Essay Preview: Aids
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37 million people in this world are living with AIDS. AIDS has already claimed the lives of 12 million people. As a result, the goal is to create a vaccine that can be used around the world to stop the spread of HIV. Vaccines are usually made of attenuated viruses that are capable of reproducing and invoking an immune response, but they cannot cause the disease.
HIV holds many problems for making the human vaccine. Problems include the virus complexity, the risk of making a vaccine from an attenuated virus, the lack of testing a retrovirus vaccine, high mutation rate and various forms of HIV, ineffectiveness of making a vaccine from subunits, and the reluctance of drug companies.
There are a few ethical problems with human testing of HIV vaccines. The designers need to choose an area were safe sex practices are not taught, so that volunteers have a greater chance of getting AIDS. If a volunteer did get AIDS during a trial, he/ she should get all available drug therapies. Because of ethical problems, testing a vaccine would be possible in developing countries.
Scientists have noticed similarities between the bubonic plague and the AIDS. They are asking of the possibility that the AIDS resistance gene is linked to the protection that it provides against the bubonic plague. Scientists suspect that VIV is a new virus and the resistance gene existed when the virus appeared.
They believe that the resistance gene would have been propelled into human populations during a cataclysmic event with high mortality. The mutated gene coincides with people who were exposed to the Black Death. The resistance gene may have emerged as a random mutation.
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