MidnightCall Magazine
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News From Israel MagazineAIDS: A Look Back at 25 Years
Billions of dollars and millions of research hours have been invested in working toward the eradication of a killer disease, but 25 years after its discovery we still do not have a medicine to cure the disease or a vaccine to prevent it.
We have known from the beginning of the efforts to find a cure that HIV/AIDS is a sexually transmitted disease. In 1981, some doctors in New York City and in San Francisco noticed a new disease in some of their patients, a disease that was destroying the patients’ immune systems and killing them in a short time. All the patients were male homosexuals, so they called the disease GRID, an acronym for Gay- elated Immune Deficiency.
The following year, these doctors noticed that other patients — most notably, intravenous drug users and recipients of blood transfusions — who had the symptoms were also dying. So they renamed the disease Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, or AIDS. Since then, the epidemic has spread around the world. Not one continent has remained untouched by the killer virus, which has been classified as a pandemic.
According to the latest statistics, 40 million people worldwide have been infected and are living with HIV/AIDS. The Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS estimates another 45 million people could become infected by 2010. That is only three years from now! How does this plague spread so far in such a short period of time? Jet travel is one of the primary reasons. International shipping trade is another.
Consider international tourism. In 1985, there were 100 million legal travelers; in 1990, that number rose to 457 million; and in 2000, it skyrocketed to nearly 700 million. “Sex tourism”— the practice of traveling to other countries to take advantage of the local sex industry — has undoubtedly fueled this increase. Some foreign cultures bring in children, creating havens for pedophiles, while other countries bring in boys and young men to serve as magnets for homosexual men. Meanwhile, the practice of female prostitution, which, of course, has existed since before biblical times, continues to increase. All the while, male prisons are serving as more of a hotbed than ever for the spread of HIV/AIDS.
Approximately 22 percent of HIV transmission occurs among intravenous drug users who share needles. Poverty also contributes to the spread of AIDS. For example, when there is nothing left to sell in order to bring in money, poor people will often sell their own bodies.
Pharmaceutical companies have developed at least 25 new drugs that help slow the replication of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, or decrease the amount of HIV found in all bodily fluids. HIV is so insidious that it ultimately will become resistant to all medications and eventually leave the patient without an immune system, which in turn will make patients vulnerable to opportunistic infections. Therefore, to try to keep this killer at bay, members of the medical science community must continuously invent increasingly sophisticated drugs.
People who have been infected with HIV/AIDS and live in the industrialized nations have access to these drugs, which can extend a person’s life span by 20 or more years. Thus, complacency has replaced the former fear of AIDS. The downside is that AIDS carriers who
have no symptoms are spreading it to new, unsuspecting sexual partners. Evidently, they do not seem to care that they are knowingly spreading a horrible and terminal disease to others.