HIV/AIDS
By Soujanya G.
History
Aids began in the early 1900s when an African hunter came in contact with a chimpanzee that had gotten the disease by eating two monkeys. The two monkeys that the chimpanzee has eaten both contained different diseases and usually the immune system of the chimpanzee will delete these diseases. However, there was a one in a million chance that the disease that was beginning to copy itself could have fallen to the other disease inside the chimpanzee and continue copying. This is what happened to patient zero, the man who had hunted the chimpanzee in Africa. However, when AIDS was first recognized, the scientists thought that patient zero was a french gay man named Gaeten Dugas.
Impact of AIDsS
AIDS has an impact on the health sector because it is now bothering the already troubled health sector. Medical costs to treat AIDS has rised. The impact it has on households is that the poorest sectors can get easily contaminated. It impacts children to take care of family members who have fallen ill with the disease. AIDs decreases the labor force, setting back the economy of the country (esp. in Africa).
Treatment
There are many drugs that scientists use in order to contain the spread of AIDS in a human body. There is no perfect cure for AIDS/HIV that has been developed by researchers yet. Every year, almost 2 million dollars is spent on gaining information on this disease and how to treat it. Emily Whitehead is a girl whose leukemia was cured by a procedure that filled her body with a derivative of HIV to activate her body's immune defense system. This procedure has miraculously worked!