The Effects of HIV Mutations o
INTRODUCTION The topic of this paper is the human immunodeficiency virus, HIV, and whether or not mutations undergone by the virus allow it to survive in the immune system. The cost of treating all persons with AIDS in 1993 in the United States was $7.8 billion, and it is estimated that 20,000 new cases of AIDS are reported every 3 months to the CDC. This question dealing with how HIV survives in the immune system is of critical importance, not only in the search for a cure for the virus and its inevitable syndrome, AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome), but also so that over 500,000 Americans already infected with the virus could be saved. This is possible because if we know that HIV survives through mutations then we might be able to come up with a type of drug to retard these mutations allowing the immune system time to expunge it before the onset of AIDS. BACKGROUND In order to be able to fully comprehend and analyze this question we must first ascertain what HIV is, how the body attempts to counter the effects of viruses in general, and how HIV infects the body. Definition HIV is the virus that causes AIDS. HIV is classified as a RNA Retrovirus. A retrovirus uses RNA templates to produce DNA. For example, within the core
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Approximate Word count = 2065
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)
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