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Towards a Solution to the Problem of Man’s Health |
| Date Added: April 08, 2010 06:56:52 AM |
| Author: mikechoen01 |
| Category: Health |
| Everyone cares about staying healthy and preventing illness. Human death rate due to illness has always been higher than the death rate due to any other factor, including war, technogenic catastrophes and natural disasters. The epidemic plague known as “the Black Death” (1347—1351) was a pneumonic epidemic caused by transmission of bacteria from one person to another through fleas. This epidemic spread all over the world, becoming the worst epidemic in human history. At least 40 million people fell victim to it, including a quarter of Europe’s population. This disease, carried by rodents and fleas, forced the English to burn London to the ground. Some 25 million people died in Mongolia and China, and China’s population in some areas was reduced by 90%. Outbreaks of the plague continued to recur in various locations until the 19th century, when scientists identified its pathogen and found means to prevent it. The new era brought new illnesses. In the 19th and 20th centuries billions of people were affected by cholera, typhus, influenza, measles, and smallpox. The epidemic commonly called the “Spanish Flu,” which spread over Europe in 1918, is considered the worst one in history: about 50 million people died from influenza at this time. In recent years a group of scientists at the Center of Disease Control in America made progress in uncovering the causes of this mass epidemic. They learned that the virus of the 1918 Spanish Flu first appeared in birds and then mutated to become dangerous for people. Further changes in the virus made it transferable between people, and this became the cause of the horrific epidemic. The plague of the 20th century is the HIV infection. Even more startling than the infection’s large scale dissemination are the unpredictable peculiarities of its development. In the late 70s AIDS symptoms were discerned in a number of homosexuals. In the beginning of the 80s the aetiological factor of AIDS was identified, and the disease took on epidemic proportions. The first person with classic AIDS symptoms died in 1959. Medics found the symptoms to be so illogical that they preserved some of the victim’s organs. 30 years later they were able to discern and study the virus that had affected the organism. The virus was HIV. A 1989 publication revealed results of a blood sample that contained fragments of HIV. The sample was taken from an inhabitant of Africa in 1959. Finally after purposeful research, in 1998 fragments of the HIV genome were discerned in blood samples taken in 1959 from a person who now lives in Kinshasa, The Democratic Republic of the Congo. Based on phylogenetic analysis researchers came to the conclusion that HIV-1 originated from an immunodeficiency virus in chimpanzees. Between 1940 and 1950 this became a source of at least three independent infections of the human population. The first case of the AIDS disease was registered and described in 1959, at the same time that HIV was discovered in blood samples of African inhabitants. The first victims of the disease attracted attention only at the end of the 70s, that is, 20 years later. They began to be identified in local areas, and only in one population group—homosexual men. An outbreak soon followed, and in some 10+ years the number of infected people jumped to over 50 million! It is startling that the infection reached such gigantic proportions despite its limited conditions of transmission: it is transferred only through injection and sexual paths. Other illnesses such as syphilis are transmitted in the same way, but nothing like this had ever happened. Also alarming is the fact that the viruses change very fast. The virus undergoes drastic evolution in a single individual over the course of the illness. Experiments on chimpanzees showed that six weeks after an initial infection by the Hepatitis C virus, the outstanding varieties no longer resembled the varieties of the initial pathogen. In addition, the varieties differed in different chimpanzees. In other words, the virus’s evolution happened swiftly and in very diverse ways. New varieties appeared in 1—6 weeks. Finally, the virus’s natural evolution in one organism resulted in such drastic changes that the organism could be re-infected by the strain that had infected it initially. The virus undergoes similar evolution in man, as do other viruses. The human immunodeficiency virus mutates a million times faster than DNA. This means that in one year it can undergo the same evolution that a “slow” virus like smallpox or herpes undergoes in a million years. http://www.kabbalah.info/engkab/mystzohar.htm http://www.kabbalah.info/engkab/mystzohar.htm |
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