Hiv / Aids Epidemic A Huge Epidemic - 1314 Words

HIV/Aids Epidemic HIV/AIDs is a huge epidemic still plaguing society today. The lack of knowledge and technical advances has caused an increasing number of cases. It has made its way around the world since the 1940s, causing countries to join together in the fight against AIDs. With all the campaigning that has been done the numbers of cases continue to rise. Countries have separated the disease into three patterns to make it easier to distinguish the effects that AIDs has on different regions of the world. As well as what subtypes sprout from what areas. HIV/AIDs can be spread in many different ways. The future is still uncertain for the victims whom lives have been dramatically changed by this deadly disease. It started back in 1940 when†¦show more content†¦The virus has been divided up into three patterns. Pattern 1 is the type of AIDs in North America, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. In these parts of the world AIDs is spread mostly by homosexual intercourse and found in homosexual and bisexual men most often. The number of cases has drastically dropped from blood transfusion due to routine screenings. The sharing of needles by intravenous drug abusers seems to be becoming a huge problem in helping to spread the disease faster. Since homosexual and bisexual men seem to be at a greater risk for the virus, the ratio of men to women is 20:1 in the pattern 1 countries. Pattern 2 is found in the sub-Saharan Africa, Central Africa, and also in the inner-city people, living in a deprived social-economic community, in the big cities of the USA. It is spread through male and female homosexual activity almost equally with a slight predominance in women. There is no real high risk region in the pattern 2 as in pattern 1 except for maybe in promiscuous individuals such as prostitutes or long-distant truck drivers. It is more common to see the infection in urban rather than rural areas. In the African cities infection could reach up to 30% of adults, and in female prostitutes up to 90%. Although blood is only periodically screened in Africa, the transfusion of blood