Charlie Sensenbrenner's List: Microbes and Diseases

• • Bacteria are single-celled organisms. So what might she mean by saying they are "multi-cellular?"
• Bassler also said that bacteria are multi-cellular and may have written the rules by which multi-cellular organisms live.

• HIV is evolving rapidly to escape the human immune system
• HIV has already killed 25 million people, and an estimated 33 million are currently infected.
• an adult with HIV will survive for ten years without anti-HIV drugs before developing AIDS
• some people will progress to AIDS within 12 months
• others can make effective immune responses to the virus and survive without any anti-HIV therapy for over 20 years
• 'This study shows just how critical it is to take a global look at HIV, and how important it is to establish field sites to do research in Africa at the heart of the epidemic,' says Bruce Walker, Director of the Ragon Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital and a collaborator on this project.
• 'The temptation is to see this as bad news, that these results mean the virus is winning the battle,' says Professor Goulder. 'That's not necessarily the case. It could equally be that as the virus changes, different immune responses come into play and are actually more effective.'
• The results are important because it is our most effective immune responses that vaccines against HIV would try and boost to a level that would protect against the virus.
• once we have found an effective vaccine, it would need to be changed on a frequent basis to catch up with the evolving virus, much like we do today with the flu vaccine,
• we are seeing changes in HIV, and our immune response to the virus, in just a couple of decades.

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