HIV can travel through a woman’s healthy genital skin

Chicago, United States, December 17: A startling research done by researchers at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine has identified a new path of HIVdefine transmission from a male to a female.

The researchers have found that the virus can penetrate into a woman’s healthy genital skin and reach the immune cells. And this whole procedure takes only four hours to complete.

Earlier it was thought that the big HIVdefine virus could not enter a woman’s body during the sexual intercourse because there was a protection of the lining of vaginal tract. But the latest research shows that this is not the case and the virus can easily penetrate through the healthy genital tissue. Here the virus can infect the immune cells.

For the research purposes, the HIV viruses were given photo-activated fluorescent tags by the researchers. They were then easily able to trace the viruses as they entered the outermost lining of the female genital tract.

Principal investigator Thomas Hope, a Professor of cell and molecular biology, said, “This is an unexpected and important result. We have a new understanding of how HIV can invade the female genital tract.”

Hope further added, “Until now, science has really had no idea about the details of how sexual transmission of HIV actually works. The mechanism was all very murky.”

If the current findings are substantiated by any further studies, then this can go a long way in developing vaccines and microbicides that can help prevent women from contracting HIV.

Experts feel that the need of the hour is new preventive measures and medicines, that can help stop the entry of HIV through a woman’s genital skin. Condoms are the safest to use as they are 100 percent effective, but everyone does not use them because of various reasons.

As per the statistics released by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there are 26 percent women in all the new HIV cases in the United States. On the basis of its 2005 data, CDC said that there are almost 56,300 new HIV cases every year, out of which 31 percent occur because of high-risk heterosexual contact.

The findings of the study were presented at the annual meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology in San Francisco on December 16.