AIDS in Africa is caused by the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), one of the deadliest viruses in the world. No country in Africa has escaped the virus, with some being more affected than others. The spread of AIDS in Africa is due to poor medical treatment and a lack of education among the people. HIV is the virus that causes AIDS.
(Aids in Africa, 1994) HIV stands for Human Immunodeficiency Virus. The virus attacks the body’s immune system and weakens it. Scientists have wondered about the origin of HIV ever since the epidemic emerged. Experts believe that the virus was contracted through chimpanzees.
AIDS came from Chimps in 1999. Perhaps someone was bitten by a chimp, or a hunter was exposed to contaminated blood while field dressing an animal. Dr. Beatrice Hahn of the University of Alabama conducted tests that tracked HIV back to a virus that infects four sub-species of chimps that live in Africa. Hahn and her team studied frozen tissue from a chimp that died of complications at childbirth. In this frozen tissue, there was the chimp version of the AIDS virus, called SIVcpz.
The genes in SIVcpz are genetically similar to those in the AIDS virus. AIDS came from chimps in 1999. However, chimps who have probably carried this virus for thousands of years do not get sick from it. Researchers are trying to find out why chimps are not affected by this virus, as it may lead to a cure for AIDS. This productive finding about the virus was not discovered until 1997 when testing started. If it had been found sooner, the massive spread of AIDS could have been prevented. Since the start of the epidemic, an estimated 34 million people living in Sub-Saharan Africa in 1998 were infected with HIV.
In 1991, AIDS became a prevalent issue due to a lack of education among the people in Africa. Unlike in the United States, where the public and media educate people about AIDS and how to prevent the disease, African cultures rarely confront sexual issues that cause AIDS and HIV. As a result, AIDS has become the leading cause of death in Africa, surpassing even Malaria.
The AIDS Reader (1991) reports that according to U.N. health experts, over 40 million people contracted the disease in the 1980s, and nearly 12 million of them have died in Africa. Perhaps if people in Sub-Saharan Africa were educated about preventing the spread of AIDS and HIV, the statistics wouldn’t be so dramatically different from other countries. However, good medical treatment can be hard to find in African countries. The United States has a better economy and more highly trained professionals than Africa.
The lower quality of medical treatment in Africa has contributed to the spread of AIDS in the past (The AIDS Reader, 1991). Unfortunately, the cost of drugs to slow down the disease can be $10,000-$20,000 per year per person (The AIDS Reader, 1991). This keeps most HIV-infected patients from getting the needed drugs because they can’t afford them. This amount of money would cover the annual health care for 200 people in Zimbabwe (The AIDS Reader, 1991). A family in Sub-Saharan Africa might.
Between $600 and $1,500 is spent to care for a person living with AIDS (The AIDS Reader, 1991). This money could be used for a college education or other basic necessities. This country has been hit so hard with AIDS that more than one-quarter of working-age adults are infected with HIV and are forced to use money for healthcare (AIDS the Epidemic, 1994). Zimbabwe was the hardest hit country by AIDS or HIV. In this country, about half of all hospital beds are filled with patients who have AIDS and AIDS-related symptoms (AIDS, 1991). Even if we stopped AIDS now, the millions of people already living with it would make the disease continue.
In Zimbabwe, 25 testing sites were set up to test pregnant women’s blood for the HIV virus. At two of these sites, less than 10% were infected, but at the remaining sites, almost half were infected (Aids in Africa, 1994). All pregnant women with the virus have a risk of passing it on to the baby. One other major problem in the spread of AIDS is through rape and sexual abuse. In Africa, these kinds of sexual actions are never discussed.
