AIDS Today

The fight against AIDS has changed from street art to international campaigns.

Funding, Awareness Of Killer Grows

By Sasha Austrie

AIDS is vicious. It has snuffed out the lives of millions and in its wake has destroyed countless lives, left children without parents and taken away any sense or normalcy for those afflicted with the virus.

It is a pandemic of cataclysmic proportions that has held the world in its grasp for more than 20 years. Christened as the gay man’s disease and initially known as Gay Related Immune Deficiency, AIDS has run rampant spreading like wild fire.

According to published statistics, there are 42 million people worldwide living with HIV/AIDS of which 74 percent live in Sub-Saharan Africa. The region is plagued with a lack of education and economic strife.

Origins Of Fear

Knowledge of HIV/AIDS has increased dramatically from its perception as a gay disease in the early 1980s. It can be spread through sexual intercourse, an exchange of bodily fluids, dirty syringes, receiving infected blood products, transplanted organs and from mother to child during pregnancy, birth or breast feeding. It is completely indiscriminate.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 1 million people in the United States are living with HIV. Men who have sex with men represent the largest population living with HIV, with black men having the highest rate of HIV infections.

Although the disease became prevalent in the 1980s, some theories trace the virus back to the late 19th century and early 20th century. The earliest physical evidence of the virus comes from an adult male who lived in what is now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1959.

The consensus among people who have studied the HIV/AIDS is the virus derived from Simian Immunodeficiency Virus, which is a similar strain of HIV found in primates. How the disease crossed over to the human species is where the source of contention lies.

Fighting The Disease

To combat the virulent virus the world has launched an assault on HIV/AIDS. Although there hasn’t been a drug that can eradicate the virus, research has traveled a large expanse of time.

In the first days of the epidemic the virus was a death sentence. Slowly but surely, technology and advancement in medicine has been catching up with the virus. In 1987, Zidovudine or AZT, was the first drug approved to combat HIV/AIDS. Twenty years later there are approximately 30 drugs that, taken in combination cocktails or in a variety of doses, could reduce HIV cells in the body and delay the onset of AIDS.

Not only has medicine come a long way in the world’s battle against HIV/AIDS, but programs are also being funded to educate people of how to protect themselves from the virus and to stop the spread of HIV.

Abstinence programs and sex education are taught in schools, free condoms are distributed globally and needle exchange programs have been set up to prevent dug addicts from spreading the disease.

Funding for HIV research has ballooned into billions of dollars. In 2006, the Joint United Nations Programmes on HIV/AIDS took in $231,336,778 with the Netherlands contributing the most with $38,346,734. USAID, a federal agency that supports long-term and equitable economic growth and advances in U.S. foreign policy, has contributed $6 billion to the fight against HIV/AIDS.