Aids Essay Research Paper AIDS is a

Aids Essay, Research Paper

AIDS is a life and death issue. To have the AIDS disease

is at present a sentence of slow but inevitable death. I’ve

already lost one friend to AIDS. I may soon lose others. My own

sexual behavior and that of many of my friends has been

profoundly altered by it. In my part of the country, one man in

10 may already be carrying the AIDS virus. While the figures may

currently be less in much of the rest of the country, this is

changing rapidly. There currently is neither a cure, nor even an

effective treatment, and no vaccine either. But there are things

that have been PROVEN immensely effective in slowing the spread

of this hideously lethal disease. In this essay I hope to

present this information. History and Overview:

AIDS stands for Acquired Immune Defficiency Disease. It is

caused by a virus.

The disease originated somewhere in Africa about 20 years

ago. There it first appeared as a mysterious ailment afflicting

primarily heterosexuals of both sexes. It probably was spread

especially fast by primarily female prostitutes there. AIDS has

already become a crisis of STAGGERING proportions in parts of

Africa. In Zaire, it is estimated that over twenty percent of

the adults currently carry the virus. That figure is increasing.

And what occurred there will, if no cure is found, most likely

occur here among heterosexual folks.

AIDS was first seen as a disease of gay males in this

country. This was a result of the fact that gay males in this

culture in the days before AIDS had an average of 200 to 400 new

sexual contacts per year. This figure was much higher than

common practice among heterosexual (straight) men or women. In

addition, it turned out that rectal sex was a particularly

effective way to transmit the disease, and rectal sex is a

common practice among gay males. For these reasons, the disease

spread in the gay male population of this country immensely more

quickly than in other populations. It became to be thought of as

a “gay disease”. Because the disease is spread primarily by

exposure of ones blood to infected blood or semen, I.V. drug

addicts who shared needles also soon were identified as an

affected group. As the AIDS epidemic began to affect

increasingly large fractions of those two populations (gay males

and IV drug abusers), many of the rest of this society looked on

smugly, for both populations tended to be despised by the

“mainstream” of society here.

But AIDS is also spread by heterosexual sex. In addition,

it is spread by blood transfusions. New born babies can acquire

the disease from infected mothers during pregnancy. Gradually

more and more “mainstream” folks got the disease. Most recently,

a member of congress died of the disease. Finally, even the

national news media began to join in the task of educating the

public to the notion that AIDS can affect everyone.

Basic medical research began to provide a few bits of

information, and some help. The virus causing the disease was

isolated and identified. The AIDS virus turned out to be a very

unusual sort of virus. Its genetic material was not DNA, but

RNA. When it infected human cells, it had its RNA direct the

synthesis of viral DNA. While RNA viruses are not that uncommon,

very few RNA viruses reproduce by setting up the flow of

information from RNA to DNA. Such reverse or “retro” flow of

information does not occur at all in any DNA virus or any other

living things. Hence, the virus was said to belong to the rare

group of virues called “Retro Viruses”. Research provided the

means to test donated blood for the presence of the antibodies

to the virus, astronomically reducing the chance of ones getting

AIDS from a blood transfusion. This was one of the first real

breakthroughs. The same discoveries that allowed us to make our

blood bank blood supply far safer also allowed us to be able to

tell (in most cases) whether one has been exposed to the AIDS

virus using a simple blood test.

The Types of AIDS Infection:

When the AIDS virus gets into a person’s body, the results

can be broken down into three general types of situations: AIDS

disease, ARC, and asymptomatic seropositive condition.

The AIDS disease is characterized by having one’s immune

system devastated by the AIDS virus. One is said to have the

*disease* if one contracts particular varieties (Pneumocystis,

for example) of pneumonia, or one of several particular

varieties of otherwise rare cancers (Kaposi’s Sarcoma, for

example). This *disease* is inevitably fatal. Death occurs often

after many weeks or months of expensive and painful hospital

care. Most folks with the disease can transmit it to others by

sexual contact or other exposure of an uninfected person’s blood