According to the Mayo Clinic, HIV is a chronic, bloodborne condition caused by the human immunodeficiency virus. HIV reduces the body's ability to fight off viruses and bacteria. It also makes the patient more susceptible to certain cancer types and infections, such as pneumonia, that a healthy person would not normally get. The late stage of an HIV infection is named Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, or AIDS.
Number of New Infections
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 468,578 people had AIDS in the United States in 2007. Because HIV treatment has improved significantly during the last decade, there is a growing number of people capable of transmitting this virus. Yet, according to the CDC's “Comprehensive HIV Prevention” report, published in 2006, the number of people who get HIV every year in the United States has dropped from over 150,000 in the late 1980s to approximately 40,000 today.
People Who Get Infected
According to the CDC, HIV was initially primarily affecting the Caucasian population, but today most of the affected people belong to minority groups. For example, in 2004, the rate of AIDS diagnoses among African Americans was 10 times that of white Americans, even though African Americans comprise only approximately 13 percent of the population in the United States. In the same way, Latinos comprise only 14 percent of the population of the United States, but 19 percent of all AIDS cases were Latinos in 2004. Although HIV continues to be more common among men than women, the number of infected women is increasing rapidly. According to the CDC, women accounted for only 14 percent of people living with AIDS in 1992. By 2004 this percentage had increased to 23 percent.
The Body website states, that young people are also at an elevated risk for getting HIV. People under the age of 25 represent half the population who become infected by HIV every year. On a more positive note, there is a marked decrease in mother-to-child HIV transmissions. According to the CDC, in the early 1990s there were 1,000 to 2,000 new infections per year whereas in 2000 the numbers had dropped to 280 to 370.
How HIV Is Transmitted
The CDC states that men having sex with men continues being the main transmission method for HIV and represents the largest population living with HIV. The second largest group is people who received HIV via heterosexual contact followed by people who received HIV via contaminated drug needles. On a more positive note, the number of HIV cases caused by injection drug use has declined by approximately 9 percent from 2001 to 2004.
Death Rates and Life Expectancy
In the earliest years of the epidemic, the average life expectancy of an HIV patient was only one year after AIDS was diagnosed. Yet, a study published in the "Lancet" in July 2008 by the Antiretroviral Therapy Cohort Collaboration states that today, in the high-income countries such as the United States, a person diagnosed with HIV at the age of 20 can expect to live until she is approximately 49.4 years old. With the improved preventive therapy, the time between the HIV diagnosis and an AIDS diagnosis has increased significantly, as well. Until the early 1990s, HIV was a leading cause of death among adults in the United States. Yet, according to the CDC, HIV deaths have dropped in the United States from more than 51,000 in 1995 to about 16,000 in 2002.
It needs to be pointed out that while deaths among white patients have dropped by 20 percent, African Americans have seen only a 2 percent reduction. Some groups, such as people who received HIV through heterosexual contact, have even seen an increase in their mortality rate.
The Stigma of HIV
Many things concerning HIV have changed. For example, HIV patients can expect to live longer and have better treatments for their illness. Yet one thing has not changed. HIV patients are still often faced with discrimination, and the stigma of HIV continues to haunt them. According to a report by Catherine Dodds, Ph.D., and colleagues that was published by Sigma Research in 2004, HIV-related stigma seems to be heavily contingent upon other forms of discrimination such as racism and homophobia. This report states that populations significantly affected by HIV undergo a severe lack of human rights and suffer from social, political and economic discrimination. Stigma relies on prejudices and exclusion in order to isolate and marginalize HIV patients. This causes many HIV patients to feel guilt and shame, and many of the patients isolate themselves from other people. People experiencing serious discrimination often do not look for the treatment they need and may even deny to themselves that they have HIV.
References
- Mayo Clinic: HIV/AIDS
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Comprehensive HIV Prevention
- NATAP: Life expectancy of individuals on combination antiretroviral therapy in high-income countries
- The Body: Mortality Trends: Toward a New Definition of AIDS?
