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In 2015, An Estimate Of 36.7 Million People Was Living

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In 2015, an estimate of 36.7 million people was living with HIV and 1.1 million people died of AIDS-related illnesses (_). AIDS is a severe disease that causes the human’s immune system to become weak. Once the human body’s immune system is damaged, the body is more susceptible for infections. The most terrifying part about this entire ordeal is that scientist have yet to find a permanent cure for HIV/AIDS. As time progresses, scientists have been able to understand the illness even more and created treatment/medication to allow a person living with HIV/AIDS to an extended lifespan. However, to truly understand HIV/AIDS one should learn of its origin and how the human body’s immune system usually deals with virus infections. A …show more content…

This discovery allowed scientist to conclude that HIV was created through a genetic mutation of the SIV. How the SIV migrated into a human host will never be known but a common theory was that a man hunted and ate a chimpanzee, allowing the SIV in the chimpanzee to enter into the human’s body. Another acceptable theory was that the chimpanzee’s blood may have seeped into the hunters wound during his hunt.
Aside from getting HIV from chimpanzees, HIV can also be obtained through unprotected sex, using an unsterilized needle, childbirth, breastfeeding, or blood to blood contact. Once inside the bloodstream the HIV virus will infect certain white blood cells, primarily the CD4 T cells. The HIV’s outer envelope consist of glycoproteins that mutates frequently, causing the CD4 T cells to not recognize the virus as a threat (_). The CD4 T cells will then allow the virus to bind its GP120 onto the Help T cell receptor/coreceptor, also known as CCR5. After binding to its host cell the virus transmembrane (GP41) will then pull the virus closer to the host cell, ultimately allowing the virus to fuse into the host cell. Once fused, the virus nucleocapsid will then enter into the cell and release two viral RNA strands and three replication enzymes: reverse transcriptase, integrase, and protease. The virus will then replicate and migrate to other white blood cells, infecting and killing the cells. HIV infection will advance through three stages

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