AIDS and YOU

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AIDS is a life and death issue. To have the AIDS disease is at

present a sentence of slow but inevitable death. I've already lost one

friend to AIDS. I may soon lose others. My own sexual behavior and that of

many of my friends has been profoundly altered by it. In my part of the

country, one man in 10 may already be carrying the AIDS virus. While the

figures may currently be less in much of the rest of the country, this is

changing rapidly. There currently is neither a cure, nor even an effective

treatment, and no vaccine either. But there are things that have been

PROVEN immensely effective in slowing the spread of this hideously lethal

disease. In this essay I hope to present this information.

History and Overview:

AIDS stands for Acquired Immune Defficiency Disease. It is caused

by a virus. The disease originated somewhere in Africa about 20 years ago.

There it first appeared as a mysterious ailment afflicting primarily

heterosexuals of both sexes. It probably was spread especially fast by

primarily female prostitutes there. AIDS has already become a crisis of

STAGGERING proportions in parts of Africa. In Zaire, it is estimated that

over twenty percent of the adults currently carry the virus. That figure

is increasing. And what occurred there will, if no cure is found, most

likely occur here among heterosexual folks.

AIDS was first seen as a disease of gay males in this country.

This was a result of the fact that gay males in this culture in the days

before AIDS had an average of 200 to 400 new sexual contacts per year.

This figure was much higher than common practice among heterosexual

(straight) men or women. In addition, it turned out that rectal sex was a

particularly effective way to transmit the disease, and rectal sex is a

common practice among gay males. For these reasons, the disease spread in

the gay male population of this country immensely more quickly than in

other populations. It became to be thought of as a "gay disease". Because

the disease is spread primarily by exposure of ones blood to infected

blood or semen, I.V. drug addicts who shared needles also soon were

identified as an affected group. As the AIDS epidemic began to affect

increasingly large fractions of those two populations (gay males and IV

drug abusers), many of the rest of this society looked on smugly, for

both populations tended to be despised by the "mainstream" of society here.

But AIDS is also spread by heterosexual sex. In addition, it is

spread by blood transfusions.

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