aids awareness :: Free AIDS Essays

When support first emerged, no-one could pay back predicted how the epidemic would spread crossways the world and how many millions of lives it would change. There was no real idea what caused it, and consequently, no real idea how to protect against it. Now, in 2004, we k instanter from bitter experience that AIDS is caused by the virus HIV, and that it can devastate families, communities and whole continents. We have seen the epidemic knock decades off countries national development, widen the gulf between rich and unworthy nations and push already-stigmatized groups closer to the margins of society. We are living in an international society, and HIV has become the first truly international epidemic, easily crossing oceans and international borders. only if as clearly, experience shows that the right approaches, applied quickly enough with courage and resolve, can and do result in lower national HIV transmission rates and less suffering for those affected by the epidemic.Glob ally, we have learned that if a rural acts early enough, a national HIV crisis can be averted.It has also been noted that a country with a very high HIV prevalence rate will often see this rate in the end stabilise, and even decline. This indicates, among other things, that people are beginning to change risky behaviour patterns, because they have seen and known people who have been killed by AIDS. Fear is the worst, and go bad way of changing peoples behaviour and by the time that this happens it is usually too late to save a huge number of that countrys population.Already, more than twenty million people around the world have died of AIDS-related diseases. In 2004, 3.1 million men, women and children have died. Around twice the amount who have died until now - almost 40 million - are now living with HIV, and most of these are likely to die over the next decade or so. The most recent UNAIDS/WHO estimates show that, in 2004 alone, 4.9 million people were newly infected with HIV.I t is disappointing that the global numbers of people infected with HIV broaden to rise, despite the fact that effective prevention strategies already exist.AfricaIt is in Africa, in some of the poorest countries in the world, that the impact of the virus has been most severe. Altogether, there are now 16 countries in Africa in which more than one-tenth of the adult population aged 15-49 is infected with HIV.