Genomic diversity of Zairian HIV isolates: biological characteristics and clinical manifestation of HIV infection.

We describe here several African isolates of HIV, compare them to U.S.-European prototype isolates and to each other, correlate the number of isolates with serological results, and provide insights into the disease spectrum associated with HIV infection in Africa. Three of 25 healthy Zairian donors and 54 of 87 Zairian patients selected for specific pathology and hospitalized in the internal medicine department of the University Clinic of Kinshasa, Zaire, were HIV positive over a six month period in 1985 either by serum antibody (42 cases) or virus isolation (40 cases). The virus positive cases showed a decrease in number of T4 cells and interleukin-2 (IL2) production by mononuclear cells. Restriction endonuclease analysis of HIV sequences from these isolates showed that genomic diversity is also observed in the Zairian isolates but closely related viruses could also be found, similar to the spectrum of diversity among isolates obtained from the U.S. and Europe. A number of isolates (12 of 40) were obtained from serum antibody negative adults. These results are difficult to explain by viral antigenic diversity alone since hybridization with a HTLV-III-B (clone BH10) probe under stringent conditions indicated an overall high degree of relatedness. Rather, these results indicate that some African HIV infected patients fail to make detectable antibodies to HIV or the antibodies were bound in immune complexes not detectable by current techniques.