Natural defense against HIV discovered
Researchers at Michigan State University were part of a team to discover a new natural defense against HIV infection.
Sep 16, 2015
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Researchers at Michigan State University were part of a team to discover a new natural defense against HIV infection.
Sep 16, 2015
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Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine have investigated the effect of infection with COVID-19 on the levels of oxidative stress, oxidant damage and glutathione, the most abundant physiological antioxidant. Compared to ...
Dec 27, 2021
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A presentation at this year's European Congress on Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID), held online this year, will discuss the growing evidence that the beta SARS-CoV-2 variant first identified in South ...
Jul 10, 2021
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(Medical Xpress)—It's a good news/bad news scenario: Researchers have made a new discovery about HIV that will redirect curative strategies toward latent reservoirs of HIV—that's the good news. The bad news is that they ...
Researchers have developed a way to pull HIV out of the latent reservoir making the virus visible to the immune system and providing the potential to be killed by treatment.
Jul 9, 2020
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A specialized gene editing system designed by scientists at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University is paving the way to an eventual cure for patients infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. In a study ...
Mar 21, 2016
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With the successful suppression of the AIDS virus (HIV) through medication, the focus turns toward its eradication. Researchers from Kumamoto University in Japan have developed a new compound that is key to the destruction ...
Oct 2, 2017
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A new study conducted by researchers at the San Francisco VA Medical Center (SFVAMC) observes that pharmacological enhancement of the immune systems of HIV patients could help eliminate infected cells, providing an important ...
Jun 17, 2016
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Adelaide researchers have made significant progress in the development of a potential vaccine to protect against HIV infection.
Nov 21, 2016
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Vitamin D plays an important part in the human immune response and deficiency can leave individuals less able to fight infections like HIV-1. Now an international team of researchers has found that high-dose vitamin D supplementation ...
Jun 15, 2015
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Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is a lentivirus (a member of the retrovirus family) that causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), a condition in humans in which the immune system begins to fail, leading to life-threatening opportunistic infections. Infection with HIV occurs by the transfer of blood, semen, vaginal fluid, pre-ejaculate, or breast milk. Within these bodily fluids, HIV is present as both free virus particles and virus within infected immune cells. The four major routes of transmission are unsafe sex, contaminated needles, breast milk, and transmission from an infected mother to her baby at birth (Vertical transmission). Screening of blood products for HIV has largely eliminated transmission through blood transfusions or infected blood products in the developed world.
HIV infection in humans is now pandemic. From 1981 to 2006, AIDS killed more than 25 million people. HIV infects about 0.6 percent of the world's population. In 2005 alone, AIDS claimed an estimated 2.4–3.3 million lives, of which more than 570,000 were children. A third of these deaths are occurring in sub-Saharan Africa, retarding economic growth and increasing poverty. According to current estimates, HIV is set to infect 90 million people in Africa, resulting in a minimum estimate of 18 million orphans. Antiretroviral treatment reduces both the mortality and the morbidity of HIV infection, but routine access to antiretroviral medication is not available in all countries.
HIV primarily infects vital cells in the human immune system such as helper T cells (specifically CD4+ T cells), macrophages, and dendritic cells. HIV infection leads to low levels of CD4+ T cells through three main mechanisms: firstly, direct viral killing of infected cells; secondly, increased rates of apoptosis in infected cells; and thirdly, killing of infected CD4+ T cells by CD8 cytotoxic lymphocytes that recognize infected cells. When CD4+ T cell numbers decline below a critical level, cell-mediated immunity is lost, and the body becomes progressively more susceptible to opportunistic infections.
Eventually most HIV-infected individuals develop AIDS. These individuals mostly die from opportunistic infections or malignancies associated with the progressive failure of the immune system. Without treatment, about 9 out of every 10 persons with HIV will progress to AIDS after 10–15 years. Many progress much sooner. Treatment with anti-retrovirals increases the life expectancy of people infected with HIV. Even after HIV has progressed to diagnosable AIDS, the average survival time with antiretroviral therapy (as of 2005) is estimated to be more than 5 years. Without antiretroviral therapy, death normally occurs within a year.
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