The U.S. Health Care System Is Trying to Help the AIDS Patients

The news that life insurances will be provided to HIV-positive people as well was welcomed with praise by the AIDS activists.  As the U.S. health care system is trying to help the AIDS patients, one of the disease control representatives of the country accused them of not fighting enough against the deadly disease.

Researchers say that 1,2 million Americans live with the virus that later causes AIDS. 66% the gay men live with the virus, without being treated. They are endangering themselves and risk infecting other people also. HIV is a silent disease, taking from 5 to 12 years for the infection to become AIDS.

Each year, approximately 45,000 Americans are infected with HIV and half of them are African American men who are either gay or bisexual.  Experts say that more white people choose to be treated than Latinos or African Americans. African Americans are almost seven times and Latinos two times as likely to die from the disease, than white men.

The AIDS and HIV activists criticize the doctors for leaving some patients behind. They hold demonstrations and make petitions in order to increase the access to HIV medication to more people. They say that there is a big social disparity when it comes to the disease, with white rich people having better access to treatment and living normal lives, and with poor or homeless people who can barely afford food, not to mention HIV treatment.

But the government is doing the best that it can, with the health care system trying to improve the HIV related treatment difficulties. Doctors are now trying to persuade HIV positive people to stay in treatment, drugs are being prescribed to them and lowering the amount of HIV in their blood. In general, people give up their treatment, with the minorities being more inclined to fall out of it.  The doctors are trying to keep them in treatment as much as possible, a clinic in San Francisco even managing to suppress the virus in 80% of the patients. Doctor Edward Machtinger said that many of his patients fight poverty, addictions, mental illness and abuse. He says that trauma led to his patients’ HIV and their diagnose only accentuates their addictions, depression and the constant urge to fall out of treatment. He also stated that his patients would sooner be killed by cocaine, not by the virus, as they expect.

As the U.S. health care system is trying to help the AIDS patients, the United States took a step forward, but more will need to be done in order to help this large number of Americans who suffer from the disease.

Image Source: www.upload.wikimedia.org