Strains circulating in Saskatchewan, where nearly 80% of infected are indigenous, may lead to faster development of related viruses
Mutated strains of HIV circulating in a Canadian province where HIV rates rank among the highest in North America could be leading to the more rapid development of Aids-related illnesses, according to new research.
The research, published in the scientific journal Aids, was sparked by anecdotal reports from Saskatchewan, where HIV rates in 2016 exceeded the national average tenfold in some areas. Nearly 80% of those infected with HIV in the province are indigenous.
“Some of our physician colleagues in Saskatchewan started to report that they were seeing cases of people being infected with HIV and getting very sick, very quickly,” said Zabrina Brumme, the lead author of the study and a professor at Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University. “It was almost as if there might have been something particularly nastier about the virus.”
Previous research carried out in Japan had explained a similar phenomenon by pointing to resistant strains that had adapted to evade host immune responses. Researchers wondered if the same factors might be at play in Saskatchewan.
Researchers at a laboratory at the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/Aids – which since 1998 has performed HIV genotyping for virtually all Canadian provinces and territories – compared more than 2,300 HIV sequences from Saskatchewan with data sets from across Canada and the US.