Please explain in more detail why human behavior can change the very nature of H
ID: 162063 • Letter: P
Question
Please explain in more detail why human behavior can change the very nature of HIV. How does evolutionary biology help us fight HIV?
Evolutionary biology and human health: Why does our collective choice change the very nature of HIV? Human health and HIV. Evolutionary theory predicts that clean needles and the encouragement of safe sex will do more than save numerous individuals from HIV infection. If humanity's behavior itself slows HIV transmission rates, strains that do not soon kill their hosts have the long-term survival advantage over the more virulent viruses that then die with their hosts, denied the opportunity to spread. Our collective choices can change the very nature of HIV.
Explanation / Answer
The human behavior can change the very nature of HIV. The HIV-1 infection is mainly going to be evolutionary reduced by performing safe sex, using behavioral interventions such as sexual abstinence and by participating with low number of sexual partners. For example, the African sex workers who have high-risk behavior have meticulously shown HIV-1 negative evolutionary due their behavioral aspects. The routine use condoms and sterile needle usage of injection can correlated to human behavioral intervention and prevention strategies to fight HIV.
The rate of evolution in RNA-based viruses, like HIV-1 has million times higher mutation rate when compared to that of DNA-based organisms (bacteria humans etc). It can rapidly changes its genome components under biological conditions to acquire adaptations for survival (resistance against drugs, immune components) in the biological host cell medium compared to the DNA based organisms in which lower rate of evolutionary adaptations were observed. This property of high genomic mutation rate in HIV-1 retrovirus is due to the following mechanisms.