Woman with HIV carries coronavirus which mutates over 30 times inside her body

Researchers in South Africa were left baffled when they found potentially dangerous mutations of novel coronavirus in a 36-year-old woman already infected eith with advanced HIV. The woman carried the COVID-19 virus for nearly 216 days and during this period, the virus mutated more than 30 times.

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Researchers in South Africa were left baffled when they found potentially dangerous mutations of novel coronavirus in a 36-year-old woman already infected with with advanced HIV. The woman carried the COVID-19 virus for nearly 216 days and during this period, the virus mutated more than 30 times.

The case report was published on Thursday as a preprint in medRxiv a medical journal. According to the report, the woman was diagnosed with HIV in 2006 and her immune system has weakened consistently over time. Read here

The study notes the erratic behaviour of the novel coronavirus in hosts with other long-term ailments that diminish the immune system.

"While most people effectively clear Sars-CoV-2, there are several reports of prolonged infection in immunosuppressed individuals. We present a case of prolonged infection of greater than 6 months with shedding of high titter SARS-CoV-2 in an individual with advanced HIV and antiretroviral treatment failure. Through whole genome sequencing at multiple time-points, we demonstrate the early emergence of the E484K substitution associated with escape from neutralizing antibodies, followed by other escape mutations and the N501Y substitution found in most variants of concern," the study noted.

The host, in this case, contracted the COVID-19 infection in September 2020 and the virus accumulated 13 mutations to the spike protein and 19 other genetic shifts that could change the behaviour of the virus.

Some of these mutations have been seen in variants of concern, such as E484K mutation, which is part of the Alpha variant B.1.1.7 (first seen in the UK), and N510Y mutation, which is part of the Beta variant B.1.351, (first seen in South Africa).

According to the researchers, it was not clear if the woman passed on these mutations to others.