The history of HIV/AIDS in the United States began in about 1969, when HIV likely entered the United States through a single infected immigrant from Haiti. In the late 1970s (i.e. 1978) and early 1980s, doctors in Los Angeles, New York City, and San Francisco began seeing young men with Kaposi's sarcoma, a cancer usually associated with elderly men of Mediterranean ethnicity.
As the knowledge that men who had sex with men were dying of an otherwise rare cancer began to spread throughout the medical communities, the syndrome began to be called by the colloquialism "gay cancer." As medical scientists discovered that the syndrome included other manifestations, such as pneumocystis pneumonia, (PCP), a rare form of fungal pneumonia, its name was changed to Gay Related Immune Deficiency ("GRID"). This had an effect of boosting homophobia and adding stigma to homosexuality in the general public, particularly since it seemed that unprotected anal sex was the prevalent way of spreading the disease.
Within the medical community, it quickly became apparent that the disease was not specific to men who have sex with men (as blood transfusion patients, intravenous drug users, heterosexual and bisexual women, and newborn babies became added to the list of afflicted), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) renamed the syndrome AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) in 1982. Hemophiliacs, who require injections of blood clotting factor as a course of treatment, during the late 1970s and 1980s also contracted HIV in large numbers worldwide through the spread of contaminated blood products. It is estimated that nearly 1 million individuals are currently infected with HIV in the country, and the number appears to be increasing each year.
Male to male sexual contact accounted for about half of new cases, and intravenous drug use contributed about a fifth of cases. Despite the availability of syringe access programs, many individuals continue to share and use dirty or infected needles in most American cities.
In addition, the percentage of AIDS diagnoses in the United States in 2007 can be spatially analyzed. There is a higher percentage of AIDS diagnoses in the Eastern and in the Southern most states. The states with similar data figures tend to be clustered together with a few exceptions such as Illinois and Nevada. With the provided data, it can be concluded that the majority of the AIDS diagnoses can be found near coastal areas. It is a fair to state that these coastal areas have a higher population density, which could result in a higher distribution rate of the disease. In other words, areas with the greatest population density tend to transmit the disease more rapidly. In contrast, in less populated areas, the disease is more likely to be localized in a contained area and is not widespread. Also, these areas are harbor areas where various people and cultures make their way into the United States and vice versa. The risk of the high interaction between the U.S. and other countries is that people become more susceptible to disease contraction and transmissions.
Read more about HIV/AIDS In The United States: Public Perception, Containment, Mortality and Morbidity, Disparities in Treatment, Current Status
Famous quotes containing the words united states, aids, united and/or states:
“Vanessa wanted to be a ballerina. Dad had such hopes for her.... Corin was the academically brilliant one, and a fencer of Olympic standard. Everything was expected of them, and they fulfilled all expectations. But I was the one of whom nothing was expected. I remember a game the three of us played. Vanessa was the President of the United States, Corin was the British Prime Minister—and I was the royal dog.”
—Lynn Redgrave (b. 1943)
“Both the Moral Majority, who are recycling medieval language to explain AIDS, and those ultra-leftists who attribute AIDS to some sort of conspiracy, have a clearly political analysis of the epidemic. But even if one attributes its cause to a microorganism rather than the wrath of God, or the workings of the CIA, it is clear that the way in which AIDS has been perceived, conceptualized, imagined, researched and financed makes this the most political of diseases.”
—Dennis Altman (b. 1943)
“We are apt to say that a foreign policy is successful only when the country, or at any rate the governing class, is united behind it. In reality, every line of policy is repudiated by a section, often by an influential section, of the country concerned. A foreign minister who waited until everyone agreed with him would have no foreign policy at all.”
—A.J.P. (Alan John Percivale)
“Methodological individualism is the doctrine that psychological states are individuated with respect to their causal powers.”
—Jerry Alan Fodor (b. 1935)