No One Left Behind ( Hiv / Aids )

The same time of the gay culture boom the disease started also known as GRID (gay related immune deficiency dubbed by the media). The CDC curious

The gay community of San Francisco rebelled against the wishes of the scientists to close the bathhouses, places where homosexual men would go for sexual encounters.  The scientists claimed their findings may support the idea of the illness being sexually transmitted.  The gays felt it was just another political ploy or social discrimination.  They continued to face high intolerance and didn’t want to be labeled the cause of this lethal, unexplained disease.  The original name, Gay-Related Immune Deficiency, GRID, placed a stigma upon the disease, increasing the fear of gays in our society.  Once other cases were investigated, non-gay related cases, everyone was baffled, but it propelled support from all around.  These non-gay related cases were confused and reluctant to come forth to the medical community, as they were not gay and should not have this gay-related disease.  This hindered the research process further.

AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) is related to HIV, but they are not one in the same. A person has AIDS only in the final stages of HIV, after the immune system becomes unable to defend itself against foreign bacteria, other viruses, and fungi, and allows for the development of certain cancers. The world first became aware of AIDS in the early 1980s. Growing numbers of gay men in New York and California were developing rare types of pneumonia and cancer, and a wasting disease was spreading in Uganda. Doctors reported AIDS symptoms under different names, including “gay-related immune deficiency” and “slim,” but by 1985, they reported them all over the world.

In 1981, mysterious cases of opportunistic infections began appearing in clusters (“Timeline”). An opportunistic infection is an unusual infection that appears in people with a weakened immune system (Ojikutu). One disease, pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, surfaced in five gay men living in Los Angeles. Another disease, a rare cancer called Kaposi’s sarcoma appeared in patients in both New York and Los Angeles. When doctors at the time realized this, they noticed obvious similarities. The patients were separated geographically, they were only located in two cities. They were also all gay men, that were previously healthy (Ojikutu). Doctors were also finding that whatever they’re patients had was highly fatal. This mysterious disease was first called GRID, Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. Symptoms began lethargy, diarrhea, weight loss, sweats, rash, and swollen lymph nodes. Initial stages resembled the common flu

In 2015, specifically in LA downtown, I met Sara who is an African American girl who was suffering from HIV virus. She told me her sadly story when she was having sexual things with random people just because of having money. She didn’t have any knowledge about this virus. So, because of that, she got the HIV virus, and she thanked god that she treated so long to be clean. So, some people in this world don’t know what the AIDS means. So, the AIDS is a dangerous virus that attack cells human’s immune system, and if the people who didn’t treat themselves in the hospital, they probably are going to die. It is dangerous because this virus happens when the human’s immune system badly damaged and it becomes impressible to opportunistic infections. When the number of the human CD4 cells decrease below 200 cells per cubic millimeter of blood, it is considered to have progressed to AIDS. People who have the AIDS virus need medical treatment to prevent death. Overall, it takes time to treat around one year, and without treatment it is typically survive about three years (AIDS.gov). According to Tony L. Whitehead that between June 1981 and October 1995 in United states that U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention got report of 501, 310 cases of AIDS. In addition, there were sixty-two percent of groups who have died, and although African American was represent only 12 percent of the United States, African American was represent 34 percent among them. In only five years, the

All the males had unusual infections indicating their immune systems were not working properly and 2 of the males had already died before the report was published. After that, there were multiple cases of homosexual males having the same infections. By the end of 1981, there were a total of 270 reported cases of severe immune deficiency among gay males with 121 of them dead. After the outbreak of AIDS and then HIV, multiple books educating young adults on these incurable diseases were published. Adults also wanted to know what the adolescents of 1986 thought about AIDS.

HIV or human immunodeficiency virus began to take serious play when gay men were infected with a disease that was unknown beginning in roughly 1981. At the start of September 1981, after studying at the Center for disease control in Atlanta Georgia, hepatitis B was found in gay men that traced a serious disease once again unknown. Don Francis wanted to find and trace the exact reason for why the disease was spreading so rapidly. It was an uncommon disease that neither him nor his colleagues knew about.

In early 1981, an unknown epidemic was spreading across America. In June of that year, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported five cases of a strange pneumonia in Los Angeles. By July, 40 cases of an even rarer skin cancer was being reported by providers working in the gay communities of New York and San Francisco. By August, the Associated Press reported that two rare diseases, the skin cancer Kaposi's sarcoma and pneumocystis, a form of pneumonia caused by a parasitic organism, had infected over 100 gay men in America, killing over half of them. By the end of the year, theses combined diseases had taken 121 lives; 1983 gave a name to the disease and by 1984 the virus had been isolated. Two years later, the virus was given its current

It is true that some of the first cases of HIV and AIDS in America were found in gay males. However, once the disease was more widely researched, it was discovered that people other than gays could become infected with the virus, including children, women, and recipients of blood transfusions. Promiscuity among homosexuals is no more common than among straight people ("Sexual Behaviors Text 2"). While having multiple partners and sharing needles through drug use are common causes of AIDS, these things are not exclusive to the gay community.

Approximately 34 years ago a covert infectious agent plagued a distinct group of individuals, and took its rightful place in medicinal history. Young homosexual men were succumbing to rare terminal malignancies at an alarming rate, causing doctors to notify the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention alongside other healthcare agencies of its disturbing effects. In the early 1980’s, light was shed upon a new illness formally described as gay compromise syndrome, GRID (gay-related immune deficiency), or gay cancer. After a significant number of heterosexuals were infected, those names were considered redundant and the acronym AIDS was adopted.

After reading the five given articles carefully there are critical points that I would like to articulate in my reaction paper. These articles provoked me to think that we are blessed to have health professional that were able to discover HIV/AIDS and the causes of Kaposi 's Sarcoma and Pneumocystis pneumonia of homosexual men in July 1981, following the report of these cases of PCP and cases of other rare life-threatening opportunistic infections and cancers in America we began to recognize the importance of being aware of HIV/AIDS (Altman). Maybe not need

This disease was not just localized to one area of the globe, or to one particular race, gender, or socio-economic class of individual. HIV was quickly spreading to individuals from all walks of life. Yet, why was there a stigma associated with the disease that prevented people from discussing it? Advancements in treating HIV had progressed drastically, there were several celebrities living with the disease and publicly sharing their stories, but for the most part HIV remained, and still remains today, a closely tight-lipped secret that is rarely spoken about in public or private. In the early 1990’s, due to the social stigmatization of the disease, there was a possibility that a person could be fired from their job if it was disclosed that the individual was HIV+. This in turn, could result in a change in one’s socio-economic standing. This loss of employment would also mean a loss in health care benefits, affecting the person’s ability to seek continued medical treatment for the

This video also mentioned that the first signs of the epidemic were not prevalent all over the United States; rather, they were only prevalent in big cities where the gay-lifestyle was prominent, which suggests that the culture of the homosexual community in the early 1980s was related to the risk of AIDS

The world changed in the 1980s. A deadly virus emerged and spread faster than common sense could keep up, fueled by fear, paranoia, and prejudice. The disease was first dubbed GRID, an acronym for Gay-Related Immune Deficiency since it seemed to prey primarily on homosexual men. As it was observed that blood transfusion recipients and intravenous drug users were also contracting it the name was replaced with Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) and its precursor Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). As the decade progressed the body count rose and the world lost such beloved celebrities as Liberace, Freddie Mercury, Robert Reed, and Rock Hudson. Rumors swirled in its wake, ranging from the bizarre to the halfway believable. It was

Doctors and scientists such as Arye Rubinstein and Marcus Conant pioneered in the early research of the disease, despite enormous discrimination against their patients and the gay community in general. Arye Rubinstein, compassionate for infected children, forcefully pushed for the theory that AIDS was not just a gay disease. He brought up the children’s cases at city immunology meetings. “There is something we need to look out for”, he warned. However, the other doctors assured him it was certainly just some new kind of congenital cytomegalovirus infection. At an immunological meeting at Cold Spring Harbor, Rubinstein presented more data, proving that what he was seeing couldn’t be the work of the CMV herpes virus. Yet the other scientists