HIV sexual spread exploits immune sentinels
By John Travis
It’s yet another illustration of the remarkable ability of the AIDS virus to exploit the immune system that seeks to destroy it. To find the so-called T cells that it most commonly infects, HIV seems to hitch a ride on specialized immune cells that patrol the body’s mucus membranes, scientists report. These sentinels may also enable the virus to more easily infect its target cells.
This is the first time that biologists have shown that a virus takes advantage of one type of immune cell to infect another, says Yvette van Kooyk of the University Medical Center St. Radboud in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.