The notion of greed originates hungry. This adjective (avid), from the Latin word avĭdus, qualifies one who is ambitious or who is eager for something.
For example: “I was always eager to get to know other countries”, “The greed for wealth can be healthy, but you don’t have to be greedy”, “Despite the team already winning four to zero, the Uruguayan striker continued to show his greed”.
It can be said that greed is the desire that a person has to obtain something. If we refer to the first example mentioned above, avidity is the desire that the subject in question has to visit different nations. In the second example, greed is associated with greed for money, which can act as an incentive to work hard and, in turn, lead to conduct that is reprehensible from a moral point of view. Finally, the third example is linked to the appetite of a footballer who wants to continue scoring goals even after the victory of his team has already been defined.
Being greedy is not positive or negative in itself: it is a circumstance or a state that can be used for the development of different kinds of actions. The hunger for knowledge can cause a person to read a lot, take workshops, or pursue a career. In this case, greed is highly valuable. On the other hand, if the desire to have a lot of money leads a subject to steal or get involved in illicit businesses, it can be argued that their greed was negative for them and their environment.
The reading is one of the activities that are linked to greed, when there is a passion that does not allow the subject detached from their favorite books. In this context, it is possible to speak of an avid reader, and should not be confused with someone who simply likes reading, but rather someone who cannot live without it.
In the field of medicine, this term also has a meaning, more precisely when speaking of toxoplasmosis, an infection that originates from the endocellular protozoan parasite known as Toxoplasma gondii. The clinical manifestations of this infection present a great variety and one of the values that doctors must ascertain to make a proper diagnosis is the avidity of the antibody, that is, the strength of its binding with multivalent epitopes, which can last several years.
Measuring the avidity of the antibody is especially useful and for this there is the so-called avidity test. The initial response to infection is with a very low avidity antibody, and this results in easy dissociation from antigen binding. On the other hand, a high index is used to rule out a toxoplasmosis infection that has taken place in the last four months.
From a medical point of view, the procedure of this test does not present a marked complexity. Broadly speaking, it is an analysis during which the patient’s serum is diluted and subjected to a parallel processing in duplicate, to obtain two readings that allow the calculation of the avidity index: one with dissociant and the other with diluent.. This index must be multiplied by 100 to finally classify the result in one of the three possible ranges: high avidity (greater than 30%), medium avidity (between 20 and 30%) and low avidity (less than 20%).
Without moving away from science, we can find another use of this term that is not common in everyday speech. In this case, it can be said that sulfuric acid has a marked avidity for water, and that for this reason it is used for drying gases.
