HIV/AIDS

Throughout the years I have learned a little bit about HIV/AIDS. Most of the information that I have learned has been through health class in high school. There is a lot about this deadly disease that I'm sure I don't know much about but I have a little idea of what this disease is and what it can do. I understand that HIV is sort of the disease that you get that leads to AIDS. Once a person gets AIDS there is not really much they can do to try to help themselves, there is no cure for AIDS and it must be incredibly hard to deal with. AIDS is a deadly virus that attacks your body's immune system eventually to the point where you cannot fight off pretty much any small infection or sickness. It allows other things to kill your body just because you no longer have the ability to fight them off. This disease became a headline in the late 80's and early 90's and was thought to only affect men in the gay population at first which attached a major stigma to it. A lot of people don't approve of a homosexual lifestyle and therefore did not even care about trying to save these people. It took a while for the U.S. to understand that AIDS could affect anyone man or women of any sexual orientation. We also know now that it is transmitted sexually between two people. It spread more easily through anal intercourse at first which is why it was so prevalent in the gay community.

It has become a huge problem globally. As we can see when looking at how it is spread across the globe, poorer areas like South and Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa have major problems with the amount of cases of AIDS. These areas need more support in health care and education to help the people in these countries to understand the disease and how it is being spread to such a major part of their population. I think if there is anything that I want to know more about it would have to be about treatment and also potential cures for HIV/AIDS. I understand that there isn't a cure but I want to know what kind of research is being done and how hard people are working to try and fix this epidemic. I also don't understand why people in Africa with AIDS seem to have such a shorter life span than those in wealthier countries like the U.S. The most shocking thing from the videos this week for me was the amount of poverty in countries like Namibia. I knew they were moving towards urbanization in many areas and I didn't know that things were still so rural and so many people there were poor. It was very sad to see all of the people that could barely afford food as well as all of the kids that were head of the households.