If there is one syndrome apart from terror which is affecting humanity for the past two decades, it is probably AIDS or Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome caused by HIV or Human Immunodeficiency Virus. But that does not mean that there is no solution to any of these issues. It is problem’s identification and addressing the issue that is the need of the hour.

The human body is a bunch of amazing organs which work in harmony and have an immune system which wards of any external agents attempting to interfere with their function. This is done by the T lymphocytes which run through the blood stream and target the foreign organisms with deadly precision. But when the virus enters the body, it causes submission of these lymphocytes and the immune system becomes suppressed and is unable to discharge its duty.

The very presence of the virus (HIV) in the body does not mean AIDS. When the T lymphocytes in circulation are less than 300 per millilitre of serum, it means the virus has begun to replicate and is leading to the killing of these immune cells. When the count falls below 200, it is a cause of concern as it can now be declared that the person is suffering from Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome. The primary source of infection in the human body is probably through the respiratory mechanism.

Since the lining of the gastrointestinal tract is the major producer of the white blood cells in the body, the lacunae caused due to their reduction in number invariably causes the infection of the area, expressing itself as diarrhoea to start with.

This virus can cause the involvement of the lining of the nerve cells called as myelitis which leads to impairment of impulses along the nerve fibres and weakening of the functions.

Patients suffering with AIDS are also more prone to tumours and cancers too as the incidence of cervical cancer, Kaposi’s sarcoma, colon cancer are more common in them.

It spreads from infected mother to her child during pregnancy or childbirth or when unsterilised needles are used for different patients or drug users are all found prone to this disease.

Homoeopathic medicine has a role to play in probably every stage of the disease. If it is Senega, Eupa perf, Dulcamara which are helpful when upper respiratory tract is beginning to get infected, Ars iod, Kali carb and Thuja help when the lungs are prone. The gastrointestinal symptoms are helped with Ars alb, Phos, Pyrogenum, etc. while the neurological issues are addressed with Plumbum met, Physostigma, etc. To keep the virus at bay and keep the immune system uncompromised even as infections are addressed well are the challenges that face modern medicine today.

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says flu season is starting to ramp up — and it’s not too late to reduce your risk with a vaccine.

But scientists have come to realize that flu vaccines are less effective for people who are overweight or obese. Considering that excess weight affects more than two-thirds of the U.S. adult population, that’s a significant shortcoming.

Researchers are studying why that’s the case, with an eye toward developing better flu vaccines.

This issue came to light during the 2009 flu pandemic, the first major outbreak of the 21st century. Health officials noticed that the flu was taking a particular toll on people who were significantly overweight.

“We had never seen that before,” says Stacey Schultz-Cherry, an infectious disease specialist at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

“The virus is able to grow to higher [concentrations] and spread deeper in your lungs, which is not what you want during an influenza infection,” she says.

And people weren’t simply getting sicker — they were also more likely to spread the disease. That has the potential to amplify a flu outbreak.

Schultz-Cherry says this point is highlighted in a study of volunteers at the University of Maryland.

“The students who were overweight/obese actually had more virus coming out in their exhaled breath,” Schultz-Cherry says.

Another research team studied families in Nicaragua during flu season and found that overweight people shed the virus by an extra day, on average, compared with people of lower body weight. That effect was bigger for people who had no or few symptoms.

“What’s particularly disturbing for us is the fact that the vaccine doesn’t work as well” in this population, says Melinda Beck, a professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She’s been studying the effect of obesity on a person’s ability to fend off infections, “and influenza is one of my favorite viruses, so that seemed like a natural thing to study.”

She looked at the two different parts of the immune system: one involves antibodies, which are proteins that can neutralize viruses; the other involves cells that join in on the fight against disease.

“You usually think of the vaccine as protecting you with antibodies,” she says. “And in fact, obese people could make a nice antibody response.” The part of the immune system that fails in this case involves the T cells, she says.

As people become overweight, their metabolism changes. And Beck says that metabolic shift affects many cells, including immune system cells. She has studied the details of this in mice.

Elderly people face the same problem. “Sometimes they can make an antibody response, but it’s their T cells that aren’t functioning, so they can still get infected with flu even though they’ve been vaccinated,” she says.

As a result, a “30-year-old obese person has the immune cells that look a lot like what you might expect in an 80-year-old individual,” Beck says.

That may be why flu vaccines don’t work so well in older people, either. So it’s possible that improvements in the vaccine will help both people who are older as well as those who are overweight.

Schultz-Cherry is part of a new effort at the National Institutes of Health to come up with a next-generation flu vaccine.

“That’s exactly our hope — that we can find a vaccine that will work for everybody, but especially for these higher-risk populations,” she says.

That effort will take many years. In the meantime, Schultz-Cherry says it’s still important for everyone to get vaccinated. People of all body types are at higher risk of heart attack or stroke if they get the flu.

There’s a lot of reasons to get the flu shot,” she says, “even if it doesn’t work as well as we want in this high-risk population.”

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