- Note - What the story ISN'T saying is that mosquitoes
are SPREADING HIV. Every time a mosquito or ANY biting insect takes blood
from an infected human and then bites the next person, scores of viruses
and bacteria are transmitted. To write a news story without pointing to
the obvious disease-vectoring reality of mosquitoes is gross deception
at the least. This is a particularly odious statement: "Higher
viral load causes more HIV transmission, and malaria causes high HIV viral
load." Mosquitos are already KNOWN to transmit over 70 different retroviruses.
HIV is a retrovirus...but there is no mention of any of this in the
following story. - ed
-
-
- WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Malaria
may be helping spread the AIDS virus across Africa, the continent hardest
hit by the incurable disease, scientists said on Thursday.
-
- The way the two diseases interact greatly expands the
prevalence of both among people in sub-Saharan Africa, a team of scientists
said in a study in the journal Science.
-
- Malaria, a mosquito-borne disease caused by a parasite,
greatly boosts viral load -- the amount of human immunodeficiency virus
in the blood of infected people -- making them more likely to infect a
sex partner with HIV, they stated.
-
- "Higher viral load causes more HIV transmission,
and malaria causes high HIV viral load," said lead study author Laith
Abu-Raddad of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle and
the University of Washington.
-
- Abu-Raddad, an AIDS researcher, estimated that malaria
has helped HIV infect hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of people
in sub-Saharan Africa. AIDS was first identified a quarter century ago.
-
- At the same time, HIV fuels malaria's spread because
HIV-infected people are more susceptible to malaria as a result of HIV
ravaging the immune system, the body's natural defenses, the researchers
said.
-
- AIDS and malaria are concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa.
Abu-Raddad said scientists were puzzled when they realized that the risky
sexual behavior by people in the region was not by itself sufficient to
explain the swift spread of HIV, so other factors must be involved.
-
- They focused their work on Kisumu, a Kenyan city by Lake
Victoria where HIV and malaria are both common. They said 5 percent of
HIV infections can be blamed on the increased HIV viral load due to malaria,
and 10 percent of adult malaria cases can be blamed on HIV.
-
- Since 1980, 8,500 more people got HIV infections, and
there were 980,000 more episodes of malaria (a person can get it more than
once) in a city whose adult population is 200,000, the study found.
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- PUBLIC HEALTH EFFORTS
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- The findings have implications for public health efforts,
Abu-Raddad said, showing the importance for authorities to tackle these
diseases together.
-
- Of the 39.5 million people worldwide infected with HIV,
24.7 are in the poor countries of sub-Saharan Africa. About 2.1 million
of the world's 2.9 million AIDS deaths in the past year were in this region.
-
- Malaria kills more than a million people annually, mostly
young children in sub-Saharan Africa.
-
- The researchers produced their results with a mathematical
model using HIV and malaria infection data gathered in Malawi by James
Kublin of the Hutchinson Center. This enabled them to quantify for the
first time the synergy between malaria on HIV and its toll on people.
-
- Scientists previously determined that a lack of male
circumcision and the incidence of genital herpes also were facilitating
the spread of HIV. Abu-Raddad noted that circumcised men are much less
likely to get HIV, and that genital herpes opens a door for HIV to infect
a person.
-
- Abu-Raddad said malaria now can be considered a third
serious factor facilitating the spread of HIV.
-
- The two diseases drive one another even though they have
different modes of transmission -- malaria by mosquito and HIV predominantly
by sexual intercourse, Abu-Raddad noted.
-
- Abu-Raddad said once an HIV person gets malaria, his
or her viral load goes up and stays higher for six to eight weeks, making
the person far more infectious to others.
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