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Dr. Konstance Knox explains why HHV-6 may be the key to dealing with AIDS.
by Neenyah Ostrom New York Native , issue #678, April 15, 1996 Konstance Knox, Ph.D., is an HHV-6 researcher who has just published a study with extraordinary implications for AIDS research and treatment strategies. Along with colleague Donald R. Carrigan, Ph.D., Knox demonstrated that 100 percent of HIV-infected patients studied (ten out of ten) had active Human Herpes Virus 6 Variant A infections in their lymph nodes early in the course of their disease. Seventy-five percent of these patients, in fact, had CD4 cell counts higher than 200 (the cut-off for receiving a diagnosis of AIDS), up to as high a CD4 count as 700. This finding led Knox and Carrigan to conclude that "active HHV-6 infections appear relatively early in the course of HIV disease and in vitro studies suggest that the A variant of HHV-6 is capable of breaking HIV latency, with the potential for helping to catalyze the progression of HIV infection to AIDS." This new study, in other words, presents data furt