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A new route of male-to-female transmission of HIV - in which the virus can travel through healthy genital skin to reach immune cells in just four hours - has been identified by US researchers.
It's long been believed that the normal lining of the vaginal tract was an effective barrier to HIV during sexual intercourse, because the large HIV virus couldn't penetrate the tissue. But the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine researchers found that HIV can penetrate normal, healthy genital tissue to a depth where it can get to immune cells and infect them.
The researchers labelled HIV viruses with photo-activated fluorescent tags and were able to track the viruses as they penetrated the outermost lining of the female genital tract (the squamous epithelium) in female human tissue obtained through hysterectomy and in animal models.
"This is an unexpected and important result. We have a new understanding of how HIV can invade the female genital tract," principal investigator Thomas Hope, a professor of cell and molecular biology, said in a university news release.
"Until now, science has really had no idea about the details of how sexual transmission of HIV actually works. The mechanism was all very murky," Hope said.
These findings, if confirmed in future studies, could help in the development of new microbicides and vaccines to protect women against HIV.
"We urgently need new prevention strategies or therapeutics to block the entry of HIV through a woman's genital skin," said Hope. While condoms are 100% effective in blocking HIV, "people don't always use them for cultural and other reasons." – (HealthDay News)
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HIV/Aids Centre
December 2008
