Aids Epidemic :: Free AIDS Essays

HIV/Aids Epidemic HIV/AIDs is a huge epidemic still plaguing society today. The lack of knowledge and technical advances has caused an increasing number of cases. It has made its way around the world since the 1940s, causing countries to join together in the fight against AIDs. With all the campaigning that has been done the numbers of cases continue to rise. Countries have separated the disease into three patterns to make it easier to distinguish the effects that AIDs has on different regions of the world. As well as what subtypes sprout from what areas. HIV/AIDs can be spread in many different ways. The future is still uncertain for the victims whom lives have been dramatically changed by this deadly disease. It started back in 1940 when the virus jump from an animal to a human, it came from either a monkey or chimpanzee. A man who is unknown, still today, went to a hospital in Leopoldville, Africa which is now know as Kinshasa. The unknown man gave blood in a clinic for a study on blood diseases. It was then frozen in a test tube and forgotten about. Nearly a quarter of a century later, around the mid 1980s, scientist took a look at the blood again due to the growing AIDs epidemic. They discovered the man had the HIV virus which causes AIDs.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  AIDs has several different subtypes of the virus, all which can be traced to the Leopoldville man. The variety of types makes it hard to find a cure for the disease since it is constantly changing and mutating it’s self. The president of the United States and the prime minister of France announced in 1987 that they were going to join together to fight against the issue.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The virus has been divided up into three patterns. Pattern 1 is the type of AIDs in North America, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. In these parts of the world AIDs is spread mostly by homosexual intercourse and found in homosexual and bisexual men most often. The number of cases has drastically dropped from blood transfusion due to routine screenings. The sharing of needles by intravenous drug abusers seems to be becoming a huge problem in helping to spread the disease faster. Since homosexual and bisexual men seem to be at a greater risk for the virus, the ratio of men to women is 20:1 in the pattern 1 countries.