Actual Reality, Act Up, Fight AIDS!

December 1st is World AIDS Day so it’s fitting to talk about the HIV virus. Everyone knows the basics of how people can become infected, but this is what the virus is actually doing inside the body…

Random Background Facts:

T-Helper cells are found in your body and play a major role in your body’s immune system. Your body is unable to fight off any foreign invasion without these super important cells. People who die from HIV/AIDS die because they do not have enough of these cells to keep the immune system going.

A virus is not really alive or dead. It needs a host to be able to survive and replicate.

HIV is a retrovirus. That means it contains RNA and not DNA. A protein called reverse transcriptase is able to turn RNA into DNA.

How the Virus Attacks:

Once the HIV virus enters the body it heads for the lymphatic tissue where it can find a lot of T-Helper cells. The virus finds a cell and uses as protein on its surface to bind to the cell. The virus’s membrane then fuses with the cell’s membrane and the viral core is injected into the T-Helper cell. Reverse transcriptase then turns all of the viral RNA into viral DNA called provirus. The provirus is then carried into the T-Helper cell’s nucleus and is integrated into the cell’s native DNA. It’s all downhill for the cell from here.

After being DNA integration, the T-Helper cell cannot determine what is native and what is viral DNA, so it copies it all into mRNA and then turns it into proteins. So basically the virus is able to confuse the cell and the cell actually makes the viral proteins for the virus. The cell is helping kill itself.

The newly made viral proteins and RNA have a group meeting and gather together at the edge of the cell where the viral material then pinches off of the T-Helper cell, taking part of the cells membrane for itself. This new bud can then go infect other T-Helper cells. The original T-Helper cell will still contain the provirus and will continue to make more and more viral proteins and enzymes. The T-Helper cells will slowly start to die off as they all become infected and turned into virus making machines.

From a scientific standpoint, the virus is smart and is very good at making sure it can survive and reproduce. Unfortunately the virus also outmaneuvers the immune system by being able to mutate its proteins very rapidly. They body is just not able to keep up with how fast it can change how it looks. This rapid mutation rate is why a vaccine is so hard to create.

So don’t be fools, wrap your tools! Keep this pesky virus out of you and everyone you know!