14th International AIDS Conference Barcelona, Spain - July 7-12, 2002

Int Conf AIDS 2002 Jul 7-12; 14:(abstract no. C10735)

Srihari BJ, Jacob M, Paranjape S, Samuel NM
Tamilnadu Dr.MGR.Medical university, Chennai, India

BACKGROUND: Namakkal, situated 400kms from Chennai has the largest high-risk population (long distance transport workers) in the whole of India, who carry the HIV-1 infection from different parts of India, and hence have the possibility of existence of various subtypes. Department of Experimental Medicine of Tamilnadu Dr. M.G.R. Medical University found the prevalence of HIV-1 among pregnant women to be 3% in Namakkal. Therefore Namakkal was identified as an ideal source for identifying the HIV-1 subtypes circulating among pregnant women Material and

METHODS: Blood samples from 5 HIV-1 seropositive pregnant women, who attended the ANC clinic, and two infant samples were tested, these were tested in cooperation with NARI, Pune. HMA technique was applied as per the standard protocol. RESULT: For HMA, different combinations of primers resulted in the successful amplification in 3 of the HIV-1 positive pregnant women samples and 2 of the infant DNA samples. HMA identified 3 samples as C2 subtype and two as C3 subtype. The other 2 samples could not be typed by this method. The two samples that could not be amplified by ED3/14 and ES7/8 were repeated with ED31/33 for second round PCR, which were not amplified. Then the samples were amplified with gag primers, which is said to be most conserved region. One sample was not amplified while another sample was amplified with gag primers. Hence the sample which did not amplify for both env and gag primers will be evaluated later by sequencing.

CONCLUSION: This preliminary study showed that C2 is circulating in pregnant women of Namakkal. Further studies are in progress to ascertain the prevalence of the HIV-1 subtypes and its role in MTCT. HMA may be a useful technique in resource limited setting.

020707
C10735

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