Mark Wainberg,
director of the McGill AIDS Center at the Jewish General
Hospital in Montreal, says that about 10% of all new HIV
cases reported in the world are already resistant to
at least one antiretroviral drug at the time of
infection, the Mail & Guardian reports.
Wainberg, speaking at the Microbicides 2006 Conference
in Cape Town, South Africa, says that the high number of
drug-resistant cases is due to HIV's ability to
easily mutate to develop defenses against
antiretroviral medications. An HIV-positive person who
carries drug-resistant HIV can pass that drug-resistant
virus along to others, he says. Infection with
drug-resistant HIV limits treatment options. Virus
that is multidrug-resistant can be much more
difficult to treat than HIV that is susceptible to all
of the available anti-HIV drugs, HIV treatment experts
say. (The Advocate)