Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Aids Epidemic in San Francisco, Vol. 2: The Response of the Nursing Profession, 1981-1984
Nursing and medicine were confronted with very similar challenges in 1981 when hiv infection surfaced as a new unidentified disease in the gay communities of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City. At that time it was not know whether this new phenomenon, named gay-related Immune Deficiency (grid), was infectious and contagious, and if so, how it was transmitted. Were nurses, like physicians, at risk for becoming infected if they provided care, and would their families also be at risk for contracting this disease? There was much speculation and controversy as to the potential etiology of the new disease. Some people including members of the impacted gay community, proposed that this new disease was the result of recreational drug use, such as poppers (nitrates) and indiscriminate anonymous sexual activity, as demonstrated by the popularity of bathhouses in the gay community, and not due to an infectious organism. A few very knowledgeable physicians/ disease specialists, such as Don Francis, hypothesized that this new disease was caused by an infectious agent, probably a virus, and transmitted by means similar to hepatitis B. There was a lot of fear among health care providers about contagion, but there was also significant prejudice and discriminatory behavior because the new disease was identified in a population (gay/bisexual men) that was stigmatized by the larger society. Identification of the disease in people of color, especially African Americans and injection drug users, only exacerbated the biases, prejudices, and discriminatory behavior. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
