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AIDS is one of the most known diseases in the world today, and while treatable with a mix of anti-viral medication, it still doesn’t have a cure.
“AIDS” is an abbreviation of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, meaning it’s a disease that causes your immune-system to stop working and thus turning even mild infections - like the common cold, into deadly diseases.
The most devastating pandemic in recent history, since its discovery in 1981, about 78 million people have been infected with HIV, and nearly 39 million people worldwide have died of AIDS-related complications. The UN agency, in-charge of monitoring and reporting about AIDS (“UNAIDS”) states that about 5700 people are infected daily (that’s about 240 people every hour!).
But now, despite the terrible loss of AIDS researchers on the Malaysian Air flight, and thanks to researchers from Temple Health in Pennsylvania, a cure for AIDS may become a reality:
Photo by Rhoda Baer
You might be asking yourself: “Why haven’t we found a cure yet?”
To cure a viral infection – you must clear the body from all of the viruses in the bloodstream and cells. When the AIDS Virus infects the body, it goes into healthy cells in our body and adds its own DNA to our cells’ sequence, causing our cells to produce move viruses into the bloodstream as well as making it currently impossible to target by medicine and eventually overpowering our immune-system, leading to it shutting down, leaving us vulnerable to diseases and other infections that would normally be taken care of by our body.
What these researchers did, was to use our body’s DNA delivery system (called RNA) to “cut out” the infected strands of DNA, effectively removing the disease and allowing the body’s repair mechanisms to fix the “damage”, as well as stopping the production of more AIDS viruses altogether.
Under lab conditions, the treatment was highly successful, with the infected DNA strands being completely removed without any damage to the host’s genetic code or other ill effects.
This means that if this method proves effective in clinical trials, it can possibly be used to treat many other viral infections (from the common cold, to herpes and more) by tailoring the mechanism to people’s specific DNA. Furthermore, when tested on healthy cells, the RNA acted similarly, which actually transformed the cells and caused them to become “immune” to HIV, meaning that this might not just be a cure, but also a vaccine!
We here at Baba are wishing these researchers the BEST OF LUCK in their research!
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