Did you miss the Black In America special?
CNN aired a special called Black in America this week.
Watch ALL of IT here
Cure to AIDS in the near future?
The economy might be in the tank but there is some good news. I read this article about some researchers from the University of Texas Medical School in Houston. These researchers claim that they have found the HIV’s weakness. This means that in the near future it is possible that we might be able to find a way to finally defeat AIDS.
To understand what the weakness is, it’s important to find out it’s strengths. Like many virus’s HIV mutates. Each year the HIV changes shape. This is problematic because our immune systems will only attack a virus if it is recognizes the foreign body as having the shape of a enemy cell. All a vaccine can do it make our immune system learn the shapes of enemy virus so they will attack them later. Because HIV changes shape we can’t make a vaccine that will protect people from the virus.
However, a virus can not completely change it’s shape. To attack a human, a virus needs to have a part that can attach it to human cell. If the virus doesn’t have this part, the virus will be unable to harm humans. Therefore it follows that this part of the virus can never change. The researchers think that this never changing part of the virus is the protein gp120.
The researchers say they have found that one part of the HIV. If we were to say, make it so that HIV didn’t have this part of the cell, we could stop it from attacking humans!
Sounds rather awesome. I just hope that we’ll be able to use this information sooner rather than later.