Comparing the AIDS Epidemic and The Plague :: Compare Contrast Disease Health Essays

Comparing the AIDS Epidemic and The PlagueThe destruction and devastation caused by the Black Death of the Middle Ages was a phenomenon left to wonder at in text books of historical atomic number 63. An unstoppable evoke swept the continent taking as much as eighty percent of the European population along with it (Forsyth). Today the world is plagued with a similar deadly disease. The AIDS epidemic continues to be incurable. In an essay written by David Herlihy, entitled Bubonic Plague diachronic Epidemiology and the Medical Problems, the historic bubonic plague is compared withthe current AIDS epidemic of today. According to his research, AIDS will probably prove to be the plague of the millennium (Herlihy p. 18). If one compares the epidemiology and social impact of these diseases they prove to be quite similar. The current AIDS epidemic has the potential to be the most dangerous and destructive plague of the millennium. No one knows exactly how the AIDS virus erupted. However, one presently dominant theory states that AIDS originated from monkeys in Africathat transmitted the HIV virus to earthly c oncern through bites (Forsyth). As people migrated it reached Haiti and then spread to America (Clark p. 65). The bubonic plague, too, was a spontaneous epidemic. The Black Death occurred because a bacillus was carried by fleas that federal official off the blood of humans and transmitted the deadly bacillus in the process (Packer). It began in China and spread bymigration throughout all of Europe and even America (Forsyth). Efforts to contain both diseases were entirely unsuccessful. AIDS is now an international problem as wasthe bubonic plague. Like the bubonic plague did in the Middle Ages, AIDS is spreading at an alarming rate. In 1994 seventeen million people around the world were infect with the HIV virus that causes AIDS, and quartette million had developed the disease (Packer). It is estimated that by the year 2000 more than forty million people, ninet y percent in developing countries will be infected (Packer).The Black Death of the Middle Ages exterminated a third of the population of Europe in just four years. Also, like the bubonic plague, AIDS was once only found among accepted delineated social groups (Herlihy p. 18) drug abusers and homosexuals in this country and in prostitutes and their contacts in Africa. Due to the early epidemiology of AIDS cases, it was believed that only certain populations in specific areas were infected. Aids may have started out in small communities, but it spread quickly and widely.