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(People and Society) see compassion fatigue
Aids acronym Also written AIDS (Health and Fitness)
Short for acquired immune deficiency syndrome, a complex
condition which is thought to be caused by a virus called HIV
and which destroys a person's ability to fight infections.
Etymology: An acronym, formed on the initial letters of
Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.
History and Usage: The condition was first noticed by doctors
at the very end of the seventies and was described under the
name acquired immune deficiency state in 1980, although later
research has shown that a person died from Aids as long ago as
1959 and that the virus which causes it may have existed in
Africa for a hundred years or more. Colloquially the condition
was also sometimes referred to as GRID (gay-related immune
disease) in the US before the name Aids became established. The
US Center for Disease Control first used the name acquired
immune deficiency syndrome and the acronym Aids in September
1982, and by 1984 the disease was already reaching epidemic
proportions in the US and coming to be known as the scourge of
the eighties. At first Aids was identified as principally
affecting two groups: first, drug users who shared needles, and
second, male homosexuals, giving rise to the unkind name gay
plague, which was widely bandied about in newspapers during the
mid eighties. Once the virus which causes the immune breakdown
which can lead to Aids was identified and it became clear that
this was transmitted in body fluids, sexual promiscuity in
general was blamed for its rapid spread. These discoveries
prompted a concerted and ill-received government advertising
campaign in the UK which aimed to make the general public aware
of the risks and how to avoid them; this resulted, amongst other
things, in the revival of the word condom in everyday English.
The acronym soon came to be written by some in the form Aids
(rather than AIDS) and thought of as a proper noun; it was also
very quickly used attributively, especially in Aids virus (a
colloquial name for HIV) and the adjective Aids-related. By 1984
doctors had established that infection with the virus could
precede the onset of any symptoms by some months or years, and
identified three distinct phases of the syndrome: