AIDS and HIV essays

AIDS and HIV essays Aids-acquired immune deficiency syndrome- is caused by HIV (Human Immunodefiniency Virus), which produces no symptoms for up to ten years before a person is diagnosed with aids. This virus attacks the immune system and leaves the body vulnerable to a lot of life-threatening illnesses. Bacteria, yeast, and viruses that do not cause disease cause these illnesses. Aids has become the most serious worldwide epidemic, and one of most dangerous stage of HIV. AIDS was known in the early 1980s. A new study of the oldest known HIV suggests the virus jumped from animals to humans in the 1940s. (Goudsmit 2) The year was 1959, in the central African city of Leopoldville. A seeming healthy man walked in to a hospital clinic to give blood for a Western backed study of blood diseases. He walked away and was never heard from again. Doctors analyzed his sample, froze it in a test tube and forgot about it. A quarter-century later, in the mid-1980s, researchers studied the growing AIDS epidemic and took a second look at the blood and discovered that it contained HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The Leopoldville sample is the oldest specimen of the aids virus ever isolated and may help solve the mystery of how and where the virus made the leap from animals (monkeys and chimpanzees) to humans, (Christine Gorman). Dr.David Ho, director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York and one of the study ¡s authors, says a careful genetic analysis of the sample ¡s DNA pushes the origin of the AIDS epidemic back at least a decade, to early 1950s or even the 1940s. Various international agencies and other bodies have introduced a number of different classification systems. The first classification system, introduced in 1982 by the CDC, established a set of clinical criteria necessary for the diagnosis of AIDS. The purpose of this classification system was to enable field workers to carry ou...