Biology Assignment Help With AIDS And Other Immunodeficiency
AIDS
AIDS also called acquired immune deficiency syndrome is one of the deadly form of disease caused due to the virus named HIV i.e. human immunodeficiency virus. AIDS affects an individual’s immune system making it weak, therefore body of such person becomes unable to fight against any infections and slowly pushes him towards death.
Firstly, person gets infected with HIV and as the time passes by his immune system becomes almost irresponsive to any infections making him suffer from AIDS. Therefore, on one hand, HIV is a virus whereas AIDS can be termed as a disease or condition in medical terms.
Causes of AIDS:
- If the blood of an infected person is transferred to the healthy person, the healthy person also becomes the victim of this disease.
- Exchange or sharing of needles or syringes.
- From mother to child during pregnancy or breast feeding
- Due to sexual intercourse
These are few of the known ways by which HIV/ AIDS is transmitted. Overall, any process that involves exchange of body fluids can result in HIV/AIDS. When it is said that HIV/ AIDS is transmitted by the exchange of body fluid, we may also get an idea that saliva is also a body fluid and hence, this disease can also be transmitted by means of saliva, but surprisingly it’s not exactly correct. Different researches have proved that saliva shows certain hypotonic disruption that prevents production of HIV transmission.
HIV infected person shows different symptoms at early and later stages. Therefore, early and late stage symptoms are as follows:
1. Early symptoms: weight loss, tiredness, fatigue, fever, pain in the body etc.
2. Late symptoms: swollen gland, night sweating, weak vision, high fever, lowered breathes etc.
These symptoms are generally common and can be viewed as the result of many other diseases, but as mentioned earlier HIV/AIDS does not particularly display any symptoms, rather lowered immune response and easy attack by any infections displays above symptoms and with passing time situation gets worsen rather than being under control. Apart from this, in many cases the situation generally takes a different turn. In few weeks, patient shows some of the above mentioned symptoms but after a period of time, the situation gets normal and they leads a complete normal life but the internal condition of the body slowly gets weakens. Finally, may be after 5-10 years the person dies due to severity of infections. Therefore, actual symptoms or time period for survival of patient cannot be exactly figured out in case of HIV/ AIDS because it may result in the death of affected individual within 1 year or two or it may also cause death in 10-15 years time period.
Diagnosis:
Generally, people are unaware about HIV/AIDS and till the time they comes to know about the disease they tend to be in the last stage of the infection i.e. nearer to death. Therefore, blood test is the way to identify about HIV/AIDS. Firstly, if patient have any doubt regarding the attack of this disease, he can immediately go for HIV/ AIDS blood test. In this case, generally it gets clear that whether an individual is suffering form HIV infection and not. The final report is handled to the patient only after repeated test. Therefore, once the report comes to be positive, infected individual are advised to go on further test so as to know the extent of infection or damage that have already occurred in the body and carry on any treatment accordingly. Presently, new method for detection using ultra- sensitive HIV sensor has also been introduced in many developed countries that is much more sensitive to viral infection and detects the disease 10 times more accurately than the blood test.
Why is there no treatment available for this disease?
Science has developed in almost every field yet till now there is no treatment available for this disease. Though it sounds surprising yet it is true. Scientist all over the world is trying to find out treatment for this disease but still they have not been successful. But certain vaccines and drug has helped to decrease the effect of HIV on human body.
This virus inserts its genetic code in human cells and replicates in large number. Now these infective cells produce numerous HIV particles and dies. The cells infected by this virus are particular CD4 cells. The main drawbacks of the designed drugs are that HIV infected cells behave very differently from each other. Besides this some infected cells under goes resting stage that are generally unaffected with any kind of antiviral drugs. Therefore though the given drug may eradicate active infected cells but after some time when the drug intake is stopped, these resting cells may become active and affect the body casing HIV/AIDS.
Treatment
Different treatments were applied to kill or flush out HIV from an infective body. Among them use of drug and antibodies to make resting infective cells active and destroy them was an initial approach. But this treatment failed because the infected cells though in small amount where still present in one or other part of the body. The other methods used where bone marrow transplant and gene therapy but they also came out to be ineffective due to one or the other hurdles.
Therefore till date no treatment has yet been found out for these diseases but we can take certain precautions to keep ourselves away from thus virus like discarding needles or syringes once used, blood test for HIV before transfusion, using safety measure during sexual intercourse, avoidance of pregnancy by infected mother and many more. Today we have no proper treatment for HIV but soon the time will come when HIV/AIDS will no longer harm any individual or cause death in any part of the world.
When the system errs by failing to protect the host from disease-causing agents or from malignant cells, the result is immunodeficiency. Genetic or developmental defect in the immune system is called primary immunodeficiency. Secondary immunodeficiency or acquired immunodeficiency is the loss of immune function and results from exposure to various agents. The most common acquired immunodeficiency is AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) which results from the infection of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).
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