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This web site is part of a project, an exhibition, for the PEGASUS Center at LaSalle Academy, Providence, Rhode Island, May 2001. An exhibition is a substantial project given to the seventh and eighth grade students in the program three times a year, each one different. In this exhibition, the topic at hand was to find a problem affecting the world, analyze it, research it, and come up with a solution. This "solution" does not have to solve the problem completely. However, each group has to come up with ideas of worldwide solutions, and even solve the problem on a local level.
When the research was accounted for, we moved onto creating an action plan to our solution. We decided to reach out to the local community by creating a web site and a pamphlet of Questions and Answers. Our exhibition was complete, and we were glad to have made a difference in the community, not to mention we were relieved that the year was finally over :-).
To learn more about the AIDS virus and the biology of it, go here, or if you want to learn about the history of AIDS, go here.
A: Presently, there is no cure for AIDS. However, there are treatments and pecautions people can take. Since sex is the leading cause of AIDS, it is very important to take precautions before having sex. You should know whether or not you or your partner is HIV positive. Also, be sure to use protection when having sex. Getting infected blood into your blood stream can cause you to have AIDS as well. Some precautions to take are: not touching the blood of an infected person, keep cuts or opened skin covered, and know for sure that if you receive a blood transfusion, the blood is not infected. Another way that AIDS is passed from one person to another is through hypodermic needles. If you are receiving a shot, or using a needle for any reason, make sure that no one else has used it, and that it is sterile. Doctors and researchers are working hard to find a cure and treatments to finally eliminate AIDS.
This is a poem created by Nicole Johnson that was used as a visual aid for our presentation.
Can you even imagine living with AIDS, People are afraid of what they don’t know, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome is caused by HIV, I can’t even imagine the trials, the fear, How did it come, will it ever leave, Who’s body did you touch, Unsafe sex is not the only way, It all started in 1981, Since then 200,000 cases have been, No one knows what will be, But right now it is a very big deal, For it ruins lives, And even if it goes away,
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My group, which consists of six people, first chose the world problem of AIDS and HIV after much debate. Some other problems that we debated over were gun control, natural resource conservation, and drug abuse. These problems were all considered, but we chose AIDS because it was a larger problem locally and it could be something that we could help with. After our topic was chosen, we spent a week gathering resources from our local libraries, and we also took a trip to the Providence College Library to research more information. The research was compiled in about a week, we were graded, and then we swapped our tidbits to the person who needed it the most.
A: AIDS, an acronym for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, is an infectious disease caused by the human immunodeficiency virus or HIV. HIV is a viral infection, which produces a slowly progressive weakening in the cellular immune system. It was first recognized in the United States in 1981 in homosexual men in New York and Los Angeles. In 1984 it was shown that the HIV virus was the probable cause for AIDS. In 1996, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated that one million people in the United States are HIV- positive and nearly a quarter of a million are living with AIDS. Approximately 16,700 people died from AIDS in the United States in 1997. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 18 million adults and 1.5 million children worldwide were infected with HIV as of 1995. Since then, 200,000 cases were reported in the year 2000.