AIDS

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Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome
I INTRODUCTION
Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS), human viral disease that ravages the immune system, undermining the body’s ability to defend itself from infection and disease. Caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), AIDS leaves an infected person vulnerable to opportunistic infections. Such infections are harmless in healthy people, but in those whose immune systems have been greatly weakened, they can prove fatal. Although there is no cure for AIDS, new drugs are available that can prolong the life spans and improve the quality of life of infected people.
Infection with HIV does not necessarily mean that a person has AIDS. Some people who have HIV infection may not develop any of the clinical illnesses that define the full-blown disease of AIDS for ten years or more. Physicians prefer to use the term AIDS for cases where a person has reached the final, life-threatening stage of HIV infection.
II PREVALENCE
AIDS was first identified in 1981 among homosexual men and intravenous drug users in New York and California. Shortly after its detection in the United States, evidence of AIDS epidemics grew among heterosexual men, women, and children in sub-Saharan Africa. AIDS quickly developed into a worldwide epidemic, affecting virtually every nation. By 2002 an estimated 38.6 million adults and 3.2 million children worldwide were living with HIV infection or AIDS. The World Health Organization (WHO), a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN), estimates that from 1981 to the end of 2002 about 20 million people died as a result of AIDS. About 4.5 million of those who died were children under the age of 15.
A North America
In the United States about 40,000 new HIV infections occur each year. More than 30 percent of these infections occur in women, and 60 percent occur in ethnic minorities. In 2001 more than 800,000 U.S. residents were infected with HIV, and more than 300,000...