SA women more susceptible to HIV infection
RIDDLE OF VAGINAL BACTERIA
AN OVERGROWTH of a particular bacteria found in some women’s vagina may be one reason why HIV infection is high among South African women.
The women have among the highest rates of HIV infection in the world and are thousands-fold more likely to get infected with the virus than other women elsewhere in the world having unprotected sex with an HIV-positive man.
About 2 000 women under the age of 25 get HIV every week, according to the Department of Health.
This has led researchers to try and find out what makes local women so susceptible to the disease.
Director of the Centre for the Aids Programme of Research in SA Salim Karim explained at the 21st Aids Conference yesterday that he and colleagues from around the world have discovered that KwaZulu-Natal women who had a lot of Prevotella bivia bacteria in their vaginas were 13 times more likely to have contracted HIV.
The bacteria is not sexually transmitted and it is not known why some women have it and others don’t.
Karim wants to study if bleaching or drying the vagina has anything to do with the overgrowth as he suspects it does.
Scientists already know that inflammation in the vagina, which the immune system fights, makes it easier to get HIV.
Research is still ongoing to uncover multiple causes of the inflammation.
“Contracting HIV is not simply a matter of behaviour or biology only, but a combination of the two,” said Karim
He said the research still needed to be confirmed in other groups outside of the small sample of women.
“Is this only a South African phenomenon? We don’t know that yet.”
What was important about this research is that while many biological features of the vagina that make women susceptible to infection cannot be changed‚ its microbiome could potentially be modified.
Anthony Fauci‚ director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health in the US said the nature of the vaginal bacteria can be altered.
“We can change the types of bacteria that colonise the vagina,” Fauci said.
“This could lead to ways of improving the effectiveness of existing prevention strategies.”