HIV/AIDS and Ravens Story - Essay Example

When cases began turning up in women and children it could no longer be called a “gay disease” (AVERT, 2006) and it was eventually found that the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS is transmitted through blood and other bodily fluids, by diverse means such as blood transfusion, homosexual and heterosexual sex, during pregnancy and breastfeeding, and through needle-sharing by drug addicts.

In 1982 the term “acquired immunodeficiency syndrome” was coined to describe the array of symptoms noted in individuals with AIDS (AVERT, 2006). The underlying cause of the array is a depressed immune response characterized by the appearance of opportunistic infections (CDC, 2003), so-called because they are caused by organisms that do not cause disease in healthy individuals. People with AIDS become sick with such infections because the virus infects and destroys CD4 T-cells, which are crucial for normal immune system functionality.

In 1999, scientists discovered that the original source of the virus in nature is a species of chimpanzee native to West Africa (NIH, 1999), and suggested that HIV was introduced into humans when hunters in the area were exposed to infected blood. This is significant because infected chimpanzees can be studied in the wild to discover why they don’t get sick from the virus, which may help in developing new treatments and possibly even a vaccine.

The World Health Organization estimates that there are currently just over 40 million adults and children infected with HIV (WHO, 2005), with 1.2 million of these living in the United States, and 25.8 million in Sub-Saharan Africa. 4.9 million new infections are estimated to have occurred in 2005, and 3.1 million are estimated to have died from AIDS-related illnesses in the same year, with a total of 25 million have died as a result of AIDS infection since the disease was recognized in 1981. Women are increasingly affected by the disease, with one million more women infected in 2005 than in 2003.

HIV is no longer a death sentence in the Western world. For people such as 15-year-old Raven Lopez, it is “little more than a footnote” (Interview with Raven Lopez, 2005). Raven is an American teenager who contracted AIDS from her mother. She is matter-of-fact about her status, and after a long period of adjustment, has accepted it as part of her life. She dates and plans for her future like any other teenage girl, and she is optimistic about her life and coping with being HIV-positive.

Raven’s story is a hopeful one. Treatments for HIV are able to help infected individuals and their families live relatively normal lives. However, the WHO statistics show that by far the greatest problem with HIV lies not in the Western world, where people can get treatment for the disease, but in Sub-Saharan African countries, where more than half the infected people of the world live, where the rate of spread of infection is higher than anywhere else in the world, and where treatment is more difficult to get than anywhere else in the world. My personal feeling is that it is not enough to educate and help people in America, England, or Europe. Controlling the spread of AIDS is not a possibility unless considerably more effort is put into doing so in Africa.