Hiv And Its Infection Dynamics - 2079 Words

Abstract HIV is one of the most feared diseases around the globe since its â€Å"discovery† in 1981. HIV stands for human immunodeficiency virus and is caused by Lentivirus, which is a subgroup of Retroviridae (Douek et al. 2009). HIV is one of the more dangerous diseases known because there is currently no known cure and will infect roughly 50,000 people in the United States alone each year (CDC 2016). HIV is a terrible disease that has taken the world by storm. While originally only known as a homosexual disease, that false perception has been shattered as the disease continued to spread. The origin of HIV is not entirely known, though there is strong evidence to support the idea that it originated in a chimpanzee in West Africa. They†¦show more content†¦The first international report on this yet unnamed immunodeficiency syndrome described five young homosexual men in Los Angeles with Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. This led to other reports of more patients who we re abnormally immunodeficient. The fact that many of these patients were either homosexual or drug abusers led researchers to strongly suspect that the disease was blood borne and sexually transmitted (hivinsite 2016). HIV was initially viewed as a homosexual disease with some drug abusers also being exposed in the United States. The CDC put together a task force to monitor the outbreak of rare opportunistic infections that were known to occur in immunocompromised individuals (Basavapathruni and Anderson 2007). The disease was unknown at the time and HIV was known by many different names as no one had yet isolated the causative agent of the disease. Robert Gallo and Luc Montagnier both went on to publish findings that identified different aspects of HIV. Gallo claimed that HIV was similar to Human T-cell Leukemia Virus and named it as HTLV-III while Montagnier claimed that HIV was immunologically independent from HTLV, and named it Lymphadenopathy-associated Virus or LAV (Gallo et al. 1983). Later, the two names were merged into human immunodeficiency virus or HIV by 1986. Etiology HIV