The Myth of Sexual ‘AIDS’
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No other word engenders as much fear, revulsion, despair and utter helplessness as AIDS. Despite increased AIDS awareness, the terror persists. AIDS is, in fact, rewriting medical history as humankind’s deadliest scourge. With 40 million deaths forecast in this millennium, statistics tell their own sordid tale.
The first recorded sample of HIV was discovered in 1959 in a blood specimen obtained at Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) in the Belgian Congo. This was the first known death chalked up by AIDS. The HIV is thought to have originally affected chimpanzees. The crossover of the virus from animals to humans may have occurred in the 1950s through an accident or a bite.
Intermittently, other theories of its origins have been advanced during the ongoing process of AIDS research. One theory, put forward by Bette Korber, traces the disease to a single viral ancestor that could have emerged between 1910 and 1950. Through an AIDS research analysis done at the Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico, Korber contends that the pandemic may have come from one or more infected humans around 1930.
Another highly controversial—but plausible—theory is that of American philosopher, Louis Pascal, first spelt out in 1987. All the early AIDS cases originated in the Central African states of Congo, Rwanda or Burundi. This belt was subjected to trials of a live polio vaccine on 300,000 men, women and children.
Pascal argued that the vaccine, which was grown in cultures obtained from chopped up chimpanzee kidneys, may have carried this virus. Polio researcher Dr Albert Sabin had reported that such a batch was contaminated by an unknown virus. In fact, monkeys harbor SIV or simian immunodeficiency virus (SV-40 to be more specific), which is thought to be the ancestor of HIV.
The first cases of AIDS were reported in the United States in 1981, amongst male homosexuals in Los Angeles and New York. Within two decades, up to 50 million may have been infected globally, approximately 22 million have succumbed and nearly 15,000 new infections are said to occur daily. With a definite AIDS cure still in the research stages, an increased AIDS awareness, counseling and alternative therapy treatments seem to offer the only succor.
What is AIDS and HIV?
HIV has two major categories: HIV-1 and HIV-2. HIV-1, which currently has about 10 subtypes, is most common worldwide and the only form found in the US. HIV-2 is less virulent and though currently confined to West Africa—it’s spreading.
The Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) basically provokes an infection, which destroys the body’s immune system. And AIDS or Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome is the advanced stage of this disease, when the immune system becomes irreparably damaged, engendering multiple infections and cancers. A person is considered HIV positive when s/he tests positive for any of the 26 diseases (Kaposi’s sarcoma, lymphoma, pulmonary tuberculosis, recurrent pneumonia within a 12-month period, wasting syndrome and other indicators) that can easily invade the body during our immune system’s nonfunctionality.
On invading the body, the virus specifically attacks T-cells. A core part of the human defence system, they mobilize other cells to seek and destroy contagious foreign elements besid es leading the immune system’s fight against infections. T-cells are targeted because the AIDS virus parasitizes the CD4 molecules on their surface.
With a protective outer shell of proteins and glyco-proteins, the AIDS virus contains genetic information on the inside. Although substantially smaller than the host T-cells—the virus reproduces by sponging off the host’s cellular resources! Our body fights back by producing up to two billion new T-cells to replace the infected ones, stabilizing the T-cell count temporarily. Yet from day one, the T-cells fight a losing battle.
The genetic information of the AIDS virus, which is encoded as RNA (ribonucleic acid), needs to be reverse transcripted—which the intruder accomplishes with the help of the host cell itself! The now legible DNA is thereafter randomly transferred into the nucleus. All this is accomplished barely a dozen hours following the infection. By this time, the aggressor begins to substantially weaken the host cell, which eventually dies, eroding the immune system and making the body vulnerable to diseases.
Although HIV targets T-cells and other cells in the body, it thrives mainly in the lymph nodes—another important part of the immune system. Each lymph node has a netlike structure inside it that acts as a protective filter by trapping virus and infected T-cells. But as healthy T-cells move through contaminated lymph nodes, they are infected by HIV. Particularly during the early stage of the disease, lymph nodes contain more infected cells than the blood.
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