Status of Aids in the US - Essay Example

 AIDS is a disease unlike any other. Thought to be traced from one single person that traveled to the United States, it took doctors almost twenty years to be able to classify this deadly disease that was first seen among homosexual men. AIDS can be traced even further back than that, and it was originally traced back to Africa, where the disease made the leap from the system of chimpanzees to humans. From there the disease spread from Africa to Haiti, and then the disease finally landed in the expansion of the open gay scene of the 1970s. Gay rights were just starting to expand until this disease brought in a new wave and era of homophobia, and also discrimination against Haitians. The epidemic continued to spread through blood and sexual contact, to the point where it could be ignore no longer. Originally misunderstood, AIDS has entered and changed the medical world and life of the American people unlike any other disease before it. By the time it was pinned with a name (that was later changed) AIDS had already begun to spread across America faster than we could keep up with it. Soon it was also found out that it was not just homosexual men that were affected by the deadly disease, and the name was changed from Gay Related Immunity Disease to AIDS as we still use today. AIDS entered into the public mentality of the United States, and awareness started to break out across the world of the problems about this deadly disease. And all the time while a cure has yet to be found patients and doctors alike struggle with combating this deadly disease, as well as combating the spread of this disease from person to person. Awareness spread as has the effects of the combatants of the disease, but AIDS is still alive and rampant in American society. Despite all human efforts, AIDS is still a killer that spread through the very veins of the American people. The AIDS epidemic continues to spread throughout America, and while numbers may be improving; there is still a lot of progress that needs to be made if we are to finally stop this deadly disease. The history of AIDS is somewhat difficult to track, and is often debated by geneticist and doctors alike. A recent study has show that there is a 99.8 percent chance that AIDS came from Africa, to Haiti, and then to the United States, as compared to the chance that is came directly to the United States from Africa, which was only .003 percent. The study found that “Haiti, which contains more HIV strains than any other country, likely served as a breeding ground for the disease between 1966 and 1969, at which point a single person carried it to the United States. From there, the rest is tragic history” (http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/10/a-single-person.html). Modern technology has traced AIDS back even further than its first appearance in the United States. Many people hold true that the disease fist made the leap from chimpanzees in the 1930s and then eventually made its way into the human societies in Africa. People often “relied on chimps for food, and it is likely that someone slaughtering an animal got the virus into his or her bloodstream. The virus festered among humans in Africa for decades until sometime in the 1960s it made its way to Haiti” (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21653369/). However these findings “won't directly produce cures or treatments. They might, however, give insight into how the disease evolved and spread -- and that, in turn, could guide research. The next step: tracing the disease back from Haiti to central Africa, where researchers believe it was acquired by visiting Haitian workers” ( http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/10/a-single-person.html. This study offers a glimpse into what has long been considered the mystery of AIDS, and has offered us a one possible set up for exactly how AIDS entered into American. Even though this study found their information to be conclusive, and they seemed to hold no doubts, other people have had trouble accepting this as cannon and fact, and seem to believe the AIDS may have in fact came from another country and that the blame should not be entirely placed on Haiti. Haiti has long been debated for its part in bringing AIDS to America, as when the outbreak was first “the unusually high prevalence of the disease in Haitian immigrants fueled speculation that the Caribbean island was the source of the mysterious illness”( http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/10/071029-aids-haiti.html). Most agree that is was an Haitian immigrant that brought the disease over, and that lead to the Haitians taking most of the heat for the upcoming epidemic that would soon ensue. Other people could argue that claim however. Haiti was a popular sex spot in the 1970s, and just as easily any American could have contracted the disease and then brought it home to American upon their return. Dugas is also often blamed for the epidemic, however “Clearly, many highly mobile, promiscuous gay men were transmitting the virus simultaneously. It is critical to remember that before 1981, no one knew the disease existed. Because the time from infection to onset of symptoms can be up to 10 years, many thousands got infected before anyone had the slightest idea what was happening. So it is not Dugas’s fault, nor the Haitians. Where the blame lies is that after scientists did understand the disease and how to prevent its spread, the epidemic continued within the U.S. and throughout the globe” (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21653369). With the disease now running rampant across America, it was only a mater of time before it caught the public’s attention and created a huge campaign against the deadly disease. And that it did. In the 1987's book And the Band Played On, by Randy Shilts, Shilts was one author to point the finger at both the United States government for not doing enough to help contain the disease, but also to non-profit organizations such as the Red Cross who decided not to stop gay and bi-sexual men from donation blood in order to keep the blood banks full and running properly. The book also widely published Dugas as the single person who brought AIDS to the United States, when other data has shown that AIDS was around before he ever entered into the picture. Other critics also lay some blame on several scientists that were working on discovering exactly what caused AIDS, and how the dragged their feet because both were more interested in attaining glory and fame, and while they were fighting over who would take credit for the disease, people continued to die of the disease (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS_in_the_United_States). The timeline of AIDS in the United States has been a roller coaster of events, problems; all centered around the progression and attempted containment of this deadly disease. A CNN special report stated that “On June 5, 1981, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a notice on page two of its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report about a strange outbreak of killer pneumonia striking homosexual men. From that obscure beginning, AIDS grew into the public health disaster of our time, a global phenomenon that has tested social, cultural, religious and scientific beliefs. Twenty years later -- with expensive drug therapies but no cure or vaccine in sight -- AIDS continues to spread rapidly, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Many researchers warn that the worst is yet to come” ( http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/aids/). Before we can look at where AIDS is going, we first need to look at how it came here and where it has been. Between the mid-1970s and 1981, over 121 deaths had been blamed on what was then called “gay cancer”, Gay Related Immuno Deficiency, or GRID. Homophobia continued to spread as did the disease, and people soon would become aware at just how deadly and fast this disease could be. In 1982 the name of the disease was changed to what we still call it today, AIDS. The Center for Disease control also discovered that this disease did not just affect homosexual men, but that it could also be transferred by other sexual contact or infected blood. This is also the year that the United States started tracking all AIDS cases, and 285 cases were reported in the United States alone that year. The next year, in 1983, Dr. Gallo and Dr. Montagnier both independently identified that it was the HIV virus that caused and later developed into AIDS. (http://www.infoplease.com/spot/aidstimeline1.html#1981). However it took more than that to exactly discover what was causing all these related deaths that people couldn’t exactly put their finger on. The first findings of a care that is often considered to be the first documented case of AIDS was of a 15 year old black male from St. Louis who died in 1968 of KS. The person’s blood was later tested as HIV positive, and had never left the country, so it can also be assumed that HIV may have been introduced into America as far back as the early 1960s, if not even sooner than that. The first case “in a transfusion recipient was reported from San Francisco in an infant in late 1982. For a short time, the new disease was called gay-related immunodeficiency syndrome (GRIDS), but by September of 1982, the CDC had published a case definition, using the current designation of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) in print, and it was rapidly adopted by researchers”( http://hivinsite.ucsf.edu/InSite?page=kb-01-03). All the data also pointed to the disease being linked to blood, and many researchers assumed the disease was sexually transmitted. Eventually, a strain of HIV was isolated in France in 1983 by Françoise Barré-Sinoussi in the laboratory of Luc Montaignie. The virus was not directly linked to AIDS until 1984 by Robert Gallo. The name HIV was given to the virus in 1986. It wasn’t until 1985, with the death of movie star Rock Hudson, that great public in AIDS was finally taken. AIDS publicity and awareness sky rocketed, and Congress allocated 70 million dollars to AIDS research. The first ever international AIDS conference was also held this year, and the first blood test for HIV was approved and the screening of the US blood supply began. In 1986 the Soviet Union reported their first case of AIDS, and the current United States Surgeon General sent AIDS information to every household within the United States. Also, scientists discovered a new strand of the virus, now called HIV-2, in West Africa. The original virus was now being referred to as HIV-1. The following year the FDA approved a new drug for AIDS patients, which helped reduce the infections and increase the amount of time some patients were able to live and battle the disease. In 1988 World AIDS Day was officially started to help promote information about the disease and to focus the world’s attention on combating and fighting the disease (http://www.infoplease.com/spot/aidstimeline1.html#1985). In 1991 more solid numbers were finally released as to how big the outbreak of AIDS had become. It was estimated that over 10 million people now had AIDS world wide, and that 1 million of those people were living in the United States. Sense the 1970s, over 36,000 Americans have already died and suffered first hand because of this deadly disease. In 1992 the first clinical trials of the combination of multiple drugs to help combat the effects of AIDS were used. Also, the FDA quickened the process that was required for the approval of experimental AIDS drugs. In 1993, the US death total reached 45,000, and in 1994 AIDS became the leading cause of death for adults 25-44 years old in the United States. And finally, in 1995, the first protease inhibitor was approved and began being used to help treat and combat AIDS (http://www.infoplease.com/spot/aidstimeline1.html#1991). Despite all these efforts however, AIDS continued to spread throughout America, and also continued to spread throughout the world. What had originally started as a “homosexual disease” has now spread to all people of all races, sexual orientations, and gender, and everybody felt the fear of this deadly disease looming over them. AIDS had entered the American society, and had no plans on slowing down or stopping its deadly path of destruction anytime soon. Or at least until 1997, when modern medicine gave AIDS a run for its money. Although no cure has yet to be found, medicines were able to combat the effects of this disease and help people live longer while fighting it. However, “living with AIDS has happened on a large scale only since 1996, when researchers announced that new medicines showed real promise. The number of people dying of AIDS dropped right away -- to 337 in 1997 from 1,335 in 1995 -- and the numbers of deaths and people living with the disease have diverged sharply since then in San Francisco. By 2004, there were 7,366 people living with AIDS in San Francisco, and only 151 died” (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/06/04/INGI1J4U391.DTL). These numbers showed great improvement in the death rate that had long been attached to aids. Other international efforts have also been taken to try to curve the horrible spread of this disease world wide. In June 2001 The United Nations General Assembly adopted a special Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS. This promise requires all the governments that signed it to improve their responses to the AIDS epidemic and to set specific targets for all of their county’s AIDS related funding, programming, and policies. The Declaration also says that “governments conduct periodic reviews to assess progress on realizing their UNGASS commitments. In recognition of the crucial role civil society plays in the response to HIV/AIDS, the Declaration calls on governments to include civil society, particularly people living with HIV/AIDS, in the review process”(http://www.soros.org/initiatives/health/focus/phw/articles_publications/publications/hivaids_20060523). Another report states that “as of December 31, 2000, 774,467 persons had been reported with AIDS in the United States; 448,060 of these had died; 3542 persons had unknown vital status. The number of persons living with AIDS (322,865) is the highest ever reported. Of these, 79% were men, 61% were black or Hispanic, and 41% were infected through male-to-male sex” and also includes that “Male-to-male sex has been the most common mode of exposure among persons reported with AIDS (46%), followed by injection drug use (25%) and heterosexual contact (11%). The incidence of AIDS increased rapidly in all three of these risk categories through the mid-1990s; however, since 1996, declines in new AIDS cases have been higher among MSM and injection drug users than among persons exposed through heterosexual contact”( http://www.cdc.gov/MMWR/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5021a2.htm). This report offers mixed news, and shows that the new medicines has helped the spread of AIDS in some groups, but that 2001 was the year the highest number of people ever living with AIDS was reported. This could also be due to the fact that people were now living longer with AIDS, which was the huge positive behind the advancements in the treatments and medicines used to treat AIDS. And the numbers have continued to decline sense those treatments were developed in 1996. The numbers dropped off significantly in 1996 and have continued to drop ever sense, but not as rapidly as when the new drugs were first introduced. These three HIV drug competitors, also known as “cocktails” included a protease inhibitor that helped combat the progression of AIDS. However, it is to be noted that the decline of the disease has been less significant in the African American population. The situation is still somewhat unstable however, and that can be seen by the fact that Great Britain recently had a huge resurgence in the cases of the disease despite taking similar methods to the ones used by the United States (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS_in_the_United_States). Also, the United States government has now made fighting AIDS one of their top priorities. The USAID cooperation has helped fund almost 6 billion dollars to help combat AIDS, and has currently over 100 programs in countries worldwide helping the world wide fight against AIDS. USAID has also started a “five-year, $15 billion multifaceted approach to combating the disease in more than 120 countries around the world (http://www.usaid.gov/our_work/global_health/aids/). One would think that the battle against AIDS must be making huge strides. And the numbers have shown that the spread of Aids has slowed down. In part of many different originations and with the help of the new drugs available “the rate of decrease in AIDS diagnoses slowed in the late 1990s. After reaching a plateau, the number of diagnoses increased slightly to an estimated 45,669 in 2005. In total, an estimated 988,376 people have been diagnosed with AIDS in the USA. The number of deaths among people with AIDS has remained relatively stable since 1999, and was estimated at 17,011 in 2005. Since the beginning of the epidemic, an estimated 550,394 people with AIDS have died in the USA (http://www.avert.org/usastaty.htm). These numbers present a very bright outlook for the future of AIDS as compared to the fear that surrounded the epidemic only years before. With the entire modern world focusing on AIDS, things looked quite optimistic, at least for a while. However, new figures and numbers have a somewhat startling effect, and show that perhaps we are no closer to truly understating the disease than when we first misdiagnosed it as a “homosexual” disease way back when we first found it. Or maybe the disease is jut adapting to the new modern medicines we are trying to use to fight it. Either way, the most recent numbers for the United States do not offer the positive outlook that most people hope for. These new most recent estimates paint a totally different picture than the recent trend has been predicting. While the numbers have been slowly continuing to decrease over the past ten years, this year’s data shows that trend may in fact be reverting, and heading back in the other direction. And this is not a positive outlook for the future of AIDS in this country. No cure has been found still, and if the numbers continue to head up like they did this year, AIDS could keep spreading at an unprecedented rate like it did back when it was first found and treatment was scarce. For the past decade, the decade doctors at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated that 40,000 new cases of AIDS will emerge each year. And up to this point they have been correct. However, this year it looks like their estimate is off, as AIDS has increased to around 55,-60,000 people this past year. It is not entirely sure if the AIDS outbreak is actually increasing, or the epidemic is just much bigger than anybody ever thought. But it will take a few more years of looking at and studying data to know exactly for sure. However, "The likelihood is that this bigger number represents a clearer picture of what has been there for the past few years. But we won't know for sure for a while," said Walt Senterfitt, an epidemiologist who is the chairman of the Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project (CHAMP), a New York-based activist organization. There is evidence, however, that at least some of the higher number may reflect an uptake in infections in recent years. Information from 33 states with the most precise form of reporting showed a 13 percent increase in HIV infections in homosexual men from 2001 to 2005. Ironically, the news comes less than two weeks after UNAIDS, the United Nations agency responsible for charting the course of the global epidemic, drastically reduced its estimate of the number of people living with the disease worldwide from 40 million to 33 million. The reason was the same: Crude methods of counting were replaced by better ones” ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/30/AR2007113002535_pf.html). This data is not comfortable and does not present the current trend of AIDS that has been presented for the past few years. These new numbers show that the problem may be larger in the United States than many people may have thought, and that it is not just an international problem. The previously presented figure of 40,000 increases a year has been often taken at face value, but has never really been explained or well justified. These new numbers show what the epidemic may really be shaping up and looking like for us in the United States, and that the picture may not be as good as that has been presented in the past decade. However, as AIDS is a hard disease to be able to accurately test and can be hard to detect in the early stages, nobody is really positive at how large the AIDS epidemic really is in American during its current stage. Another similar reports by a different news source cited that the estimate for AIDS is expected to increase almost 35 percent, and that ” Government officials acknowledge they are revising the estimate, which they say is not yet complete”( http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22081089/). However, the numbers are not due to be released until early next year, and AIDS activists claim these are merely political measures and that by not releasing the numbers the government is hurting AIDS funding. The cooperation in charge of the numbers, “The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the numbers are being reviewed for accuracy and won’t be released until early next year”( http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22081089/). Some people fear that may not be soon enough for these numbers though. The AIDS burden does not fall equally on the American people. A CNN special report on AIDS showed that “Thirty percent of gay black men in their 20s are infected with HIV, compared to 7 percent of white gay men, according to a recent CDC study of six large U.S. cities. An African-American woman is 20 times more likely to contract AIDS than a white woman. African-American adolescents accounted for more than 60 percent of AIDS cases reported in 1999 among 13- to 19-year-olds” (http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/aids/stories/social.cost.html). These numbers are supported by various other reports that all claim that African American’s are paying most of the cost of AIDS in today’s American climate. That same report also noted the economic impact of AIDS, and that AIDS is a deadly, and costly disease. It is not easy or inexpensive to treat people with the disease, and while America may currently be able to support it, other countries are struggling and it may someday be that way in America as well. The people cost of AIDS, people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, is also a burdensome cost to the economy, and hearts of America as well. Other recent studies have also shown how AIDS still affects all people in the United States. In 2005 it was estimated that 437,982 people were living in the United States with the disease. Of these people 44 percent were black, the largest percentage of American affected by the disease. 35 percent of people affected were white, 19 percent were Hispanic, and the remaining percent were mixed of other races and ethnicities. This same set of data also compiled how men and women most likely contracted the disease. 59 percent of men contracted the disease by sex with other men, 20 percent by injecting drugs, 11 percent from unprotected heterosexual contact, 8 percent from a mix of two other categories, and one percent from unknown or other risks. Women on the other handed contracted the disease 65 percent of the time through unprotected heterosexual contact, 33 percent from injecting drugs, and 3 percent from unknown or other risks. Also noted by the data was that “an estimated 1,411 children aged under 13 were living with AIDS at the end of 2005. The vast majority of these children acquired HIV from their mothers during pregnancy, labor, delivery or breastfeeding. People with AIDS are surviving longer and are contributing to a steady increase in the number of people living with AIDS. This trend will continue as long as the number of new diagnoses exceeds the number of people dying each year” (http://www.avert.org/statsum.htm). Throughout the past few years, the changes in the AIDS epidemic have been across all the racial and sexual barriers. The same report also stated that: “During the 1990s, the epidemic shifted steadily toward a growing proportion of AIDS cases among black people and Hispanics and in women, and toward a decreasing proportion in MSM, although this group remains the largest single exposure group. Black people and Hispanics have been disproportionately affected since the early years of the epidemic. In absolute numbers, blacks have outnumbered whites in new AIDS diagnoses and deaths since 1996, and in the number of people living with AIDS since 1998. From 2000 to 2005, the estimated number of new AIDS cases increased in all racial/ethnic groups. Over the same period, the estimated number of new AIDS diagnoses increased by 17% among women and by 16% among men. The number of new cases probably due to heterosexual contact grew by 42%; cases probably due to sex between men grew by 24%; and the number among injecting drug users fell by less than 1 %”( http://www.avert.org/statsum.htm). These numbers giving an interesting look at the course of AIDS in America through the past few years and also support the more modern numbers that have just come out. All of these numbers however, do not present a very pretty picture for the future development of AIDs in America. While it may have looked like AIDs was decreasing across America and that the epidemic was simply abroad, these new studies show that that is just not the case, and that AIDs is just as strong in American as it has always been, if not growing even stronger. This does not give a very good outlook for the course of AIDS in the future, and does not make the hopes of stopping the epidemic very bright. Since its original journey to American, be it from the Haitian immigrants, people going to Haiti for sex trips, or even from the St. Louis boy’s gene pool years earlier, AIDS has had a lasting and lingering effect on the people of American. And although we may argue over where exactly it came from and how exactly it got here, those are really mute points when we are trying to deal with a problem the scope of the AIDs epidemic. Things may look brighter in the United States than in the rest of the world, but things are starting to look a little bit darker given the new numbers and data that is coming out about the epidemic. Frustrating trials and experiments have all tried to find a common cure, and to this day have failed. That does not mean we should not rest our hope in medicine that one day a new cure can be found, and that we will then ultimately be able to triumph over this deadly disease. However, for the time being that is not so. No cure has yet to be found, and we have to continue to find a way to help combat the spread of this disease. The measures taken have greatly reduced the number of people affected, but if the numbers start to go back up new measures may need to be taken. Something like AIDS can not be allowed to go unchecked, and we must keep educating all people about the horrors of this deadly disease and how far reaching the impacts can be. Experts say that “"It's going to have a long lasting impact on the human race, AIDS is going to change the course of human evolution. There's no doubt about that. When you have a disease that affects so many people and some people have systems better able to respond to it, that's how evolution works. It is so enormous that even for someone like myself who's been involved in it for 17 years, it is impossible for me to truly conceive of the magnitude of the epidemic"( http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/aids/stories/social.cost.html). And if the experts can’t even fully understand the epidemic, how is the rest of the world supposed to? Aids has been a growing and changing part of American culture ever since it started killing people all those years ago. And it is still killing, only it has been slightly slowed down. AIDs will however have a continued lasting impact on the future of all of world history, and will continue to have a great impact on the course of American history as well. The AIDs epidemic is unlike any other in the course of time, and will ultimately shape the course of human history, and how we adapt to it will define who we end up being as humans. Read More