Hiv Essay, Research Paper

CURRENT EVENTS:

HIV?S ROOTS TRACED TO 1930

Summary

Scientists have concluded, based on mathematical research, that the virus that lead to the epidemic of AIDS can be traced all the way back to 1930, somewhere around Central Africa. Bette Korber, of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, presented this conclusion at the Conference of Retroviruses. The notion that HIV was introduced in contaminated oral polio vaccines in Africa between the years of 1957 and 1961 has been often debated and challenged. The results presented by Korber, not only refute the before mentioned allegations, but also move us toward finding out where the virus really came from and in which direction it is heading in the future.

The first sample discovered in 1959 comes from a man in Congo, who died as a member of the M class of HIV, the type that most people are infected with today. However old the virus was, it was evident that it wasn?t the first of its kind. The reason that the virus was ever connected to polio is because in the same year of 1959, the introduction of oral polio vaccines, supposedly tested on chimpanzees, came to the continent of Africa. However in reality, states Stanley Plotkin of the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, ?the introduction of HIV in chimpanzees occurred well before the polio vaccine.?

The machine used in the process of determination is the Los Alamos Nirvana Machine, which is capable of making one trillion calculations per second. After plugging in dates, formulas and locations, the Nirvana located the origin of the HIV virus as being 1930, however the range of error shows that it could have been anywhere from 1915 to 1942. The Nirvana was also able to determine that the virus appeared in the Caribbean Islands such as Haiti, in the 1960?s, while it came to America more than ten years later.

It is quite definite that the virus came from chimpanzees in the area around Gabon, Cameroon, and the Central African rainforest. It most probably passed onto the hunters while they were butchering the animals. After that, the virus has taken on six different strands, and is spread in humans mostly through sexual intercourse.

Issue

The matter being discussed here is the AIDS epidemic. AIDS and the HIV virus are very real issues in the world and especially in America. Whether it is the needle of the syringe of a junkie, a blood transfusion or the exchange of bodily fluids, people are getting infected and dying every day with this disease, and there is no remedy. Each day thousands of researchers scientists and mathematicians try to go further, so that they might bring the world closer to a cure. A lot of progress has been made, and as a result people are living ten, fifteen, and even twenty years with AIDS. This article demonstrates to us that developments are still being made, and we are slowly but surely approaching a revolutionary discovery.

Opinion

It is very refreshing for me to read articles of this kind. I see people dying of AIDS and it scares me to think that, if I am not overly cautious, it could be me as well.

The fact that we are making progress such as this, where we now know that HIV really originated thirty years before we presumed, is leading us to understand more about this epidemic. The more we understand about where it came from, the better our chances of understanding what caused it, and how to cure it. I realize that the discovery of a vaccine is still far off, and there is a chance that there will never be a complete cure. However, with each new scientific discovery, I have a renewed hope in our civilization?s survival of the plague we commonly call AIDS.