Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) is an infectious disease that was first recognized in the late 20th century. Its impact on human illness and death is profound. The human immunodeficiency virus or HIV causes AIDS. AIDS is always fatal, even when therapy is provided. AIDS first came to the attention of the medical community when young gay men were afflicted with a mysterious cancer in the early 1980s. Initially the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) thought the cancer was specific to homosexual men and labeled it gay-related immune deficiency (GRID). In 1982, the disease was given its current name of AIDS. In 1993 researchers identified HIV as being the causative agent for AIDS. Until this time HIV had been contained in animals, but within two decades millions of people would be dead of the disease with tens of millions more infected with the deadly virus:
Within the past 50 to 100 years, HIV went from being maintained primarily, if not exclusively, in sooty mangebeys (HIV-2) and chimpanzees (HIV-1) to being the etiologic agent of a worldwide pandemic. AIDS was not recognized as a specific disease until 1980, and HIV was not identified as the etiological agent until 1983. Nevertheless, an estimated 16 million persons have died from AIDS worldwide with 50 million currently infected with AIDS.
The outbreak of AIDS and infections of HIV have dropped significantly in the United States over the past two decades. In the mid-1990s more than 40,000 people were dying of the disease each year in the US, compared with only 16,000 annually in 2000 (Buckley, 2001, 1A). However, even though there have begin declines in the United States in terms of annual infections and deaths, the rest of the world is not experiencing such declines. This is particularly true in Africa, where 25 million people have HIV in sub-Saharan Africa alone, six million in India and Southeast Asia, and the disease is making inroads in the Caribbean, ...