Nowadays, with the developed industrialization there are a lot of dangerous diseases which have influence on the people. There are the cancer, osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s etc. One of them is AIDS – the serious disease. Unfortunately, day by day the number of people who are infected with Aids is increasing. Infected people are very weak to fight off other infectious disease and soon they will die. AIDS is one of the dangerous diseases, so the people need to know about how to prevent it.
Acquired Immune-Deficiency Syndrome, popularly known by its abbreviation AIDS is a fatal disease as it attacks and destroys the immune system of the body. It is caused by a virus called Human Immuno Deficiency Virus or HIV in short. HIV damages body’s immune system by destroying white blood cells which help us to destroy invaded pathogens. When HIV enters a white blood cell, it may remain dormant. However, once it is activated, it infects another cell to produce many new HIVS. After a certain period of time, the white blood cells are destroyed and leading to a loss of function of the immune system (Y.K. Ho,2004).
The first ever case of a person with AIDS was detected in America in 1959 which later emerged as a dreadfully widespread disease in the 1980s in countries like France, , Belgium, Uganda, Zambia Tanzania, Zimbabwe etc. Moreover, AIDS was first clinically observed in 1981 in the United States. [The initial cases were a cluster of injecting drug users and homosexual men with no known cause of impaired immunity who showed symptoms of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), a rare opportunistic infection that was known to occur in people with very compromised immune systems.
Soon thereafter, an unexpected number of gay men developed a previously rare skin cancer called Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS). Many more cases of PCP and KS emerged, alerting U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and a CDC task force was formed to monitor the outbreak. In the early days, the CDC did not have an official name for the disease, often referring to it by way of the diseases that were associated with it, for example, lymphadenopathy, the disease after which the discoverers of HIV originally named the virus.
They also used Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections, the name by which a task force had been set up in 1981. At one point, the Center of Diseases Control coined the phrase “the 4H disease”, since the syndrome seemed to affect Haitians, homosexuals, hemophiliacs, and heroin users. In the general press, the term “GRID”, which stood for gay-related immune deficiency, had been coined. However, after determining that AIDS was not isolated to the gay community, it was realized that the term GRID was misleading and the term AIDS was introduced at a meeting in July 1982.
By September 1982 the CDC started referring to the disease as AIDS. HIV is a fast spreading disease in the world which if—not controlled—can take an epidemic proportion. According to the data and statistics of World Health Organization, global summary of the AIDS epidemic, 2009, the number of people living with HIV is around 33. 3 million and AIDS death in 2009 is around 1. 8 million. The highest numbers of AIDS cases are found in Mumbai in India which is known as die AIDS capital of the country and is closely followed by Chennai, Thiruvanandiapuram, Nagpur, Aurangabad and Kolhapur.
Mizoram, Manipur, Nagaland and Delhi too have a number of HIV cases being reported in die recent years. As per die common myth, HIV infection is not contagious as is measles, chicken pox, tuberculosis, cholera, plague, smallpox etc. The infection mainly spreads through a sexual route or blood to blood contact. HIV spreads mainly through sexual relationship-whether heterosexual or homosexual with an infected partner, transfusion of HIV infected blood and blood products, use of infected syringes or needles and is passed on by an infected mother to her unborn child.
It is therefore, foolish to believe that HIV spreads through mosquitoes, embracing, holding, touching or kissing each other, shaking hands, coughing, sneezing, spitting, sharing of public toilets or swimming pools, sharing meals or eating from the same plates, or sharing clothes, bed sheets, or attending similar schools or working together. There are many causes to explain why people got AIDS and there are also some serious effects. The first cause can be because they did not recieve enough information about specific illnesses like AIDS.
So to help us to prevent AIDS: we need to educate the children carefully. It is because AIDS has existed since many years ago. Although many scientists have tried to discover the treatment against this terrible disease, they have not found some patent treatments yet. Scientists caution that a safe, effective vaccine against HIV may be at least a decade away, mainly because, like the influenza virus, HIV mutates (changes structure) quickly, producing different strains. An ideal vaccine must be able to stimulate neutralization of both “free” viruses and those hidden within lymphocytes, such as T-helper cells.
Researchers in various countries have developed and are testing a few preliminary vaccines. One sub-unit vaccine, made from virus coat material (a glycoprotein) genetically cloned in an insect virus (the baculovirus, which attacks moths and butterflies but no humans) has been shown to stimulate an immune response in experimental animals. Another preliminary vaccine, produced by cloning modified Vaccinia viruses, containing a portion of HIV envelope, is about to enter clinical trials in New York.
But to date no vaccine tried in animals or humans has been shown to prevent AIDS. The best way to avoid AIDS is to regard it as a highly lethal disease and practice commonsense prevention. Avoiding infection is in one’s own hands. People can protect themselves. To halt its spread, people are encouraged to obtain and apply accurate AIDS information to their living styles and sexual habits in order to reduce the risk of getting or transmitting the virus. Sadly, health promoters claim that “reaching the many who don’t want to know” is no easy task.
Health promoters suggest that educators must learn how and when to communicate AIDS information – in the right way at “teachable” moments. Many Public Health Departments are now taking the lead in disseminating education about AIDS with large scale public awareness programs. On the other hand, there are many ways to reduce AIDS, but the primary way is have a protective sex. One of the examined showed that consistent condom use reduces the risk of HIV transmission by approximately 80% over the long term.
When one partner of a couple is infected, consistent condom use results in rates of HIV infection for the uninfected person of below 1% per year. There is some evidence to suggest that female condoms may provide an equivalent level of protection. Application of a vaginal gel containing tenofovir (a reverse transcriptase inhibitor) immediately before sex seems to reduce infection rates by approximately 40% among African women. By contrast, use of the spermicide nonoxynol-9 may increase the risk of transmission due to its tendency to cause vaginal and rectal irritation.
Circumcision in Sub-Saharan Africa “reduces the acquisition of HIV by heterosexual men by between 38% and 66% over 24 months”. Based on these studies, the World Health Organization and UNAIDS both recommended male circumcision as a method of preventing female-to-male HIV transmission in 2007. Whether it protects against male-to-female transmission is disputed and whether it is of benefit in developed countries and among men who have sex with men is undetermined. Some experts fear that a lower perception of vulnerability among circumcised
men may result in more sexual risk-taking behavior, thus negating its preventive effects. Women who have undergone female genital cutting have an increased risk of HIV. Programs encouraging sexual abstinence do not appear to affect subsequent HIV risk. Evidence for a benefit from peer education is equally poor. Comprehensive sexual education provided at school may decrease high risk behavior. A substantial minority of young people continues to engage in high-risk practices despite knowing about HIV/AIDS, underestimating their own risk of becoming infected with HIV.
It is not known if treating other sexually transmitted infections is effective in preventing HIV. To conclude, AIDS is a very dangerous diseases, so it needs to be controlled.. We must go to all extremes in preventing this virus from spreading much more that it already has. If you could spread it then you need to be tested, educated, isolated and treated. We must do all that it takes to prevent someone else from being infected.
References Aids. In Wikipedia. com. Retrieved from http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/HIV/AIDS.