UPSC Express

HIV and AIDS: in brief

• Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) is a virus that attacks the immune system, our body’s natural defence against illness.
• If HIV is left untreated, a person’s immune system will get weaker and weaker until it can no longer fight off life-threatening infections and diseases.
• Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) is a set of symptoms and illnesses that happen at the final stage of HIV infection, if left untreated.

How the HIV attacks the immune system?

• After a person is infected with HIV, the virus attaches itself to the body’s immune cells in the hopes of producing more virus particles.
• In the acute stages of infection, the virus destroys a lot of immune cells and produces many virus particles, leading the immune systeminto overdrive in trying and warding off infection.
• Later, the virus enters into a period of clinical latency, this time the virus is active but reproduces minimally.
• In the last stage of infection, AIDS, the number of immune cells drops well below the normal level.
• The body’s immune system is left critically damaged, leaving the person susceptible to illness.

About CCR5-delta 32 mutation

• CCR5-delta 32 is a genetic mutation responsible for HIV resistance, which hampers HIV’s ability to infiltrate immune cells.
• CCR5 co-receptor is present outside the cells and acts like a door that allows HIV entrance into the cell.
• The CCR5-delta 32 mutation acts like a door lock which prevents HIV from entering into the cell.
• About 1% of people who are descendents from Northern Europeans, are homozygous carriers of the mutated gene (they inherited a copy from both of their parents). Thus, they are immune to HIV infection.
• Since the CCR5-delta 32 is tied primarily to the Eurasia region, the mutation has not been found in Africans, East Asians etc.

Way ahead:

• These successful cases marks critical moments in the search for an HIV cure and give hope that scientists will one day be able to cure AIDS.