AIDS

AIDS

Is the message getting through? We already know enough about AIDS to

prevent its spread, but ignorance, complacency, fear and bigotry continue

to stop many from taking adequate precautions.

We know enough about how the infection is transmitted to protect

ourselves from it without resorting to such extremes as mandatory testing,

enforced quarantine or total celibacy. But too few people are heeding the

AIDS message. Perhaps many simply don't like or want to believe what they

hear, preferring to think that AIDS "can't happen to them." Experts

repeatedly remind us that infective agents do not discriminate, but can

infect any and everyone. Like other communicable diseases, AIDS can strike

anyone. It is not necessarily confined to a few high-risk groups. We must

all protect ourselves from this infection and teach our children about it

in time to take effective precautions. Given the right measures, no one

need get AIDS.

The pandemic continues:

Many of us have forgotten about the virulence of widespread epidemics,

such as the 1917/18 influenza pandemic which killed over 21 million people,

including 50,000 Canadians. Having been lulled into false security by

modern antibiotics and vaccines about our ability to conquer infections,

the Western world was ill prepared to cope with the advent of AIDS in 1981.

(Retro- spective studies now put the first reported U.S. case of AIDS as

far back as 1968.) The arrival of a new and lethal virus caught us off

guard. Research suggests that the agent responsible for AIDS probably

dates from the 1950s, with a chance infection of humans by a modified

Simian virus found in African green monkeys. Whatever its origins,

scientists surmise that the disease spread from Africa to the Caribbean

and Europe, then to the U.S. Current estimates are that 1.5 to 2 million

Americans are now probably HIV carriers, with higher numbers in Central

Africa and parts of the Caribbean.

Recapping AIDS - the facts: ---------------------------

AIDS is an insidious, often fatal but less contagious disease than

measles, chicken pox or hepatitis B. AIDS is thought to be caused

primarily by a virus that invades white blood cells (lymphocytes) -

especially T4-lymphocytes or T-helper cells - and certain other body cells,

including the brain. In 1983 and 1984, French and U.S. researchers

independently identified the virus believed to cause AIDS as an unusual

type of slow-acting retrovirus now called "human immunodeficiency virus"

or HIV. Like other viruses, HIV is basically a tiny package of genes. But

being a retrovirus, it has the rare capacity to copy and insert its genes

right into a human cell's own chromosomes (DNA).