This week at an HIV conference in San Francisco, investigators provided long-awaited information on the incidence of sexually-acquired HIV superinfection. In lay man's terms, "superinfection" occurs when someone is infected twice with HIV, but with slightly different strains (versions) of HIV than the first infection. In a recent study on a group of people newly diagnosed with HIV, 5% of them had multiple strains of HIV in their bodies. Not good.

Scientists currently believe this 5% rate of superinfections actually occur every year. But how these superinfections occur is still unclear; it is not known whether these men were infected with multiple versions of HIV from just one encounter, or if they picked each strain up from various encounters. (All reported multiple sexual partners.)

No matter how you get it, fighting off one strain of the virus with your HIV drugs is hard enough; having to make two separate drug regimens work for you is a recipe for disaster.

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