The purpose of this paper is to educate you about Aids and how to prevent and the problems that come along with it. HIV/AIDS is a sexually transmitted disease that can be life threating. I will be talking about how it was discovered and if there is a cure or not. And we will look at how the disease came up and the amount of people it affects today.
Cause of disease
HIV is caused by a virus called immunodeficiency. It’s a virus that attacks the immune system. You can catch this disease by coming in contact with infected blood, semen, vaginal fluids and sharing needles with someone with the disease. It can be passed down through a mother in pregnancy, but the most common way people catch the disease is by having unprotected sex with someone who has HIV.
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History
HIV is traced back to Kinshasa, the democratic republic of Congo in the 1920s they say it was crossed from chimpanzees to humans. We have no idea how many people had the virus until the 1980s. It was documented that 100,000 to 300,000 people had already been affected been infected. In 1983 doctors from Pasteur institute of France discovered that Lymphadenopathy-Associated Virus could be the cause of aids. Shortly after the first reports of AIDS in children was documented. They found it could be passed via casual contact but later this turned out to be false. Shortly after they found that the children were getting It from their mothers at birth. In 1984 the CDC published their first set of recommended precautions for healthcare workers and allied health professionals to prevent 'AIDS transmission'. The CDC said to prevent aids don’t share needles with anyone and do not have unprotected sex. By the end of 1984 7,700 cases of aids was made and 3,665 deaths occurred. By 2000 HIV was the leading cause of death in America.
Epidemiology
HIV originated in Africa and so it has the most amount of people infected followed by Asia. There are currently 37.9 million people infected in the world. 25 million of those people live in Africa. There are 1.7 million new people infected this year. Since HIV has been documented 770,000 people has passed away due to the effects of HIV. The disease can be spread in multiples of ways unprotected sex sharing needles and getting in contact with bodily fluids.
Pathology
HIV attacks the body's immune system by destroying lymphocytes. These are specialized white blood cells that perform many immune functions, such as fighting pathogens. Helper T cells stimulate B cells to produce antibodies, which help destroy pathogens that enter the body. When HIV enters certain cells, it reproduces itself and destroys the cell. As more cells are destroyed, the immune system becomes weaker. Then the body can catch disease easily because it cannot fight them off.
There are three phases of HIV. The first is the infection phase it starts two to four weeks of infection. You would become sick with flu-like symptoms. Like headaches fever vomiting and more. At the stages the HIV levels in your blood are very high. The next phase is called clinical latency stage. In this phase the HIV is reproducing, but the person may not feel ill. This phase can last for decades if treated. The final phase is called Aids. It's when the helper T cells drop below 200 and the AIDS-opportunistic infections are present.
Response and Treatment
Our immune system fights the pathogen with CD4 and White blood cells, but the HIV virus easily defeats the cells and conquers are immune system. There is no cure for HIV, but people can suppress it by doing antiretroviral therapy. Which basically means taking a bunch of different drugs to help combat the virus. You can totally avoid this disease by doing 3 things. Abstain from sex, do not use anyone's needles and do not touch anyone else’s blood.
To combat the issue of aids the people who made condoms started to advertise on tv saying they will prevent HIV. The education system started putting HIV in textbooks so kids will learn about it. Doctors started running tests and logging data and projecting how many people has died and is infected by AIDS. A policy to help limit Aids is to not sell any medicine to newly infected people so people will be more cautious. We would have to sacrifice the money that America gets from selling the medicine. Another policy would be that everyone must get a yearly test to see who has HIV. Everyone would have to get a yearly checkup would be the only sacrifice.
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