by Alicia M Prater PhD

Created on: January 12, 2008

An increase in AIDS cases, anywhere, is a public health threat. It is a threat not only to the country or region or continent where it is found, but to the United States and any developed nation participating in global exchange. Americans should be concerned enough to follow the simple measures needed to prevent the spread of HIV infection, to support research that investigates alternative treatments that can replace the current ones when they are outdated, and to encourage basic health measures that will prevent the spread of AIDS-associated infectious diseases.

AIDS is a global epidemic. There are more than 33 million people infected with HIV worldwide according to numbers released by the World Health Organization and UNAIDS last year. There were 2.5 million new infections in 2007 alone. Since the mid-1980s when AIDS was first recognized as a disease, 25 million people have died worldwide. In the larger countries of the Caribbean, according to the organization Avert, 2% of the adult population lives with AIDS and it is one of the top causes of death in the region.

However, in recent years HIV infection has been relegated to being a treatable condition in the United States. New medications and therapies have pushed the onset of AIDS farther into the course of infection for those who can afford them. This may put Americans at ease enough to not worry about Africa, the Caribbean, or any other region dealing with the human, economic, and quality of life loss that AIDS bestows. In today's world where a man with potentially contagious and drug resistant tuberculosis can board several planes, putting people in countries separated by an ocean at the same risk, nowhere is far enough away for AIDS to be a memory.

The treatments used the past decade will not be viable options in the future. HIV mutates at an alarming rate. Strains from other parts of the world also do not respond in similar ways to the drugs used to treat the common strain found in North America (HIV-B-M). Infection with more than one strain complicates therapy, often requiring multiple drugs and forms of therapeutic treatment. The ability to effectively treat AIDS has also led to a potentially disastrous situation where opportunistic infections have time to mutate in the infected population, allowing the diseases to infect the non-HIV population as well. The spread of drug resistant tuberculosis is one example of this. A research study published in October 2007 found that AIDS first made its way into the United States in the 1960s from a single HIV infected Haitian immigrant. The Caribbean was not far enough away 50 years ago to prevent the spread of the disease, any increase there now will surely be reflected elsewhere.

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