HIV Virus
The modern era has made life easier and with the information age, the whole world is reached through a great internet connection and a simple flick of the fingers on the keyboard. There have also been great discoveries in the field of medicine where a man would not be allowed to look, act, and feel old with the help of wonder drugs and aesthetic surgery. The underside to all these high technology gizmos and gadgets is the widening and alarming spread of sexually transmitted diseases particularly the deadliest of all, the HIV/AIDS virus.
Around the mid-nineties, the deadly of HIV/AIDS made a huge splash all over the world that even culminated in a World AIDS Day when the widespread infection seemed to engulf the whole of South Africa. It was during that time when private organizations and federally funded health centers focused on the problem of eradicating the infection. Research groups were funded in the race to come up with a cure for the infection that can devastate a human body’s immune system and rob it of life-saving antibodies leaving it open and vulnerable to every opportunistic infection, harmful and harmless that eventually led to death.
From the nineties to the twenty-first century, no cure has been found to stop the HIV/AIDS in its tracks. Numerous multi-million researches have been done and some advances such as a retroviral treatment was discovered. The treatments though are not a means to cure but more palliative in nature which could temporarily stop the replication of the HIV virus, thus giving it a latency period that may extend for a long period depending on the state of health of the infected person. However, once the retroviral treatment is stopped, the HIV virus will wake up from its dormant state and again rapidly replicate by taking over the white blood cells which are the ‘soldiers’ of the human body leading to a weakened immune system that will be helpless to fight off infections even as harmless as a common cold.
The only way that a non-infected person could stay uninfected would be to abstain from sex. This is easier said than done especially with the proliferation of sex manuals, pornographic online sites, and adult movies that seem to encourage the delights of promiscuous sexual relations with multiple sex partners.
Medical professionals and organizations are aware of this and the only way that can contain the HIV infection became focused on safe sex practice which is using protective sex barriers like a condom for every sexual encounter. Other than protective barriers, the other thing that is being encouraged are monogamous relationships between two uninfected people and as long as both partners remain faithful to their partners, presents a far better option than the safe sex protective barriers.
Sadly, monogamous relationships seem to become a dying breed with unfaithfulness the foremost reason for break-ups. This again had to be addressed by medical practitioners since these groups pose a high risk for getting infected. The solution encouraged is still and always will be safe sex protective barriers so long as a cure for the HIV/AIDS is not available.
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