123 School Work

HIV Education and Prevention

• This is a preview of the essay.
  To view the full text you must login!
  
  HIV Education and Prevention
  
       With neither an affordable cure of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) guaranteed nor an effective vaccine to prevent the spread of the disease years away, currently the focus is on stopping AIDS by changing people's behavior. Many diseases cannot be prevented; however, AIDS is not one of them. HIV, the acronym for Human Immunodeficiency Virus, is the virus that causes AIDS, and is transmitted by the direct exchange of body fluids such as blood, semen, and vaginal secretions (CDC). HIV slowly attacks the immune system, the part of the body that fights infection. AIDS is rarely fatal in itself, the depressed immunity is an opportunity for benign germs to cause trouble, and thus death occurs in infected individuals because of these opportunistic infections that overwhelm the immune system (Nuland, 1993). Today, unprotected sex and the sharing of injection equipment by infected drug users are two of the main types of risk behaviors predisposing one to the spread of HIV. Because HIV has a long incubation period, a person's risky behavior does not have immediately apparent consequences. However, anyone with the right knowledge and motivation can avoid contracting HIV and eventually becoming ill. Indeed the old adage that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure has never been more true than in the case of HIV education.
  In the absence of a cure or vaccine for AIDS, prevention is the only available recourse to reduce HIV infections...