AIDS and hemophilia: still a risk?AIDS and hemophilia: Still a risk? With the advent last year of heat treatment of vital blood factors, AIDS from such products was supposed to cease being a risk to hemophiliacs. But a report in the March 15 LANCET describes a hemophiliac he·mo·phil·i·ac n. A person who is affected with hemophilia. hemophiliac an animal affected with hemophilia. whose blood showed he had been exposed to the AIDs virus AIDS virus n. See HIV. after he received heat-treated factor VIII factor VIII n. A factor in the clotting of blood, a deficiency of which is associated with hemophilia A. Also called antihemophilic factor, antihemophilic globulin, antihemophilic globulin A, . The connection, says coauthor Gilbert C. White II of the University of North Carolina North Carolina, state in the SE United States. It is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean (E), South Carolina and Georgia (S), Tennessee (W), and Virginia (N). Facts and Figures Area, 52,586 sq mi (136,198 sq km). Pop. (UNC (Universal Naming Convention) A standard for identifying servers, printers and other resources in a network, which originated in the Unix community. A UNC path uses double slashes or backslashes to precede the name of the computer. ) in Chapel Hill, warrants further investigation but doesn't yet mean factor VIII is hazardous. And Peter Levine of Memorial Hospital in Worcester, Mass., a medical co-director of the National Hemophilia Foundation, says the possibility that the hemophiliac was exposed to AIDS through intravenous drug use intravenous drug use Intravenous drug abuse The habitual IV injection of drugs of abuse Epidemiology In the US ± 2.5 million–population ± 235 million have used IVDs Infections Pyogenic–eg, endocarditis, pneumonia, sepsis Common agents cannot be ruled out. The man, who received heat-treated factor VIII following an operation, was a mild hemophiliac who had not received blood products ince 1975. Upon quetioning by physicians, he admitted to having used intravenous drugs prior to 1978, but said he no longer used them and was in no other AIDS risk group. His blood showed no evidence of AIDS antibodies before the operation, but a blood sample taken five weeks after the operation came up positive. White and his UNC and Duke University co-workers examined several possibilities for the finding: The heat-treated factor VIII could have included live virus; inactivated inactivated rendered inactive; the activity is destroyed. inactivated viruses treated so that they are no longer able to produce evidence of growth or damaging effect on tissue. virus could have caused an immune response; the factor VIII preparation could have contained AIDS antibodies; or the patient could have used intravenous drugs recently. "We think it may well have been live virus," says White, "but we're not sure." While donor-blood screening -- which was not available when the man received the factor VIII -- combined with heat treatment is likely to handle the problem, the safety of such blood products still needs to be studied, says White. According to Levine, an international study of hemophiliacs who have received only heat-treated blood products has found no antibody-positive patients among several hundred hemophiliacs checked so far. |
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