On-Going Fear of AIDS Essay - 1550 Words

AIDS isn’t a disease people have known about since the 1800s. In fact, it wasn’t even known as AIDS until a couple years after its discovery in the 1980s. Before, it was called Gay Related Immunodeficiency Disease, or GRID (â€Å"Natural History of HIV/AIDS†). And because of the fact it wasn’t discovered until the 1980s, people feared the disease and still do to this day. It’s been thirty years and many are still not properly educated about AIDS (Hawkins 16). The fear, stigmatization, and discrimination of people with AIDS and the disease in general have many underlying factors. People have feared and still fear AIDS today because of their misunderstanding of how AIDS is spread, their dislike of homosexuality, and their preexisting prejudices†¦show more content†¦Once this was discovered though, the fear died down some, but it continues to exist still. Lack of education is usually a main reason for discrimination. AIDS-education was and is still lacking. When the disease was first discovered, many people believed it could be transmitted through the air or by touching someone with it. In New York City in 1985, a group of people who rented a summer house together went into a frenzy when they learned one man in the group was diagnosed with AIDS (Rimer). All of these people were â€Å"highly educated professional men and women in their thirties† (Rimer), and they didn’t even understand how AIDS was spread. At the same time in New York City, no nursing homes had accepted AIDS patients. When the city announced a plan to move ten AIDS patients into a nursing home in Queens, residents filed a lawsuit with the State Supreme Court (Rimer). People are unjustly discriminated against because of the lack of education on AIDS. Ryan White, a thirteen-year-old hemophiliac contracted HIV following a blood transfusion, and in 1984, he was expelled from his school in Kokomo, Indiana because of it. 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