AIDS :: Free AIDS Essays

AIDS   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Aids is a disease that effects the immune system. Your immune system is unable to fight off diseases, viruses, and infections. Aids usually makes you very skinny and tired, and it effects the nerves system in your brain. You also can get certain cancers from aids especially Kaposi’s sarcoma, are purple lesions on the skin, and tumors known as B-cell lymphomas. Aids can be transmitted through several ways by blood, through intimate sexual contact, from infected mothers to there babies in there uterus, and even through infected mother’s milk. A major way of getting the disease was through blood transfusion that was before they had a test for screening blood. Another major way of getting it is through blood contaminated needles by intravenous drug abusers. Blood donors and casual contact is definitely not a way you can catch the disease. It could take up to ten years for symptoms to develop because it usually stays dormant. There are several different strains of the aids virus and it continually changes in a persons immune system. Because of this it makes it very hard to develop a vaccine for aids. Dramatic progress is being made in short time to identify the aids virus and transmission and mechanisms, in which it produces the disease. Research centers treat people who have the aids virus, and those who have been infected but not yet have developed the symptoms. The first drug developed was AZT in 1986-87. It has been shown to be partially effective in clinical symptoms, but the death rate with aids are likely to survive in the long run with adequate treatment.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Aids raises many ethical, legal, and civil right issues. Live mandatory testing of all citizens or of particular populations, like for marriage license applicants. It also demands discrimination in housing , employment, and medical treatments and confidentiality versus notification of sex partners.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The first place aids was discovered was in New York in1979. The cause of this disease was retrovirus which is Human Immunodeficiency Virus, HIV. Which was identified in 1983-84 by scientists working at the National Cancer Institute in the United States and the Pasteur Institute in