Before treatment, people with the VB variant had far more virus in their blood and suffered more immune system damage than people with other HIV variants, the study found. It’s not clear which of many viral genetic changes are the cause, but after treatment they fared the same as other HIV patients.
Finding this type of variant “is not a public health crisis,” Joel Wertheim, a viral evolution expert at the University of California, San Diego, cautioned in an accompanying Science editorial. He wasn’t part of the Oxford research.
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It “does not appear to have led to a spike” in HIV cases, Wertheim said in an email interview. But the finding highlights how much is left to learn about why a long-spreading virus “still has the potential to evolve and adapt. As this current pandemic continues to remind us, we shouldn’t underestimate the potential for viral adaptation.”
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