How Has Aids Affected Our Society?
...than at any other time in
history. The most serious of these diseases is AIDS. Since the first cases were
identified in the United States in 1981, AIDS has touched the lives of millions
of American families. This deadly disease is unlike any other in modern history.
Changes in social behavior can be directly linked to AIDS. Its overall effect
on society has been dramatic.
It is unknown whether AIDS and HIV existed and killed in the U.S. and
North America before the early 1970s. However in the early 1980s, "deaths by
opportunistic infections, previously observed mainly in tissue-transplant
recipients receiving immunosuppressive therapy", were recognized in otherwise
healthy homosexual men. In 1983 French oncologist Luc Montagnier and scientists
at the Pasteur Institute in Paris isolated what appeared to be a new human
retrovirus from the lymph node of a man at risk for having AIDS. At the same
time, scientists working in the laboratory of American research, scientist
Robert Gallo at the National Cancer Institute, one of the National Institutes of
Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and a group headed by American virologist Jay Levy
at the University of California at San Francisco isolated a retrovirus from
people with AIDS and from individuals having contact with people with AIDS. All
three groups of scientists had isolated what is now known as HIV, the virus that
causes AIDS. In 1995 HIV was estimated to infect almost 20 million people
worldwide, and several million of those people had developed AIDS. The disease
is obviously an important social issue.
AIDS has caused many to rethink their own social behavior. People are
forced to use caution when involving themselves in sexual activity. They must
use contraception to avoid...
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