HOW DO I GET A QUICK OVERVIEW OF THE STATUS TODAY
Here is a very good radio show with Dr. David Baltimore Director of Cal. Tech and others by KCRW.com and will get you started.
One thing to keep in mind, the "carefully" negotiated subsidy over getting the price down for sub-saharan Africa is an example of the awful hyperinflated costs of these products, and should get you thinking about why do they cost so much here? Particularly when the basic research to get the discovery was federally funded with your tax dollars, the drug company only bought up the patent to produce it once it was clear it had a high chance of success while the true basic research was conducted using public dollars.
The cost of mass producing the pills are less than a dollar often less than 0.10 cents, and the mark up that we pay (even after publicly funding the basic research) is often in the thousands and 10's of thousands of percent markup.
This must change.
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DOES HIV EXIST?
Yes.
In the words of Bob Gallo  (right) who was the discoverer with Luc Montaigne (left) of the virus that we now call HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus), "there has never been a virus so well studied and understood in all of human history as HIV."
We have pictures of it as it infects a cell,have actually figured out what atoms make it up and how they are arranged, and we know how it infects, how it highjacks our body's cells and teaches them to make more of itself, and we know how to stop this from happening.
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WHERE DID HIV COME FROM?
It was called by Beatrcie Hahn, who led the team that figured out where it came from 'the revenge of the rain forest'.
(Dr. Hahn with Chimpanzee in Gombe, Africa)
As humans cut down and worked more and more in the jungles of Africa, in a land called Gabon, a chimpanzee (Pan troglodyte troglodyte), a close relative of ours, which has the virus chronically but does not get hurt by it, was often hunted for bushmeat by people hired to cut down trees and other activities in the rain forest. This is called the bushmeat trade. In theory, during the bloody preparation of these apes, hunters would cut themselves with their machettes, already covered in chimp blood and the bloodlines would mix exposing the humans to chimp blood carrying the virus.
At some point this led to some people getting infected with the virus that jumped from the chimp to the humans.
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There was a theory that surfaced in the fiftees that purported HIV may have jumped species during inadvertent use of chimpanzee kidneys to create mass quantities of a version of the polio vacinne in the African Congo. No evidence has conclusively proven nor disproven this theory as of yet, though it is certain that there was no malicious intent by the researchers.
You can watch a 7 Part series on the topic at YouTube by clicking here.
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WHY ARE THERE TWO WORDS FOR THE SAME THING (HIV/AIDS)?
HIV/AIDS
HIV is a virus.
AIDS means ‘Acquired Immuno Deficiency Syndrome' - it is the last stage of the infection.
HIV if it is not treated over many years causes the body to lose its T cell repertoire, the white blood cells that fight diseases. This leads to an inability to fight infections. This inability to fight infections is called “AIDS”. HIV and AIDS are different things.
HIV is the virus. AIDS is the last stage of the infection, the disease that HIV can cause in most people who are not treated and who loose their total immune function. Loosing their immune function, there ability to fend off foreign intruders makes them susceptible to 'opportunistic infection' like anything you normally catch; a cold, the flu, strep throat. Without an immune system, these opportunistic infections become fatal.
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HOW DOES HIV GET INTO A CELL?
The env gene of HIV is transcribed, translated, and glycosylated to form a single polyprotein product, glycoprotein 160 (gp160), which is subsequently cleaved into glycoprotein 120 (gp120), an N-terminal extracellular protein, and gp41, a C-terminal transmembrane protein. These two glycoproteins non-covalently associate at the membrane surface: each subunit of the trimeric, normally hidden gp41 associates in a non-covalent manner with a trimeric spikes of gp120, thereby anchoring gp120 in the viral membrane as the outermost receptor of HIV (Kieny et al).
HIV uses its envelope protein complex, gp120 and gp41, in order to selectively bind with high affinity to its cellular receptor protein, CD4, located on the exterior of T cells. This binding between gp120/gp41 and CD4 is responsible for mediating the process of viral and cellular membrane fusion and ultimately facilitating the entry of HIV into the host cell (Lu et al). While CD4 is necessary for viral entry into host target cells, it is not sufficient (Kieny et al). Lu et al demonstrated that although the interaction between gp120/gp140 and CD4 induces conformational changes in gp120 that increase the exposure of the third variable loop of env (V3 loop), it is not sufficient in allowing for the membrane fusion reaction to occur. The V3 loop is a specific amino acid sequence within gp120 that is highly subject to genetic mutation and is critical to viral entry. Furthermore, studies have shown that expression of CD4 in non-human cell lines did not render these cells susceptible to infection by HIV, suggesting that another factor, namely a co-receptor, plays a critical role in mediating membrane fusion and viral entry into the host cell (Lu et al). Thus, it was demonstrated that the binding of gp120/gp41 to CD4 and the subsequent induction of a conformational change of gp120 that increased the exposure of the V3 loop requires the interaction of co-receptors CCR5 or CXCR4 with the V3 loop in order for viral entry to occur (Tscherning et al). This binding of gp120/gp41 to both CD4 and chemokine receptor CCR5 or CXCR4 results in the dissociation of gp120 fro gp41 and the formation of a hairpin structure in gp41 that is thrust into the host cell membrane, ultimately allowing for membrane merging, eventual fusion, and entrance of HIV into the target cell (Gallo et al).
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