18 Time December 6/December 13, 2021
THE BRIEF NEWS
Trucks line up on Nov. 10 to enter a Port of Oakland shipping terminal in Oakland, Calif.As The U.s. conTends wiTh sUpply-
chain problems that could make holi-
day shopping harder, one explanation
comes up again and again: the coun-
try doesn’t have enough truckers. But
in California alone, there are 640,
people who hold active Class A and
Class B commercial driver’s licenses,
according to the department of motor
vehicles, and only 140,000 “truck
transportation” jobs in the state.
There’s no trucker shortage; there’s
a trucker retention problem, created
by the poor conditions that sprang up
in the wake of the industry’s deregula-
tion in the 1980s. People learn to drive
a truck but quickly realize it’s not a
good deal. Turnover in large fleets
was 92% at the end of 2020, meaning
roughly 9 out of 10 drivers left over
the course of a year.
Deregulation essentially changed
trucking from a system where a few
companies had licenses to take freight
on certain routes for certain rates to a
system where just about anyone with
a motor- carrier authority could move
anything anywhere for whatever the
market would pay, says Steve Viscelli,
a sociologist at the University of Penn-
sylvania and the author of The Big Rig:
Trucking and the Decline of the Ameri-
can Dream. As more carriers got into
trucking post-deregulation, union
rates fell, as did wages. Today, driv-
ers earn about 40% less than they did
in the late 1970s, Viscelli says, but
they’re twice as productive.
In fact, there are so many truck driv-
ers right now that brokers are able to
pit them against each other for jobs,
says Sunny Grewal, a driver based in
Fresno, Calif. Supply-chain issues have
worsened conditions—drivers lose
out when they’re waiting to pick up
and drop off a load. Grewal says he’s
waited as long as 27 hours to pick up a
shipment; truckers get paid per mile
driven, so delays mean lost money,
especially since federal regulations
stipulate that he can only drive 11 hours
out of every 24. —AlAnA semUelsBUSINESS
There’s no trucker shortage;
the real problem is trucking jobs
HEALTH
SECOND PATIENT’S
IMMUNE SYSTEM
CLEARS HIV WITHOUT
THE HELP OF DRUGS
In a report published in the Annals of
Internal Medicine on Nov. 15, scientists
described the case of a now 31-year-
old woman from Argentina who was
diagnosed with HIV in 2013 but never
consistently showed high levels of the
virus. She took anti-HIV medications
for six months during a pregnancy, to
prevent transmitting the infection to her
baby. But even after she stopped taking
the drugs, multiple sophisticated tests
looking for genetic evidence of HIV in
her blood have showed no intact virus
in her cells, says Dr. Xu Yu, principal
investigator at the Ragon Institute of
Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT
and Harvard, who led the research
team. The findings suggest that the
patient’s immune system was able to
apparently rid HIV from the body without
relying on medications—and that she
was even able to clear the reservoirs
of HIV that allow the virus to continue
replicating for decades. Current
anti-HIV drugs generally aren’t able to
reach those latent pools, but can lower
circulating virus levels to where it’s
undetectable by tests.
“There is no way to ever say we have
proof that there is not a single virus in
this patient,” says Yu. “The only thing
we can say is that, after analyzing a
large number of cells from the patient
with the technology in our lab, we
cannot reject the hypothesis that the
patient probably reached a sterilizing
cure by natural immunity.”
The woman is the second patient to
apparently clear the virus in this way.
(Yu’s team previously identified the first
person, “the San Francisco patient,”
in 2020.) This new patient, who’s from
Esperanza, Argentina, is working with
Yu’s team and continues to provide
blood samples for research studies.
Yu cautions that the findings may not
be generalizable to most HIV patients.
So far, researchers haven’t identified
what keeps some people protected
from severe disease—but studying
patients like these could lead to better
understanding of how to thwart HIV and
develop better treatments for those
whose immune systems aren’t as adept
at clearing the virus. —Alice Park