SIVs and Human Crossovers in West and Central Africa
Moderators: George Amato (Director, Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics, American Museum of Natural History) and Rob DeSalle (Molecular Systematics, American Museum of Natural History)
François Simon, (Hôpital St. Louis, Paris)
“HIV-1 Group N Is Back”
We report in 2011 a case of primary infection by HIV-1 group N in Paris, France, particularly demonstrative of the HIV passages from a rampant epidemic to an emergence in the Western Europe. HIV-1 group N corresponds to rare variants identified so far in Cameroon, allowing us to definitively consider the HIV epidemic as a zoonosis, HIV-N being more closely related to the SIV isolated from chimpanzees than to the HIV-1 group M and group O (Nature Med 1998). Since, only a dozen of HIV-N infected patients living or collected in Yaoundé, capital of Cameroon have been reported. The HIV-N-Paris patient with a primary infection lives in France without link to Cameroon and was coming back from Togo. He was successfully treated by a penta therapy during the primary infection. He reported to have been heterosexualy contaminated in Lomé with a young girl from unkown origin. Since this case of primary infection in Paris, we also reported last year a new case of HIV-N infection in a patient with AIDS, dying in Douala.
These observation of rare cryptic HIV-1 group N infections, so far reported only in Yaoundé , Cameroon in less than 0.1% of the HIV-infected patients are now circulating inside the Camroon but also in Togo and now are detected in Europe. This case illustrates perfectly the emergence of new viruses around the world, the movement of the HIV strains from a remoted community, their passage to a country and the circulation along migratory routes. These highly divergent HIV strain close from SIV from chimpanzees, trafficking since many years as an epidemiological background noise in remoted community, could be now detected as an incident infection everywhere in the world.
