African AIDS prevalence may be physiological

From Wikinews, the free news source you can write! Thursday, July 24, 2008 A variation in the Duffy antigen receptor for chemokines, or simply DARC, found in two-thirds of sub-Saharan Africans may have introduced an unknown vulnerability that could lead to a 40% greater risk of catching — thought to be a defense mechanism against malaria — in which a single genetic letter is flipped, stops the growth of the malaria causing parasite Plasmodium vivax. Concurrently it also causes chemokines to avoid red blood cells, an opposite behavior of the typical Duffy gene. Twenty-two years into an on-going study of American Airmen who self-identify as Black has found that the group infected with HIV was more likely to lack red blood cells that host the Duffy gene. The study, published in Cell Host & Microbe, doesn’t identify why the... [read full story]