In Asia and the United States, a new disease has been identified that causes symptoms very similar to AIDS, but has nothing to do with HIV. This alarming news was reported by the New England Journal of Medicine.
Epidemiologists don't yet know how to treat the mysterious ailment. Dr. Sarah Browne of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases says the patients show symptoms of immune deficiency, just like people with HIV infection, but the new disease is not contagious.
Scientists do not exclude that this disease can be caused by some unknown microbes, but so far everything indicates that an unknown ailment is not transmitted from person to person. The new disease occurs only in adults, and most often at the age of about 50 years. It also became known that this disease is not hereditary and is not the result of genetic mutations. Death occurs due to the excessive accumulation of infection in the body, which the body with a weakened immune system cannot cope with.
In Asia, the disease is most common in Thailand and Taiwan, but foci of the disease have also been found in Vietnam. Some patients are now being treated at the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. One of the patients at this center is a 62-year-old Vietnamese woman named Kim Nguyen from Tennessee. When she was admitted, her body was weakened, there was no appetite, she lost a third of her body weight, she suffered from headaches, nausea and fainting.
However, after a year of treatment, she was saved. The new disease attacks the body somewhat differently than the HIV virus that causes AIDS. An unknown bacterium destroys the regulatory T cells that keep the body's immune system from attacking its own tissues, and as a result, the patient's immune system is completely destroyed.
After examining more than 200 people in Thailand and Taiwan, Dr. Brown concluded that in addition, the new disease blocks interferon gamma, which also plays an important role in the human immune system (warns the cells of the immune system when disease-causing microbes are in the body).
As a result, there is an effect very similar to the destructive "work" of the HIV virus: the patient's body loses its resistance to the effects of any microorganisms - viruses, bacteria and parasites. But most of all, the body is susceptible to attacks by acid-fast mycobacteria (like those that cause tuberculosis).
Unfortunately, antibiotics are not always effective in treating a mysterious disease. Doctors try to treat some patients with anticancer drugs, but even if such a patient can be saved, the disease turns into a chronic state when the person's immune system is constantly weakened.
Promotional video: