AIDS: A DEADLY SOCIAL DEISEASE.
The World Health Organization and the U.S. public Health service’s center for disease
Control now regard AIDS as one of the most frightening diseases of the last two or three centuries. As at 1991, about 60,000 Americans would have died of the
disease and more that a 100,000 Americans would have contacted the disease. While more than 40 million people would be living with the AIDS virus worldwide, if adequate major is not taken the number would rise.
Even though the world has experience a frightening emergence of deadly disease, such as Black Death (bubonic plague) and the influenza epidemic, AIDS is by far the most frightening new social disease. We have not previously experienced an AIDS out break, but we know that the two major risk groups are male homosexuals and IV drug users. The virus that causes AIDS has been identified, and expects are working very hard to produce a vaccine that would bring it under control.
AIDS is a defect in the natural immune system against diseases. Victims could die of diseases that are not likely to kill those whose immune system are functioning normally. There are so many ways of
contacting AIDS, namely, through having anal, oral or vaginal unprotected sex with infectious persons and the sharing of hypodermic needles and syringes with person infected with the virus, others are new born babies being infected with the virus transmitted from the mother and through blood transfusion. Though the transmission rate of contacting the disease through blood transfusion have substantially reduced, but the numbers of new born babies contacting the diseases through their mother has been on the increase.
In United States about 70% of victims of AIDS acquired the virus through sexual act with an infected homosexual or bisexual male, about 20% acquired AIDS by sharing needles that were used in intravenous drug administration, while the remaining 10% contacted the virus that causes AIDS through heterosexual activity, blood transfusion or babies who contacted it during birth. The fear of AIDS has lead to a drop in multiple sex partners and unprotected sex and a decline in the sharing of pressing instruments and personal hygiene. The only ways to prevent contacting the virus is either through total abstinence from unprotected sex or sticking to one sex partner or using condoms, and also to stop sharing needles and syringes.
The virus that originally causes AIDS is HIV (human Immunodeficiency Virus). About 30% of AIDS victims in United States live in New York, 25% in California and 45% in the rest parts of U.S. causal contact with victims of the disease do not pose any health danger. C. Everett koop, one time Surgeon General of the U.S. stated that one cannot contact the virus through contact in social place, kiss, mosquito bite, from saliva, sweat, tears, urine or feces, or sharing clothes, telephone, swimming in the same pool, or using the same utensils.
Researchers have made a progress in the production of antiviral drugs. People do not die of AIDS, but as a result of complication resulting from diseases that has invades and destroys the body after the virus causing AIDS must have destroyed the body defence system. Many medical practitioners are working on drugs that would be able to treat the diseases that kill the victims. In 1989 scientists reported that they have able to eliminate AIDS infections in monkeys.
The origin of the virus that causes AIDS cannot really be traced to a particular area, but there are speculations that it originated from Africa, and that by the later part of the eighties, the Central Africa is worse hit.
While AIDS has not spread like other sexually transmitted diseases, its deadly results are clearly more frightening.