Doctors are baffled by a strange outbreak that looks like AIDS and kills like AIDS but isn't caused by any known form of HIV.
In fact, they cannot agree whether they are dealing with an entirely new illness, an unrecognized old one or ordinary AIDS that is caused by some mutant form of HIV.Even whether the cases seen so far are a cause for alarm is unclear.
"People should be thoughtfully concerned, but they shouldn't panic," advised Dr. June Osborn, head of the U.S. National Commission on AIDS.
In victims of the disease, levels of protective white blood cells called T cells drop precipitously, just as they do in AIDS patients. And like people with AIDS, they develop overwhelming infections from usually harmless germs.
Doctors comparing notes Tuesday at the Eighth International Conference on AIDS said they have seen at least two dozen cases of the disease.
Some, such as James Curran, head of AIDS work at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, questioned whether the cases are caused by a microbe or are even connected to each other in any way.
Curran contends that because the disease is apparently not caused by HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, then it's not AIDS.
"It's easy to slip into an AIDS mentality. We are at an AIDS conference. But this is not AIDS," he said.
However, Dr. Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, a co-discoverer of HIV, said he has seen two cases of the mystery illness and believes they are caused by a mutant form of HIV.
Doctors and blood banks routinely screen for AIDS by checking blood for antibodies that the body makes to combat the virus. Montagnier said that while the patients he saw had no AIDS antibodies in their blood, he could find the antibodies in their urine.
He speculated that their disease was caused by a mutant form of HIV that perhaps had changed its outer skin so it looked different to the body's immune surveillance system.
No matter what the disease is, it's uncommon, Curran said. During the past two to three years, the CDC has learned of six cases of the illness.
However, during the course of one session at the AIDS meeting, the known number of cases doubled, as scientists rose from the floor to describe cases they had seen. More are sure to come to light, especially since Curran is urging doctors to inform the CDC of any they find.