READING PASSAGE  -  AIDS                                                                                                           B

Read this passage as many times as you need to. However, during your first reading, you should:

Try to identify the most important idea the writer wants to communicate to you in this passage.

 

AIDS—Not Someone Else's Problem

By the early 1980s, a frightening new health problem was beginning to appear in the United States. Healthy young people, especially males, began to suffer from a number of infections that doctors had seldom needed to treat because the human immune system normally protects people from them. Without any effective treatment, the infections worsened; the patients weakened and ultimately died. The disease came to be named AIDS (acquired immuno-deficiency syndrome).

 

     The U.S. government was slow to recognize the seriousness of  the disease and at first made little financial support available for research into the disease. According to some critics of the govern­ment, there was no feeling of urgency because the population group that appeared to be most affected by AIDS was homosexual men. However, whatever the reason for the early lack of urgency, it soon disappeared as the number of AIDS cases increased rapidly. Between 1984 and 1985, for example, there was a 100 percent rise in the number of people who were diagnosed as having AIDS.

 

When governments made it a priority, research into AIDS, mostly   in   the   United   States   and   Western   Europe,   expanded greatly. Researchers were able to identify the cause of the disease, a virus that attacks the human immune system and which they named HIV (human immuno-deficiency virus). Further research has established that the virus is transmitted most frequently through blood-to-blood contact with a person who is infected with the virus. The most common means of transmission are sexual con­tact or the use of hypodermic needles that are contaminated with the blood of an HlV-infected person. During the early years, smaller numbers of people were also infected with the virus when they   received   transfusions  of infected  blood  in  hospitals.  Since 1985, however, supplies of blood and blood products to hospitals have been made almost 100 percent safe by the development of effective tests to identify the presence of HIV.

 

Today AIDS is no longer a disease that is limited to a small section of the United States. Between 1984 and 1989, the number of annual new cases of AIDS rose from 4,436 to 33,710, an enormous increase of 660 percent. Between 1989 and 1992, the number of American teenagers who were infected with the virus rose by 75 percent.

 

Although it first came to the public´s attention in the United States and Western Europe, AIDS » now truly a global problem. It is spreading through sub-Saharan Africa where the rate of infection in young heterosexual adults has reached catastrophic levels in some countries. It has also reached Asia It arrived late, but by 1992, for example, 40 percent of Thailanïs heroin users had AIDS and were passing the virus on to the gen­eral population through sexual contacts. In the same year it was estimated that a full 1 percent of the Thai population was infected with the virus. If nothing is done to reduce this high transmission rate, experts are predicting that between 2 and 4 million Thais could be infected with the AIDS virus by the year 2000.

How are we to solve the AIDS crisis? In spite of the massive sums of money that are being spent for AIDS research, scientists warn that they are not close to finding an effective treatment for the disease. A vaccine is still years away; a cure may never come, and the transmission rates show that we cannot afford to wait. However, we have a realistic answer—to emphasize prevention.

 

At first sight, the task of developing an effective AIDS pre­vention program appears quite simple—for two reasons. First, AIDS is always fatal. This is a fact that should give people all the incentive they need to avoid it. Second, we know how to prevent most cases of AIDS—by avoiding contact either through sex or through sharing a hypodermic needle with a person who might have the disease.

 

However, the task is made much more complex by two factors. First, people are often unwilling to speak openly about sexual behavior. This reluctance is also shared by some governments, among them the U.S. government, which have been slow to speak plainly and directly to their populations about sex and AIDS.

Second, because AIDS is so often associated in the public's mind with homosexual men and with illegal drug users, there is a feeling among the general population that they are not at risk. After all, they have no contacts with either of these groups. If we are to defeat AIDS, however, we have no choice but to convince the public of two basic facts: First, with AIDS everyone is at risk; sec­ond, the risk decreases greatly if people avoid illegal drugs and follow rules for safer sexual behavior.

 

 

AIDS  

A Closer Look

1.      U.S. government support for AIDS research started as soon as the first cases of the disease appeared in the population.                                                       T    F

  1. Identify the way or ways, according to the article, in which a person could
               have become infected with the AIDS virus in the early 1980s.
    1. through sexual contact with an infected person
    2. through a transfusion of infected blood
    3. through sharing a drug needle with an infected person
    4. through living in the same house as an infected person
  2. Heterosexual sex carries no risk of AIDS.                                                 T    F                                                                                 
  3. According to the writer, developing a vaccine for AIDS may be easier than developing a cure for it.       T    F
  4. Reread paragraphs 5-8. Then fill in this cause-effect diagram with information from the list that follows the diagram. Write only the correct letter in each box.                                                                                                                                                  

a.      It becomes more difficult to convince people that they should protect themselves against AIDS.

b.      People think tftat AIDS is a disease that attacks oniy homosexual men and
illegal drug users.

c.      People do not like to speak openly and plainly about sexual behavior.

                              

 

                                causes                                effect