So I have read the reports on the CDC website, and they leave me wondering about a few miniscule details concerning the virus.
What does the virus look like?
Can it be viewed through a microscope?
Would viewing it through a microscope be a valid test for HIV?
Would this test be any more effective than any other test for the disease?
Oh, BTW I have already been tested, and I do not have the disease, so please no propaganda about the need to get tested, and/or prevention please.
maybe with an electron microacope, but you’re not going to find that at the local clinic.
Try Google Images. That will yield excellent results if you want to know what it looks like.
H.I.V..
Cartooniverse
Viruses can be imaged with electron microscopes. But it wouldn’t make for a useful test - I don’t know how well they can be identified on “sight”, but you have to understand that the quantity of material you can view with an electron microscope is tiny. It would take months or years of searching to find them in a blood sample, I should think.
There are more photos and drawings here.
Preparing a sample for an electron microscrope isn’t as simple as putting a drop of blood on a slide. To get an electron micrograph of a virus, the virus has to be isolated, purified, and prepared for electron microscopy (by coating it with gold atoms, for example). The isolation step would amount to a test for HIV, because HIV would have to be separated from other blood components, and this would allow it to be identified. Looking at it under an electron microscrope would only confirm what you already knew, and would take a lot of work – far more work than would be required for an ordinary HIV test.
This has already been adequately covered, but I have to chime in.
Pics have been linked.
As has been said, it’s far far too small to be seen with a regular light microscope, but with some work and luck, you can see it with an electron microscope. To be viewed in an electron microscope, a sample must first be completely dried (because the imaging chamber is in a vacuum, and if any water were in the sample, it would evaporate out and knock your atoms all over the place in the process) and coated with a heavy metal at a very oblique angle so as to make strong shadows, which are actually what’s picked up by the microscope. Not having done this myself, I’m not sure exactly how long this process takes, but I’d hazard a guess that it’s days to weeks. Regular HIV tests take minutes to hours.
Absolutely not. Most emphatically not. Aside from the aforementioned technical problems, there’s the fact that you’d only be able to scan an infinitesimal sample. Additionally, patients may not be actively shedding the virus - in other words, the virus would not exist in its intact form in the bloodstream as pictured in the links. It may be present in infected cells, existing as its component parts, or even as just a strand of nucleic acid, which would be impossible to detect.
Again, absolutely not. Current tests look at the body’s immune reaction to the virus, which is a very reliable test and technically much more feasable. For starters, antibodies, if present, will be present throughout the body, so one small blood draw will tell you the status of the whole patient.
Forgive me if I’m leaping to conclusions, but this makes it sound like you’re thinking you (or someone you know) could avoid the whole testing thing by taking a blood sample and checking it yourself under a microscope. If this is true, it’s a very very very very foolish idea and could cause a lot of harm to a lot of people. Please don’t.
Again, if I’m wrong about that, I apologize.
