| This chapter is a short three page introduction to the disease we now know as AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) and the resulting epidemic caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). A section entitled AIDS in Brief gives an overview on AIDS and the associated opportunistic infections associated with the syndrome. The second section, entitled The AIDS Epidemic, briefly describes some of the basic facts about the epidemic- when it was first recognized in the USA, risk, groups, modes of transmission, and the scope of the epidemic in the USA and globally.All of these are covered in much greater detail in later chapters and questions on the facts presented in this first chapter are included at the end of the summaries of the later chapters. |
