How Aids Has Affected Our Society :: essays research papers fc

     Today more Americans are infected with STDs than at every other time inhistory. The most serious of these diseases is AIDS. Since the firstcases were set in the United States in 1981, AIDS has touched thelives of millions of American families. This harmful disease is unlikeany other in modern history. Changes in social behavior can be directlylinked to AIDS. Its overall effect on society has been dramatic.     It is unknown whether AIDS and human immunodeficiency virus existed and killed in the U.S. andNorth America before the primordial 1970s. However in the early 1980s,"deaths by opportunistic infections, previously observed mainly intissue-transplant recipients receiving immunosuppressive drug therapy", wererecognized in otherwise healthy homosexual men. In 1983 Frenchoncologist Luc Montagnier and scientists at the Pasteur Institute inParis isolated what appeared to be a new human retrovirus from the lymphnode of a man at essay for having AIDS. At the same time, scientistsworking in the laboratory of American research, scientist Robert Galloat the National Cancer Institute, one of the National Institutes ofHealth in Bethesda, Maryland, and a group headed by American virologistJay Levy at the University of California at San Francisco isolated aretrovirus from heap with AIDS and from individuals having contactwith people with AIDS. every last(predicate) three groups of scientists had isolated whatis now known as HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.                                                    Lorusso 2In 1995 HIV was estimated to infect almost 20 million people worldwide,and several million of those people had developed AIDS. The disease isobviously an measurable social issue.      AIDS has caused many to rethink their own social behavior. deal areforced to use caution when involving themselves in sexual activity. They mustiness use contraception to avoid the dangers of infection. Manypeople consider HIV infection and AIDS to be completely preventablebecause the routes of HIV infection are so well known. To completelyprevent transmission, however, dramatic changes in sexual behavior anddrug dependence would have to occur passim the world. Preventionefforts that promote sexual awareness through open password and condomdistribution in public schools have been opposed ascribable to fear that theseefforts encourage sexual promiscuity among young adults. Similarly,needle-exchange programs have been criticized as promoting drug abuse.Governor Christine Todd Whitman vetoed a bill in New island of Jersey that triedto create a needle-exchange program. She was accused of being"compassionless". She replied that she could not provide drug addicts tocontinue to break the law. By distributing needles, she felt that shewas, in fact, boost them to break the law.      Prevention programs that identify HIV-infected individuals and notify