AIDS

Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) is an infectious disease that suppresses the immune system and prevents its victims from successfully fighting off infections that would not be of major concern in healthy people. The disease is caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which is part of a group of viruses known as retroviruses.

Although the disease did not have a name until 1982, the first known cases of AIDS occurred in 1981. In the spring of that year, both California and New York reported an increase in the number of cases of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), a life-threatening form of pneumonia. In June, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported five cases of PCP in Los Angeles, all without identifiable causes. The report is referred to as the beginning of a general awareness of AIDS in America. Before the end of the year, the first case of AIDS was reported in the United Kingdom.

Because the first documented cases of AIDS involved young homosexual men, the disease was originally believed to be exclusive to that population. Intravenous drug users were also transmitting the disease. It soon became apparent that AIDS could be acquired through blood, as evidenced by the death of a twenty-month-old child who had received blood transfusions in 1982. With this discovery, scientists and medical experts knew the disease was caused by an infectious agent, but HIV was not identified as that cause until early 1985.

How it works

AIDS was not publicly mentioned until September 17, 1985, when U.S. president Ronald Reagan (1911–2004; served 1981–89) was asked about funding for the disease at a press conference. That same year, a thirteen-year-old boy from Indiana named Ryan White (1971–1990) was diagnosed with AIDS. White was a hemophiliac (someone who has blood that does not clot) and had been infected with HIV via contaminated blood. Although White posed no risk to other students, he was banned from attending school and became a national symbol for the AIDS movement. White died in 1990 at the age of eighteen.

The public was terrified of this new disease, and little was known about it. Two scientists, French immunologist Luc Montagnier (1932–) and American immunologist Robert Gallo (1937–) and their teams discovered HIV as the cause around the same time (1983 and 1984), although they worked independently. HIV leads to AIDS because it destroys a certain type of blood cell necessary to maintaining a healthy immune system. Although a person can live for years with HIV and not know it, HIV always leads to AIDS. And AIDS is a fatal disease.

Since the advent of AIDS, researchers have learned much more about how the disease is transmitted. HIV is spread by sexual contact with an infected person, by sharing needles or syringes with someone

who is infected, and by receiving transfusions of infected blood. Babies born to women who are HIV-positive can become infected either before or during the birth process. HIV-positive mothers who breastfeed may transmit the disease to their babies. Sweat, tears, and saliva of infected people have never been shown to transmit the disease.

AIDS in the twenty-first century

No country is immune from AIDS. According to a United Nations publication, 33.2 million people lived with HIV in 2007, up from 29 million in 2001. Around 2.5 million of those living with HIV in 2007 were newly infected that year.

The most severely impacted region of the world in 2007 was sub-Saharan Africa, where 22.5 million people live with HIV. Sixty-one percent of these people are women. More than three-fourths of all AIDS-related deaths in 2007 occurred there. In North America, 1.3 million were infected, and approximately forty-six thousand adults and children were newly infected in 2007.

Medical treatment of HIV and AIDS has made many advancements since the 1980s. In 1986, a drug called azidothymidine (AZT) was shown to slow the attack of HIV. Since that time, other drugs have been found to be effective. Antiretrovirals interfere with the reproduction of HIV; protease inhibitors interfere with the enzymes HIV requires to take control of specific body cells; and nonnucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors interfere with HIV's ability to sort its genetic material into the viral code that leads to AIDS.

Although modern medicine helps delay the onset of AIDS in HIV-positive patients, there is no medicine that will prevent AIDS. The medicines available are expensive, and those who need them most can least afford them. AIDS remains one of the leading causes of death across the globe and is the leading cause of death in Africa.