Word: viruses
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...other scientific custodians, Marilyn is getting belated recognition. In this week's Nature, researchers at the University of Alabama in Birmingham report that Marilyn's frozen tissue, carefully preserved all these years, may have solved a pair of lingering medical mysteries: where the dominant form of the AIDS virus originated in the animal world, and how it made the deadly leap to humans. More than brilliant scientific detective work, the Alabama research, if it turns out to be correct, could lead to new treatments and possibly even a cure for a fatal disease that afflicts more than 35 million people...
...some time, scientists have known that a small African monkey called the sooty mangabey is the natural reservoir of a virus very similar to HIV-2, which causes a milder form of AIDS found largely in western Africa. But the source of HIV-1, the dominant cause of the AIDS pandemic, has remained elusive to virus hunters like Alabama's Dr. Beatrice Hahn. Long on the trail of links between HIV and kindred simian viruses, she jumped at the chance to examine old tissue samples (stored, as it turns out, in a freezer at the National Cancer Institute) from...
These results demonstrate the adaptability of the virus as well as the danger of using vaccines derived from...
Previous experiments led researchers to believe that the most promising vaccine to fight HIV would use a weakened virus, but this idea now has to be revised, Ruprecht said...
Currently, the dominant treatment for HIV involves a cocktail of drugs that attack the virus once it has infected. The drugs can significantly reduce the presence of the virus but there is little evidence to suggest that it can actually cure the virus...