HIV may emerge again from a single cell, new findings suggest

The way AIDS virus brings itself back to life after the use of powerful drugs wasn’t less than a mystery for medical researchers.

But now a new study says that HIV can lie dormant inside some cells (it can be even a single cell) until emerging again to cause destruction.

Huldrych Gunthard, a researcher at University Hospital Zurich, in Switzerland, who is co-author of the study says that their findings are indeed good news, as they suggest that virus doesn’t replicate itself when dormant.

Such drugs are available in the market since the mid-1990s that allow many AIDS patients to decrease the level of the virus in their blood to zero, but the disease remains incurable. Gunthard says that the virus can hide itself in the lymphatic system, bone marrow, brain and in other places in the body.

Usually, Doctors urge HIV patients to have their medication as prescribed, as the virus can dramatically reappear in the body if there aren’t drugs in the body to keep it away.

In their study, Gunthard and colleagues observed the AIDS virus from 20 patients who gone off their medicines for two weeks. The researchers focused on how the virus evolved over time and they noticed that disease could remerge from a small number of cells or even with a single cell.