“…The FIV/cat system has been developed into an animal model for studying lentivirus effects on both the immune and CNS systems (Podell et al, 2000). There are seven main reasons that the FIV/cat system is ideally suited for examining the effects of methamphetamine on the neurological form of the disease: (i) both FIV and HIV-1 are lentiviruses and share many common structural and biochemical properties; (ii) the clinical syndrome for both FIV and HIV-1 is remarkably similar; (iii) from our preliminary work, as well as the contributions of other investigators, the FIV/cat system has been developed into a reproducible disease model, with the establishment of reliable measures (detectable as soon as two months post-infection) of both general and neurological disease progression; (iv) the FIV/cat system is a natural model, dependent upon active virus replication in its natural host; (v) because of the relatively low cost of cats, large numbers of animals can be employed in properly controlled studies, thus, increasing the likelihood of meaningful results being obtained; (vi) specific pathogen free (SPF) cats are available, eliminating confounding interactions with other feline pathogens and (vii) since cats are a species of veterinary importance and are commonly used as experimental animals in neuroscience, the nervous and immune systems of the cat have been well characterized, plus the pharmacology of numerous compounds (including methamphetamine) have been thoroughly investigated in the feline species (Ellinwood and Escalante, 1970;Escalante and Ellinwood, 1970;Sudilovsky et al, 1974;Baker et al, 1976;Balster et al, 1976;Dankova et al, 1977;Fujii et al, 1979;Ishikawa and Yamamoto, 1979;Sato et al, 1980;Sato, 1983;Maeda et al, 1985;Maeda andMaki, 1986, 1987;Emori et al, 1991). Given these numerous advantages of the FIV/cat model, it would be timely to take advantage of this system and apply it towards understanding the effects of drug abuse on lentivirus disease progression.…”