Word: infectives
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...that time, scientists across the U.S. were excited about a possible breakthrough treatment: soluble CD4. They knew that HIV does not infect T cells at random. It must first attach itself to a particular protein, called CD4, on the T cells' surface. Perhaps, researchers reasoned, if they flooded the bloodstream with free-floating CD4 molecules, the molecules would act as decoys and prevent HIV from infecting the T cells. Preliminary tests on viral samples grown under laboratory conditions showed that soluble CD4 worked beautifully...
Then what happens? Cutting off treatment for patients taking the multidrug regimes would be a tragedy, and not just for the individual patients. Suddenly freed from that chemical barrage, the HIV in their bodies could easily become resistant to one or more drugs. If these patients infect anyone else before they die, an entirely new superstrain of HIV could be unleashed on the world--precipitating another and even more frightening public health crisis...
...Ashanthi DeSilva, are viruses, which by their nature invade cells and deposit their genetic material into the cell nucleus. Researchers have learned how to strip the viruses of their reproductive genes, insert into the viral DNA the beneficial gene they want to deliver, and then let the virus infect a patient's cells. The virus inserts its own now harmless genes, as well as the beneficial one, into the cellular DNA. If all goes well and the gene "expresses" itself, the cell begins producing the needed protein...
...tend to worry a lot more about the health hazards of anal sex than oral. Everybody knows, after all, that it's much easier for the virus that causes AIDS to cross the lining of the rectum than to infect someone through the mouth. Or is it? The surprising results of a study on rhesus monkeys published last week in Science not only suggest otherwise but also underscore how little scientists know about how, at the microscopic level, HIV spreads from one person to the next...
...study, scientists from Boston's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Tulane University tried to infect 15 sedated monkeys with SIV, the simian cousin of the AIDS virus. To simulate oral sex, researchers dribbled an SIV solution onto the tongues of seven animals. Then, for comparison, they carefully placed SIV in the rectums of eight other monkeys. Much to their surprise, they found that it took less of the viral solution to infect a monkey orally than rectally--6,000 times less...