THE SPREAD AND CONTROL OF HIV/AIDS IN COMPREHENSIVE HEALTH CENTER
INTRODUCTION
It is sometimes difficult to recall how it all started, how we arrived at this stage of our journey through a global disaster, engaging one of the most serious threat to public health in our lifetime. The story began a long time ago. AIDS was to enter the world’s consciousness and became part of the vocabulary of the human soul as a result of a dawning awareness of the advent of a new and strange disease first reported in California, in 1981. In July 1981, the New York Times reported an outbreak of a rare form of cancer among gay men in New York and California, first referred to as the “gay cancer”; but medically know as Kaposi Sarcoma. About the same time, emergency rooms in New York City began to see a rash of seemingly healthy young men presenting with fevers, flu like symptoms, and a pneumonia called Pneumocystis. About a year later, the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) link the illness to blood and coins the term AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome). In that first year over 1600 cases were diagnosed with close to 700 deaths (CDC, 1981). Probably, no one actually expected the magnitude of the epidemic that was in the making. However, evidence of a gathering storm was soon arriving. The presence of related retroviruses in African monkeys and apes and the close relationship of HIV to a Chimpanzee Immunodeficiency virus all suggest that Central Africa may have been the site of evolution of HIV. Some people think that there are other possible origins of HIV. One of these is the suggestion that HIV was a deliberate or accidental product of biological warfare research. That is not possible, since the technology and the basic knowledge that would have been necessary to create such a virus had not been developed in 1975, when the epidemic began to grow.
HIV is a virus. Viruses infect the cells of living organisms and replicate (make new copies of themselves) within those cells. A virus can also damage human cells, which is one of the things that can make an infected creature become ill. HIV is the virus that causes AIDS. People can become infected with HIV from other people who already have it, and when they are infected they can then go on to infect other people. Basically, this is how HIV is spread. HIV stands for the ‘Human Immunodeficiency Virus’. Someone who is diagnosed as infected with HIV is said to be ‘HIV+’ or ‘HIV positive’.
