HIV AIDS Pandemic Outbreak and Discussion

HIV/AIDS Pandemic: A Look Back in Time In modern times, one could easily argue that the HIV/AIDS pandemic was the single most destructive widespread illness to sweep the globe. In summary, the death toll from HIV/AIDS has reached a total of 36 million people. At this time there are around 31-35 million individuals who have been diagnosed with HIV: the bulk of these people reside in Sub-Saharan Africa, a place where around 5% of the total number of people are infected (mphonline.org).

While an HIV diagnosis is not the death sentence that it was decades ago, there is still a need for more research and developments in preventing and treating the condition. Looking backwards to the past can be tremendously beneficial in understanding the journey the disease has taken, starting with the first outbreak. The disease was very pinpointed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1976. The outbreak as it manifested in the United States was more mysterious.

The first whisper of the disease was reported by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in their weekly Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report detailed cases of an uncommon lung infection: “In the period October 1980-May 1981, 5 young men, all active homosexuals, were treated for biopsy-confirmed Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia at 3 different hospitals in Los Angeles, California. Two of the patients died. All 5 patients had laboratory-confirmed previous or current cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection and candidal mucosal infection. Case reports of these patients follow” (cdc.gov, 1981).

The scientific community now views this as the first report of AIDS that the world had ever seen. By the end of 198, there was a total number of 270 cases of this same mysterious immune deficiency, primarily seen in gay men. Also by the end of the year, slightly less than half of those men had died (hiv.gov). The following year demonstrates how organizations around the nation began to mobilize around the AIDS crisis. A clinic was set up in San Francisco; another one was developed in New York.

This year was notable because it represented the first time that the U.S. government devoted time and attention to addressing the disease: on April 13, 1982, the first congressional hearing on HIV/AIDS happened where the CDC aired their estimate that there were perhaps tens of thousands of infected people probably living in the United States, unaware of the fact that they were infected.

Thus, “In September, Congressional representatives Henry Waxman and Phillip Burton introduce legislation to allocate $5 million to CDC for surveillance and $10 million to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for AIDS research” (hiv.gov). This move signaled to the rest of the world just how serious the outbreak was: with so many people infected and unaware of it, the disease could spread rapidly with people completely oblivious to the fact that they were spreading it. In many ways, that’s exactly what happened.

The following year, 1983, was a noteworthy year regarding the spread of the disease. In this year, the first cases of females infected with AIDS emerged, as many of these women were the female sexual partners of men infected with the disease (CDC.gov, 1983). In the summer of this year, San Francisco General Hospital opens up a ward dedicated exclusively to incidences of AIDS and it is filled within days (hiv.gov).

This was also the year when the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report was able to rule out all casual transmissions of HIV/AIDS such as via food, water, air, and environmental surfaces (cdc.gov, 1983). This was so significant because it provided clarity to the rest of the world about how people were at risk in becoming infected—and how they were not.

While it was good that major centers and organizations for health and safety took this disease so seriously from the moment it emerged in the nation, many members of society dismissed the disease as something that was merely a problem of the gay community. “Early in the 1980s, AIDS was considered a “gay disease,” and a disease that drug addicts got” (Barnhart, 2014).

Some people even suggested that the illness was retribution from God for homosexual behavior which he condemns members of the gay community for (Mwangi et al., 2014). These damaging stigmas were some of the things that had to be overcome in terms of fighting the disease and raising awareness for it. The education of the general public has long been one of the greatest weapons in fighting the disease—that along with perseverance (Barnhart, 2014).

The fact that famous people came forward as being infected with the disease, helped wake the general public up regarding the widespread magnitude of the illness. For example, Liberace, Rock Hudso, Freddy Mercury and Magic Johnson all came forward as being infected with HIV/AIDS and this helped in part to remove some of the tremendously damaging stigma that the disease carries, even today.

In regards to whether or not HIV/AIDS is a pandemic or epidemic, one could say that the disease started as an epidemic and then transformed in scale and size to a pandemic. In the early 1980s HIV/AIDS appeared to be attacking people at the same time in various communities and was beginning to spread in a dangerous.