25 years...
AIDS is alive, well, and rearing its ugly head again. Transmission rates are rising significantly, and this is a completely preventable virus. Get tested, insist on condoms, and educate yourself and others. Oh yeah, and throw a few bucks toward your local HIV/AIDS clinic.
~J
From today's New York Times:
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June 5, 2006
The State of AIDS, 25 Years After the First, Quiet Mentions
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
On June 5, 1981, in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, brief note was taken of a peculiar cluster of pneumonia cases in five otherwise healthy gay men.
The item was the first official mention of a scourge that had no name, no known means of transmission, no treatment and no cure.
AIDS, as it would eventually be called, was already spreading fear in America's gay enclaves, where before long half the young men who came of age at the dawn of the gay liberation movement would be infected, stigmatized, ravaged by rare infections and cancers, and die. It soon reached into neighborhoods already burdened by poverty and drug abuse.
For years after that federal report, one of the few certainties was that this disease, to quote other reports, was "invariably fatal." The United Nations estimates that today, H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, has infected more than 65 million people, 25 million of whom have died.
Eventually, scientists discovered the virus that caused AIDS and a test to screen for it. They learned the primary routes of transmission unprotected sexual intercourse, intravenous drug use and prenatal infection. They found a cocktail of medications that slowed the disease's progression, at least in America. In Africa and Asia, AIDS continues to cut a deadly swath.
~J
From today's New York Times:
-------------------------------------------------------------
June 5, 2006
The State of AIDS, 25 Years After the First, Quiet Mentions
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
On June 5, 1981, in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, brief note was taken of a peculiar cluster of pneumonia cases in five otherwise healthy gay men.
The item was the first official mention of a scourge that had no name, no known means of transmission, no treatment and no cure.
AIDS, as it would eventually be called, was already spreading fear in America's gay enclaves, where before long half the young men who came of age at the dawn of the gay liberation movement would be infected, stigmatized, ravaged by rare infections and cancers, and die. It soon reached into neighborhoods already burdened by poverty and drug abuse.
For years after that federal report, one of the few certainties was that this disease, to quote other reports, was "invariably fatal." The United Nations estimates that today, H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, has infected more than 65 million people, 25 million of whom have died.
Eventually, scientists discovered the virus that caused AIDS and a test to screen for it. They learned the primary routes of transmission unprotected sexual intercourse, intravenous drug use and prenatal infection. They found a cocktail of medications that slowed the disease's progression, at least in America. In Africa and Asia, AIDS continues to cut a deadly swath.