Why HIV Should Scare You

Human immunodeficiency virus or HIV is something that most people have been learning about since the beginning of their educational career. However, the majority of those people do not know why HIV has been baffling the minds of scientists for years. More so, HIV is one of the scariest diseases known to man kind — and here is why you should be scared of it.

On the surface of an HIV virus is a receptor called gp120, which binds to helper T cells in the human body. Helper T cells are vital components of the human immune system. The gp120 binding site on the HIV cell evolves at a very rapid rate, and since the HIV cell has many different gp120 receptors on it, evolution occurs randomly on each binding site.

As the immune system begins to catch up and attack new strains of the evolved HIV strain, new forms are already evolving. The human body is always one step behind. Because of the rapid rate of evolution, an individual who transfers HIV to someone else once a year is transferring a different strain each time they pass the virus on to someone else.

This is why developing a cure for the HIV virus is so difficult — no two cases of HIV are the same, and thus no two people can have the same treatment. Scientists are working on various medicines that bind to CD4 receptor cells (the part in the human body that HIV’s gp120 receptor binds to). This would prevent HIV from binding in the human body — however the downside is that the medicine would always have to be present in the body.