Global Significance of the AIDS Virus
Global Significance of the AIDS Virus
Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome which stands for AIDS, Aids is a human viral disease that ravages the immune system, undermining the body’s ability to defend itself from infection and disease. Caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), AIDS leaves an infected person vulnerable to opportunistic infections. Such infections are harmless in healthy people, but in those whose immune systems have been greatly weakened, they can prove fatal. While there is no cure for AIDS, new drugs have prolonged the life spans and improved the quality of life of many infected people.
Infection with HIV does not necessarily mean that a person has AIDS, although people who are HIV-positive are often mistakenly said to have AIDS. Some people who have HIV infection may not develop any of the clinical illnesses that define the full-blown disease of AIDS for ten years or more. Doctors prefer to use the term AIDS for cases where a person has reached the final, life-threatening stage of HIV infection.
AIDS was first identified in 1981 among homosexual men and intravenous drug users in New York and California. Shortly after its detection in the United States, evidence of AIDS epidemics grew among heterosexual men, women, and children in sub-Saharan Africa. AIDS quickly developed into a worldwide epidemic, affecting virtually every nation. By 1999 an estimated 33.6 million adults and 1.2 million children worldwide were living with HIV infection or AIDS. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that from 1981 to the end of 1999, about 16.3 million people died as a result of HIV infection. More than 3.6 million of those who died were children under the age of 15.
In the United States and Canada, at least 44,000 new HIV infections occur each year. Over 30 percent of these infections occur in women, and 60 percent in ethnic minorities. In 1999 more than 900,000 Americans and Canadians were living with HIV infection. The incidence of new cases of HIV infections and AIDS deaths has significantly decreased in Canada and the United States since 1995. This decrease is attributed to the availability of new drug treatments and public health programs that target people most at risk for infection. But while the overall rate of HIV infection seems to be on a downturn, certain populations appear to be at greater risk for the disease. In the United States in 1987, Caucasians accounted for...