Acquired Immune Difficiency Syndrome

Acquired Immune Difficiency Syndrome
AIDS is a life and death issue. To have the AIDS diseas 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 in10 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