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Re: Brief Summary 4

Written by Ivan at 04 Jun 2003 01:05:40:

As an answer to: Re: Brief Summary 4 written by chImp at 04 Jun 2003 00:36:53:

I hadn't really bothered to read the interview you had linked to; now it seems that there is no need, as you are going to eventually post the whole thing piecemeal. The parts you are quoting however show him to be an immensely ill-informed person - is he even a biologist!? Of course there are slow viruses, particularly among the retroviruses. There is a definite evolutionary advantage to not killing a host too quickly, as you noted elsewhere. A great example of that is chicken pox, which causes the well-known rash and other symptoms initially, then sits latent for long periods, erupting in times of stress as shingles. Or the Herpes Simplex viruses, which cause an initial outbreak of the Herpes cold sores, and then sit latent until stress allows another outbreak, when they can again be transmitted. These viruses are parasites, not killers, and they are extremly widely dispersed for that reason.
By the way, there si no reason to assume that HIV has been honed by evolution to be a successful species - the best information on it suggests it made the transition from simian immunovirus (SIV) to the human population fifty to eighty years ago in central Africa, and then sometime later undergoing the nutations which have allowed it to spread. Perhaps, like smallpox, it will eventually be wiped out (at least we think we've wiped out smallpox, except for a couple samples), because it is such a dreaded disease.

>I see your point, but this fact was mensioned in comparison with other deseases, where you'll find a LOT of virus! On the other hand (damn it, where is that PaulB, he probably knows this), don't the T-cells get reproduced as well?!!! Is the number of T-cells really a constant? If they DO get reproduced, then occupying a mere 0.1% of them isn't going to reduce their numbers! Besides, viruses are simple organisms. They can't "slow down". They take what they can get. All the other viruses cause damage by rapidly reproducing themselves until they are in such an abundance that the immune system goes down.

Of course, the body replaces T-cells as they break down, but not all that fast. My recollection is that during the latent period of the infection, the cells which make new T-cells are under attack.

>>>* In HIV/AIDS patients, at most 1/1000 of T-cells are infected with HIV.
>>So what! If we had a flu (influenza) outbreak where at any given time 1/1000 of the population was infected, it would be a worse epidemic than the early 1900s outbreaks. If HIV shortens the lifespan of the T-cells by a considerable extent (in actual AIDS cases, not during the latency period),
>Hmm...Where did you dig THAT theory up? It's a rather peculiar way of destroying the immune system- by keeping a constant number rather than multyplying like hell!
>>only a few at any given time would be infected, but the population would be rapidly dwindling. If all the T-cells were infected at once, the victim would die within weeks if not days.
>To quote Duesberg: "there are no slow viruses. There only are slow virologists!"
>>It is a relatively slow-acting virus (actually retrovirus, but for these purposes that's a quibble).


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