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.