Word: viruses
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...nearly 35 million people around the world now living with HIV, there may never be a cure. Once cells are infected with HIV, it's excruciatingly difficult--perhaps impossible--to rid them of the virus. The only sure way to stop the epidemic is to prevent infection in the first place, and only a vaccine can do that...
...about two dozen vaccines have been tested, most made from proteins found on the virus' coat and delivered via another, inactivated virus such as canarypox. While such vaccines are safe and successful in triggering antibodies, it's not clear that any will be sufficiently powerful to combat the strains of the virus that are currently in circulation...
Still, the billions of dollars spent on AIDS research over the past 20 years has not been wasted. As scientists learn more about how HIV co-opts the human body to survive, they are realizing that drugs alone may not be enough. To contain the virus effectively, it may take a balance between drug therapy that keeps HIV levels low and a bolstered immune system that can then target and destroy the remaining virus. Until scientists find a vaccine, however, they may control but never cure the century's final scourge...
Fortunately, Salk had somehow found time to do basic research on the virus and write a few theoretical papers, and it was these that caught the eye of Basil O'Connor, the zealous head of the Infantile Paralysis Foundation, who decided to play a hunch and shove some dimes in Salk's direction with instructions to get going...
Since its inception in 1988, the institute has worked with researchers in Senegal to combat the AIDS virus in Africa...