Word: viruses
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...raise any false hopes. Despite Windom's caution, the dramatic news he reported was bound to be en couraging to AIDS victims around the world: early results of clinical tests with an experimental drug called azidothymidine (AZT) had shown that it slowed the attack of the AIDS virus and seemed to prolong the lives of many of its victims...
...experts, began in February and was scheduled to end in December; it involved 282 subjects. Some were victims of AIDS who during the previous four months had also suffered their first bout of PCP. The remaining subjects had ARC (AIDS-related complex); although they were infected with the AIDS virus, their symptoms were not as severe as those of full-blown AIDS. Each patient took a capsule every four hours. For slightly more than half the group, those capsules contained AZT. For the control group, the capsules contained a placebo, a harmless, inactive substance. The tests were "double blind...
...September there had been 16 deaths among the 137 patients receiving the placebo and only one among the 145 taking AZT. Those being given the drug developed fewer AIDS-associated infections, gained weight and showed growing numbers of helper T cells (the immune-system cells attacked by the AIDS virus) in their bloodstream. The independent review board of AIDS experts, set up by a division of the National Institutes of Health in February, promptly recommended that the study be halted and the drug given to the placebo patients...
...Jerome Horwitz of the Michigan Cancer Foundation as a possible anticancer drug. But it proved ineffective against tumors and was largely forgotten until 1984, after Robert Gallo of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris independently isolated the AIDS virus...
...Some viruses consist of a segment of double-stranded DNA surrounded by a protein skin. When they invade a cell, the DNA takes over the cell's genetic machinery and orders it to produce copies of the virus, which escape to infect other cells. The victim cell is often killed in the process. But the AIDS virus is a so-called retrovirus and contains single-stranded RNA. Alone, RNA lacks the ability to conquer cells, but retroviruses carry an enzyme called reverse transcriptase. When the AIDS virus invades an immune-system T cell, the enzyme enables the viral...