from Medical Issues

New York: Super-HIV Man
Has Sex With 100 Men

February 25, 2005 - New York health officials are continuing to express alarm about a man who was diagnosed recently with a new HIV strain that becomes full-blown AIDS in months, not years.

Dr. David Ho of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in Manhattan says the man "participated in wild orgies fueled by crystal meth before coming sick." The man is estimated to have had unprotected sex with at least 100 men. "We don't know if this is an isolated case or if there are more cases out there."

The new HIV strain is resistant to 19 out of the 20 antiviral drugs used to combat AIDS. The 46-year-old gay man tested positive for HIV in December. Another test indicated he had antibodies to HIV, indicating he had been infected for more than three months but less than 20, according to Dr. Ho.

Dr. Ho presented many of his findings at the 12th Annual Retrovirus Conference in Boston recently. According to AIDSMap, Dr. Ho "emphasized that the case is unusual, as it represents a convergence of multi-drug resistant HIV and rapid disease progression in a single patient."

Ho observed: "....there has been lots of talk of people who have seen this. [But] according to the literature, the acute infection database and the MACS database [the multicenter AIDS cohort study in which gay HIV-positive and negative men have been followed for many years] such a case is extremely unusual. Look at facts, not people's anecdotes."

Reference: Markowitz M et al. A case of apparent recent infection with a multi-drug-resistant and dual-tropic HIV-1 in association with rapid progression to AIDS. Twelfth Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, Boston, abstract 973B, 2005.