Health

Identify an epidemiological measure (examples: mortality rate, morbidity rate, risk data) and describe it as it relates to the initial post.
Identify a Healthy People 2020 goal or objective related to the disease. Describe what role epidemiology plays in reaching the Healthy People 2020 goal.

For this week’s discussion the public health issue that will be addressed is the HIV/Aids emergence in the early 1980s. The first published report about the illness that came to be known as acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) started with the CDC morbidity and mortality weekly report of five cases of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia among five homosexual men in Los Angeles1 . Next healthcare workers started to see a pattern of a usually mild “cancer Kaposi’s Sarcoma, common among the elderly, started appearing as a virulent strain in younger patients” 2 . There was a lot of work being done in the background to figure out why this normally mild cancer was presenting so virulently. Connections started to be made, surveys were sent out, and healthcare providers were instructed to ask more questions to these patients. A commonality was discovered, that people with this virulent Kaposi’s Sarcoma tended to be much more sexually active1 . In the United States the initial impression of the disease was that it is a gay-related immune deficiency. Then as we saw outbreaks happening around the world amongst heterosexual groups, it was discovered that it was sexually transmitted amongst any person gay or heterosexual. The people of this disease are sexually active and not using protection, or needle sharing drug users. The place was in the United stated specifically identified in Los Angeles to begin, then identified everywhere around the world. The time for this discovery was around the 1980s. Like any newly emerging disease such as our present day COVID-19 we see fear and panic in people about the unknown. Like all public health issues that are newly emerging we need to stay calm throughout these discoveries and take it day by day learning from reliable resources.

1. Curran J, Jaffe H. AIDS: The early years and CDC’s response. CDC Web site. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/su6004a11.htm. Updated 2011. Accessed Mar 15, 2020.

2. Writers S. HIV and AIDS: An origin story. PublicHealth.org Web site. https://www.publichealth.org/public-awareness/hiv-aids/origin-story/. Updated 2020. Accessed Mar 15, 2020.