AIDS

36 Pages 9067 Words

people were living with full-blown AIDS. In Canada about 4,200 new HIV infections occur each year. Nearly 25 percent of these infections occur in women. In 2002 about 55,000 Canadians were living with HIV infection and about 18,000 people were living with full-blown AIDS.
The incidence of new cases of HIV infections and AIDS deaths has significantly decreased in Canada and the United States since 1995. This decrease is attributed to the availability of new drug treatments and public health programs that target people most at risk for infection. But while the overall rate of HIV infection seems to be on a downturn, certain populations appear to be at greater risk for the disease. In the United States in 1987, Caucasians accounted for 60 percent of AIDS cases and blacks and Hispanics only 39 percent. But by 2000 the trend had reversed: 26 percent of new cases were diagnosed in Caucasians and 73 percent in blacks and Hispanics. Likewise the number of female AIDS patients in the United States has increased significantly in recent years, from 7 percent of all AIDS cases in 1985 to 30 percent in 2000. In the United States, African American and Hispanic women accounted for 82 percent of AIDS cases among women in 2000.
B Europe
In western Europe the first cases of AIDS were detected in the early 1980s, and by the late 1990s, at least 30,000 new HIV infections occurred each year. In 2002 about 570,000 western Europeans were HIV positive, and 25 percent of these cases were women. Before the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1991, eastern Europe reported few HIV cases. But since 1995, HIV infection has spread rapidly in cities of several eastern European countries, including Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova. The WHO estimates that the total number of HIV infections in this region may have risen from less than 30,000 in 1995 to about 1 million in 2002.
C Developing Nations
While cases of AIDS have been reported...