HIV/AIDS in Africa

A potentially fatal transmittable disease that has disproportionately affected African Americans in the United States, as well as millions of blacks in Africa. The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is transmitted through exposure to blood, semen, vaginal secretions, and breast milk. The virus can remain dormant for months or even years, but if left untreated, it causes a gradual deterioration of the immune system. As the immune system is increasingly depressed, patients develop infections that progress to full-blown acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, or AIDS. Unless patients follow a very strict drug regimen, they will die when their immune systems can no longer resist the infections that attack their bodies.

The first HIV/AIDS patients were young gay men in New York City who began to appear at health clinics in 1981. Doctors deduced that the disease was spread through sexual contact. At first, believing that only homosexuals were susceptible, they named the disease GRID (gay-related immune deficiency). However, when intravenous drug users, hemophiliacs, and heterosexual men and women started to develop the disease, it became clear that the disease did not discriminate between victims. The disease was renamed AIDS.

Nevertheless, AIDS continued to be viewed by both victims and experts as a white middle-class problem. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) focused early research on members of the white gay community, who were determined to be at “high risk.” When Haitian immigrants began to appear at clinics with the disease, the CDC concluded that AIDS had likely originated in Haiti. Additional research, however, suggested that the virus came from sub-Saharan Africa. Scientific evidence for this theory was inconclusive, but many experts showed social bias by concluding prematurely that AIDS had its roots in non-Western, nonwhite regions of the globe.

The changing profile of HIV/AIDS patients has been a topic of concern at the ...