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AIDS, thriving on the rivalry of old viruses

New evidence suggests that the fight to battle AIDS was lost in evolutionary history.

While the homo sapiens specie was branching out from the common ape ancestors, old world viruses needed to be overcome so that the new specie evolved and matured. Scraps of the old virus found in the genome of chimpanzees and humans point at such evolutionary violence.

While the immunity defense mechanism to over come another deadly virus ‘Pan troglodytes endogenous retrovirus’ [or PtERV1] succeeded but in it lay the very seeds that have rendered the same immunity system defenseless against the killer Human Immunodeficiency Virus.

An evolutionary victory, millions of years ago, has turned into a losing fight since the 20th A.D.

Acquired Immunity Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) has claimed more than 25 million lives since it was first identified in the 1981. The first known victim though diagnosed much later was a African man who died from AIDS in 1959. As of now, more than 40 million people are estimated to living with the disease. Africa alone has 12 million AIDS orphans.
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Billions of dollars have gone into research and nothing conclusive has yet surfaced that may contain or strike a credible cure from the dreaded disease.

The new evidence thrown up will widen the scientist’s research area into exploring human evolutionary history and other possibilities so as to fix the deathly virus.

While scientist test newer molecules or throw up newer theories for the emergence of this global disease, the social cost it has extracted is enormous.

Complete innocent societies, tribal, rural or urbane have born the brunt. On wonders, what more price will the human world will have to pay till an effective molecule to blunt the strike capability of this virus is achieved.

Theories abound, scientists squabble over newer discoveries and rich nations promise aid for battling AIDS, which never comes through while the Dark Continent and many other populated regions of the world are in the grip of a crisis.

Burying ones head in the sand and holding AIDS as a problem of another society, land, country or continent, will not secure the health of those who don’t identify with the epidemic at large.

The world is not an isolated place anymore. Trade, health, migration and many other links bind it together, today.

Global institutions like the United Nations may have not evolved beyond the post World War II power structure, but people to people linkages have gone beyond that.

The old platforms will need to be fortified, if we are to ensure that the world remains a habitable place and is not destroyed by deadly viruses, global warming, nuclear doom, or other causes.

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