AIDS VIRUS HIV IS "SMART" WITH A SOUL AND INTELLIGENCE OF ITSELF...AND ALSO A PURPOSE SINCE 1930'S......
Posted by Vishva News Reporter on August 14, 2006

 

Scanning electron micrograph of HIV-1 budding from cultured lymphocyte.

Scanning electron micrograph of HIV-1 budding from cultured lymphocyte

HIV CAUSES GLOBAL PANDEMIC
SILENTLY IN PROGRESS
FROM 1981 TO 2006
WITH A DEATH TOLL OF
25 MILLION PEOPLES and counting...
.

The major global death tolls are:

  • 830,000:  Shaanxi earthquake (China, 1556)
     
  • 20 million: Europeans by The Black Death by bubonic plague , 1348
     
  • 37 million: World War I- 1914-18
     
  • 62 million: World War II - 1939-45
     
  • 50 million to 100 million: The Spanish Flu Pandemic, 1918-19
     
  • 1 to 3 million: every year: 80-90 % in Africa, mostly children, expected the rate to double in 20 years....
     
  • 25 million: AIDS by HIV virus-1981-2005 and still killing about 1 million peoples every year till cure is found....
    2.4 - 3.3 million: in 2005: of which 570,000 were children, 33 % of total deaths in Africa

From the above listing, second to malaria  it appears that AIDS is a major silent killer which the humanity in the world is really not concern about...

The recent Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation seems to be the only human service organization that seems to be really interested in finding a cure for the HIV based AIDS pandemic with a US$287 million to various HIV/AIDS researchers...

The Red ribbon is a symbol for solidarity with HIV-positive people and those living with AIDS.

The Red ribbon is a symbol for solidarity with HIV-positive people and those living with AIDS.


This knowledge-sharing PVAF web site is sharing this news story with the entire humanity to awaken the humanity to the pursuit of knowledge....with which it can live life with the design of the Creator and the operation manual provided by the Creator in vED knowledge...which is the most ancient of knowledge there exists containing all aspects of human existence - physical, intellectual, emotional, spiritual and conscious and unconscious modes and other metaphysical aspects that the current humanity is yet to be conscious of....

The news is also published to honour and acknowledge the 16th INTERNATIONAL AIDS CONFERENCE 2006 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada on August 13-18, 2006. Please click here to visit its website for all its news....

 

AMAZING FACTS OF ON HIV VIRUS WHICH CAUSES AIDS
  • Humanity gets concerned about wars in which it pours billions and trillions of dollars to kill people but when it comes to saving peoples from pandemics such as listed above, humanity is very reluctant to open its purse on an urgent basis.
     
  • HIV is believed to have been killing people in Africa for roughly 50 years before the world knew the virus existed.
  • More than 40 million have been infected. Some experts predict that by 2020, AIDS could prove to be the most destructive pandemic in history.
     
  • But due to a fateful confluence of events and genetic accidents, only the one — HIV-1, group M — gave rise to the global scourge that continues to stump medical science since 1980.
     
  • HIV  virus makes its way through the world on rivers of bodily fluids, striking humans at their most intimate points of contact — sexual intercourse, childbirth, breastfeeding. Tainted blood and intravenous drug use have also been sources of transmission, and HIV has developed uncanny methods to spread itself.
     
  • Outside of a human host, it's powerless. A few hours outside of a human body and the virus is no longer infectious. Nor can it be easily grown in a lab dish. Inside a human host it makes 10 billion copies of itself every single day.
     
  • HIV belongs to a group of pathogens known as retroviruses.
    They have no ability to replicate outside of a host cell and they carry their genetic material not in the double-stranded code of DNA, but the single strand of RNA that makes proteins. Chimpanzees had long been the suspected source of HIV. No one knows exactly when chimps contracted it, but it's estimated to be anywhere from 70,000 to 1.5 million years ago. Neither can anyone say how the virus first affected chimpanzees.
     
  • Inside a human host in enters T cells most of which are found in the intestines which is the largest organ in a human body to have T cells which forms the immune system of a human body to protect it against infection:
    • T cells are lymphocytes, or white blood cells, that orchestrate the body's ability to fight infection.
    • The HIV attacks them, specifically a type known as CD4, like a guided missile.
    • The virus breaks in with its own set of keys and slips into the host cell like an unwanted guest.
    • Then it settles down to become the king of freeloaders, injecting its own genetic material into the DNA of its host and making an HIV factory of the very cell that was designed to kill it.
    • New viruses eventually burst out of the host cell to wreak fresh rounds of destruction.
    • Integrating itself directly into the DNA of the host means you can't get to it easily to cause its destruction without the risk of damaging the host's cell.
       
  • "The body's immune response you see with HIV is somewhat slower than what you see with lots of other infectious agents:
    •  Probably because the immune system is overwhelmed, partly because the virus is infecting the very cells that we need to respond quickly. It's a very insidious virus.
    • The earliest phase of infection is also the most contagious. With no immediate immune response, the patient's "viral load" — the medical term for the number of HIV particles in a given volume of blood — soars.
    • Before a person knows they are infected, they are at their most infectious and because they don't know it, they are not practising safe sex.
       
  • In terms of its smarts, it's right up at the top. Not only does it know how to escape from everything we throw at it, but if you're the virus, your main objective . . . is to survive and spread yourself to as many people as possible. You don't do that if you're a virus that kills your host within a week. If you want to be efficient at spreading yourself, you want your host to stay alive for a number of years and remain infectious throughout that time.
     
  • Presently a very expensive cocktail of 3 medications appears to be the savior in controlling the HIV virus to inaction in the human body and thus extending the life of those infected. However only small fraction of the 40 million infected peoples on the planet earth limited to rich industrialized countries with public health systems today are able to afford the medication.....
    • The price of prescription drugs has gone up radically over the last ten years.
    • In 1996, when the first highly effective anti-HIV combination therapy became available, treatment for a single individual cost at least $12,000 to $15,000 a year per person for a typical three-drug regimen.
    • Today, a single drug can cost this much or even twice this amount.

 

Please click on the next line to read the full news story on which the above information on HIV pandemics is extracted from........



 

 

HIV The smartest virus in history?

From Canadian Globe and Mail: August 12, 2006: CAROLYN ABRAHAM, Medical Reporter

Tracing the origins of HIV has been a Herculean task and often not a glamorous one. Most recently, it involved the serious scrutiny of 599 samples of ape feces.

But after two decades of work, scientists have slowly pieced together a biography of the human immunodeficiency virus — where it was born, what its ancestors were and possibly how it grew up to be the mass murderer of the modern era.

Not since the Middle Ages has one virus cut such a long, wide swath through humanity. More than 25 million people have died since HIV was first recognized in 1981. More than 40 million have been infected. Some experts predict that by 2020, AIDS could prove to be the most destructive pandemic in history. Yet in all likelihood, HIV was not the first virus of its kind to infect humans, and scientists suspect it will not be the last.

The closest ancestor of the AIDS virus lived in West Africa's chimpanzees for thousands of years, and chimps have long been on the menu of human hunters in that corner of the world.

HIV is believed to have been killing people in Africa for roughly 50 years before the world knew the virus existed. Yet scientists have since discovered the pandemic virus was one of three types of HIV that jumped to humans around the same time. But due to a fateful confluence of events and genetic accidents, only the one — HIV-1, group M — gave rise to the global scourge that continues to stump medical science.

The king of freeloaders

HIV belongs to a group of pathogens known as retroviruses. They were once considered rare, medical curiosities and only late in the 20th century were they discovered to actually infect humans.

They have no ability to replicate outside of a host cell and they carry their genetic material not in the double-stranded code of DNA, but the single strand of RNA that makes proteins.

HIV is a retrovirus with just nine genes tucked inside a round protein envelope. Magnified, it looks a little like the wheel of a ship, circular with spikes radiating from its surface. The virus makes its way through the world on rivers of bodily fluids, striking humans at their most intimate points of contact — sexual intercourse, childbirth, breastfeeding. Tainted blood and intravenous drug use have also been sources of transmission, and HIV has developed uncanny methods to spread itself. Outside of a human host, it's powerless.

"It's a bit wimpy that way," said Richard Harrigan, director of the research laboratories at the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS. A few hours outside of a human body and the virus is no longer infectious, he said; nor can it be easily grown in a lab dish.

But inside a T cell, the story is dramatically different. T cells are lymphocytes, or white blood cells, that orchestrate the body's ability to fight infection. The HIV attacks them, specifically a type known as CD4, like a guided missile.

The virus breaks in with its own set of keys and slips into the host cell like an unwanted guest. Then it settles down to become the king of freeloaders, injecting its own genetic material into the DNA of its host and making an HIV factory of the very cell that was designed to kill it.

New viruses eventually burst out of the host cell to wreak fresh rounds of destruction. "Integrating itself directly into the DNA of the host means you can't get to it easily to cause its destruction without the risk of damaging the host's cell," Dr. Harrigan said. "It also makes lots and lots of copies of itself every single day."

How many copies?

"Oh," he said, "about 10 billion."

It started with chimps

Chimpanzees had long been the suspected source of the AIDS pandemic. HIV bears a close genetic resemblance to a chimp infection known as simian immune deficiency virus, or SIVcpz.

But it was only this spring that an international team of scientists, led by Beatrice Hahn at the University of Alabama, was finally able to confirm that this chimp virus exists in the wild and that it was indeed the progenitor of HIV-1.

Dr. Sharp, who, along with researchers in France and Cameroon, has worked with Dr. Hahn's group since 1991, said the study, published in Science, was a long time coming. Collecting blood from wild apes was considered too invasive and dangerous, so researchers spent years developing molecular tests to run on chimp droppings instead. The samples, amassed with the help of trekkers, were scooped up from 10 remote areas of forest in central West Africa and preserved in tubes.

Molecular tests on the samples were able to determine the species and sex of the animal to whom it belonged, whether it carried antibodies for an SIV, or genetic material of the virus itself. The results showed the virus most closely related to the HIV-1 pandemic strain was indeed the SIVcpz strain.

Researchers believe it jumped to a single human from a chimp in southeast Cameroon about 70 years ago.

Scientists can estimate the date because viruses are believed to mutate at a fairly constant rate. By comparing the oldest known HIV strain with its progenitor chimp virus, they can clock when the two diverged and one crossed the species barrier.

"The only missing part of the story is from one person [contracting it] around about 1930 or a little earlier, getting infected with the virus and then getting it down to Kinshasa," Dr. Sharp said.

Kinshasa is considered ground zero of the AIDS pandemic, since the HIV-1 subtypes there are older and more diverse than anywhere else in the world.

"We would imagine that this virus has been transmitted down rivers ending up in Kinshasa, known as Leopoldville in those days," Dr. Sharp said. "The virus needed to get to somewhere like that, it needed to get to a big city before it could really get started as an epidemic."

The earliest known case to come from the continent would not, however, be diagnosed for several decades. A blood sample taken in 1959 from a Bantu man participating in a medical study in Kinshasa was found in the 1980s to be HIV positive. By then, the virus had the world's attention.




 

Mass cellular slaughter

Ask where the AIDS virus ranks among its peer pathogens and scientists rarely hesitate: "In terms of its smarts, it's right up at the top," said Mark Wainberg, director of the McGill University AIDS Centre. "Not only does it know how to escape from everything we throw at it, but if you're the virus, your main objective . . . is to survive and spread yourself to as many people as possible. You don't do that if you're a virus that kills your host within a week. If you want to be efficient at spreading yourself, you want your host to stay alive for a number of years and remain infectious throughout that time."

In its early stages, HIV triggers a mass slaughter of its host's T cells, most notably in the gut. Tissues that line the intestines contain more lymphocytes than any other single site in the body.

"This is the largest organ in the body in terms of the immune system. If not the heart, the soul of the immune system," Dr. Wainberg said.Scientists have found it can take up to four months before the immune system kicks in to produce antibodies that can be detected in a blood test.

"The immune response you see with HIV is somewhat slower than what you see with lots of other infectious agents," Dr. Wainberg said. "Probably because the immune system is overwhelmed, partly because the virus is infecting the very cells that we need to respond quickly. It's a very insidious virus."

The earliest phase of infection is also the most contagious. With no immediate immune response, the patient's "viral load" — the medical term for the number of HIV particles in a given volume of blood — soars.

"Before a person knows they are infected, they are at their most infectious and because they don't know it, they are not practising safe sex," Dr. Wainberg said.

Once the immune system responds, the viral load drops, reducing the risk of transmission. The viral load can remain low and stable for several years. But that number will eventually rise again, resulting in big losses of T cells that can lead to acquired immune deficiency syndrome without effective treatment.

AIDS leaves the body with an immune system so crippled that opportunistic infections, such as pneumonia, tuberculosis and certain cancers pose a sudden and serious threat. Yet one intriguing hallmark of HIV in humans is how few T cells actually become infected. "At any given time, it's less than 1 per cent," Dr. Wainberg said. "Yet the number of losses of T cells can be profound."

Dr. Wainberg said the accepted theory is that HIV not only kills the cells it directly infects, but that infected cells secrete a substance toxic to other, uninfected T cells. This in turn triggers the body's own killing of these other cells.

Adapting to new hosts

The HIV-like virus chimps carry is a descendant of two other ape viruses — one that infected red-capped mangabeys and another that infected Cercopithecus monkeys.

"The ancestors of those two monkey viruses have recombined to form what is now the chimp virus [that gave rise to HIV]," Dr. Sharp said.

No one knows exactly when chimps contracted it, but it's estimated to be anywhere from 70,000 to 1.5 million years ago. Neither can anyone say how the virus first affected chimpanzees. It may well have wiped out all chimps without a natural resistance, Dr. Sharp said. "We know at the moment, these viruses don't cause any illness in chimps. They get infected, but they never get to the stage of deteriorating.

"The real problem with AIDS is that you are destroying your own T cells, and when you've destroyed your own T cells you are susceptible to infection. If somehow the immune system can avoid recognizing the virus and destroying them, you may be okay."

The chimp's immune system, for example, has somehow learned to simply ignore the infection, Dr. Sharp said.

Dr. Sharp has lately been studying the three separate HIV-1 groups that jumped from chimps to humans on separate occasions. His hope was to find something that distinguished them from the chimp virus that spawned them.

"The logic of our ongoing analysis was to say, well if we find a site in a gene which is the same in each of the HIV groups, but different in all the chimp viruses, then those are changes that have occurred in all of the three groups leading to HIV," he explained, "that would be too big of a coincidence for it to just be an accident. It must be something that has been selected for as the virus adapts to its new host."

The hunch bore fruit. Dr. Sharp has located a single chemical change in a protein important to the core matrix HIV-1. The change is there in all three groups of the human form of the virus, but not the chimp virus.

What's more, Dr. Sharp learned that a research project 10 years ago showed that when chimps are infected with HIV-1, the virus does not fare well. But over time, the virus adapts and the protein switches back to the original form it originally had in chimpanzees.

"This tells you it's important for the chimp virus to have it one way, and to move into humans to have it this other way."

Looking to the future

People often ask Dr. Sharp how it could be that a virus like HIV could go undetected for half a century, infecting one person in 1930 to 40 million by 2000. But he's done the math, and he feels numbers as well as geography explain it.

"If you did just the simplest epidemiological plot . . . you see only about 2,000 people infected in 1960. . . . Even by 1980, you are only getting up to a million people.

"It takes a long time for the numbers to build up. It really is not at all surprising that nobody knew about this virus in 1960; there just weren't that many people infected and they were all in Central Africa.

"So it's no surprise to me that the virus went undetected for so long."

What concerns him more is that about 30 species of monkeys in Africa carry simian immune deficiency viruses. "With continued exposure to these viruses, more of them could jump into humans," he said.

"There is an ongoing risk."

 



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