AIDS identified 1981 - Essay Example

, the United Nations, and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as well as those in the national and local levels have remained troubled of the effects of this condition as millions continue to contract the virus and die every year. In fact, the United Nations recorded 2.7 million new cases of HIV infections worldwide in the year 2008 and noted almost three-quarters of this number have died an AIDS-related death in the same year (“The Global AIDS” 1). As it worries the authorities and the total population of the current times, this paper intends to tackle how the condition was discovered and how it has affected the history since then.

AIDS first came to view in the early 1980s when a number of homosexual men presented a kind of ill health condition which had not been identified in the history of the medical field Practitioners in Los Angeles, New York, and California have linked and treated the unknown condition with mononucleosis, cytomegalovirus, and other related conditions with their designated treatments as supported by the signs and symptoms seen in the patients (Grmek 3-5). The homosexual men who went to Joel Weisman showed “hectic fever, weight loss and swollen lymph nodes” (Grmek 3).

A New Yorker also presented the same condition when he illustrated “lassitude, weight loss, spiking fevers, and slow consumption of the body” (Grmek 5). However, despite the attempts to counter the symptoms observed, no improvements became visible. Grmek even pointed out that two of Weisman’s patients “treated since fall of 1980, went from bad to worse” (4). After a number of laboratory works, the cause of the involvement of some opportunistic infections such as Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia were attributed to the “reduction in the population of lymphocytes, due to the almost complete disappearance of the helper T subgroup,” components of the immune system that helps fight infection (Grmek 4).

This decrease in efficiency for immune