Title: What's the big deal about Aids? This is a critcal essay on AIDS listing treaments, prevention, and facts about AIDS. 5pages, MLA format with Works Cited

What's the big deal about Aids?

"In 1980 and 1981, doctors in Los Angeles and New York became alarmed about the possibility of a new disease when they noticed that some of their homosexual patients had contracted rare forms of cancer and pneumonia. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) identified the new disease-now known as acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS)- in June 1981" (Bender 12). Knowing how to protect someone from HIV, and the proper methods used, will help reduce the chance of a person from getting AIDS.

HIV, human immunodeficiency virus, is a precursor to AIDS. There are three main ways of contracting HIV: in semen during intercourse, from mother to baby during labor, and sharing a syringe with another infected person (Bender 12). After becoming infected with the HIV virus, it could take up to ten years before it develops into AIDS stage (Hyde and Forsyth). There are four major stages of HIV progression into AIDS, acute infection, infection without outward symptoms, persistent swelling of lymph nodes, and finally full-blown AIDS (Dispezio 85).

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HIV Testing AD2

English: The Centers for Disease Control and Preve...

Once you have progressed to the AIDS stage, it is fatal (Jussim).

Sticking a needle into your vein after someone else has used it is an easy way to contract any diseases that they might have. Within a year of the onset of the epidemic, 20 percent of AIDS patients were found to be drug users. However, by 1988 that number increased in certain cites to one-third and one-half of all AIDS cases. Controlling the spread of AIDS among drug abusers is vital to stopping the AIDS epidemic (Check 34-35).

Homosexual men spread the disease to others through unprotected anal sex. If one man has the disease, he can pass it to his partner through the semen. The risk of contracting HIV or AIDS...