Like gossip, a juicy scientific hypothesis doesn’t die easy. There has been a dilly percolating through the scientific community this last year, a suggestion at once horrifying and plausable. It has been suggested that a vaccine caused AIDS. This is not as silly an idea as it might at first appear. To understand its peculiar… Read More »
This week marked the twentieth anniversary of the AIDS epidemic. On June 5, 1981, doctors in Los Angeles reported five unusual cases of immune system failure, all gay young men. These were the first reported cases of AIDS. A tragic flood of additional cases have followed. In the twenty years since that day, the United… Read More »
Since 1981, when the first cases were reported, over 350,000 Americans have died of AIDS. Worldwide, over 5 million are affected, with numbers growing rapidly in India and Southeast Asia. The search for a cure has occupied researchers worldwide. Every few years a promising approach appears, only to disappoint. Starting in the mid-1990s, for example,… Read More »
Last Friday the UN held World AIDS Day, but there was little to celebrate. The worldwide death toll since the AIDS outbreak began in 1981 has now reached 21.8 million. Three million people died of AIDS this year alone, and a staggering 36.1 million others are infected with the HIV virus. Most will also die… Read More »
Combination drug therapy for AIDS buys time, but is not a cure In the battle against AIDS, drugs are beginning to play an important role. A promising approach suggested by laboratory studies has met with recent success. It involves drugs that inhibit the AIDS-causing HIV virus in the test tube. There are two basic kinds… Read More »
This week the world’s AIDS researchers held the 17th Annual AIDS Conference in Mexico City. The news is not good. AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) was first recognized as a disease in the United States in June of 1981. 130 Americans died of AIDS that year. By the end of 2006 in the United States, more… Read More »
Since the AIDS epidemic burst upon us in 1981, scientists have feverishly sought a vaccine to protect people from this deadly and incurable disease. But the path to a vaccine has not been easy. Twenty years and 600,000 American AIDS cases later, an effective AIDS vaccine still eludes the best efforts of researchers. One problems… Read More »
While AIDS deaths decreased in the United States last year, most of the world has not been so fortunate. Worldwide, more than 2.6 million people died of AIDS in 1999, and the UN reports 5.6 million new HIV infections that year, bringing the global total to 33.6 million. The search for an effective AIDS vaccine… Read More »
One of the cruelest aspects of AIDS is that clinical symptoms typically do not begin to develop until long after infection by the HIV virus, generally eight to ten years after the initial exposure to HIV. During this long interval, carriers of HIV have no clinical symptoms but are apparently fully infectious, which makes the… Read More »
