Biology At St. Francis Desales High School - 3053 Words

y name is Brittany Truong and I am a rising senior at St.Francis DeSales High School. b. I plan to major in biochemistry at a four year university and to later attend medical school. c. HIV is a virus that most of you, if not all, have heard of. That is because over 1.2 million Americans live with it everyday. Many of you may wonder: what makes this disease so dangerous? Well, out of all these infected people, one in eight are not even aware that this virus is currently multiplying in their bloodstream (CDC). This ignorance stems from the fact that HIV initially lies latent in the body for up to ten years. After this period, it becomes a sneaky killer by destroying the white blood cells of the immune system. When your body no longer has a†¦show more content†¦It is a virus that desecrates immune systems and can slowly creep upon its victim due to its potential ten year incubation period. You might contract the disease and not even know it. The virus kills by destroying all your disease fighting T cells, leaving your body powerless to foreign pathogens that we are surrounded by everyday. b. HIV is an incurable disease that relies on coreceptors to initiate host cell interaction and proliferates by utilizing the host cell’s own machinery to reproduce new virus. We will more deeply explore the mechanism in which HIV virions infiltrate and deceive our host cell. In addition, we will discuss current treatment and research that are in the process of finding a highly coveted cure. 3. Disease Description: low level i. HIV is a virus that kills cells in our immune system, which protects us from germs and sickness. When we lose our primary method of infection defense, our body can no longer fight illness and we can die. It originally came from chimpanzees in Africa who had the same disease in monkey form. Humans hunted them for meat. When these people killed them, contacted the chimpanzee blood, and ingested the infected meat, they allowed the monkey form of the virus to enter their bodies (The AIDS Institute). Viruses are strong because they can change in order to survive. ï ¿ ¼Therefore, the virus changed so that it could live in human cells, which led to the birth of