Where Did Hiv Come From
HIV is thought to have developed from Simian Immunodeficiency Virus , first transmitted to humans who consumed and butchered primates for bushmeat in the African country of Cameroon. The virus is thought to have began spreading amongst the local populations and adapting to the human body. As the virus adapted, it’s virility amongst humans increased causing greater rates of infection during the 1950’s. After this the rise of worldwide travel ensured its development into a global pandemic.
What Is The ‘four
In 1983, the Centers for Disease Control in the United States listed the main at-risk groups, including partners of people with AIDS, people who inject drugs, haemophiliacs and people who have recently been to Haiti. At the time that cases of AIDS began to emerge in the USA, the absence of definitive information about HIV and its link to AIDS, inflated the panic and stigma surrounding the epidemic. Before long people began to talk colloquially of a 4-H Club at risk of AIDS: homosexuals, haemophiliacs, heroin addicts and Haitians, contributing to further stigmatisation.21
Stigma In The Early Years
When the first few cases of AIDS emerged, people believed the disease was only contracted by men who had sex with men. The CDC called this infection GRIDS, or gay-related immunodeficiency syndrome. Shortly after, the CDC published a case definition calling the disease AIDS.
Public response was negative in the early years of the epidemic. In 1983, a doctor in New York was threatened with eviction, leading to the first AIDS discrimination lawsuit.
Bathhouses across the country closed due to high-risk sexual activity. Some schools also barred children with HIV from attending.
In 1987, the United States placed a travel ban on visitors and immigrants with HIV. President Obama lifted this ban in 2010.
The United States government resisted funding needle exchange programs due to the war on drugs. NEPs were shown to be effective at reducing HIV transmission. Some believe that this resistance accounts for 4,400 to 9,700 avoidable transmissions.
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What Were The Past Themes Of World Aids Day
1988 Inaugural Event
1989 Our World, Our Lives Lets Take Care of Each Other
1990 Women and AIDS
1994 AIDS and the Family
1995 Shared Rights, Shared Responsibilities
1996 One World. One Hope.
1997 Children Living in a World with AIDS
1998 Forces of Change: World AIDS Campaign With Young People
1999 Listen, Learn, Live! World AIDS Campaign with Children & Young People
2000 AIDS: Men Make a Difference
2001 I care. Do you?
2002 Live and Let Live: Stigma and Discrimination
2003 Live and Let Live: Stigma and Discrimination
2004 Have you heard me today? Women, Girls, HIV and AIDS
2005 Stop AIDS. Keep the Promise.
2006 Keep the Promise Accountability
2007 Keep the Promise Leadership Take the Lead
2008 Keep the Promise Leadership Lead, Empower, Deliver”
2009 Keep the Promise Universal Access and Human Right
2010 Keep the Promise Universal Access and Human Right
2011 Getting to Zero: Zero New HIV infections. Zero discrimination. Zero AIDS-related deaths.
2012 Getting to Zero: Zero New HIV infections. Zero discrimination. Zero AIDS-related deaths.
2013 Getting to Zero: Zero New HIV infections. Zero discrimination. Zero AIDS-related deaths.
2014 Getting to Zero: Zero New HIV infections. Zero discrimination. Zero AIDS-related deaths.
2015 Getting to Zero: Zero New HIV infections. Zero discrimination. Zero AIDS-related deaths.
2016 Access Equity Rights Now
2018 Know Your Status
Impact On Gay And Bisexual Men
- While estimates show that gay and bisexual men comprise only about 2% of the U.S. population, male-to-male sexual contact accounts for most new HIV infections and most people living with HIV .58
- Annual new infections among gay and bisexual men declined overall between 2015 and 2019 but remained stable among Black and Latino gay and bisexual men.59
- Blacks gay and bisexual men accounted for the largest number of new diagnoses among this group in 2019, followed by Latino gay and bisexual men .60 Additionally, according to a recent study, Black gay and bisexual men were found to be at a much higher risk of being diagnosed with HIV during their lifetimes compared with Latino and white gay and bisexual men.61 Young Black gay and bisexual men are at particular risk â Black gay and bisexual men ages 20-29 accounted for 51% of new diagnoses among that age group and 13% of all diagnoses.62
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What Is The Four
In 1983, the Centers for Disease Control in the United States listed the main at-risk groups, including partners of people with AIDS, people who inject drugs, haemophiliacs and people who have recently been to Haiti. At the time that cases of AIDS began to emerge in the USA, the absence of definitive information about HIV and its link to AIDS, inflated the panic and stigma surrounding the epidemic. Before long people began to talk colloquially of a 4-H Club at risk of AIDS: homosexuals, haemophiliacs, heroin addicts and Haitians, contributing to further stigmatisation.21
A Tax To Fund Treatment
Some action taken by African heads of state to fight the scourge did not go down well at home. A tax introduced in 1999 by Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe to help orphans and sufferers met with resistance. It is still in place today. In 2004 Mugabe admitted that his own family had been affected by AIDS. He said the disease was “one of the greatest challenges facing our nation.”
Many different approaches to tackling HIV/AIDS in Africa
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What Is The Theme Of World Aids Day In 2021
The theme for World AIDS Day this year is End Inequalities, End Aids. The importance of this theme reflects the stigma that is attached to the disease and the people who live with it.
In 2020, the statistics of those living with AIDS are staggering as the WHO estimates about 37.7million people are currently living with HIV. During the same year, 1.5million people were infected and 680,000 people died from an HIV-related illness.
This years theme stems from the need to provide healthcare to people in lower-income countries or to those in Western countries who cant afford treatment. It is also meant to raise awareness of global targets for 2020 that were not met.
In response to World AIDS Day, the WHO says they are calling on global leaders and citizens to rally to confront the inequalities that drive AIDS and to reach people who are currently not receiving essential HIV services.
When And Where Did Hiv Start In Humans
Studies of some of the earliest known samples of HIV provide clues about when it first appeared in humans and how it evolved. The first verified case of HIV is from a blood sample taken in 1959 from a man living in what is now Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The sample was retrospectively analysed and HIV detected. There are numerous earlier cases where patterns of deaths from common opportunistic infections, now known to be AIDS-defining, suggest that HIV was the cause, but this is the earliest incident where a blood sample can verify infection.9
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Canadian Flight Attendant Theory
A Canadian airline steward named Gaëtan Dugas was referred to as “Case 057” and later “Patient O” with the alphabet letter “O” standing for “outside Southern California”, in an early AIDS study by Dr. William Darrow of the Centers for Disease Control. Because of this, many people had considered Dugas to be responsible for taking HIV to North America. However, HIV reached New York City around 1971 while Dugas did not start work at Air Canada until 1974. In Randy Shilts‘ 1987 book And the Band Played On , Dugas is referred to as AIDS’s Patient Zero instead of “Patient O”, but neither the book nor the movie states that he had been the first to bring the virus to North America. He was incorrectly called “Patient Zero” because at least 40 of the 248 people known to be infected by HIV in 1983 had had sex with him, or with a person who had sexual intercourse with Dugas.
Where We Are Now: 2000
Since 2000, additional factors have begun contribute to the the global spread of HIV. Heroin addiction in Asia has been on the rise, which brought with it dirty needles and the risk of new infections. India suffered with over 2 million diagnoses alone, in spite of the government’s refusal to admit the epidemic had adversely affected the nation.
The WHO released its comprehensive report examining HIV and AIDS in all of its 25-year history in 2010. This report had good news for developed nations: by 2008, the U.S. domestic HIV infection rate was considered effectively stable, and has remained so to this day. The report also demonstrated that while insistent public awareness campaigns about safe sex and other methods of transmission had slowed the rate of HIV infection in developed countries, there was much to be done elsewhere.
Global Education and Aid Efforts
Under President Bush, the U.S. committed funds to help African countries, but the funds were mismanaged and the spread of HIV continued unabated. Of the 4.1 million cases in sub-Saharan Africa then, only 1% received the available drugs. This led to the WHO’s declaration of the failure to treat the 6 million AIDS patients living in developing nations as a global public health emergency.
HIV Denialism Disrupts Aid
By the time Mbeki was recalled from the presidency in 2008 and one year before the FDA approved its 100th HIV/AIDs drug, an estimated 16.9% of South Africans aged 15-49 were HIV positive.
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Hiv And Aids: An Origin Story
When HIV first began infecting humans in the 1970s, scientists were unaware of its existence. Now, more than 35 million people across the globe live with HIV/AIDS. The medical community, politicians and support organizations have made incredible progress in the fight against this formerly unknown and heavily stigmatized virus. Infection rates have fallen or stabilized in many countries across the world, but we have a long way to go.
Image via aids.gov. The WHO estimates that 97 percent of the world’s HIV positive population lives in low income nations where anti-viral treatments are scarce or unavailable.
Tracing The Long Convoluted History Of The Aids Epidemic
The common narrative holds that the spread of HIV and AIDS among humans can be traced back to one flight attendant in the 1980s. But while that individual certainly did spread the virus, he was far from the first to do it.
In fact, humans had been infected with HIV as far back as at least the early 1900s, writes renowned science journalist David Quammen, who traced the genetic origins of the AIDS epidemic by reviewing scientific literature, consulting researchers and traveling to the geographic source of the deadly disease.
The story Quammen puts forward in his newly published work, The Chimp and the River: How AIDS Emerged From an African Forest, is an edited and reshaped version of a chapter from Spillover, his much larger 2012 book about zoonotic diseases.
The AIDS pandemic results from a single spillover of what was a chimpanzee virus, from one chimpanzee to one human, in the southeastern corner of Cameroon back around 1908, give or take a margin of error, Quammen told The Post.
But unless youve been paying close attention to developments in scientific literature, Quammen said, thats shockingly different than what we knew.
Knowing the origins of a disease like is crucially important for preventing instances of the same sort of thing, Quammen said.
She could tell from that the ancestor of all the viruses in human-causing pandemic AIDS around the world came from a chimp in southeastern Cameroon, Quammen said.
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A Brief History Of The Epidemic In America
HIV was first identified in 1981 and is the cause of one of the most deadly and persistent epidemics in human history.
The identification of the virus began with rare lung infections and rare and unusually aggressive cancers in young gay men in New York and California. By December 1981, doctors found these same symptoms in five infants whose mothers were drug users and sex workers.
In 1992, AIDS became the number one cause of death for men in the U.S. aged 2544. By 1995, there were 500,000 reported cases of AIDS in the country. However, in 1996 the number of new AIDS cases declined for the first time since the epidemic began.
Definitions Of Hiv And Aids
The human immunodeficiency virus has infected tens of millions of people around the globe in the past three decades, with devastating results. In its advanced stageacquired immunodeficiency syndrome the infected individual has no protection from diseases that may not even threaten people who have healthy immune systems. While medical treatment can delay the onset of AIDS, no cure is available for HIV or AIDS.
The human immunodeficiency virus kills or impairs the cells of the immune system and progressively destroys the bodys ability to protect itself. Over time, a person with a deficient immune system may become vulnerable to common and even simple infections by disease-causing organisms such as bacteria or viruses. These infections can become life-threatening.
The term AIDS comes from acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. AIDS refers to the most advanced stage of HIV infection. Medical treatment can delay the onset of AIDS, but HIV infection eventually results in a syndrome of symptoms, diseases, and infections. The diagnosis of AIDS requires evidence of HIV infection and the appearance of specific conditions or diseases beyond just the HIV infection. Only a licensed medical provider can make an AIDS diagnosis. A key concept is that all people diagnosed with AIDS have HIV, but an individual may be infected with HIV and not yet have AIDS.
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History Of Hiv And Aids Overview
KEY POINTS:
The history of the HIV and AIDS epidemic began in illness, fear and death as the world faced a new and unknown virus. However, scientific advances, such as the development of antiretroviral drugs, have enabled people with access to treatment to live long and healthy lives with HIV.
Here, we go through the key historical moments that have defined the HIV epidemic over the past 30 years.
Groups And Subtypes Of Hiv
Genetic studies have led to a general classification system for HIV that is primarily based on the degree of similarity in viral gene sequence. The two major classes of HIV are HIV-1 and HIV-2. HIV-1 is divided into three groups, known as group M , group O , and group N . Worldwide, HIV-1 group M causes the majority of HIV infections, and it is further subdivided into subtypes A through K, which differ in expression of viral genes, virulence, and mechanisms of transmission. In addition, some subtypes combine with one another to create recombinant subtypes. HIV-1 group M subtype B is the virus that spread from Africa to Haiti and eventually to the United States. Pandemic forms of subtype B are found in North and South America, Europe, Japan, and Australia. Subtypes A, C, and D are found in sub-Saharan Africa, although subtypes A and C are also found in Asia and some other parts of the world. Most other subtypes of group M are generally located in specific regions of Africa, South America, or Central America.
In 2009 a new strain of HIV-1 was discovered in a woman from Cameroon. The virus was closely related to a strain of SIV found in wild gorillas. Researchers placed the new virus into its own group, HIV-1 group P, because it was unique from all other types of HIV-1. It was unclear whether the newly identified virus causes disease in humans.
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Bid To Make Tests Compulsory
The fight against AIDS by Kaundas successor Edgar Lungu met with some hitches when he tried to make AIDS-testing compulsory in Zambia. Lungu said in 2016 that the policy was non-negotiable. But a huge outcry in Zambia and abroad forced him to backpedal especially as the World Health Organization made clear that compulsion encourages the stigmatization of HIV-positive people.
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Unaids Sets Ambitious Goals
UNAIDS the United Nations body that works on HIV/AIDS set itself and the world an ambitious goal that it called 90-90-90. And it wanted to achieve the goal by the year 2020.
90-90-90 means 90% of all people living with HIV will know their HIV status, 90% of all people with a diagnosed HIV infection will receive sustained antiretroviral therapy, and 90% of all people receiving antiretroviral therapy will have viral suppression.
On the first two counts, we managed to get to 84% by 2020. On the final count, we got to 66%. So, we failed. And the target has been moved to the year 2030.
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The Origin Of The Aids Virus
From time to time, new diseases are discovered. In the past 20 or so years we have seen new diseases like hantavirus, ebola virus, Legionnaires’ disease, lyme disease, chronic fatigue syndrome and toxic shock syndrome. Among these new diseases, AIDS has become the most notorious.
In 1980 and 1981, doctors in the United States discovered that young gay men and IV-drug users, were mysteriously getting diseases most often seen when the immune system is damaged. As the months progressed, more and more people in these groups began to die from diseases associated with a damaged immune system. This trend was also beginning to be seen in Western Europe. As the numbers began to dramatically increase, it became clear that a new disease was upon us. AIDS was identified as a new disease in 1981. Human immunodeficiency virus was co-discovered several years later by Luc Montagnier and Robert Gallo.
AIDS is caused by HIV. HIV is believed to have originated in Africa sometime between the late 1940s and the early 1950s. The earliest known case was in a man from the Belgian Congo in 1959 .
Once HIV entered humans, over time it spread person-to-person primarily through heterosexual contact. In fact, even today, most of the worlds HIV/AIDS cases are spread by heterosexual contact, not by homosexual contact or by needle sharing.
Until next time . . . Work hard, play hard, play safe, stay sober!
Rick Sowadsky, M.S.P.H.