How Aids Has Affected Our Society
...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.
Lorusso 2
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.
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