Recovery of Human Immunodeficiency Virus From Serum

Pathogenesis of Human Immunodeficiency Virus Infection

“…In most situations, HIV has been recovered from both blood and cultured PBMC. In others, the virus has been found only in the plasma and not in the PBMC (782). This latter finding may indicate a different source for the plasma virus (e.g., lymph nodes).…”

“…The early data suggested that free infectious HIV was present in the blood of about 30 to 50% of infected individuals (290,782). However, studies with improved virus detection procedures showed that nearly all blood samples contain circulating infectious virus whether the individual is asymptomatic or has AIDS (199,277,471,892,1021,1028).…”

Oral diseases in HIV-1 infection

“…An initial study [70] reported similar occurrence of infectious virus in saliva (44%) and peripheral blood cells (39%). But, follow-up studies consistently showed a very low rate of recovery (0%-9%) of infectious virus in saliva specimens [71][72][73] and a comparatively higher rate of recovery (8%-100%) of infectious virus fi'om blood [74][75][76][77]. Most of the evidence indicates that saliva is a very low risk route of transmission for the virus.…”

Factor VIII, HIV and AIDS in haemophiliacs: An analysis of their relationship

“…Reference 12 cited by Levy is a paper which he published in collaboration with Barbara Michaelis but this paper does not contain a description of the method used to show that (a) HIV seropositive (non-haemophiliac) plasma was infected with 'HIV particles'; (b) HIV was 'present in low titers' and (c) the particles were 'infectious'. Commenting on this and his colleagues' findings Levy wrote: 'These studies demonstrate further that not all seropositive individuals have virus recoverable from their PMCs and that isolation from serum is not a common event' [PMCs=peripheral blood mononuclear cells] (Michaelis & Levy, 1987). 'Thus, cell-free virus in body fluids is unlikely to be a meaningful source of HIV transmission' (Levy, 1988).…”