Word: viruses
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...pronged quest for an AIDS remedy. "The most important questions from a clinician's point of view are how can you treat it and how can you prevent it," Hirsch says, and that is exactly what he is trying to do. By developing drugs to knock out the AIDS virus, and by determining why some infected patients die while others live, he hopes to move toward a solution to a problem that has galvanized the nation...
AIDS, first reported in the U.S. in 1979, is a disease that breaks-down the body's natural immune response system and leaves its victims open to opportunistic infections and cancers. Additionally, patients with AIDS frequently develop mental illnesses, such as dementia or meningitis, caused by the AIDS virus. Scientists believe at present that AIDS is caused by a virus similar to herpes called Human T-Lymphotrophic Virus Type III (HTLV-III) which infects the white blood cells. But while the virus has been linked to AIDS, it does not always produce the deadly and debilitating disease. Sometimes, it causes...
While molecular biologists like Dr. William Haseltine and Dr. Myron E. Essex (See profile below) have probed the HTLV-III virus to discover its fundamental building blocks, others in the Harvard Medical Area like Hirsch at Massachusetts General and Dr. Jerome E. Groopman at New England Deaconess Hospital are hunting for immediate ways to stop the disease...
Their studies involve both patients and test-tubes and their methods are aimed at producing a panoply of weapons "that would be effective in eradicating or at least controlling this virus in patients," Hirsch says. Groopman, an assistant professor of medicine, concurs, saying he has never worked so hard in his life to catch the "clever sucker...
Four approaches to the disease now look most promising. The two doctors and their teams want to develop anti-viral drugs to treat infected patients, engineer antibody-based vaccines to ward off the disease, elucidate how the virus attacks the body, and discover what "cofactors"--or additional factors--cause some people infected with the virus to contract full-blown AIDS while others go unaffected...