Aids Virus

Essay by EssaySwap ContributorHigh School, 12th grade February 2008

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AIDS Coping with AIDS, facts, fears, and cures have become frightening in our times . Television shows use the word AIDS with frightening implications that it stands for terror and anxiety.

AIDS is an acronym that stands forAcquired Immune Deficiency Syndrom . Aids is a disease caused by a virus that destroys a person's defense against infections. These defenses are known as the immune system. AIDS can also weaken a person's immune system so that he or she cannot fight off even mild infections and eventually becomes vulnerable to life threatening infections and cancers.

Elizibeth Kubler Ross writes "Since we can no longer deny that AIDS is a life threatening illness that will eventually involve millions of people and decimate large portions of our human population, it is our choice to grow and learn from it , to either help the people with this dread disease or abandon them. It is our choice to live up to this ultimate challenge or parish."

1 Historically, the occurrence of AIDS-like illnesses in populations has closely followed the appearance of HIV. This first cases of AIDS in homosexual men in San Francisco were detected in 1981, and retrospective examination of frozen blood samples of gay men showed the presence of HIV antibodies as early as 1978.

According to recently developed sensitive testing methods, DNA and improved culture techniques, these have enabled researchers to find HIV in patients with AIDS with very few exceptions. HIV has repeatedly isolated from the blood, vaginal secretions and semen of patients with AIDS, findings consistent with the data demonstrating AIDS transmission is due to sexual activity and with infected blood.

Transmission of AIDS is by sexual contact with an infected partner. The virus can enter the body in many different ways, through the vagina, vulva, penis, rectum or...