Historical Focus:

HIV has been one of the most devastating diseases that the world has ever known. This hasn’t been by the millions and millions of people that have lost their lives to it, or by the hundreds of years that it has been around either. The disease is fairly new but due to the time period of when it arose and those that are affected it has become one of the most stigmatized diseases in human history. The problem with HIV is that it is a virus that is transmitted through the blood. The main ways that blood is swapped from person to person is through sexual intercourse or by sharing needles with drugs. Because of these two forms of transmission this disease has become the disease that nobody wants to talk about, especially political leaders or those in power. Due to the time period when the disease arose too has made it especially easy for word to get out about what

HIV originated in the congo basin of Africa as a form of chimpanzee virus. The way that it spread to humans was through years and years of contact with nomads that would hunt these chimpanzees and in the process of killing them would accidentally get contaminated. The original form of the virus was not actually that bad, but the one thing that HIV does a really good job of is mutating. Scientists now believe that through years and years of contact with the virus it finally mutated into something strong enough that the human immune system could not fight it, and actually was extremely weakened by the disease. It is thought that the disease mutated in one chimpanzee in Africa and that single mutation was passed onto a human that eventually killed the chimp. Around this time Africa was being urbanized and large cities were sprouting up. This made it increasingly hard for the tribes to continue to survive on their own. Many men stopped hunting and went into the cities to work. Those infected with the new HIV virus spread that to the big cities and from there it exploded into what it is today.

Socially this disease has the worst stigma’s on it. It it thought to be the disease of druggies and gay’s. This is all due to one report int he 1980’s in the US that was completely false. The disease actually does not care who it infects. In fact, one African country reported just as many female cases of HIV as it did male cases. The stigma that it is only gay men that get the disease came from the United States because those were the first cases that were seen here. It is very easy for the disease to be spread from unprotected sex.

Unfortunately there have been very few efforts to really get the disease under control in the world. It is very hard for political figures to bring up the fight against HIV/AIDS because of the population that is infected. There have been some attempts though, to start a global effort for HIV. For example, President Bush in his state of the union speech didn’t start off by giving an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein, like he was expected to. Instead he started off his address to Congress by calling for 15 billion dollars in HIV/AIDS funding that would be spent on drugs and research. This was by far the biggest step forward in the fight against HIV because as stated in the video it brought the talk from millions to billions of dollars for the fight. Finally HIV was on the national stage.