Cells in the linings of the sex organs and the anus can harbour HIV and allow it to replicate rapidly, according to American researchers. This unexpected finding, reported in Florence, may help to explain how the virus spreads from person to person during intercourse.
Dani Bolognesi, a leading AIDS vaccine researcher from Duke University, North Carolina, said the results were important because of the 'strategic position' of the cells on the virus's main routes of entry to the body. William Haseltine from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, whose team carried out the study, said the findings reinforce the message that HIV is basically a sexually transmitted disease.
Although sex is the most important route of transmission for HIV, it is the least understood. Eight out of 10 infections are acquired through intercourse rather than via the bloodstream or in pregnancy, but researchers know almost nothing about which cells in ...