World experts call for Australia to act on HTLV-1 virus

The obscure but devastating virus affecting thousands of people in central Australia is a “very significant problem”, according to international experts on HTLV-1.

The UK’s leading human T-lymphotropic virus clinician said he was “shocked by the extraordinary rate” of infection among central Australian Aboriginal communities, and warned that governments and health professionals needed to mount a “strenuous effort” to tackle the problem.

Prof Graham Taylor is the head of the UK’s National Centre for Human Retrovirology at Imperial College, London. “Central Australia has the highest recorded prevalence rate of HTLV-1 in the world. A 45% infection rate in communities is shocking to me”, he said. In Japan, a concerted public campaign has reduced the transmission of HTLV-1 by 80% over the last twenty years. Prof Yoshi Yamano said Australia needed an “urgent” comprehensive study to map the spread of the virus, as HTLV-1 could be more prevalent than first thought.

This week, Guardian Australia revealed that in five communities around Alice Springs, more than 45% of adults tested had the virus – a rate thousands of times higher than for non-Indigenous Australians. An infectious diseases clinician at the Baker Institute in Alice Springs, Dr Lloyd Einsiedel, also found a strong link between high rates of HTLV-1 infection and the fatal lung disease, bronchiectasis. This research is of great interest to his UK counterpart Taylor. “It’s different to what everyone else has seen, though he is describing a disease that is known elsewhere. But the patients he’s seeing are dying, and dying young. “Every person counts”, Taylor said. “We should not neglect further this community, the disease rates in this community, and the death rates in this community.” Taylor is concerned that Australia doesn’t “even have a testing regime.” “It’s a very significant problem and there needs to be a strenuous effort to deal with it. It will not be easy, it’s complicated by culture and remoteness, but this is a preventable infection. These are preventable deaths”, he said.

The federal Indigenous health Minister, Ken Wyatt, told Guardian Australia: “Indigenous health improvement is a top priority.”

Wyatt said HTLV-1 would be considered in the new bloodborne viruses and sexually transmissible infections strategy, which is being finalised. In the meantime, “further research is contributing to a better understanding of the risks of infection to help guide control efforts in Australia.”

One barrier has been the availability of bloodtests to determine who has the virus and, most importantly, their viral load. The higher the viral load, the greater the risk of serious complications.

Testing for HTLV-1 in Australia is expensive and results can take six months to return because these are currently done as part of a research program. The proviral load test is not publicly available yet. (The Guardian)