The_Epidemic_of_Hiv_and_Aids

The Epidemic of HIV and AIDS In the early 1980’s the United States was hit with a strange outbreak of killer pneumonia that was infecting young and healthy homosexual men. The disease was one that no one had ever seen prior because it was showing signs and symptoms of Kaposi’s Sarcoma (KS) and Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) but the treatment for these diseases were not working on the patients that were coming in and they would die soon after from this rare illness. It was first diagnosed in the United States, in New York and at the same time in California (www.Avert.org 1981 second paragraph). The number of gay men getting ill was growing rapidly every day. As the year went on the public was starting to worry about their own health. In 1981 drug users and patients receiving blood from the blood banks were being diagnosed with this rare disease that they were calling GRID (gay, related, immune deficiency). It wasn’t until June 1982 that they officially started calling it AIDS (www.Avert.org 1982 fifth paragraph). From the moment the epidemic started the Center of Disease Control (CDC) was trying to figure out what the disease was and how was it spread from one person to the next. It took them a long time to find out the source because they couldn’t understand since it originated with homosexual men having the disease, to patients who were receiving blood in the hospitals, and newborn babies dyeing from the illness that they had gotten from their mothers at birth. In 1982 they found out that this illness was transmitted through bodily fluids (sexual contact, blood, and breast milk) (www.aids.gov). Since the epidemic began there have been 1,129,127 cases of adults who have been diagnosed with AIDS. There have been 619,400 deaths from the disease of that number 300,000 were men who have had sex with other men, 175,000 were IV drug users, 250,000 were blacks, and 95,000 were Latino and Hispanics. Approximately 50,000 Americans will become infected with HIV each year(www.cdc.gov). There still is no cure for the disease as of today but there is always hope for tomorrow.