Aids:The Quiet Rise in America
For an epidemic that has exploded around the world and is claiming thousands of lives everyday, AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) surfaced very quietly in the United States. On June 4, 1981, a weekly newsletter published by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta reported five unusual cases of pneumonia that had been diagnosed in Los Angeles residents over the previous few months. All the patients were homosexual males who had come down with Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, a rare lung infection usually found only in severely malnourished individuals that had been undergoing intensive chemotherapy. Before getting ill, all five men were well nourished and considered to be very healthy with strong immune systems (Odets, 20-23).Within the year, similar cases were reported from all over the country. Adults that seemed perfectly healthy were suddenly coming down with rare infections and malignancies. Most cases were reported in New York City, California, Florida and Texas, but unlike the men in the Los Angeles cases, not all were homosexual males. Many were people who used intravenous drugs, men with hemophilia, and immigrants from Afric
According to Everything You'd Better Know About AIDS and HIV, there were 90,000 cases of AIDS reported in 1988 and over 50,000 more had died from the illness, but public health officials estimated that over a million people might be infected without even knowing it. These numbers proved to be fairly accurate. More than 700,000 cases of AIDS have been reported in the United States since 1988, and 900,000 more Americans are infected with HIV (Kashif, 49, 63-65). The Food and Drug Administration has now approved a number of drugs for treating HIV infection. The first group of drugs used to treat HIV infection, called nucleoside reverse transcriptase (RT) inhibitors, interrupts an early stage of the virus making copies of itself. Included in this class of drugs is AZT. AZT was released for widespread use in 1987 and was not found to be very successful in treating patients that were already infected with the virus but was remarkably effective in keeping it from passing from mother to baby. (Odets, 125) Although major medical advances have been made towards a cure for this terrible disease, the numbers of people infected each year are astounding. At the end of 1999 6.4 million Americans had died from AIDS, and 1.8 million of those were children under the age of 15 (Wadhams, 237). AIDS is not a small or quiet problem anymore. What started out as five men with an unusual case of pneumonia has led to millions of deaths in just over twenty years. It was discovered in the mid-eighties that HI
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Approximate Word count = 1010
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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