Aids 2 Essay Research Paper How Aids

Aids 2 Essay, Research Paper

How Aids Has Affected Our Society

Today more Americans are infected with STD’s than at any other time in

history. The most serious of these diseases is AIDS. Since the first

cases were identified in the United States in 1981, AIDS has touched the

lives of millions of American families. This deadly disease is unlike

any other in modern history. Changes in social behavior can be directly

linked to AIDS. Its overall effect on society has been dramatic.

It is unknown whether AIDS and HIV existed and killed in the U.S. and

North America before the early 1970s. However in the early 1980s,

“deaths by opportunistic infections, previously observed mainly in

tissue-transplant recipients receiving immunosuppressive therapy”, were

recognized in otherwise healthy homosexual men. In 1983 French

oncologist Luc Montagnier and scientists at the Pasteur Institute in

Paris isolated what appeared to be a new human retrovirus from the lymph

node of a man at risk for having AIDS. At the same time, scientists

working in the laboratory of American research, scientist Robert Gallo

at the National Cancer Institute, one of the National Institutes of

Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and a group headed by American virologist

Jay Levy at the University of California at San Francisco isolated a

retrovirus from people with AIDS and from individuals having contact

with people with AIDS. All three groups of scientists had isolated what

is now known as HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

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In 1995 HIV was estimated to infect almost 20 million people worldwide,

and several million of those people had developed AIDS. The disease is

obviously an important social issue.

AIDS has caused many to rethink their own social behavior. People are

forced to use caution when involving themselves in sexual activity.

They must use contraception to avoid the dangers of infection. Many

people consider HIV infection and AIDS to be completely preventable

because the routes of HIV transmission are so well known. To completely

prevent transmission, however, dramatic changes in sexual behavior and

drug dependence would have to occur throughout the world. Prevention

efforts that promote sexual awareness through open discussion and condom

distribution in public schools have been opposed due to fear that these

efforts encourage sexual promiscuity among young adults. Similarly,

needle-exchange programs have been criticized as promoting drug abuse.

Governor Christine Todd Whitman vetoed a bill in New Jersey that tried

to create a needle-exchange program. She was accused of being

“compassionless”. She replied that she could not allow drug addicts to

continue to break the law. By distributing needles, she felt that she

was, in fact, encouraging them to break the law.

Prevention programs that identify HIV-infected individuals and notify

their sexual partners, as well as programs that promote HIV testing at

the time of marriage or pregnancy, have been criticized for invading

personal privacy.

Efforts aimed at public awareness have been propelled by

community-based organizations, such as Project Inform and Act-Up, that

provide current information to HIV-infected individuals and to

individuals at risk for infection. Public figures and celebrities who

are themselves

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HIV-infected or have died from AIDS-including American basketball player

Magic Johnson, American actor Rock Hudson, American diver Greg Louganis,

American tennis player Arthur Ashe, and British musician Freddie

Mercury-have personalized the disease of AIDS and have thereby helped

society come to terms with the enormity of the epidemic. In memory of

those people who died from AIDS, especially in the early years of the

epidemic, a giant quilt project was initiated in which each panel of the

quilt was dedicated to the memory of an individual AIDS death. This