HIV epidemic

It’s 1981 and a number of men in California end up in hospital with an unusual type of pneumonia. Around the same time in New York, doctors notice an increase in the number of patients with a rare type of cancer. Doctors suspect that these unusual illnesses have something to do with their patients’ immune systems. Most of these first patients are gay men. But by the end of the year, there are hundreds of similar cases, not just among gay men.

It’s also heterosexual men, women, drug users who inject drugs, and even infants, who are getting ill. It takes several years for scientists to identify the virus that is causing this mystery disease. They name it the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV. At this point, thousands of people are infected with HIV in over half of all countries around the world. But where did HIV come from all of a sudden?

HIV is a virus that originated in monkeys and chimpanzees of West Africa. It transferred to humans, probably in the late 1800s or early 1900s. Scientists suspect it might have been through bushmeat hunters who came into contact with the blood of monkeys or chimpanzees, blood containing the virus. When only hunters came in contact with the virus, it didn’t spread so easily. But during the late 1800s and early 1900s people in West Africa started living in much larger cities because of colonialism.

A need for more food, meant that more and more people relied on bushmeat, so more people came in contact with the virus. In these larger cities, another activity also became more widespread — prostitution. This was also the beginning of the first mass vaccinations and treatments for tropical diseases. Because much was still unknown about hygiene and good hospital practice, nurses and doctors often used the same contaminated medical equipment to treat many patients. So for the first time, conditions were right for the virus to spread from person to person, rather than just from animal to person.

And it spread very quickly. As people travelled out of West Africa, this allowed the virus to spread across the globe. But we still don’t know why in the 1980s, there was such a rapid spread of the disease within a short period of time — why HIV became an epidemic. A lot has changed since the 1980s. Now, we know much more about the virus.

But there are still many misconceptions, many people have negative attitudes towards those with HIV. For a long time people believed that only certain groups of people could get HIV, such as gay men, drug addicts, black or homeless people. But it was discovered fairly quickly that anyone can get HIV. The virus is passed from person to person via sexual contact, infected blood or from mother to child during pregnancy, delivery or breastfeeding. And yet, people thought they’d get the virus by touching a person with HIV, or coming into contact with their saliva — which is not possible at all!

Even today, many people with HIV still face discrimination from those who are not well-informed about HIV. Today, around 40 million people across the globe live with HIV. And while the number of new cases is declining every year, the HIV epidemic is far from over. This is why it’s important to learn about HIV, about how to prevent transmission and how to care for those infected. This is the only way to reduce discrimination against people with HIV, and make their life easier.

And hopefully one day, HIV will be a thing of the past.