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Hiv Virus Research Paper

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The worst viruses in the world seem to appear out of nowhere and spread like wildfire, infecting hundreds of thousands of people before researchers can even get a toehold on what it is that is killing people. Viruses are not alive, but saying they are makes it seem like it is possible to stop them. They do not rely on any energy or food source, and only need living cells to thrive and reproduce, therefore anything that can kill a virus also has to kill the host, which is what makes them frightening. HIV, or Human Immunodeficiency Virus, is a virus that had a massive outbreak in America in the early 1980s, and has since killed up to 37 million people that have progressed to the final stage, or AIDS. (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome) HIV …show more content…

After further research, they found that the chimps ate two smaller species of monkeys that had two different strains of SIV, allowing the virus to transmit into the chimps. Because the smaller monkeys were infected with two different strains of SIV, it was inevitable that the chimps would be infected with both kinds, and in some cases even developed mutated versions of the two combined. When these strains mutated, they became capable to infect humans, and this mutation became known as HIV. Humans in the area that the infected chimps lived in hunted the chimps for food, and so HIV was brought into the human population. In most cases, the infected human’s immune system fought off HIV, but sometimes it stayed and became a parasite in the new host, making this host HIV-1. More than one HIV-1 people exist because more than one person contracted it from the monkeys, and so the strain in each HIV-1 was different. HIV is classified into four substrains; M, N, O, and P. Strain M is the responsible for most AIDS deaths. (Origin story from www.avert.org) Right now, 36.7 million people globally are living with HIV, (www.aids.gov) and 2.1 in 100,000 people will die from AIDS. (www.cdc.gov) In The Hot Zone, the Ebola origins are said to be in either fruit bats or primates at a cave in Africa known as Kitum Cave. In 1976, the poor man, Monet, went into that cave and inevitably contracted it, starting an outbreak to be followed by countless more. However, though it would be easier to just assume that we could follow the trail of that outbreak, that is not the case. That was just the outbreak of one out of 5 Ebola strains known as Ebola Zaire, the most deadly out of the filovirus strains with a 90% fatality rate. (www.who.int) A completely different outbreak began also in 1976 in Sudan when a hospital transmitted the disease from one infected patient to many

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