The immune system is the body’s natural defense against infections and disease. Your immune system is made up of different types of cells that protect your body from bacteria and viruses. For example, the CD4 cells which is also known as the T cells are part of the immune system. These cells recognize viruses and bacteria and help your body fight the infection. HIV is a type of virus that cannot make copies of itself(reproduce) on its own. Instead, HIV attacks the cells in your body and uses the cells’ “machinery” to make copies of itself.
When HIV attacks and destroys CD4 cells, your body has fewer CD4 cells to protect you from infections. This means you are more likely to get sick. HIV life cycle refers to the 4 main steps that HIV takes to make copies of itself. Step 1:ENTERY-HIV attaches to the cell and uses a special chemical as a key to enter. Step 2:DISGUISE-once inside, HIV uses a chemical called reverse transcriptase to disguise itself. Wearing this disguise, HIV is ready to sneak into the cell’s control center. Step 3:Access-HIV uses a chemical called integrase to gain access to the cell’s control center.
HIV then adds its own information into the cell’s machinery and starts making copies of itself. Step 4:Assembly-another chemical, called protease, cuts out and puts together copies of the virus. Once the new viruses leave the cell, they are ready to find and attack more CD4 cells. HIV Medicines There is no absolute cure for HIV. HIV can be treated with medicines. HIV medicines stop the virus from making copies of itself, which helps decrease the virus and increase CD4 cells. There are 3 medicines needed to stop the HIV life cycle.
Step 1:ENTERY INHIBITORS-this change the lock on the cell door.This means the key no longer works, and HIV cannot enter the cell. Step 2:NRTIs and NNRTIS-this targets the reverse transcriptase and cause it to make faulty disguise. Without the right disguise, HIV cannot enter the cells control center. Step 3:INTEGRASE INHIBITORS-this stops HIV from entering its own information into the cells machinery. This means that HIV cannot start making copies of itself. Step 4:PROTEASE INHIBITORS(PIs)- PIs target protease, the chemical that HIV uses to cut out and put together new copies of the viruses from being put together correctly.
NRTIs NRTIs stand for Nucleoside Reverse Transcriptase Inhibitor. There are two major mechanisms of NRTI resistance. The first being reduced incorporation of the nucleotide analog into DNA over the normal nucleotide. This results from mutations in the N-terminal polymerase domain of the reverse transcriptase that reduce the enzyme’s affinity or ability to bind to the drug. Another well characterized set of mutations is the Q151M complex found in multi-drug resistant HIV which decreases reverse transcriptase’s efficiency at incorporating NRTIs, but does not affect natural nucleotide incorporation.
INTEGRASE INHIBITORS Integrase inhibitors (also known as integrase strand transfer inhibitors) are a class of antiretroviral drug designed to block the action of integrase, a viral enzyme that inserts the viral genome into the DNA of the host cell. Since integration is a vital step in retroviral replication, blocking it can halt further spread of the virus. Integrase inhibitors were initially developed for the treatment of HIV infection, but they could be applied to other retroviruses. The first integrase inhibitor approved by the U.S.
Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was raltegravir (brand name Isentress), approved on October 12, 2007. Research results published in the New England Journal of Medicine on July 24, 2008, concluded that “raltegravir plus optimized background therapy provided better viral suppression than optimized background therapy alone for at least 48 weeks. ” Since integrase inhibitors target a distinct step in the retroviral life cycle, they may be taken in combination with other types of HIV drugs to minimize adaptation by the virus.
They are also useful in salvage therapy for patients whose virus has mutated and acquired resistance to other drugs.
PROTEASE INHIBITORS Protease inhibitors may be classified either by the type of protease they inhibit, or by their mechanism of action. In 2004 Rawlings and colleagues introduced a classification of protease inhibitors based on similarities detectable at the level of amino acid sequence. [2] This classification initially identified 48 families of inhibitors that could be grouped into 26 related super family (or clans) by their structure.
According to the MEROPS database there are now 85 families of inhibitors. These families are named with an I followed by a number, for example, I14 contains hirudin-like inhibitors. Charts In the United States, HIV is very high for our age group(15-19) in 2009. At this time, our fellow teens were kinda sexually active which led to unprotected sex and also can lead to someone getting HIV and not even know it. Many schools taught teens not to have sex at a young age, but they didn’t and this was the outcome.
2,036 teens from age groups(15-19) were infected with the HIV virus by not knowing if any of their sexual partners was one of the infected so now they are putting more teens in harms way. Now the age group we have now, they are more out going and more outrageous. In 2009, we were the age group 13-14. We had the less amount of HIV in 2009. In 2009, the age group(13-14) had a diagnoses of HIV infections of 21. People are now trying to reduce their sexual actions because they finally realized that HIV is very very dangerous.
At first they failed to realized that this disease is dangerous to those close to them and around them. HIV can be given but cannot be taken away, this disease is a one way disease. That means that HIV cannot be stopped or fully cured.
BRIEF SUMMARY This basically means that HIV is one of the most dangerous diseases out there to get. You can only get HIV by being birthed with it, sexual contact, or using anonymous objects that has blood of someone who has HIV. Those objects include needles. Also this lets us know how much HIV can be an impact on our communities and families.