HIV and Aids :: Medical Health Medicine Essays

HIV and Aids In Junior High, when we were in sex education class, we were told about AIDS and HIV. We learned that being HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) positive eventually led to AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome), which eventually led to death. We were taught this and never really doubted it. The AIDS pandemic is global and an estimated 40 million people are infected. None of them have been cured. The amount of funding for AIDS research is not small. A plentiful amount of drugs are available to patients diagnosed with AIDS or HIV. Some AIDS patients take "cocktails" of pills, which often lead to serious physical side effects. Some "cocktails" can mean ingesting 25 pills a day. There has been much talk about finding an AIDS Vaccine, but there have been no definite results as of yet. She created a stir in the media when she appeared on ABC News 20/20(1). Her person She has been called an unfit mother, a heretic, and has been compared to those who believe the Holocaust never happened. The reason for such a stir is because she is HIV positive, doesn"t take any medications whatsoever, questions whether HIV causes AIDS, has published a book called What if Everything You Thought You Knew About AIDS Was Wrong?, has unprotected sex with her husband, has an untested 3 year old son who she breast-fed at birth (the virus can be transmitted in utero, during birth, or through breast feeding), and is pregnant with her second child. Her name is Christine Maggiore and she as well as other dissidents have aroused both anger and support from AIDS and HIV communities. The difference between being HIV positive and having AIDS is that having AIDS means that a person must be HIV positive and either have a T-cell count below 200 or have one of the CDC"s (Center for Disease Control) 28 opportunistic infections. Christine Maggiore started questioning the connection between HIV and AIDS and the HIV and AIDS testing process when certain things she was told about AIDS and HIV did not add up with her situation. She speaks about how she "started really thinking about what AIDS doctors and educators told me rather than just accepting everything as true and correct." Doctors had told her that from her T cell count, she had a recent new infection.