Survivors with HIV challenging science Immune systems may hold clues to virus

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Survivors with HIV challenging science Immune systems may hold clues to virus - Wyatt Buchanan, Chronicle Staff WriterSunday, June 4, 2006

When Lanz Lowen first learned he was HIV-positive 21 years ago, he was not surprised; he had frequented San Francisco's gay bathhouses in the 1970s and picked up sex partners at discos. What has surprised Lowen, 53 -- who knows from blood samples tested later that he was positive in 1978 -- is that he is still alive. It is not known how many people who were infected with HIV in the late 1970s are still living, but the Bay Area is home to many survivors like Lowen, whose lives follow the arc of the epidemic. In the mid-1980s, he said, "the message really was, 'People don't live longer than a year or two,' " said Lowen, who lives in the Oakland hills with Blake Spears, his partner of 31 years, who is HIV-negative. "People close to us were dying, and they were going pretty quickly. There wasn't a lot of hope around it." Lowen's story begins in 1975, after he moved to the Bay Area from Florida with his wife. He came out, they divorced, and within a few months he met Spears at the White Horse Inn in Oakland. Lowen attended political rallies and gay pride marches and enjoyed his new liberated life, dancing a lot and experimenting with sex inside and outside of his relationship with Spears. Then in 1981, Lowen saw a short article posted in the window of Star Pharmacy in San Francisco's Castro neighborhood about gay men getting sick from a strange illness. "It was scary, but it was too early to know how big a deal it was," he said. "It was like, 'God, I hope this doesn't spread, and I hope I don't have to do anything different than I've been doing.' " But it did spread. Lowen and Spears stopped going to the baths in San Francisco -- they still recall the last night they did so -- and six months later, one of Lowen's previous sex partners died. The couple stopped having sex with other people and began using condoms. "It didn't take long for it to hit home," said Lowen, who eventually lost five close friends and more than 100 acquaintances. They assumed they both were positive, but learned in 1985, when the first HIV test came out, that Spears never contracted the virus. "The mind-set for us was that, well, like any disease, there are lots of people who are exposed that don't come down with it. That was the way we stayed confident and didn't get too freaked out till they came out with some report close to '87 that said everyone who was positive eventually would die from this," Lowen said. "I wasn't in denial, but it wasn't an absolute. That changed overnight." There is a common factor among those who have had HIV for a long period and whose health has been affected but not destroyed. "They were able to make it to 1996, basically," said Dr. Buchbinder, director of HIV research for the San Francisco Department of Public Health, referring to the year when effective medicine first appeared. Dr. Jay Levy, a UCSF virologist who has focused on HIV and AIDS since the beginning of the epidemic, is studying the immune systems of people who have carried HIV at least 10 years and never gotten sick, for clues about how to stop the virus. Called long-term nonprogressors, they make up 3 to 5 percent of HIV-positive people. Lowen's journey to the turning point of 1996 became largely spiritual. Soon after his diagnosis, he saw a medical doctor who also did shamanic work. He eventually came to see the virus as an energy force. "It was like this spirit I was living with and I could learn from it. To the degree I could learn from it and honor it, I might be able to coexist with it. Rather than trying to get it out of my system, I really tried to pace myself, stay in balance, look at what this experience could be teaching me," he said. He thought of the virus as a rattlesnake whose venom pumped through his veins, and he held shamanistic rituals honoring the "rattlesnake" as a teacher, creating masks and other pieces for the ceremony. His analogy inspired the title of a project by San Francisco artist Rob , who has had HIV since at least 1978. made drawings and recorded oral histories of 20 individuals who had HIV before 1985 for "Rattlesnake in a Moving Car." Lowen's T-cell count fell precipitously in 1987 but rose again to healthy levels, and his case never progressed to AIDS. He began taking antiviral medication in the late 1990s when his viral load climbed, and he no longer suffers any side effects. He is more amused than regretful of the lifestyle choices he made because of HIV, like not saving for retirement or getting a master's degree instead of a doctorate. "I really do feel grateful," he said. "One, I'm alive, and two, I've had a good life and I've been enriched by all of this." E-mail Wyatt Buchanan at wbuchanan@.... Page E - 5 URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/06/04/INGBOJ58M31.DTL

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