AIDS: Or What I Already Know and What I Hope to Learn

What do I currently know about AIDS?  Quite a lot actually as I came into this class pretty well informed on the subject.  Well, let the listing commence I guess:  I know that AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) is a virus that can be passed through sexual contact, between mother and infant through pregnancy and breast feeding, through tainted blood transfusions, and through IV drug users sharing needles.  You can't spread it though casual contract with infected people like hugging them, shaking their hand, or kissing.  I know that the virus infects white blood cells, killing them, and in turn destroying the immune system.  Thus, you can't actually die from AIDS, but from subsequent infections that can attack the body with a weakened or non-existent immune system.  I know there isn't a cure or a vaccine capable of preventing it.  I know the virus came from a mutation in a similar virus that affected chimps and that people who hunted chimps contracted it originally.  I didn't know that it was in the Congo.  Uh, I knew the disease really started popping up in American and Europe in the early 1980s though the virus existed earlier.  I know that AIDS can be fairly successfully kept from passing on through proper condom use.  South East Asia and Sub-Sahara Africa have the highest AIDS rates in the world.  I guess that about sums up what I know.  

I learned most of this on my own from casual conversations with people, some from sex education classes in middle and high school, from my parents and of course from the media.  Most of my knowledge about sexual matters comes and came from my friends and what I see on television and movies and such.  Luckily, I have a pretty good B.S. detector and can filter out the real information from the crap.  

I guess what I want to know about AIDS globally is what current measures are being used to halt its spread and how successful these methods are.  I know that countries are handing out free condoms and using education programs to help control the incidence of AIDS, but I'm curious to know how widespread these measure are, how available they are, how much it's costing to implement, and how successful these measures are in lowing the AIDS rates among the countries that use them.  

As far as surprising information that I have learned, I was surprised to learn how uniform the symptoms of AIDS were across so many different patients, as presented in the Frontline video.  I always thought that AIDS patients could basically get any disease due to their compromised immune system, but the video showed that most in the early 80s had Pneumocystis pneumonia and a rare form of skin cancer that only affected people with poor immune systems.  This was how doctors were able to diagnose AIDS early on and how they were able to discover the disease, by identifying the highly increased rates of the aforementioned diseases.  

Global Disparities in Money Distribution and its Effect on STDs

As I'm sitting here typing this blog on my computer, eating my bowl of generic brand Fruity Pebbles, and listening to the latest Radiohead album, pretty much the last thing going through my mind is that I could possibly die from an STD like AIDS or Syphilis.  This is most likely because I consider myself an asexual (read: virgin) (read: raging virgin), but also in a large part due to the fact that due to the culture in which I live, with easy and for the most part affordable access to health care, and my ability to pay for said health care, STDs just aren't that big of a worry for many Americans.  Sure there are more serious STDs like AIDS or Herpes which can be fatal and/or last your entire life, but we also have numerous prevention methods available to us as well.  However things are much different in the disadvantaged parts of the world.  

In the poorer parts of the world, particularly Sub-Saharan Africa and South East Asia, STDs run rampant.  Unlike us in America, the people in these places don't have access to cheap health care, or even much health care at all.  Furthermore, education about these diseases isn't widespread because disadvantaged countries can't afford it, so people are spreading them unknowingly and if they do get them, they can't do much about it.  Even STDs that are easily treatable and considered a mere nuisance in America, like chlamydia or gonorrhea, are considerable problems in poorer countries passing untreated from person to person and resulting in birth and fertility problems from prolonged exposure.  Even worse, with the lack of education, people in disadvantaged countries lack access to preventative measures like condoms.  So even if they knew about STDs, they couldn't do much about it, other than being totally abstinent, and we all know that isn't going to happen.  So, unless everyone in the third world becomes socially repressed nerds who spend all day playing Dungeons and Dragons, a lot of sex is going to happen and STDs are going to be spread.

Similar events happen in poor areas and disadvantaged population in wealth countries too.  In the Southern United States, particularly in poor Black communities.  Health care access may be suspect in these areas, or if available, the people there may not be able to afford it.  Large cities can act as breeding grounds for STDs.  Individuals may also lack education, or be mistrusting of the health care community for wrongs committed in the past (e.g. the Tuskegee study).  

In any case, problems with STDs stem from a lack of money and until money starts to flow into poorer areas, things aren't going to get much better for the foreseeable future.