told DN2 from the US in an e-mail conversation last week.
Researchers are puzzled by one large study in Thailand and Taiwan, where adults at the age of around 50 were found to have little immunity against infections.
These people did not have HIV and their CD4 (a group of white blood cells that gives the body immunity against infections) counts were normal.
The team has named the disease Adult-Onset Immunodeficiency, which has also been found in Americans of Asian descent.
It has not yet been confirmed whether the new disease has spread to Africa, but researchers do not rule out that possibility.
“We know there are many others out there, including many cases mistaken for tuberculosis in some countries,” Dr Browne had told CBS in an earlier interview, pointing to a likelihood of a misdiagnosis that could help the disease spread undetected.
Signal-blocking Chemical
The condition was found in people aged about 50, Dr Browne explains, indicates that the condition is not acquired at birth but later in life.
The team also explained that the Aids-like symptoms were not confined within family groups, suggesting that this was not a hereditary problem.
Because it is not inherited, doctors have ruled out the idea that a single gene could be responsible for the condition.
A normal body produces chemical signals that tell it when to start fighting germs or other infections.
However, in people with this new condition, the body produces another substance that switches off this disease-fighting capacity.
This is exactly what happens in HIV, even though there is an absence of such a virus in the new discovery, which also does not affect the body’s white cells (CD4).
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