Posts Tagged ‘HTLV’

Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV)

Since 1981, cases were detected striking infection Pneumocystis jiroveci (formerly named Pneumocystis carinii), a fungus related to the original forms of the Ascomycetes, known to infect severely immunocompromised patients. Initially there was a group of similar cases in which gay men were involved and where time appeared to cytomegalovirus infection, and Candidiasis. First thought that the cause should be linked to common practices among male homosexual population.

He soon began to appear cases involving heterosexual male or female intravenous drug users and their children, and also between patients and healthy habits homosexuals who had received transfusions of whole blood or blood products by hemophiliacs condition. Soon it was thought, by epidemiological criteria basically, that the cause must be an infectious agent transmitted in a similar way as does the hepatitis B virus
HIV-1 virions assembled at the surface of a lymphocyte.

Several teams started to get a virus associated with known cases of acquired immunodeficiency, perhaps as a retrovirus known to be produced immunodeficiency cat or HTLV, producer of a type of leukemia. In 1983, at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, a team dedicated to investigating the relationship between retroviruses and cancer led by JC Chermann, F. Barre-Sinoussi, and L. Montagnier found a candidate who called lymphadenopathy-associated virus (lymphadenopathy-associated virus, LAV).

In 1984 the team of R. Gallo, discoverer of HTLV, the only human retrovirus known then, confirmed the discovery, but calling the virus human T lymphotropic virus type III (human T-lymphotropic virus type III, with the acronym HTLV-III). There was a subsequent dispute over the priority in which it became clear that Gallo had described the virus only after receiving samples from the French. As part of resolving the conflict, the virus acquired its final name, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in Castilian is expressed as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

In the same year, 1983, which identified the virus, several teams began work on its genome sequence published in early 1985, and also began the characterization of proteins.