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Description:
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AIDSMAP, April 29, 2008. Standard HIV drug resistance tests may fail to detect HIV drug resistance in more than one-third of newly diagnosed patients, the 14th British HIV Association Conference heard last week. This is important clinically because if no more 0.4% of a person’s viral population is drug-resistant, this can triple the risk of treatment failure, the conference was told. Standard resistance tests can only detect resistance if 10-20% of a person’s viral population is drug-resistant.
Dr Jeffrey Johnson of the US Centers for Disease Control retested 205 samples of what was thought to be wild-type, non-resistant HIV from a group of people newly diagnosed with HIV between 2003 and 2005 in Los Angeles and Chicago, using hypersensitive resistance tests that could pick up resistant virus that comprised as little as 0.1% of the viral population .
The group was a very mixed population of newly-diagnosed people, with roughly a third each being white, Latino and black. Two-thirds were gay men, one in five were injecting drug users, and in the other 15% the HIV exposure risk was heterosexual sex.
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