Hiv/Aids: A Pandemic

The acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) was first recognized among homosexual males in the United States in 1981. Infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was limited initially, but has since exploded over the past two decades and became the worst epidemic of the twentieth century. The AIDS epidemic ranks with the influenza pandemic and the Bubonic plague with more than 25 million fatalities.

The AIDS epidemic continues to spread into new areas. As of July 2006, 38.6 million people were living with HIV/AIDS, and more than 27 million had died since the epidemic began (Quinn, T., 2007). An estimated 4.9 million people became infected with HIV in 2005 which includes 700,000 children who became infected from their mothers while they were pregnant. Also, 209 million people died due to AIDS in 2005 (Quinn, T., 2007). On a daily basis, 14,000 people became infected with HIV increasingly among mother-to-infant transmission.

There are three major ways of acquiring HIV. The first is through sexual transmission which includes heterosexual and homosexual contact. The second is transmission among IV drug users and the third is through perinatal transmission when a mother passes the virus to her child while she is pregnant.

As of December 2005, there were approximately 2.3 million children living with HIV globally. Most of these children live in the developing world, where it is estimated that 700,000 infants were born with HIV in 2005 (Mofenson, L., 2007).

There has been great progress in reducing mother to child transmission of HIV since the results of a Pediatric AIDS Clinical Trial Group (PACTG) began in 1994. With these advances, mother-to-infant transmission was reduced to less than 2 percent in resource rich countries. These resource rich countries have also implemented universal prenatal HIV counseling and testing, elective cesarean delivery and avoidance of breast feeding.

HIV has spread to every country in the world and has infected 59 million people worldwide and includes 20 million people who have already died. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that 1.1 million people in the US are infected with HIV and about 405,926 people living with AIDS (Bartlett, J., 2007). While the HIV infection is usually transmitted through sexual intercourse, exposure to contaminated blood, or perinatal transmission, the ways of contracting the disease vary in different countries. Areas that are not rich in resources show vaginal sex is responsible for 70 to 80 percent of AIDS cases. Perinatal transmission and injection drug use account for 5 to 10 percent each (Bartlett, J., 2007).

For the first twenty years of HIV in the United States, male to male sexual contact and injection drug use made up almost one half of all cases. From 2000 to 2003, many new cases were a result of men having sex with men, heterosexual adults and adolescents. Use among IV drug users had declined. Men having sex with men and people exposed through heterosexual contact made up the majority of HIV/AIDS cases. The most commonly reported mode of HIV was with heterosexual women.

Minority populations are also at an increased risk. Black females were infected 19 times higher