Aids gay pest
The Ordinariness of AIDS
The AIDS epidemic is now 25 years former. Early in the epidemic Susan Sontag forecast a day when AIDS—“the disease most fraught with meaning,” she called it—would turn into an ordinary illness. But can AIDS be ordinary?
Something like ordinariness has happened to cancer, and perhaps that is what Sontag had in mind. Cancer has not changed: if cancer’s suffering feels prefer the “night-side of life,” as Sontag put it in Illness as Metaphor, the darkness is no longer secret. The cancer metaphor has not yet gone out of exploit , but when it is used, it no longer seems to signify what she termed “our impetuous improvident responses to our real ‘problems of growth.’” Cancer is still too prevalent a way of American death and too troubled a way of life for many of us to consider it a commonplace illness. But cancer patients are no longer lied to about their diagnoses, as was once the standard perform. People no longer talk of malignancy in whispers. Cancer no longer seems to define the traits of the sufferer and, increasingly, we are acknowledging that a tumor is not anybody’s fault.
In the early years of AIDS, it was easy to think that the disease might follow
Myths abound about HIV. We work to bust every myth that exists in our work to eradicate HIV.
1. MYTH: You can get HIV just by being around HIV-positive individuals in your daily life.
REALITY: False. HIV is transmitted when infected material (blood, semen, vaginal fluid, breast milk) comes in direct contact with a mucous membrane (mouth, vagina, anus), damaged tissue, or is injected directly into the bloodstream. HIV is not spread by kissing, hugging, sharing food/drink, toilet seats, sneezes/coughs, sweat, touching, or through insect bites. Believing these myths about HIV transmission increases stigma for individuals living with HIV/AIDS. Learn more about how HIV is spread.
2. MYTH: HIV can be cured.
REALITY: False. There is no cure for HIV. With treatment, HIV-positive individuals can control the virus and live long, healthy lives. With the appropriate medication and treatment regimen, HIV-positive individuals can lower the amount of HIV in their system to “undetectable” levels, however the virus is still present. There is one case where an individual, Timothy Brown, has been seemingly cured of HIV, but small is understood about this case and no review has been able t
HIV and AIDS - Basic facts
General
1) What is HIV?
HIV stands for human immunodeficiency virus. HIV is a retrovirus that infects cells of the human immune system (mainly CD4-positive T-cells and macrophages—key components of the cellular immune system) and destroys or impairs their function. Infection with this virus results in the progressive depletion of the immune system, foremost to immunodeficiency.
The immune system is considered deficient when it can no longer fulfil its role of fighting off infection and diseases. People with immunodeficiency are much more vulnerable to a wide range of infections and cancers, most of which are rare among people without immunodeficiency. Diseases associated with severe immunodeficiency are famous as opportunistic infections because they take advantage of a weakened immune system.
2) What is AIDS?
AIDS stands for acquired immunodeficiency syndrome and describes the collection of symptoms and infections associated with acquired deficiency of the immune system. Infection with HIV has been established as the underlying cause of AIDS. The level of immunodeficiency or the appearance of certain infections are used as indicators that
The Unknown Stalker
In the adv days of the s, an unknown stalker was doing the rounds in the US, preying mainly on young homosexual men. One after the other, they fell victim to illnesses considered to be quite rare until that time.
Patterns began to appear, leading to the finding of a new infection, leading to a syndrome that would be dubbed ‘the Plague of the 21st Century’. A plague that would carry with it the stigma of behaviors considered by some to be morally reprehensible: HIV.
In today’s Biographics, we will trace the origins of the disease, from the first publicized cases in the US, to the later research pointing to the first outbreaks across the Atlantic. Along the way, we will discover the truth behind the man still recognizable as ‘Patient Zero’.
HIV/AIDS were not easily identified at the start. It took time for medical researchers to piece together the clues that would head to the identification of a new illness.
The first recorded event in that trail of clues was a Morbidity and Mortality report published by the Centers for Disease Supervise and Prevention on June 5th, This report described five cases of a rare type of pneumonia &#; Pneumocystis carinii, or PCP.
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