The Invisible Tyrants A Brief History of the H.
I. V. VirusFebruary 27th, 1994Frank Manciniemail protected Supposedly 1. 6 million years have passed since the earliest human like ancestors.
250,000 years since the earliest Homo Sapiens and 1962 years since Jesus Christ was executed. Although not everyone agrees on whether the existence of Christ is true or not, that is what the standard calendar defining days and time is based upon and that is the way we deal economically and politically worldwide. Millions of years have passed, civilizations have appeared and disappeared, we have had harmonious as well as destructive societies and fought for the evil and the good. Dictators have come and gone and missions out of this world have been accomplished, from walks on the moon to the launch of dozens of satellites scattered throughout the universe.
We call it progress, evolution, intellectual advancement. Although in some parts of the world we still have wars being fought and dictators in power, there are other societies which consider themselves at the peak of evolution and progress, these societies are part of the first world and western civilization. They are able to create state of the art automobiles, luxurious homes, efficient and organized industries, automated and complex computerized machinery and atomic weapons. Most of these humans are governed by a democratic system and a belief of freedom.
This first world like the third world is also populated by Dictators with the only difference that they are special, unseen a naked eyes, they are invisible and invincible. These invisible tyrants are called microorganisms. Underdeveloped countries as well as “developed” countries are at the mercy of the invisible tyrants which come in the form of: Viruses, Bacteria, Fungi and Parasites. The most dangerous of these is the Virus, some with limited powers such as the flu is able of enslaving humans to a week or two of soreness, stuffy nose and may lead up to minor bronchial complication. Then there is a more controlling, severe, non-discriminating, merciless tyrant with enormous corrupting influences infiltrate all of civilization rising mountains of sorrow and oceans of pain It’s not just submicroscopic pathogens consisting of a particle of nucleic acid enclosed in proteins and able to replicate only within a living cell.
It’s more complex and responsible for the enormous chaos and fear in the world today, bringing outward the basic faults of us humans, placing in the light our lack of awareness and abundance of ignorance. This complex and confusing Dictator, king of all tyrants is called Human, Immunodeficiency, Virus or H. I. V.
The H. I. V. it’s not just a virus, it’s a retrovirus and one of the few retroviruses found in humans. Retroviruses are commonly identified in many animal species but in Humans H. I.
V. or it’s variants such as HTLV I, HTLV II, HTLV III are found. The only way this virus can be transmitted is through blood, semen and vaginal secretions. H.
I. V. is a retrovirus of the Lentivirus group and is the etiologic agent of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Briefly AIDS was first recognized as a disease syndrome in 1981 and HIV was identified as its cause in 1984. Coincidentally viruses isolated by a French researcher Dr.
Montgnier as (Lymphadenopathy-Associated Virus LAV) and by Dr. Gallo (HILV-III) and Levy (AIDS Related Retrovirus ARV) in the United States, they were all found to be identical and to be associated with AIDS. The virus is now known universally as HIV, its antibodies were found in serum drawn in parts of Africa in the early 1970 leading most investigators to believe that the disease originated in Africa and spread to the Caribbean and then to the United States, furthermore two strains of HIV have been identified, HIV-1 which is predominant isolate in clinical AIDS and found in central Africa and other regions in the world and HIV-2 which is generally limited to west and central Africa and has not demonstrated the virulence of HIV-1. In trying to assess its origin let’s take a look at the following possibility. AIDS first appeared in Equatorial Africa, the earliest evidence of its presence on the African Continent dates from a plasma sample drawn in 1959 in what was then Leopoldville, the Belgian Congo and is now Kinshasa, Zaire. The timing seems .
