How Has AIDS Affected Our Society?

How has AIDS affected our Society?


     Today more Americans are infected with STD's than at any other time in

history. The most serious of these diseases is AIDS. Since the first cases were

identified in the United States in 1981, AIDS has touched the lives of millions

of American families. This deadly disease is unlike any other in modern history.

Changes in social behavior can be directly linked to AIDS.  Its overall effect

on society has been dramatic.

     It is unknown whether AIDS and HIV existed and killed in the U.S. and

North America before the early 1970s.  However in the early 1980s, "deaths by

opportunistic infections, previously observed mainly in tissue-transplant

recipients receiving immunosuppressive therapy", were recognized in otherwise

healthy homosexual men. In 1983 French oncologist Luc Montagnier and scientists

at the Pasteur Institute in Paris isolated what appeared to be a new human

retrovirus from the lymph node of a man at risk for having AIDS. At the same

time, scientists working in the laboratory of American research, scientist

Robert Gallo at the National Cancer Institute, one of the National Institutes of

Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and a group headed by American virologist Jay Levy

at the University of California at San Francisco isolated a retrovirus from

people with AIDS and from individuals having contact with people with AIDS. All

three groups of scientists had isolated what is now known as HIV, the virus that

causes AIDS. In 1995 HIV was estimated to infect almost 20 million people

worldwide, and several million of those people had developed AIDS.  The disease

is obviously an important social issue.

     AIDS has caused many to rethink their own social behavior.  People are

forced to use caution when involving themselves in sexual activity.  They must

use contraception to avoid the dangers of infection.  Many people consider HIV

infection and AIDS to be completely preventable because the routes of HIV

transmission are so well known. To completely prevent transmission, however,

dramatic changes in sexual behavior and drug dependence would have to occur

throughout the world.  Prevention efforts that promote sexual awareness through

open discussion and condom distribution in public schools have been opposed due

to fear that these efforts encourage sexual promiscuity among young adults.

Similarly, needle-exchange programs have been criticized as promoting drug abuse.

Governor Christine Todd Whitman vetoed a bill in New Jersey that tried to create

a needle-exchange program.  She was accused of being "compassionless".  She

replied that she could not allow drug addicts to continue to break the law.  By

distributing needles, she felt that she was, in fact, encouraging them to break

the law.

     Prevention programs that identify HIV-infected individuals and notify

their sexual partners, as well as programs that promote HIV testing at the time

of marriage or pregnancy, have been criticized for invading personal privacy.

     Efforts aimed at public awareness have been propelled by community-based

organizations, such as Project Inform and Act-Up, that provide current

information to HIV-infected individuals and to individuals at risk for infection.

Public figures and celebrities who are themselves HIV-infected or have died

from AIDS-including American basketball player Magic Johnson, American actor

Rock Hudson, American diver Greg Louganis, American tennis player Arthur Ashe,

and British musician Freddie Mercury-have personalized the disease of AIDS and

have thereby helped society come to terms with the enormity of the epidemic. In

memory of those people who died from AIDS, especially in the early years of the

epidemic, a giant quilt project was initiated in which each panel of the quilt

was dedicated to the memory of an individual AI
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