AIDS

In addition to violations of individual liberties and, in some cases, civil rights, discrimination against those infected with HIV has broader public policy implications. The Presidential Commission on the HIV epidemic has concluded that "discrimination is impairing this nation's ability to limit the spread of the epidemic." While the United States Public Health Service has developed a strategy of early identification of those infected with HIV to assist in treatment and limit the spread of the virus, the absence of adequate safeguards against discrimination has been seen as a factor that seriously undermines these efforts.

AIDS is different from other illnesses or ailments with which the medical community and general public have familiarity and knowledge, making the problem of how best to deal with those infected with the virus clearly unprecedented. In February, 1994 the United States Centers for Disease Control had estimated that 1 million Americans were carriers of the HIV virus. In addition, 339,250 Americans had been diagnosed with full-blown AIDS with 204,390 deaths having had occurred at that time. By comparison, 292,000 Americans were killed in World War II and 58,000 lost their lives in Vietnam.

What is now known as AIDS was essentially unknown to the medical community prior to 1980 when Dr. Michael Gottlieb of UCLA noticed that a patient had a strange array of symptoms, including a rare ailment known as pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, (PCP). He subsequently published a study concerning an outbreak of PCP in five homosexual men in Los Angeles. Upon publication of the study in 1981, the United States Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta began investigating reports of similarly unusual opportunistic infections occurring in New York City as well as some additional cases in Los Angeles.

The human body fights off infection by a series of complicated processes which collectively make up the functions of the immune system. The internal processes of the immune system includes three sequential stages. First the body identifies any foreign agents that have entered it . The body then forms antibodies that fight the foreign agents. Finally, the immune system regulates the production of these antibodies when and where the foreign agents are detected.

Epidemiological theories about AIDS tend to center on the process of the regulation of the production of such antibodies or the third stage of the immune system response. Most scientists doing research in this area believe that a viral agent perhaps in combination with, or in the presence of, one or more other cofactors, attacks and destroys certain cells known as T-helper lymphocyte cells. These cells normally trigger the production of antibodies once foreign substances have been detected and initial antibodies manufactured. Hence, while the immune system allows the body to form antibodies to fight off the virus, it is unable to regulate the ongoing production of the antibodies to control the spread of the virus.