Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, commonly known as AIDS, is one of the leading causes of mortality in adults below age 45 in many industrialized countries, according to an article by Gebhardt, Neuenschwander and Zwahlen published in the European Journal of Epidemiology in 1998 (pNA). It is also rampant in many African nations, and is rapidly spreading in many Asian nations.
AIDS is caused by the HIV virus, which destroys lymphocytes and thus compromises the immune system of the infected individual, making them highly susceptible to many infections which the normal person with an intact immune system can fend off. The virus attaches to T-helper cells with a CD4 receptor on their surface. These cells serve to activate other cells of the immune system to mount an immune response. This paper will look at the origin of AIDS, different treatments and therapies available, and current research in the field.
Reports in The Economist (86) and Newsweek (Underwood 53) in 1999 both indicated that the current belief on the origin of AIDS is that it spread from chimpanzees to people in equatorial Africa. Both articles cite studies by Dr. Beatrice Hahn of the University of Alabama at Birmingham which show that the origins of HIV-1, the virus responsible for 99 percent of the world=s 33 million cases of AIDS, and confirmed a long-held belief by scientists that the virus originally came from the African primate. While other monkey species such as the sooty mangabey, which carries HIV-2, a rarer form of virus found in primarily in West Africa, and mandrils, and the African green monkey carry still other simian immunodeficiency viruses, Hahn and her colleagues were able to trace HIV-1 specifically to a subspecies of chimpanzee called Pan troglodytes. Since the first cases of AIDS, reported in 1959, came from Africa, this adds to the presumption that this is where the disease originated.
Chimpanzee simian immunodeficiency viru...