The News Thread

[Bird Bird Bird]

In short, no. Primarily because you cannot transfuse whole 5 litres of blood without some major complications (and it's not done.) It's not like you take 5 litres from one arm and supplement 5 litres from the other one. Can't do that bro.

 

Quite simply put, HIV targets a type of infection fighting cells (CD4+ Helper T cells) which are involved in modulating the functions of the immune system. And once infecting them, the virus can lie in a dormant state doing simply nothing (days- years), and therefore being avoided by our immune system. Sooner or later, it will become active and start multiplying, infecting more of these cells & other vital cells as well.

Now the number of these helper cells keep on declining due to the viral action and since these helper cells are the ones regulating the immune response, the body gets progressively deficient wrt it's immunity status and finally the patient develops AIDS. Death in AIDS is actually not directly due to HIV but due to other opportunistic infections, which can normally be overcome by a healthy body but not by a highly immunodeficient person with AIDS.

[playstation]

In short, no. Primarily because you cannot transfuse whole 5 litres of blood without some major complications (and it's not done.) It's not like you take 5 litres from one arm and supplement 5 litres from the other one. Can't do that bro.

 

Quite simply put, HIV targets a type of infection fighting cells (CD4+ Helper T cells) which are involved in modulating the functions of the immune system. And once infecting them, the virus can lie in a dormant state doing simply nothing (days- years), and therefore being avoided by our immune system. Sooner or later, it will become active and start multiplying, infecting more of these cells & other vital cells as well.

Now the number of these helper cells keep on declining due to the viral action and since these helper cells are the ones regulating the immune response, the body gets progressively deficient wrt it's immunity status and finally the patient develops AIDS. Death in AIDS is actually not directly due to HIV but due to other opportunistic infections, which can normally be overcome by a healthy body but not by a highly immunodeficient person with AIDS.

very well explained bro...repped ...dont even remember reading in bio in such nice simple way.

 

btw ..still no medicine for aids na in any kind ??

[Bird Bird Bird]

btw ..still no medicine for aids na in any kind ??

There are medications, infact many medications, but everything depends on the route via which virus was transmitted, how much was transmitted, how long has the exposure been present and the immune status of the person. Many people have been living comfortably (in a way they wouldn't have been without drugs) for years. All the medications can do is delay the onset of disease, there is no cure.

[playstation]

There are medications, infact many medications, but everything depends on the route via which virus was transmitted, how much was transmitted, how long has the exposure been present and the immune status of the person. Many people have been living comfortably (in a way they wouldn't have been without drugs) for years. All the medications can do is delay the onset of disease, there is no cure.

okay. thanks once again.

 

 

strange in school we use to talk abt aids on how it spread from monkey to humans ....and we use to talk how a women did with monkey and from then it spread...

 

but to think of it ...this is one f**ked up diseases right there with cancer....and unfortunately we have no cure for both i guess.

[piper]

In other news : http://ibnlive.in.com/news/a-sunday-to-remember-for-indian-hockey/183219-5-136.html

 

And we all stayed glued to the cricket match.

[playstation]

Pakistan school bus attack kills teacher and three children

 

slamist gunmen opened fire on a school bus in north-western Pakistan on Tuesday morning, killing a teacher, three children and the driver in the latest round of a vicious turf war between insurgents and pro-government militias near the region's largest city.

 

The shooting in Matani, on the outskirts of Peshawar, occurred as a bus carrying boys and girls aged between nine and 14 returned from the Khyber Model school.

 

The children hailed from a village where men have formed a large lashkar, or tribal militia, to repel Taliban incursions into their area.

 

The attackers first fired a rocket, which missed the bus, then sprayed the vehicle with gunfire, a senior police officer in Peshawar said. Five people died instantly and at least 17 were wounded.

 

TV footage showed wounded teenage boys, some writhing in pain, crowded into a Peshawar hospital ward where they were awaiting treatment.

 

Tribesmen in Adezai, a village in Matani district, formed the lashkar in late 2008 in response to Taliban incursions. Armed volunteers carry out foot patrols, stand guard at fortified battlements and support police operations to secure the area, which includes the gun-producing village of Dara Adam Khel.

 

There have been bloody exchanges of fire with a pro-Taliban Islamist militia that seeks to dominate the area and lashkar leaders say they have come under attack 40 times in three years, resulting in the death of more than 130 people.

 

One tribal elder, Ijaz Bacha, was killed along with two police officers in a massive car bomb attack on his home last June.

 

Tuesday's bloodshed marked the first deliberate attack on children but was not the first violence targeting civilians.

 

Militants have repeatedly attacked ordinary villagers in an effort to break their support for the lashkar.

 

One such attack was a suicide bombing on mourners at a funeral last March in which 43 people died and more than 50 were wounded.

 

Lashkar leaders complain of insufficient official back-up, particularly a lack of ammunition, and have threatened to withdraw their support of the government.

 

Police officials say they fear the lashkar could spin out of their control if it is armed too heavily.

 

Separately, the bodies of two men were found in Lakki Marwat at the southern end of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on Tuesday. A note said they had been executed for spying on a commander of the Pakistani Taliban.

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/13/pakistan-gunmen-open-fire-school-bus

 

[HarishProGamer]

That is pretty SICK!

 

Rest In Peace their souls... Poor children.

 

 

17 Indians are freed from Death Sentence.

 

 

[Ne0]

In short, no. Primarily because you cannot transfuse whole 5 litres of blood without some major complications (and it's not done.) It's not like you take 5 litres from one arm and supplement 5 litres from the other one. Can't do that bro.

 

Quite simply put, HIV targets a type of infection fighting cells (CD4+ Helper T cells) which are involved in modulating the functions of the immune system. And once infecting them, the virus can lie in a dormant state doing simply nothing (days- years), and therefore being avoided by our immune system. Sooner or later, it will become active and start multiplying, infecting more of these cells & other vital cells as well.

Now the number of these helper cells keep on declining due to the viral action and since these helper cells are the ones regulating the immune response, the body gets progressively deficient wrt it's immunity status and finally the patient develops AIDS. Death in AIDS is actually not directly due to HIV but due to other opportunistic infections, which can normally be overcome by a healthy body but not by a highly immunodeficient person with AIDS.

 

Slight OT:

 

How a passive organism like Virus have so much of intelligence is beyond me ! I'm not a medical student, but I was always fascinated with viruses/bacteria during my high school/pre-university days. How can an organism with nothing but some DNA/RNA alone do so much of damage ? I just can't comprehend their existance. Also, do viruses evolve like other creatures over time ?

[playstation]

Slight OT:

 

How a passive organism like Virus have so much of intelligence is beyond me ! I'm not a medical student, but I was always fascinated with viruses/bacteria during my high school/pre-university days. How can an organism with nothing but some DNA/RNA alone do so much of damage ? I just can't comprehend their existance. Also, do viruses evolve like other creatures over time ?

+1. good point.

[Solitaire]

Slight OT:

 

How a passive organism like Virus have so much of intelligence is beyond me ! I'm not a medical student, but I was always fascinated with viruses/bacteria during my high school/pre-university days. How can an organism with nothing but some DNA/RNA alone do so much of damage ? I just can't comprehend their existance. Also, do viruses evolve like other creatures over time ?

 

 

They do evolve. They're not 'intelligent' as such, they just do what they are coded to do. They adapt based on the same laws of natural selection, the strong ones live and thus form an 'evolved' population. All they're doing is using the human body as their natural habitat to gather 'food' (in the form of the human body's cellular contents) and reproduce while the human body's own immune system is just a hostile force they have to constantly contend with.

[playstation]

They do evolve. They're not 'intelligent' as such, they just do what they are coded to do. They adapt based on the same laws of natural selection, the strong ones live and thus form an 'evolved' population. All they're doing is using the human body as their natural habitat to gather 'food' (in the form of the human body's cellular contents) and reproduce while the human body's own immune system is just a hostile force they have to constantly contend with.

i am not sure if that is all it is....still a sensible point....i still feel that they are quite intelligent and all.

[AtheK]

train accident near chennai, 15 dead 80 injured more expected casualties...

 

crazy sh*t..

 

http://www.ndtv.com/article/cities/chennai-train-accident-15-killed-80-injured-133457?pfrom=home-bigstory

[godspeed4476]

yeah just watching the news right now, the Indian railways is going to drain ever since banerjee and her cronies have taken over

[Bird Bird Bird]

Slight OT:

 

How a passive organism like Virus have so much of intelligence is beyond me ! I'm not a medical student, but I was always fascinated with viruses/bacteria during my high school/pre-university days. How can an organism with nothing but some DNA/RNA alone do so much of damage ? I just can't comprehend their existance. Also, do viruses evolve like other creatures over time ?

Yes, viruses do evolve over time. As a simple example, take the case of influenza, which is among those viruses which mutate pretty fast. Every 3-5 years or so, you will hear (specially in the Western world) about an ongoing flu epidemic. That's simply due to mutation. Viruses are obligate intracellular parasites, which means they can only survive inside a living host (and thus cannot be 'grown' on a culture plate in labs). So once our body developes resistance to it, they need to change their structure to fool our immune cells and continue their lives. At the very base, it's just a method of survival.

Mostly our body fights an infection against a foreign body (called as antigen) via production of antibodies. And these antibodies are produced against the part of the organism which it is sensitized to, which in case of viruses, is mostly the outer protein envelope. So to survive they undergo mutation changing the DNA sequence responsible for the formation of their protein coat and voila, you've an entirely new entity to fight from. But mutation takes time and that is why these infections aren't so common.

And mutation is one of the reasons we can't make any vaccine against HIV. It mutates like it's on steroids !

 

Regarding bacteria, it's an entirely different entity altogether. It infects you in various ways, for ex via producing toxins when living (exotoxins) and when dead (endotoxins). Then many times it's due to our body's fault that a something like granuloma formation happens in TB/Leprosy etc. The body reacts to the TB bacteria by killing and engulfing it (phagocytosis) and forming an inflammatory multicellular layer on top of it so as to cut of the infection from the rest of the body, and this results in cavity formation in the lungs. So in many diseases, the overactivity of the immune system is also a culprit.

Then there is the phenomenon of resistance among the bacteria. You give one drug over and over for years and gradually they mutate and either change their structure or start developing enzymes which neutralize the medicines. And that is one of the reasons why rampant misuse of antibiotics shouldn't be done. There are soooooooo many bacterias which have developed resistance to old school drugs.

 

Obviously the info above is a highly distilled summary on the what and how of bacteria/viruses and infection. For anything more than this, it's gotta get complex.

[achilles]

^ Reads like Tron.

[hammerhead]

Yes, viruses do evolve over time. As a simple example, take the case of influenza, which is among those viruses which mutate pretty fast. Every 3-5 years or so, you will hear (specially in the Western world) about an ongoing flu epidemic. That's simply due to mutation. Viruses are obligate intracellular parasites, which means they can only survive inside a living host (and thus cannot be 'grown' on a culture plate in labs). So once our body developes resistance to it, they need to change their structure to fool our immune cells and continue their lives. At the very base, it's just a method of survival.

Mostly our body fights an infection against a foreign body (called as antigen) via production of antibodies. And these antibodies are produced against the part of the organism which it is sensitized to, which in case of viruses, is mostly the outer protein envelope. So to survive they undergo mutation changing the DNA sequence responsible for the formation of their protein coat and voila, you've an entirely new entity to fight from. But mutation takes time and that is why these infections aren't so common.

And mutation is one of the reasons we can't make any vaccine against HIV. It mutates like it's on steroids !

 

Regarding bacteria, it's an entirely different entity altogether. It infects you in various ways, for ex via producing toxins when living (exotoxins) and when dead (endotoxins). Then many times it's due to our body's fault that a something like granuloma formation happens in TB/Leprosy etc. The body reacts to the TB bacteria by killing and engulfing it (phagocytosis) and forming an inflammatory multicellular layer on top of it so as to cut of the infection from the rest of the body, and this results in cavity formation in the lungs. So in many diseases, the overactivity of the immune system is also a culprit.

Then there is the phenomenon of resistance among the bacteria. You give one drug over and over for years and gradually they mutate and either change their structure or start developing enzymes which neutralize the medicines. And that is one of the reasons why rampant misuse of antibiotics shouldn't be done. There are soooooooo many bacterias which have developed resistance to old school drugs.

 

Obviously the info above is a highly distilled summary on the what and how of bacteria/viruses and infection. For anything more than this, it's gotta get complex.

Very informative. Are you a biomedical engineer or something?

[Bird Bird Bird]

No. Just a doctor.

[hammerhead]

^That's even better.

[godspeed4476]

Mere tonsil ka medicine de, sala 2 mahine se lataka hua hai

[Ne0]

Yes, viruses do evolve over time. As a simple example, take the case of influenza, which is among those viruses which mutate pretty fast. Every 3-5 years or so, you will hear (specially in the Western world) about an ongoing flu epidemic. That's simply due to mutation. Viruses are obligate intracellular parasites, which means they can only survive inside a living host (and thus cannot be 'grown' on a culture plate in labs). So once our body developes resistance to it, they need to change their structure to fool our immune cells and continue their lives. At the very base, it's just a method of survival.

Mostly our body fights an infection against a foreign body (called as antigen) via production of antibodies. And these antibodies are produced against the part of the organism which it is sensitized to, which in case of viruses, is mostly the outer protein envelope. So to survive they undergo mutation changing the DNA sequence responsible for the formation of their protein coat and voila, you've an entirely new entity to fight from. But mutation takes time and that is why these infections aren't so common.

And mutation is one of the reasons we can't make any vaccine against HIV. It mutates like it's on steroids !

 

Regarding bacteria, it's an entirely different entity altogether. It infects you in various ways, for ex via producing toxins when living (exotoxins) and when dead (endotoxins). Then many times it's due to our body's fault that a something like granuloma formation happens in TB/Leprosy etc. The body reacts to the TB bacteria by killing and engulfing it (phagocytosis) and forming an inflammatory multicellular layer on top of it so as to cut of the infection from the rest of the body, and this results in cavity formation in the lungs. So in many diseases, the overactivity of the immune system is also a culprit.

Then there is the phenomenon of resistance among the bacteria. You give one drug over and over for years and gradually they mutate and either change their structure or start developing enzymes which neutralize the medicines. And that is one of the reasons why rampant misuse of antibiotics shouldn't be done. There are soooooooo many bacterias which have developed resistance to old school drugs.

 

Obviously the info above is a highly distilled summary on the what and how of bacteria/viruses and infection. For anything more than this, it's gotta get complex.

 

Awesome info man, thanks

 

Any URL that explains medical stuff in way that can be understood by the layman ? Apart form wikipedia that is ?