Explain virulence in terms of AIDS or Swine flu. -How it make us sick? -Why we g
ID: 257770 • Letter: E
Question
Explain virulence in terms of AIDS or Swine flu. -How it make us sick? -Why we get sick? -Why was the AIDS virus so virulent in the 1980 and why is it less virulent than those day now?All those question are based on AIDS or Swine flu. Explain virulence in terms of AIDS or Swine flu. -How it make us sick? -Why we get sick? -Why was the AIDS virus so virulent in the 1980 and why is it less virulent than those day now?
All those question are based on AIDS or Swine flu. -How it make us sick? -Why we get sick? -Why was the AIDS virus so virulent in the 1980 and why is it less virulent than those day now?
All those question are based on AIDS or Swine flu.
Explanation / Answer
Virulence is a pathogen or microbe's ability to infect or damage a host. Virulent viruses such as HIV, which causes AIDS, have mechanisms for evading host defenses. HIV infects T-Helper Cells, which leads to a reduction of the adaptive immune response of the host and eventually leads to an immunocompromised state. Death results from opportunistic infections secondary to disruption of the immune system caused by AIDS.
How it make us sick?
Due to disruption in the original function of WBCs (protecting the body) and their eventual elimination, the disease resisting capacity of the body goes down and body becomes vulnerable to more and more diseases.The patient, due to low immunity, quickly acquires various diseases like pneumonia, tuberculosis, cholera, malaria, Kaposi’s Sarcoma, etc, which heals extremely slowly since the body is unable to fight back and eventually dies due to these diseases.Therefore, HIV virus indirectly makes the human body susceptible to hundreds of other opportunistic diseases, which later leads to the death of the human body.
Why we get sick?
Some groups of people are more likely to get HIV than others because of many factors, including the status of their sex partners, their risk behaviors, and where they live.
HIV is transmitted through contact with the following bodily fluids:
Sexual contact and sharing contaminated needles — even tattoo or piercing needles — can result in the transmission of HIV.
Why was the AIDS virus so virulent in the 1980 and why is it less virulent than those day now?
HIV mutates fast, allowing it to evade both the body's natural defences and those thrown up by modern medicine, thus helping it to spread rapidly, infecting some 80 million people since it emerged in the 1980s, of whom half have died.
But today AIDS is less virulent. One reason for the change could be the growing use of HIV drugs, says Goulder. People with the most virulent form of the virus get sick sooner and start drug treatment. This reduces the level of the virus in their blood and sexual fluids almost to zero, so they are unlikely to pass it on. This means that a more aggressive virus is less likely to be transmitted.
Those accessing HIV treatment have increased in recent years, rising from just 5 million in 2010 to 13.6 million people this June.
But there seems to be another factor at play too – the virus is responding to people whose immune systems are naturally better at keeping the infection under control for longer.
About 15 per cent of people in southern Africa have genes that mean their immune cells are good at recognising and targeting crucial proteins belonging to the virus. In such people, HIV can only survive by mutating those proteins to evade detection, which makes it slower at reproducing. When those people pass on the virus, it retains that weakness.The viruses that are left are the ones that are least able to cause disease.
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