HIV infects, attacks body much faster than previously believed, experts find

HIV infects and attacks the body within days -- much faster than previously thought -- drastically narrowing the window of time when intervention is possible, Duke University researchers have found.

This means clinicians must test more and sooner if they hope to catch an infection before it can be transmitted to someone else. "We're just going to have to be much more aggressive in identifying the infection early on," said Dr. Peter Leone, North Carolina's HIV/AIDS health director and an associate professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill schools of medicine and public health.

Knowledge of what goes on immediately after transmission of the virus is essential to understanding what kind of vaccine will be effective, a discovery especially important after two recent failed attempts to find a shot that works.

On Thursday, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, the main federal agency in charge of AIDS research, called for scientists to return to a basic question: what happens when the virus is transmitted?

"Design of a vaccine that blocks HIV infection will require enormous intellectual leaps beyond present day knowledge," concluded a broad team of institute researchers writing in today's edition of the journal Science. They said the focus of research should be on discovering a vaccine rather than on clinical trials for evaluating medicines that may or may not work.

The Duke results, to be published in the August issue of the Journal of Virology, exemplify that type of scientific inquiry.

FENTANYL OVERDOSES

More than 1,000 people died over two years from an illegal version of the painkiller fentanyl, the government reported Thursday in its first national tally of those deaths.

The spike of overdoses seems to have ended, health officials said, pointing to law enforcement's shutdown of a fentanyl operation in Mexico in 2006.

The wave of fentanyl overdoses first came to light in Chicago in 2005, and by 2006 more clusters were identified in Philadelphia, Detroit and other cities.

Thursday's report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention puts the toll at 1,013 deaths from early April 2005 through late March 2007. The new report is being published this week in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

Fentanyl is a prescription painkiller, often prescribed for cancer patients and administered through a patch. But it also is a powerful, euphoria-inducing narcotic, 30 to 50 times more potent than heroin.

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