Acquired Immune-Deficiency Syndrome, popularly known by its abbreviation AIDS is a fatal disease as it attacks and destroys the immune system of the body. It is caused by a virus called Human Immuno Deficiency Virus or HIV in short. HIV damages body’s immune system by destroying white blood cells which help us to destroy invaded pathogens. When HIV enters a white blood cell, it may remain dormant. However, once it is activated, it infects another cell to produce many new HIVS. After a certain period of time, the white blood cells are destroyed and leading to a loss of function of the immune system (Y.K. Ho,2004). The first ever case of a person with AIDS was detected in America in 1959 which later emerged as a dreadfully widespread disease in the 1980s in countries like France, , Belgium, Uganda, Zambia Tanzania, Zimbabwe etc.
Moreover, AIDS was first clinically observed in 1981 in the United States.[The initial cases were a cluster of injecting drug users and homosexual men with no known cause of impaired immunity who showed symptoms of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), a rare opportunistic infection that was known to occur in people with very compromised immune systems. Soon thereafter, an unexpected number of gay men developed a previously rare skin cancer called Kaposi 's sarcoma (KS). Many more cases of PCP and KS emerged, alerting U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and a CDC task force was formed to monitor the outbreak. In the early days, the CDC did
References: Aids. In Wikipedia.com. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS