1.     Read this week's Chapters 21 and 22  in Technical Communication carefully.

2.     Visit the following link for lecture reading:  Unit 12 Lecture

3.      Read the information carefully and take notes.

4.       Your writing assignment will be to make the definition below more understandable for a general
                       audience. To understand what you have read, you may need to look up some definitions of
                       unknown words. Read the definition below, do the rewrite and then go Discussion Board .
                       You will post your rewrite on the Discussion Board , and you will not send it directly to me.
                         "Resistance":  reduction in a pathogen's sensitivity to a particular drug. Resistance
                         is thought to result usually from a genetic mutation. In HIV, such mutations can change
                         the structure of viral enzymes and proteins so that a anti viral drug can no longer bind
                         with them as well as it used to. Resistance detected by searching a pathogen' s genetic
                         makeup for mutations thought to confer lower susceptibility is called enotypic
                         resistance. Resistance found by successfully growing laboratory cultures of the
                         pathogen in the presence of a  drug is called phenotype resistance. High level
                         resistance reduces a drug's virus suppressing activity hundreds of times. Low-level
                         resistance represents only a few fold reduction in drug effectiveness. Depending on the
                         toxicity of  the drug, low-level resistance may be overcome by using higher doses of
                         the drug in question.
 

  5.      In the Discussion Board section, under the appropriate thread (posted question with a linked list of
                        responses),  post your written response to the writing assignment above.  Classmates should comment on
                        the  effectiveness of the rewrite and offer suggestions as well.

                        QUESTION:  How did you rewrite the definition of resistance?  Post, and classmates comment.

                         Last updated:  January, 2003
                        Patricia A. Hutchins
                         http://www.delta.edu/pahutchi/unit12assn.html