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We are heading towards a disaster, as this disease is spreading rapidly. So the educated and aware people have to rise to face this challenge and not wait for the reformists or social workers to do something about it.
For that we need to understand this subject, and to understand this subject we need not go to a microbiologist or a immunologist. We all have the capacity to understand and we have the right to understand. When the first case of AIDS was reported in the US in 1981, India gave the matter a let go, saying that such incidences occur in the US only as we do not have homosexual or pre/extra marital relationships here. When the first AIDS case in India was reported in
Chennai, we ignored it as something that happens once in a blue moon. We need not worry about such matters. When AIDS awareness programs were aired on television, they had to be closed due to opposition saying such programs create unnecessary fear among the masses.
India is one of the worst affected countries today. And sometimes also known as "World capital of AIDS". This is a great financial burden for a country like India, which is already loaded with problems of poverty, economic instability and a haphazard medical system and a corrupt bureaucracy. The AIDS challenge has been overlooked by the heads of the state. India has ignored the warning given by experts at the Vancouver Conference that India will have maximum AIDS patients by the year 2005, but India has already proven this ten years earlier.
Before understanding the subject of AIDS we need to understand immunity first, I passed out MBBS in 1967 and compared to that the research in this field has increased a lot. I felt like a new comer in this field, so I started tutorials with specialists at the National AIDS Research Institute At Bhosari
Pune. There I met this fair bespectacled gentleman Dr. Arun Paranjpe. He taught me how the immune system works.
He showed me a diagram of various cells moving towards each other. He explained me "this cell stimulates this cell ", " this cell inhibits this cell " I was unable to understand the whole puzzle, but Dr told me there is further more complicated network of immunity in the body. But how do these cells signal each other ? I asked How do they come to know? Do they think? My curiosity was increasing, Dr Paranjpe told me experiments have proven that this is regulated by chemicals. Millions of anti bodies circulate in the body to combat the lacs of germs entering our body. There is an ongoing fight in the body between the germs and antibodies which protect us from falling sick.
Whenever an external organism enters the body, it travels through the blood or lymph nodes. It is stopped by cells called macrophages. Every cell has a secret code called
HLA. Every living organism has its own HLA, which is identified by macrophages and attacked upon where by its separate protein or antigen is taken to a white cell and then taken to a T-cell. These macrophages stick to a T-cell and transfer the antigens, the T-cell identifies the antigen and when it is established that this organism is external, they send an alarm throughout the body. This is how our immune system works. This T-cell which receives the antigen immediately divides itself into numerous other cells through replication, some of which are retained as memory cells by the body. So next time when a similar organism enters the body the above procedure does not have to be repeated. These memory T-cells identify the organism immediately and the remaining T cells start secreting Lymphokine
interleukin, which signals the circulating WBC in our body to protect our body.
We have lymph nodes all over our body which house the WBC. This stimulates the B cells also which are a small manufacturing unit for antibodies. Each of these can create an accurate antibody in an hour, which fight the external organism and destroy it. Some of which do not respond to this procedure retain the antibody whereby the macrophages destroy the same.
Some T cells turn poisonous and penetrate into the body of the external organism and destroy it and then clear out the remaining dead organisms. If these are not cleared then there are chances of attracting other cells which thrive upon these dead organisms. This is a necessary procedure where B-cell stops T cells from destroying the normal body cells .
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