Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, better known as AIDS, is a raging epidemic. Taking nearly 2.1 million lives and 300,000 children are living with the disease and it shows no sign of slowing down. A person has a collection of symptoms and or illnesses caused by the most advanced stages of HIV or Human Immunodeficiency Virus infection. Once the virus weakens your immune system, and your CD4 cells are reduced to a certain number, a patient is considered to have AIDS. This condition progressively reduces the effectiveness of the immune system and leaves individuals vulnerable to opportunistic infections and tumors. A common disbelief about the illness is that you can die from it which is not all factual. You can indeed die once you have contracted the illness but it is from your body’s inability to fight off the common colds and infections that cannot be cured by your immune system because it has become far too weak.
AIDS first appeared July 5, 1981 by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It was first reported in five homosexual men in Los Angeles. In the beginning, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did not have an official name for the disease, often referring to it by way of the diseases that were associated with it, for example, lymphadenopathy, the disease after which the discoverers of HIV originally named the virus. They also used Kaposi's Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections, the name by which a task force had been set up in 1981. In the general press, the term GRID, which stood for Gay-related immune deficiency, had been coined. The CDC, in search of a name, and looking at the infected communities coined “the 4H disease,” as it seemed to single out Haitians, homosexuals, hemophiliacs, and heroin users. However, after determining that AIDS was not isolated to the homosexual community, the term
