AIDS

If a survey was conducted that asked people what disease they would most like NOT to get, I bet that one of the top answers would be AIDS. This syndrome is a disease that leads to different diseases as well, and is caused by a virus called HIV (human immunodeficiency virus). There are treatments available for this disease, but no ultimate cure that rids a body of AIDS.

In the 1980s, gay men and intravenous drug users started developing symptoms that led to the discovery of AIDS. Scientists think that this disease originated in chimpanzees in Africa, but moved to humans, possibly by humans eating infected chimps. Now it is a pandemic, an epidemic that is spread over a wide geographical area. It is present in every country in the world, although the concentration of AIDS is in sub-Saharan Africa.

AIDS is actually very easy to get – if you have contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person, then the virus is transferred from their body to yours. Most people who get AIDS get it through unprotected sex, but there are other ways to get it too. The spread of the disease would be much less if people would only wear condoms, become more educated about sex, and even if circumcisions were performed for male. There are also treatments that can help to slow the replication of the HIV virus in the body, but there is no treatment to eradicate the virus from the body completely. Scientists are working on a vaccine for AIDS, and currently have about 30 potential vaccines, but none have been confirmed to prevent the disease.

I, personally, would be devastated if anyone I knew contracted AIDS. You always hear such scary stories about people dying from AIDS, especially in Africa, and it is so easy to get that I would not be surprised if I actually do know people that have it. I hope that the scientists working on cures and vaccines come to a major breakthrough that eliminates this disease from the world, but I doubt that it would happen for quite some time. Something that comes to my mind through learning about AIDS is the difference between the research for a cure for AIDS and the research about cancer. In my mind, my first thought is that more time and resources should be spent on the research for cancer, because patients don’t have any choice in the matter of whether or not they get cancer. It seems to me that AIDS patients mostly get the disease from irresponsibility on someone’s part, but I know that I do not know enough about the disease to make a judgment like that. I do hope that diseases such as cancer and AIDS will be wiped out in coming years, so that everyone will have a better chance to experience the joys of life in this world.

Image Source: http://panachereport.com/channels/old_school_update/AIDSBLK.htm

Article Source:http://science.nationalgeographic.com/science/health-and-human-body/human-diseases/aids-article/?source=A-to-Z