No One Left Behind ( Hiv / Aids ) - 3059 Words

No One Left Behind (HIV/AIDS) Imagine you are sick, afraid, enveloped in insecurity, not knowing what may lie ahead. It is in the darkest moments of a potentially fatal illness that we look to others for solace, we often turn to partners, family, friends, and our community. We rely on healthcare systems to provide medication, comfort, assistance and adequate treatment in order to assist in the recovery process, as well as to provide physical, and psychological well-being. What if the illness you are experiencing is life threatening and comes with a stigma attached, a stigma that ignites fear, loneliness, blame, and misrepresentation. You are isolated, your Physical and psychological needs quelled in a blanket of this stigma. Your†¦show more content†¦Silence is your companion and your enemy, for it is in this silence that misconception and fear are incubated. You scream for others to hear, you scream for awareness, because they need to know the facts, they need to understand the transmission and to realize they should not be afraid of your touch †¦ Yet, your screams go unheard just as if in a nightmare, there is simply no one listening. These are the people who live with a virus that takes their health, their freedom, their choices and their human rights. Yet, they are strong, productive, funny, and talented. They are leaders, musicians, blue-collar workers, men of faith, students, sons, daughters, mothers, and fathers, they are heterosexual and homosexual. They are of all races, all people, they are human beings who need their voices heard they are the people who live everyday with the letters HIV. The problem defined The beginning Early in the 1980’s unusual outbreaks or pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) and Kaposi’s sarcoma were reported to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) these five reported case were limited to otherwise healthy homosexual men (Granfors Stalstrom, 1987). In June of 1981 these early reports were published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, this report referred the five cases to homosexual men which began the inference to HIV being a gay- related immune deficiency syndrome termed â€Å"GRID† (Fee Perry, 2008) later know as Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)