Wide range of symptoms at time of seroconversion
In the very first few weeks after infection with HIV, some people feel unwell. Commonly reported symptoms at this time include fever, sore throat, tiredness, a skin rash, aching muscles and joints, swollen lymph glands and headaches.
These symptoms are the result of the immune system’s production of antibodies to HIV in order to mount a defence against HIV. This is known as seroconversion.
The symptoms usually clear up after a while. They are very similar to those of other, much more commonly reported illnesses, including the flu and glandular fever. For these reasons, doctors often fail to suggest an HIV test to people who have these symptoms.
Now a new study has found that a few people have an even wider variety of symptoms and health problems around the time of their seroconversion. The study comes from Switzerland where, since 2002, doctors have been recording information on people who were diagnosed with HIV very early, within six months of their infection.
While most people did have the symptoms mentioned in the first paragraph – like fever and sore throat – the range of other symptoms reported is quite surprising. And many of them were serious enough to require hospital treatment.
There was a long list of unusual illnesses seen. Many involved the gastrointestinal system (including tonsillitis, gall-bladder inflammation and what was at first thought to be appendicitis). Others were connected with the central nervous system (including temporary paralysis of part of the face and psychiatric problems), but symptoms also involved the eyes, the lungs, the kidneys and genitals, and the skin.
Most previous studies of the symptoms of early HIV infection have been conducted with gay men in the United States or Europe, where HIV subtype B is most commonly found. People who had unusual symptoms in this study were more likely to be heterosexual and to have a different subtype. This is interesting because some subtypes which are more often found in other parts of the world, such as D and A/E, seem to be more virulent than subtype B.
The study is a reminder that HIV can present in a wide variety of different ways and can cause a significant illness soon after infection.
Six-week hepatitis C treatment
Until recently, treatment for hepatitis C usually lasted 48 weeks (almost a year) and included injections that gave some people unpleasant side-effects.
A succession of new drug discoveries means that treatment can now be as short as twelve weeks and doesn’t include injections of pegylated interferon.
And researchers are working to see if even shorter durations of hepatitis C treatment are able to cure people of the infection. Early results suggest that six-week courses of treatment may be possible for some people, but that even shorter courses of treatment are not effective.
Researchers offered people combination therapy with three new hepatitis C drugs, each of which attacks hepatitis C at different steps of its lifecycle. Whereas one group of researchers tested three new drugs produced by the pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences, another group of researchers tested two new Merck drugs in combination with Gilead’s drug sofosbuvir.
Both studies found that a six-week course of treatment worked well for certain people – those who have genotype 1 (one of the strains of hepatitis C most commonly found in the UK), had never been treated before and who did not have liver cirrhosis.
The studies found that people with genotype 3 (the other very commonly found strain of hepatitis C in the UK), people who had already tried treatment, and people with cirrhosis tended to need longer treatment, for example for eight or twelve weeks.
And reducing the length of treatment to four weeks did not work well for anyone.
But, for these advances in treatment to benefit people living with hepatitis C, the NHS needs to make these costly drugs available. Last week, officials at NHS England were accused of interfering in the process to make a new hepatitis C drug available.
Editors' picks from other sources
Surviving life itself
from POZ
Mark S King on long-term survival: "In the decades since those sorrowful days, I have faced a host of perilous circumstances apart from AIDS, including a car crash, drug addiction, serious medical procedures and weapons pointed in my direction. Like everyone else, positive and negative alike, I am a survivor of life itself. That life has included falling in love, changing careers, teasing my friends, watching my cats wrestle one another, and looking forward to whatever lies ahead with a deep sense of gratitude and joyful anticipation. And it is this prism – one that includes AIDS as only a segment of my life – through which I view the world today."
HIV-positive vicar overwhelmed by response to video
from The Guardian
The Rev Hayley Young of Hampshire creates video using words on sheets of cardboard to explain illness to congregation.
Tories must now come clean about where their £12bn of welfare cuts will be made
from The Independent
A controversial option would be to pare benefits for the disabled. Taxing disability living allowance, personal independence payments and attendance allowance would save about £1.5bn. But Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne hinted during the election that the most vulnerable would be protected, and hitting the disabled would hardly chime with “compassionate Conservatism”.
Why are organisers being forced to cancel HIV Walk for Life?
from Gay Star News
It would cost more money to put on than it would raise for HIV-positive people living in poverty.