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A.I.D.S. The Acronym A.I.D.S. suggests the mystery of a syndrome that has become a major public health problem in the United States and abroad. A.I.D.S., which stands for acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, is the final and life-threatening stage of infection of the virus H.I.V., human immunodeficiency virus. Cases of A.I.D.S. were first discovered in 1981 in the United States, but researchers have traced cases to as early as 1959, but millions of A.I.D.S. cases have been diagnosed since then, worldwide. A.I.D.S. is caused by a retrovirus named human immunodeficiency virus, H.I.V., which its name refers to the fact that it severely damages the patient’s disease-fighting immune system. The A.I.D.S. virus primarily infects certain white blood cells, including T-helper cells and macrophages, that play a key part in the functioning of the immune system. As a result, A.I.D.S. patient’s can get certain illnesses that don’t normally occur or that are normally not serious. In 1979 doctors in both San Francisco and New York found themselves dealing with a certain unusual outbreak of a type of cancer normally found in Africa. The disease called Kaposi’s sarcoma rarely occurred in the United States but when it did it usually involved older males of Italian or Jewish background. It was then occurring in patients that were mostly young, white males that were mostly homosexuals. The A.I.D.S. virus was isolated by researchers in France in 1983 and researchers in the United States in 1984, that is when the virus became known as H.I.V.-1. Another virus was also found that was closely related to the virus causing A.I.D.S., it was named H.I.V.-2, which occurred mainly in Africa. A person with H.I.V. does not necessarily mean that, that person has A.I.D.S., although people who are H.I.V.-positive are often mistakenly said to have A.I.D.S. A person can remain H.I.V.-positive for more than ten years without developing any of the clinical illnesses that define and constitute a diagnosis of A.I.D.S.
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