AIDS

No other word engenders as much fear, revulsion, despair and utter helplessness as AIDS. Despite increased AIDS awareness, the terror persists. AIDS is, in fact, rewriting medical history as humankind's deadliest scourge. With 40 million deaths forecast in this millennium, statistics tell their own sordid tale. The first recorded sample of HIV was discovered in 1959 in a blood specimen obtained at Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) in the Belgian Congo. This was the first known death chalked up by AIDS. The HIV is thought to have originally affected chimpanzees. The crossover of the virus from animals to humans may have occurred in the 1950s through an accident or a bite.Intermittently, other theories of its origins have been advanced during the ongoing process of AIDS research. One theory, put forward by Bette Korber, traces the disease to a single viral ancestor that could have emerged between 1910 and 1950. Through an AIDS research analysis done at the Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico, Korber contends that the pandemic may have come from one or more infected humans around 1930.Another highly controversial—but plausible—theory is that of American philosopher, Louis Pascal, first spelt out in 1987. All the early AIDS cases originated in the Central African states of Congo, Rwanda or Burundi. This belt was subjected to trials of a live polio vaccine on 300,000 men, women and children. Pascal argued that the vaccine, which was grown in cultures obtained from chopped up chimpanzee kidneys, may have carried this virus. Polio researcher Dr Albert Sabin had reported that such a batch was contaminated by an unknown virus. In fact, monkeys harbor SIV or simian immunodeficiency virus (SV-40 to be more specific), which is thought to be the ancestor of HIV. The first cases of AIDS were reported in the United States in 1981, amongst male homosexuals in Los Angeles and New York. Within two decades, up to 50 million may have been infected globally, approximately 22 million have succumbed and nearly 15,000 new infections are said to occur daily. With a definite AIDS cure still in the research stages, an increased AIDS awareness, counseling and alternative therapy treatments seem to offer the only succor.