ABSTRACT
November 1995 marked another milestone in the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) epidemic in America: more than one-half million confirmed cases had been reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, of these, 311,381 were dead. AIDS is the leading cause of death among persons twenty-five to forty-four in the United States. In 1994, AIDS rates per 100,000 populations were 101 for African Americans, 51 for Latinos, 17 for Whites, 12 for Native Americans, and 6 for Asians. The age distribution has remained relatively stable in comparisons of these two periods, with a small decline in the percentage of pediatric AIDS cases and a small increase in the number of people over the age of forty. Hardly more than a decade ago, a number of countries acted and spoke in public as if they had immunity to Human Immunodeficiency Virus and AIDS. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
