Dr. Ruth Kennedy
English 1210-52
April 18, 2011
The Deadly AIDS Kills in Haiti
(All Adults)
Haiti has a generalized HIV/AIDS epidemic. It has the largest epidemic in the Caribbean, where about three-quarters of HIV-positive people live in Haiti or the Dominican Republic. Some people believe that AIDS and HIV are a death sentence. Some believe that it’s best not to know, and some find out and never respond. AIDS and HIV is in fact not the same thing even though both can cause death. HIV is the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS. And AIDS is a disease in which the body 's immune system breaks down and is unable to fight off certain infections, known as "opportunistic infections," and other illnesses that take advantage of a weakened immune system(1). This essay will show the devastating effects of Haiti. AIDS has destroyed the tourism business, stigmatized the prostitution industry and given the country of Haiti a bad name. While in Haiti, there are low-paid workers building and staffing new luxury hotels, attempting to draw tourist in for a visit to this preindustrial Caribbean land. It all sounds good until the American health authorities linked Haiti and the so-far incurable disorder known as acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS, Haiti’s tourist industry has collapsed. The people and health advisors are giving Haiti a bad name. Their saying that the largest group of AIDS victims consisted of male homosexuals and the second largest group of victims consisted of Haitians. In the story A Mask on the Face of Death, it stated that “the lucrative tourism on which so much of the country’s economy was crippled. Alone with tourism went much of the foreign business investment” (Selzer, 1988, p. 450). The people began to think twice about coming to tour Haiti knowing that Haiti was indicted as the source of AIDS in the entire western hemisphere, no one wanted to risk getting the disease.
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