Improving the Human Conditions - Essay Example

Any program designed for AIDS prevention must consider the stigma associated with the disease and with homosexuality. The World Health Organization intended to provide simple local access to those needing treatment by providing clinics in areas of high leprosy incidence. However, without prior investigation, they could not know that, because of the social stigma, utilization of clinical facilities was not a matter of simple distance or lack of transportation (Campbell, 2003). The virus usually enters the host in fluids (blood or semen) or within infected cells.

The persistent infection that results remains intact in spite of an immune response whose products coexist with the virus. All the experiences with smallpox, yellow fever, measles, and poliomyelitis vaccines have focused on using an attenuated virus that could replicate in the host initially, would not harm the host, yet would provide enough stimulus for the host's immune system to combat and clear the viral infection. This experience has been useless for HIV. For reasons that are not yet clear but may reflect the victim's high level of viral load and unique properties of the virus, both the humoral (antibody) and cellular (CTL) arms of the immune system respond vigorously to HIV throughout the course of infection, yet some of the viruses remain in place (Campbell, 2003).

This situation is in stark contrast with viruses that cause an acute infection in which, if the infected individual survives, the immune response has cleansed viruses from all tissues. In this instance, viruses and the immuneresponse components coexist for but a short time (days), before either the virus or the immune response wins out. With HIV infection, both the virus and the immune response coexist but the duration can be years long -- until the patient dies (Fieldhouse, 2005). As the plague of AIDS continues and expands throughout the world, there is neither effective therapy for its permanent treatment and abatement nor is there a vaccine for its prevention.

Treatment with the drug azidothymidine (Zidovudine) (AZT) or its counterparts, although effective in some instances, has at best worked only for the short term, presumably because of the rapid mutation rate of the virus and its ability to escape the drug's effects. The development of new drugs such as the HIV protease inhibitors offers the hope that combination drug treatment will remove the virus before HIV mutates and the virus escapes therapy. Whether HIV can be eradicated from an infected person and a case of AIDS cured is unknown.

However, even with present combination therapy, nearly a quarter of treated individuals are not helped. The lack of a vaccine after years of research reflects how little is known about immunizing patients to protect them from an infectious agent that persists. A progression of events led to the concept that a virus could cause cancer (Fieldhouse, 2005). At first, HIV infection sets off a cascade of events that disseminates the virus to multiple lymphoid tissues. The immune response generated against HIV effectively lowers the host's viral load but does not remove all of it.

The remaining viruses hide and cause a low-grade persistent infection. As the