LOS ANGELES, March 1 (UPI) -- A bout of measles among children dramatically lowers levels of the virus that causes AIDS, say U.S. researchers.
Doctors said Wednesday they "observed universal and profound but transient" decreases in circulating human immunodeficiency virus while the children in Uganda were battling co-infection with measles.
"Measles tends to cause immunosuppression so we were concerned about what that double infection would do to our patients," Theodore Ruel, a fellow in pediatric infectious diseases at the University of California, San Francisco, told United Press International.
"We were surprised at the magnitude of the decrease in HIV," he said at the 14th annual Retrovirus Conference in Los Angeles.
Ruel noted that the double infection caused no apparent problems with patients who were on treatment with anti-retroviral treatment. In treatment where viral loads were detectable, all 11 children showed dips in HIV. In all, Ruel had data on 15 children who were co-infected.
They are part of the international Children with HIV And Malaria Program (CHAMP) in Uganda. The program receives funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
Ruel said his observations mirrored those reported earlier by William Moss of Johns Hopkins University who published his findings in the Journal of Infectious Disease 2002.
Ruel and other researchers are actively trying to unravel the reasons why measles co-infection appears to stop or dramatically slow HIV replication.
He suggested that scientific pursuit of the mechanism causing that change in replication could result in a future treatment in the fight against HIV/AIDS.
