CROI 2013The rate of drug-resistant HIV transmitted among newly diagnosed people has remained constant at about one in six cases, MedPage Today reports. Researchers with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) presented their most recent findings on the matter at the 20th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) in Atlanta. The governmental health agency found that there was no significant increase in transmitted virus resistant to antiretrovirals between 2007, when the rate was 15 percent, to 2010, when it was 16.7 percent. However, resistance to non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NNRTIs, or “non-nukes”) is rising at an estimated rate of 5.2 percent per year.

The CDC sampled 18,144 HIV sequences from 77,887 newly diagnosed people with HIV at 10 U.S. surveillance sites between 2007 and 2010. Among these sequences, 2,932 (16.2 percent) had at least one resistance mutation: 2,461 of them showed resistance to one class of drugs, 386 to two classes, and 85 to three. Non-nuke resistance was the most common, with 1,464 mutations that yielded resistance to that class, followed by 1,205 to nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors and 818 to protease inhibitors.

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