endind people that didnt even know why or what was happening. It was a lot like what started happening in the U. S. in the mid 1970s.
When aids first showed up in Denmark people were dieing but no one new why. In the first few cases there were no major illnesses. The disease that showed up was one that attacks the bodies immune system. The US was completely not ready for this to happen.
. At the beginning doctors and scientist didnt know how the disease was passes or were it came from. The Center for Disease Control is located in Atlanta George was doing an investigation to find out were the disease came from. The CDC started their investigation by sending investigators to the local Bathhouses in San Francisco.
The investigators didnt know how the disease was being passes on but they thought it might be by sexual intercourse. The main question that the investigators had to answer was what do you think? What do you know? And what can they prove?By Halloween 1981 there were 160 cases and 88 deaths from the unknown disease. The Center for Disease Control was getting samples of blood, urine, and swabs from the mouth form people they thought carried the disease to study. As the disease came out to the public people didnt know what to call it. So the public called it Gay Pneumonia.
They called it this, I guess, because it was only know of in the gay communities. The Center for Disease called the disease G. R. I. D.
Which stood for Gay Related Immune Deficiency. Which was kind of mean because they had no proof that you had to be gay to get the disease. The first people to get the disease without being gay were the Haitians. It wasnt until 119 people had died that the disease was finally proven to be sexually transmitted?A member of the Center for Disease control named Dr. Francis figured out that the disease was gobbling up the bodies T-cells by watching the game Pac Man. The Center for Disease centered their investigation around one person called Patient O.
How was a airline steward which had the disease. There were 40 cases directly linked to patient O. Which in turn lead to numerous cases. Proving that you can give the disease to some one even if you dont know you have it. As of June 1982 the number of cases and deaths had more then doubled. The number of cases went to 405 with 272 deaths.
In a gay community meeting Dr. Francis stated that if you get the disease you will die and that the disease was being passed on in the bathhouses. Even with the knowledge that the disease was being passed on in bathhouses the gay community still didnt want the houses closed. G. R. I.
D was finally renamed to aids a name that more correctly suited it. It wasnt until October 1983 that the disease was finally discovered. And even since then scientist have not been able to find a cure for the disease. Dr.
Francis played a major part in the fight to get the disease known. Since the disease is passed on by bodily fluid its all so passed on by blood transfusions. And as of May 1, 1985 blood banks started to test blood to help in the fight against aids. By the time President Reagan gave his fist speech on aids 25,000 people had all ready died. Aids is a disease that affects women, children, and adolescents more then any other group. By the year 2000 40 million people worldwide will have the aids disease.
With no chance of a cure in sight the only way to bring this number down is to teach people about aids and how to prevent it. Since aids is a disease that can be prevented maybe one day the number of infected people will drop dramatically.
