Welcome back to my very last blog post! Oh, how it saddens me how I won’t be able to write and educate about all the fun things I’ve learned about this human immunodeficiency virus!
It’s come so fast and over this quick period, I learned more than I thought I would’ve honestly. HIV has always been an interest of mine since my Infectious Disease class with Dr. Dix but with my visit to the CDC, diving deep into the how it infects us and more, I was able to gain a greater interest of it. I wanted to talk about an area that I didn’t cover and that was the history of HIV.
HIV was brought into light in the 1980’s in the US but is believed to be originated in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the 1920’s. When HIV first mentioned in the scientific world, it was only seen in gay men. The first cases of HIV in the US were in California where many gay men who had sexual contact would pass away from a separate disease due to the deficiency in their immune system. This illness became so common in the gay community and was only seen in gay men that in 1981, the illness was named gay-related immune deficiency (GRID). A year later, there were blood transfusion patients who contracted AIDS. This was a turning point because before this it was believed that this was only a sexually transmitted disease. Research in this field began to emerge to fully understand what type of disease this was, where it came from, how it can be transmitted, etc. As research emerged, new things were being discovered such as women can also contract AIDS through heterosexual sex and that HIV could be passed from mother to child through breast-feed. Research continued to find different ways of transmission but as time progressed, many researchers were interested in focusing less on the virus itself and more on vaccines and treatments. The anti-retroviral drug AZT was approved and put on the market. The way this drug works is by stopping the pathway of reverse transcriptase, which is a very important component for HIV-infected cells to make new viruses. AZT would inhibit this enzyme and by doing so, these HIV-infected cells won’t reproduce as much virus throughout the body. This was a big deal at the time because to have a treatment that can slow down the reproduction of these infected cells because it aided in decreasing the chance of the patient’s symptoms worsening. As time progressed though, more drugs became familiar and a common treatment called triple combination therapy became very popular. This is where 3 different drugs would be taken together and worked together to fight against HIV and AIDS illness. I also wanted to mention the drug Truvada that we learned about in class and that I am actually familiar with from working in a pharmacy. I think this drug in particular is especially unique because instead of it being a treatment drug, it’s actually a prevention drug. Truvada is normally prescribed to those who at a higher risk of contracting HIV so by taking Truvada you would be completely inhibiting reverse transcriptase which will block the spread of HIV. This is all is an accomplishment in itself and HIV history and research has come such a long way, as you can see!