AIDS & Bubonic Plague- is there a genetic advantage? Body Talkâ?¦

This brings us to a new branch of medicine: Evolutionary Medicine, which I find fascinating.

So there are people in our population right now who are resistant to diseases that haven't even evolved yet. Fifty years ago, those folks who have resistance to AIDS in their genetic background, had no inhertible advantage over anyone else, but now, that AIDS has become a pandemic, they do. Problem is humans try to do crazy stuff, like cure diseases, and thus muck up the real evolutionary process. That's okay, really. We evolved these large brains, shouldn't we use them to our own advantage.

So those resistant/carriers have a personal advantage over those who are not resistant/carriers. Their families have the same resistance, but at this point in time, there is no benefit to all humans, except for in studying them, we might be able to help those without their genetic make up.

I'm not sure about those old diseases, but the HIV virus requires a certain set of proteins to enter white blood cells and cause disease. (they're called HLA types) Anyway, those resistant do not have those particular proteins, so the virus can not enter their cells and thus they are resistant. In studying HLA types of the resistant people, drugs have been developed to try to block HIV from entering cells of non-resistant folks.

The real problem with the HIV virus is that it has an unstable genetic code and mutates rapidly. So those resistant to the current strains might not be resistant to evolved strains. Viruses are scary things.

I'm not sure if I even answered your real question, but I had fun spewing forth knowledge.

And the bubonic plague was caused by a bacteria, so those surviving undoubtedy had superior immune systems which they passed to their offspring. We have antibiotics now, but those EVIL resistant strains are going to put some strain on our immune systems again. 500,000 years of immune system evolution is far superior to any antibiotic we can come up with.

I did not realize it was a bacterial infection carried by the rats.

Here is a nifty article actually debunking it for the Oxford Journal

http://qjmed.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/99/8/497

Thanks for the link, Vivian. Fascinating. I'd not heard of the proposed link between the two diseases before. I would have rolled my eyes at them. :-) HELLO! Mode of transmission. Not even the same type of pathogen. Origin of the disease causing agent. Get a clue, people.

All right part of my confusion has been the non consensus of the medical field to list the bubonic plague as the Black Death- hmmm, I need to reread the article in greater depth.

I come up with odd things but not 100% random :) Promise.

Medical professionals should call it the bubonic plague, historians the Black Death. Microbiologist infectious Yersina Pestis pandemic.

Alright let's say I'm a super villian- how hard is it to take a normal strain of a bacteria and adjust it to create something more deadly? Is it realistic or possible to control- nature mutates but how successful will a well funded lab be?

Just sneaked in to see what you'd learned. Fascinating.

Scientists mutate bacteria and viruses all the time, inserting genes that can potentially be beneficial (or deadly, depending on the degree of EVIL in the scientist - I personally have never met an EVIL scientist, but they are the norm in fiction and in hollywood). So absolutely a bacteria could be genetically engineered to be more deadly.

Jamie

I dont know any evil scientists either, and I know why. Evil people are usually greedy, and there is absolutely no money in science (as we well know). So all the evil people become lawyers or accountants. (I dont mean you out there, I mean the OTHER lawyers and accountants).

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