Human Immunodeficiency Viruses

Abstract

HIVs, a family of related lentiviruses etiologically associated with AIDS, now include at least two, possibly three different types (Fig. 5). The “classical” isolates comprise those viruses originally isolated from patients with AIDS and related diseases and variably designated LAV, HTLV-III, or ARV which were identified as the etiological agents of AIDS in 1984 (Barré-Sinoussi et al. 1983; Gallo et al. 1984; Popovic et al. 1985b; Sarngadharan et al. 1984; Schüpbach et al. 1984b; Levy et al. 1984). These viruses, now referred to as HIV-1 (Coffin et al. 1986), are responsible for the current AIDS epidemic in central Africa, Europe, the Americas, and other regions of the world. A novel type of HIV, HIV-2, has been identified as LAV-2 in AIDS patients of West African origin (Clavel et al. 1986a), and as HTLV-IV in healthy prostitutes of this region (Kanki et al. 1986: see “Natural History of HIV Infection”, p. 37). Its progress in Europe and the United States appears to be slow and, at the moment, HIV-2 is not of quantitative importance in these areas. A third type of AIDS-associated virus, distantly related to HIV-2 may have recently been identified in Nigerian patients with disease similar to AIDS and is likely to be dubbed HIV-3 (R. C. Gallo, communication at the third International Conference on AIDS, Washington DC, June 1–5, 1987).