To study the genetic variation of the HIV-1 strains prevalent in South Korea, we analyzed the nef sequences derived from 46 HIV-1-positive individuals living in various geographic regions in Korea. Phylogenetic analysis revealed four subtypes of HIV-1: A (3 patients), B (41 patients), D (1 patient), and a type that could not be clearly classified to any known subtype (1 patient). Thirty-five of the 41 Korean subtype B isolates formed a distinct monophyletic clade that is not related to any of the international sequences from the Los Alamos Database or GenBank as of June 1997. Indeed, the presence of unique conserved sequences was identified among the Korean isolates in this Korean subtype B group. The variations in the nucleotide sequences of a majority (32 of 35) subtype B samples within the Korean clade were 1.9% to 8.8%, and amino acid sequences varied from 3.9% to 15.5%. These results suggest that HIV-1 strains currently present in South Korea might have originated from a few sources or might be developing through a certain selective pressure. This is the first report on the molecular nature of the HIV-1 infection present in South Korea.

Continuous increase of bacterial resistance to antibiotics causes many problems such as the advent of resistance to pathogenic bacteria, difficulty of microbial disease treatments, environmental pollution and others. It is inevitable to find potential substitutes for antibiotics in order to solve the above mentioned problems. Recently many literatures have shown that probiotics could be applied to the treatment or amelioration of respiratory diseases in addition to intensively studied gut related diseases. Target diseases for collecting data and analysis of the efficacies were chosen because viral respiratory infections are the most common diseases in humans. They were mainly viral diseases like common colds, pneumonia in addition to allergies and asthma. Papers on clinical efficacies, safety risks and mechanisms of microbial action of respiratory diseases were secured through known information sites and analyzed for their exact evaluations. The present analysis of research results on probiotics efficacies for respiratory diseases showed discrepancies in efficacies. On the whole, half to one third of papers reviewed only showed certain level of efficacies against respiratory viral diseases. It is very difficult to compare the results directly because the studies varied highly in study design, outcome measures, probiotics, dose, and matrices used. However, the results obtained so far show the potential applications of probiotics to the prevention or amelioration of the diseases. Conclusively, further well organized studies using randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials are needed to elucidate the realities of probiotics on respiratory related diseases and to obtain more definite efficacy results.

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