ATLANTA – The city’s top AIDS official said yesterday the recently discovered virulent HIV strain – dubbed a “superstrain” by some – appears to be an isolated case and may not have been the new virus form that was initially feared.
“This could have been very bad, but our worst fears haven’t been realized,” Scott Kellerman, a Health Department assistant commissioner, told The Post at a conference here.
The doctor made his remarks after giving a detailed presentation of the case at the 2005 National HIV Prevention Conference, which attracted 3,000 doctors, scientists and AIDS service workers.
“We’re never going to really know for sure if this is a severe case of primary HIV infection or whether this represented something brand new or something completely different,” Kellerman said.
In February, officials alerted the world to a fortysomething gay man in New York whose HIV infection progressed with lightning speed to full-blown AIDS in four or five months.
He was also resistant to 19 of 20 classes of drugs used to treat HIV.
But months after scouring national lab records and investigating 14 partners, Kellerman said researchers still haven’t found anyone else infected with the same strain.
“No patients with identical strains have been identified by the big labs in our attempts to find out whether this was more widespread but the investigation is ongoing,” he said. “It suggests that this might be an isolated incident.”