A mutated strain of HIV spotted in Canada is driving sufferers to develop AIDS quicker than usual, a study reveals.
The strain is circulating in Saskatchewan, where 80 percent of people diagnosed with the illness are Indigenous.
Doctors started reporting alarmingly rapid declines among patients in 2016, when the rate of HIV infections rocketed to 10 times the rate of other regions.
Now, a new study carried out by Simon Fraser University in Vancouver warns there is concrete evidence that this community is the birthplace of a particularly aggressive strain, which is developing faster than modern medicine can keep up with.
They believe the virus has likely adapted to an immune profile specific to the Indigenous community.
‘Instead of it taking years, sometimes it just takes a month or a year … and it’s much more aggressive than we would otherwise see,’ Dr Alex Wong, an infectious disease physician with the Saskatchewan Health Authority, told The Canadian Press.
Researchers at the university’s BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS compared 2,300 samples of Saskatchewan strains to other ones obtained across Canada and the United States.
Unequivocally, they found higher levels of mutations that are resistant to the body’s immune responses in the Saskatchewan strains than in the others.