Why did aids spread so fast in gay community

Last Updated: May 28, The human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, is a virus that attacks the immune system, specifically CD4 cells or T cells. The virus is transmitted through bodily fluids such as blood, semen, vaginal fluids, anal fluids, and breast milk. Historically, HIV has most often been spread through unprotected sex, the sharing of needles for drug use, and through birth.

History of AIDS

A person with AIDS is very vulnerable to cancer and to life-threatening infections, such as pneumonia. And a study in in the medical journal, Lancetshowed that an anti-viral treatment effectively halted the spread of HIV. Scientists have traced the origin of HIV back to chimpanzees and simian immunodeficiency virus SIVan HIV-like virus that attacks the immune system of monkeys and apes.

Chimps, the scientist later discovered, hunt and eat two why did aids spread so fast in gay community species of monkeys—red-capped mangabeys and greater spot-nosed monkeys—that carry and infect the chimps with two strains of SIV. These two strains likely combined to form SIVcpz, which can spread between chimpanzees and humans.

Researchers believe the first transmission of SIV to HIV in humans that then led to the global pandemic occurred in in Kinshasa, the capital and largest city in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The virus spread may have spread from Kinshasa along infrastructure routes roads, railways, and rivers via migrants and the sex trade.

International travel from the United States helped the virus spread across the rest of the globe. Inthe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention CDC published a report about five previously healthy homosexual men becoming infected with Pneumocystis pneumoniawhich is caused by the normally harmless fungus Pneumocystis jirovecii.

This type of pneumonia, the CDC noted, almost never affects people with uncompromised immune systems. The following year, The New York Times published an alarming article about the new immune system disorder, which, by that time, had affected people, killing of them.

Because the disease appeared to affect mostly homosexual men, officials initially called it gay-related immune deficiency, or GRID. Though it had been around for ages, leprosy grew into a pandemic in Europe in the Middle Ages. A slow-developing bacterial disease that causes sores and deformities, leprosy was believed to be a punishment from God that ran in families.

Called the Great Mortality as it caused its devastation, it became known as the Black Death in the late 17th Century. The worst of the outbreak tapered off in the fall ofaround the same time as another destructive event—the Great Fire of London. The first of seven cholera pandemics over the next years, this wave of the small intestine infection originated in Russia, where one million people died.

Spreading through feces-infected water and food, the bacterium was passed along to British soldiers who brought it to India where millions more died. The first significant flu pandemic started in Siberia and Kazakhstan, traveled to Moscow, and made its way into Finland and then Poland, where it moved into the rest of Europe.

By the end of, had died. The avian-borne flu that resulted in 50 million deaths worldwide, the flu was first observed in Europe, the United States and parts of Asia before spreading around the world. At the time, there were no effective drugs or vaccines to treat this killer flu strain.

Read more: How U. Starting in Hong Kong and spreading throughout China and then into the United States, the Asian flu became widespread in England where, over six months, 14, people died. A second wave followed in earlycausing about 1. AIDS was first observed in American gay communities but is believed to have developed from a chimpanzee virus from West Africa in the s.

First identified inSevere Acute Respiratory Syndrome is believed to have started with bats, spread to cats and then to humans in China, followed by 26 other countries, infecting 8, people, with deaths.