Since we talked about HIV/AIDS a couple weeks ago in class, I wanted to remind everyone about HIV infection of hemophilia patients in the 80's. Patients with hemophilia often require frequent transfusions of clotting factors to control bleeding. This plasma-derived factor is made from pooled factor from many blood donors, which greatly increased the risk of HIV contamination in the 80s, when HIV screening of blood donors was not in place (and for some time they didn't even know about HIV). HIV transmission has not occurred from factor products since 1986, when they started viral inactivating blood products.
Unfortunately, about half of the hemophilia patients in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the United States were infected with HIV via blood products, and many have developed AIDS. Currently, 10-15% of the hemophilia population is HIV positive.
I think there is an important lesson from this story-even though we believe the blood supply is safe, it is only safe with respect to the infections we know about and can/do test for.
Inflammablog 2 is the second Blog made specially to be shared by two courses at two schools: PSIO 495 at University of Arizona in Tucson, and IMMU 7630 at University of Colorado School of Medicine in Denver. PSIO is a colloquium on inflammation and IMMU is a lecture course on immunology for graduate students. You can visit the Original Inflammablog.
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We particularly want this to be a place to practice clear, friendly communication to people who have a background in science, but are not experts in this particular area. Sort of the Café Scientifique crowd.
Inflammablog 2 is the place to post short reviews about selected subjects in immunology, inflammation, and infection, and have them commented on (and possibly even improved) by friends and colleagues. It is managed by John Cohen in Denver, and Zoë Cohen in Tucson. We invite students in either course to comment on the postings by their classmates and by the students in the other course.
We particularly want this to be a place to practice clear, friendly communication to people who have a background in science, but are not experts in this particular area. Sort of the Café Scientifique crowd.
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2 comments:
I thought your post was interesting. I was once watching a documentary about when HIV was first discovered. It said that the CDC warned the blood banks that HIV might be transmittable through the blood. But they refused to throw out the blood because they thought it would be wasteful.
I just wanted to add that little tidbit because I thought it was interesting, but I did have a real question. I know that HIV is constantly mutating and that's why they have a hard time finding a cure. Is there any part of the virus that does stay constant?
Thanks for your comments!
From my class notes, it appears that the reason the HIV has such a high mutation rate is that the reverse transcriptase is a very error-prone enzyme and doesn't have proofreading capability. It makes a mistake about 1 in every 100,000 bases.
Based on that information, I would guess that there isn't any part of the viral genome that would remain constant, but I'm not completely sure.
I'm also not sure if that is the reason it is so hard to find a treatment, but it might be contributing to the problem.
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