BCM’s Dr Paul Klotman had nothing to say about COVID during this week’s video. Instead, he addressed the other on-going pandemic – HIV infection.
Baylor (BCM) has a long-standing collaboration with Botswana and Bristol-Meyers Squib that addresses HIV/AIDS in that country. I think that collaboration goes back some 20 years and has led to Botswana becoming a shining example of how public health efforts that focus on individual interventions can eliminate maternal-child transmission of the HIV virus in the third world.
The connection between HIV and COVID pandemics is subtle. People who have weakened immune systems can develop chronic SARS-CoV-2 viral infection. Those individuals harbor the COVID virus in their bodies longer than folks who have intact immune systems and who either recover or die from COVID infection.
Chronic infection gives the COVID virus lots of time to mutate and shed among a person’s community contacts. So, treating an HIV/AIDS patient with effective anti-retroviral therapy does more than help the individual; it also helps protect the wider community not only against HIV but also against COVID.
As every student of ecology learns, everything is interconnected – all of us, the earth, the water, the air, and every living thing in the world.