Health News: AIDS Virus Lives Inside Intestinal Walls

Elaine Meinel Supkis

As we struggle to understand AIDS, more and more information about the habitat and lifestyles of this rapidly evolving organism comes pouring in. Maybe we can outwit it before it becomes a permanant fixture within our organisms. Seems it is taking up residence within our intestines. Ugh.

Many stubborn diseases have found a happy home within our sexual systems.

The virus replicates in the lining of the gut and does much of its damage to the immune system there, Satya Dandekar, chairwoman of the Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology at the University of California Davis Health System, and colleagues reported.

Writing in the Journal of Virology, Dandekar said the study was the first to explain why the drug cocktails taken by HIV patients so often fail to work completely.

"The real battle between the virus and exposed individuals is happening in the gut immediately after viral infection," she said in a statement.

AIDS did the same but now, after evolving for quite a few generations within the human biomass, the disease has found a nice niche for itself, one that doesn't rely upon the sexual organs to perpetuate itself.

I would suggest this is due to all the children born with the disease. This is a classic example of evolution. Any disease that kills rapidly dies out with its hosts. Diseases that mutate to 'milder' forms that can live for many years within its host is much more successful! So the tendency is towards longevity, not quick death.

When AIDS first hit, it was very rapid, very powerful, very deadly. I knew some of the ballet dancers with ABT and Joffery Ballet who died of AIDS the very first year it hit NYC's gay community. It was very ugly.

Over time, due to both modern medicine and simple evolution, the disease still ravages but much slower. The more benign the germs, the more it is transmitted since it shows fewer symptoms and the host has much more time to spread it. So less deadly germs multiply much faster than the deadly strains. From the point of view of the AIDS germs, if they could talk, they would say, 'We must keep everyone alive for as long as possible and not weaken them so they have the energy to have sex!'

All sorts of nasty diseases have followed this path. Some have killed over a third of the population, one disease 800,000 years ago nearly wiped out all hominoids! Since humans love to travel and love to have sex with strangers when travelling, we tend to spread diseases at an amazing pace. Rats are like this, too, and they have hosted more than one killer germ colony. Ditto birds, thus the fear of the bird flu.

Now that scientists have located the new residence AIDS has forged for itself, it is going to be easier to target it and treat it. I really dislike being colonized by germs. Thank you, modern medicine! We all get a chance to live a lot longer (if we don't blow ourselves up).

On the other side, very bright teenagers, taking anti-depressants, are very much in danger of committing suicide.

PRAGUE, Czech Republic -- A promising young woman British chess player taking part in a chess tournament in the Czech Republic has died after a mystery fall from her hotel room.

Jessie Gilbert, 19, fell Wednesday from the eighth floor of her hotel in the central city of Pardubice amid conflicting reports that she could had been sleepwalking and had suffered from depression.

Her family Friday paid tribute to the "much loved" and "exceptionally talented" teenager.

Very brilliant children are always very much in danger of killing themselves. I should know, I tried it once, when 16. I wasn't depressed, I was being driven up the wall by noise, by stimulation, by irritation, by thinking too much and feeling like a weirdo.

Then I discovered being a freak is fun! Whoopee! My parents hated this and still hate it but I had to be what I became! I took no drugs except for some LSD. Frankly, this was a lot better than those anti-depressants.

Maybe this is why humans haven't evolved brains any bigger or better than the ones we had 75,000 years ago. Aside from the difficulties in birthing. It really hurts to give birth to big, hard headed children. Seriously, it is incredibly painful.

Aside from that, I strongly feel humans can barely handle thinking as it is. Perhaps this is why they often refuse to think, at least, logically. This is why we get in trouble all the time. When I was young and a 'genius' (yes, took a graduate course when only 17 years old!) ---it all drove me nuts. I fixed it all by letting go and going wild. It opened my eyes to more than one world, one way of thinking aside from paths pre-set by others. Which is why I blog, I guess.

Better than shooting myself in the head. Peace and love, everyone.

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