 First edition | |
| Author | Alice Hoffman |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | AIDS |
| Genre | Romance |
| Published | 1988 (G. P. Putnam's Sons) |
| Media type | Hardback, Softcover |
| Pages | 219 |
| ISBN | 9785552268344 |
At Risk is a 1988 book by Alice Hoffman about Amanda, an 11-year-old girl who contracts HIV from a blood transfusion.
Amanda lives with a typical suburban family in the town of Morrow, Massachusetts until she comes down with a fever and a blood test for HIV returns as positive. She contracted it from an unscreened blood transfusion during surgery, 5 years before. Her world is turned upside down. As the news spreads, other parents, fearful of their own children catching the disease, cut off contact with the family. Fear spreads among her peers, who are uneducated as to the nature of sex and believe that AIDS can be spread by skin contact or using the same toilet seat. Her principal decides to counter this by giving the whole school a class-by-class sex education talk. Amanda eventually becomes weaker and weaker; she has to give up gymnastics because of this and because of parental fears that using the same equipment could spread the virus to her teammates. She becomes bitter and disillusioned, becoming friends with Laurel, a medium. She decides to have her braces removed, and her father locates a pediatric orthodontist who will see an AIDS patient. While Amanda's death is portrayed to be inevitable, the novel concludes with an open ending - the special friendship between Charlie and Sevrin.
This book is set in the contemporary 1980s, a time when little was publicly known about HIV/AIDS or how it was spread.
Reviews of the novel were positive, and it was a Main Selection of the Book of the Month Club. [1] However, it attracted controversy and was referred to as "that AIDS novel" in publishing circles. [1]
The film rights were acquired by 20th Century Fox.
Ryan Wayne White was an American teenager from Kokomo, Indiana, who became a national poster child for HIV/AIDS in the United States after his school barred him from attending classes following a diagnosis of AIDS.
The spread of HIV/AIDS has affected millions of people worldwide; AIDS is considered a pandemic. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that in 2016 there were 36.7 million people worldwide living with HIV/AIDS, with 1.8 million new HIV infections per year and 1 million deaths due to AIDS. Misconceptions about HIV and AIDS arise from several different sources, from simple ignorance and misunderstandings about scientific knowledge regarding HIV infections and the cause of AIDS to misinformation propagated by individuals and groups with ideological stances that deny a causative relationship between HIV infection and the development of AIDS. Below is a list and explanations of some common misconceptions and their rebuttals.
Criminal transmission of HIV is the intentional or reckless infection of a person with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). This is often conflated, in laws and in discussion, with criminal exposure to HIV, which does not require the transmission of the virus and often, as in the cases of spitting and biting, does not include a realistic means of transmission. Some countries or jurisdictions, including some areas of the U.S., have enacted laws expressly to criminalize HIV transmission or exposure, charging those accused with criminal transmission of HIV. Other countries charge the accused under existing laws with such crimes as murder, manslaughter, attempted murder, assault or fraud.
Elizabeth Glaser was an American AIDS activist and child advocate married to actor and director Paul Michael Glaser. She contracted HIV very early in the modern AIDS epidemic after receiving an HIV-contaminated blood transfusion in 1981 while giving birth. Like other HIV-infected mothers, Glaser unknowingly passed the virus to her infant daughter, Ariel, who died in 1988.
AIDS is caused by a human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which originated in non-human primates in Central and West Africa. While various sub-groups of the virus acquired human infectivity at different times, the present pandemic had its origins in the emergence of one specific strain – HIV-1 subgroup M – in Léopoldville in the Belgian Congo in the 1920s.
Infection with HIV, a retrovirus, can be managed with treatment but without treatment can lead to a spectrum of conditions including AIDS.
"Killing All the Right People" is the 26th episode of the sitcom Designing Women. Originally airing on October 5, 1987, as the fourth episode of the second season. It features Tony Goldwyn as Kendall Dobbs, a young gay man dying of AIDS who asks the Sugarbaker ladies to design his funeral. Series creator Linda Bloodworth-Thomason's mother died of AIDS and her experience with her mother's disease and the prejudice associated with it inspired the episode.
The Caribbean is the second-most affected region in the world in terms of HIV prevalence rates. Based on 2009 data, about 1.0 percent of the adult population is living with the disease, which is higher than any other region except Sub-Saharan Africa. Several factors influence this epidemic, including poverty, gender, sex tourism, and stigma. HIV incidence in the Caribbean declined 49% between 2001 and 2012. Different countries have employed a variety of responses to the disease, with a range of challenges and successes.
Eliana Martínez was an American adoptee who contracted HIV from a blood transfusion as an infant. Her adoptive mother, Rosa Martínez, fought for Eliana to be allowed to attend a public school without being isolated from other students by transparent partitions, referred to by Rosa Martínez as a "glass cage". Eliana died of complications from AIDS seven months after winning the right to attend a special education program without being physically isolated from other students.
HIV is recognized as a health concern in Pakistan with the number of cases growing. Moderately high drug use and lack of acceptance that non-marital sex is common in the society have allowed the HIV epidemic to take hold in Pakistan, mainly among injecting drug users (IDU), male, female and transvestite sex workers as well as the repatriated migrant workers. HIV infection can lead to AIDS that may become a major health issue.
Gao Yaojie is a Chinese gynecologist, academic, and AIDS activist in Zhengzhou, Henan, China. Gao has been honored for her work by the United Nations and Western organizations, and had spent time under house arrest. Her split with the Chinese authority on the transmission and the seriousness of the AIDS epidemic in China hinders her further activities and resulted in her leaving for the United States in 2009. She is now living alone in uptown Manhattan, New York City.
The history of HIV/AIDS in Australia is distinctive, as Australian government bodies recognised and responded to the AIDS pandemic relatively swiftly, with the implementation of effective disease prevention and public health programs, such as needle and syringe programs (NSPs). As a result, despite significant numbers of at-risk group members contracting the virus in the early period following its discovery, Australia achieved and has maintained a low rate of HIV infection in comparison to the rest of the world.
A transfusion transmitted infection (TTI) is a virus, parasite, or other potential pathogen that can be transmitted in donated blood through a transfusion to a recipient. The term is usually limited to known pathogens, but also sometimes includes agents such as Simian foamy virus which are not known to cause disease.
Angola has a large HIV/AIDS infected population, however, it has one of the lowest prevalence rates in the Southern Africa zone. The status of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Angola is expected to change within the near future due to several forms of behavioral, cultural, and economic characteristics within the country such as lack of knowledge and education, low levels of condom use, the frequency of sex and number of sex partners, economic disparities and migration. There is a significant amount of work being done in Angola to combat the epidemic, but most aid is coming from outside of the country.
HIV/AIDS is considered the deadliest epidemic in the 21st century. It is transmitted through sex, intravenous drug use and mother-to-child transmission. Zambia is experiencing a generalized HIV/AIDS epidemic, with a national HIV prevalence rate of 11.3% among adults ages 15 to 49 as of 2018. Per the 2000 Zambian census, the people affected by HIV/AIDS constituted 15% of the total population, amounting to one million, of which 60% were women. The pandemic results in increased number of orphans, with an estimated 600,000 orphans in the country. It was prevalent more in urban areas compared to rural and among all provinces, Copperbelt Province and Lusaka Province had higher occurrence.
Nsambya Home Care (NHC) is one of the departments of Nsambya Hospital, a faith-based hospital in Uganda. The department offers medical and psychosocial support to people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHAs). Established in 1987 by Miriam Duggan, it is a department of St. Francis Hospital Nsambya. Since its founding, NHC has provided care and treatment services to over 15,000 clients. With support from the AIDS Relief program and in collaboration with Catholic Relief Services, the program started providing antiretroviral medications in 2004 and so far close to 2000 active patients are benefiting from treatment. It is headquartered in Nsambya, a section of Kampala, Uganda. A field office of the program is located at Ggaba, a southern suburb of Kampala. NHC is led by Maria Nannyonga Musoke, a consultant paediatrician of Nsambya Hospital.
Cases of HIV/AIDS in Peru are considered to have reached the level of a concentrated epidemic.
With an estimated 150,000 people living with HIV/AIDS in 2016, Haiti has the most overall cases of HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean and its HIV prevalence rates among the highest percentage-wise in the region. There are many risk-factor groups for HIV infection in Haiti, with the most common ones including lower socioeconomic status, lower educational levels, risky behavior, and lower levels of awareness regarding HIV and its transmission.
There is a relatively low prevalence of HIV/AIDS in New Zealand, with an estimated 2,900 people out a population of 4.51 million living with HIV/AIDS as of 2014. The rate of newly diagnosed HIV infections was stable at around 100 annually through the late 1980s and the 1990s but rose sharply from 2000 to 2005. It has since stabilised at roughly 200 new cases annually. Male-to-male sexual contact has been the largest contributor to new HIV cases in New Zealand since record began in 1985. Heterosexual contact is the second largest contributor to new cases, but unlike male-to-male contact, they are mostly acquired outside New Zealand. In 2018 the New Zealand Government reported a “major reduction” in the number of people diagnosed with HIV.
Discrimination against people with HIV/AIDS or serophobia is the prejudice, fear, rejection, and stigmatization of people with HIV/AIDS. Marginalized, at-risk groups such as members of the LGBTQ+ community, intravenous drug users, and sex workers are most vulnerable to facing HIV/AIDS discrimination. The consequences of societal stigma against PLHIV are quite severe, as HIV/AIDS discrimination actively hinders access to HIV/AIDS screening and care around the world. Moreover, these negative stigmas become used against members of the LGBTQ+ community in the form of stereotypes held by physicians.