Virus Smackdown!

Wow. Check out this New Scientist article by Phillip Cohen: Being coinfected with a Hepatitis-c like virus called GBV-C may actually help people infected with HIV fight off AIDs, according to a recent study from The New England Journal of Medicine authored by Jack Stapleton of the University of Iowa and colleagues.

"Those results suggest GBV-C infection is as powerful a protective agent against HIV as some genetic factors that have been linked to slow progression of AIDS. Exactly how GBV-C can accomplish this is not clear.

Stapleton says some tantalising hints will be revealed by experiments his team has conducted in which the two viruses compete for infection in a test tube. They hope to publish that data in the next few months. "