AIDS




Aids is a disease that effects the immune system. Your immune system

is unable to fight off diseases, viruses, and infections. Aids usually makes

you very skinny and tired, and it effects the nerves system in your brain. You

also can get certain cancers from aids especially Kaposi’s sarcoma, are purple

lesions on the skin, and tumors known as B-cell lymphomas.


Aids can be transmitted through several ways by blood, through

intimate sexual contact, from infected mothers to there babies in there uterus,

and even through infected mother’s milk. A major way of getting the disease

was through blood transfusion that was before they had a test for screening

blood. Another major way of getting it is through blood contaminated

needles by intravenous drug abusers. Blood donors and casual contact is

definitely not a way you can catch the disease. It could take up to ten years

for symptoms to develop because it usually stays dormant.


There are several different strains of the aids virus and it continually

changes in a persons immune system. Because of this it makes it very hard to

develop a vaccine for aids. Dramatic progress is being made in short time to

identify the aids virus and transmission and mechanisms, in which it produces

the disease.

Research centers treat people who have the aids virus, and those who

have been infected but not yet have developed the symptoms. The first drug

developed was AZT in 1986-87. It has been shown to be partially effective

in clinical symptoms, but the death rate with aids are likely to survive in the

long run with adequate treatment.


Aids raises many ethical, legal, and civil right issues. Live mandatory

testing of all citizens or of particular populations, like for marriage license

applicants. It also demands discrimination in housing , employment, and

medical treatments and confidentiality versus notification of sex partners.


The first place aids was discovered was in New York in1979. The

cause of this disease was retrovirus which is Human Immunodeficiency

Virus, HIV. Which was identified in 1983-84 by scientists working at the

National Cancer Institute in the United States and the Pasteur Institute in

France. Workers developed tests for aids enabling researchers to study up on

the transmission of the virus and to study the organs mechanisms of the

disease also. African monkeys were infected by close relatives of the aids

virus. Because of this fact scientists think the aids virus was originated in

Africa. In 1990 the world health organization announced that 203,599

people were infected that were reported by the end of 1989, and an estimated

number of aids victims is to be 600,000.