Syndemic

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Syndemics is the evaluation of how social and health conditions arise, in what ways they interact, and what upstream drivers may produce their interactions. [1] The word is a blend of "synergy" and "epidemics". The idea of syndemics is that no disease exists in isolation and that often population health can be understood through a confluence of factors (such as climate change or social inequality) that produces multiple health conditions that afflict some populations and not others. [2] Syndemics are not like pandemics (where the same social forces produce clustered conditions equally around the world); instead, syndemics reflect population-level trends within certain states, regions, cities, or towns. [3] [4]

Contents

A syndemic or synergistic epidemic is generally understood to be the aggregation of two or more concurrent or sequential epidemics or disease clusters in a population with biological interactions, which exacerbate the prognosis and burden of disease. The term was developed by Merrill Singer in the early 1990s to call attention to the synergistic nature of the health and social problems facing the poor and underserved. [5] Syndemics develop under health disparity, caused by poverty, stress, climate, or structural violence and are studied by epidemiologists and medical anthropologists concerned with public health, community health and the effects of social conditions on health. The concept was translated from anthropology to a larger audience in 2017, with the publication of a Series on Syndemics in The Lancet, led by Emily Mendenhall. [6]

The syndemic approach departs from the biomedical approach to diseases to diagnostically isolate, study, and treat diseases as distinct entities separate from other diseases and independent of social contexts.

Definition

A syndemic is a synergistic epidemic. The term was developed by Merrill Singer in the mid-1990s, culminating in a 2009 textbook. [7] Disease concentration, disease interaction, and their underlying social forces are the core concepts. [8] Disease co-occurrence, with or without interactions, is known as comorbidity and coinfection. The difference between "comorbid" and "syndemic" is per Mustanski et al. [9] [10] "comorbidity research tends to focus on the nosological issues of boundaries and overlap of diagnoses, while syndemic research focuses on communities experiencing co-occurring epidemics that additively increase negative health consequences." It is possible for two afflictions to be comorbid, but not syndemic i.e., the disorders are not epidemic in the studied population, or their co-occurrence does not cause an interaction that then contributes to worsened health. Two or more diseases can be comorbid without interactions, or interaction occurs but it is beneficial, not deleterious. Syndemic theory seeks to draw attention to and provide a framework for the analysis of adverse disease interactions, including their causes and consequences for human life and well-being. [11] Although the majority of this research has focused on HIV, [12] an emerging body of work on syndemics has expanded to other co-occurring conditions. [13] [14]

Syndemic methods: from historical archives to mathematical models

Methods for evaluating syndemics have been a focus on scholarship for deepening the application of what has largely served as theory to understand why and how social and health conditions cluster together, interact, and are driven by shared forces, from climate (such as escalation of heat, rain, drought, and events) to poverty (such as food insecurity, poor housing, lack of safety, and limited work opportunities). [15] In 2022, Alexander Tsai (an epidemiologist), Emily Mendenhall (a medical anthropologist), and Timothy Newfield (a historian) teamed up on a Special Issue in Social Science and Medicine to explore the various methodological ways in which syndemics can be understood, interpreted, and evaluated through history. [16] For instance, historical syndemics may be evaluated using archival data that is incomplete but provides a novel way of thinking about disease biography. [17] This is exemplified by Dylann Atcher Proctor's historical work on gastrointestinal distress in Gabon using historical archives that had never yet been evaluated on their own or synergistically. [18]

Ethnographic data provides a deeper understanding of how and why larger social forces produce disease clusters and interactions and are crucial for understanding "why" syndemics occur. Ethnographic insights have served as the bedrock of syndemic thinking since Merrill Singer's pioneering intellectual and practical work with the concept beginning in the 1990s. His first article based on ethnographic thinking about the SAVA Syndemic came from real time observations as the AIDS epidemic that unfolded in tandem with substance use amidst structural violence in urban America throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. [19] Singer demonstrated how it was impossible to think about one condition without contextualizing the broader social, structural, and health contexts in which people lived. Discussion of ethnographic methods were detailed in Emily Mendenhall's books Syndemic Suffering [20] and Rethinking Diabetes [21] and is also exemplified in Mac Marshall's book Drinking Smoke. [22]

The largest body of methodological scholarship has emerged around the utility of epidemiological data. [23] Epidemiological data provides opportunities to investigate the synergistic ways in which diseases emerge and interact with social and health conditions. [24] This latter method has been the focus of contention, particularly in dialogue between Alexander Tsai and Ronald Stall. [25] [26] Early epidemiological studies, for example, evaluated the ways in which social and health conditions co-occurred. Tsai argued that instead, there is a deeper need to interrogate how conditions syngistically interact to cause more adverse health conditions that the conditions would produce on their own. This has led to a slough of emergent research interrogating mathematical models that can take seriously how health conditions may cluster together and interact to affect the health and well-being of populations residing in a specific nation, region, city, or town. A particularly useful model based on the Soweto Syndemics study was published in Nature Human Behavior. [27] In particular, spatial models for thinking through syndemic clusters, such as using GIS, are an emerging area of interest in syndemics research. [28] [29]

Types of disease interaction

Diseases regularly interact and this interaction influences disease course, expression, severity, transmission, and diffusion. Interaction among diseases may be both indirect (changes caused by one disease that facilitate another through an intermediary) and direct (diseases act in direct tandem).[ citation needed ]

Iatrogenic

The term iatrogenesis refers to adverse effects on health caused by medical treatment. This is possible if medical treatment or medical research creates conditions that increase the likelihood that two or more diseases come together in a population. For example, if gene splicing unites two pathogenic agents and the resulting novel organism infects a population. One study suggests the possibility of iatriogenic syndemics. During a randomized, double-blind clinical trial testing the efficacy of the prototype HIV vaccine called V520 there appeared to be an increased risk for HIV infection among the vaccinated participants. Notably, participants immune to the common cold virus adenovirus type 5 had a higher risk of HIV infection. The vaccine was created using a replication-defective version of Ad5 as a carrier, or delivery vector, for three synthetically produced HIV genes. On November 6, 2007, Merck & Co. announced that research had been stopped suspecting the higher rate of HIV infection among individuals in the vaccinated was because the vaccine lowered defenses against HIV.[ citation needed ]

Examples

Various syndemics though not always labeled as such have been described in the literature, including:

19th century Native American

Contact between Native Americans and Europeans during the Columbian Exchange led to lethal syndemics within the Native American population due to diseases introduced which the Native Americans had not encountered before and had not built-up immunity to.[ citation needed ]

An example of a syndemic from the 19th century can be found on the reservations on which Native Americans were confined with the closing of the U.S. frontier. It is estimated that in 1860 there were well over 10 million bison living on the American Plains. By the early 1880s, the last of the great herds of bison upon which Plains Indian peoples like the Sioux were dependent as a food source were gone. At the same time, after the U.S. military's defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, there was a concerted effort to beat the Sioux into total submission. Thus, in 1872, Secretary of the Interior Columbus Delano stated: "as they become convinced that they can no longer rely upon the supply of game for their support, they will return to the more reliable source of subsistence [i.e., farming]." As a result, they were forced to give up their struggle for an independent existence on their own lands and take up reservation life at the mercy of government authority. Treaties that were signed with the Sioux in 1868 and 1876 stipulated that they would be provided with government annuities and provisions in payment for sections of their land and with the expectation among federal representatives that the Sioux would become farmers on individually held plots of land. The Sioux found themselves confined on a series of small reservations where they were treated as a conquered people. Moreover, the government reneged on its promises, food was insufficient and of low quality. Black Elk, a noted Sioux folk healer, told his biographer: "There was hunger among my people before I went across the big water [to Europe in 1886], because the Wasichus [whites] did not give us all the food they promised in the Black Hills treaty... But it was worse when I came back [1889]. My people looked pitiful... We could not eat lies and there was nothing we could do." Under extremely stressful conditions, with inadequate diets, and as victims of overt racism on the part of the registration agents appointed to oversee Indian reserves, the Sioux confronted infectious disease from contact with whites. knowledge about the epidemiology of the Sioux from this period is limited, James Mooney, an anthropologist and representative of the Bureau of Indian Affairs sent to investigate a possible Sioux rebellion, described the health situation on the reservation in 1896: "In 1888 their cattle had been diminished by disease. In 1889, their crops were a failure ... Thus followed epidemics of measles, grippe [influenza], and whooping cough Pertussis, in rapid succession and with terrible fatal results..." Similarly, the Handbook of American Indians notes, "The least hopeful conditions in this respect prevail among the Dakota [Sioux] and other tribes of the colder northern regions, where pulmonary tuberculosis and scrofula are very common... Other more common diseases, are various forms of, bronchitis ...pneumonia, pleurisy, and measles in the young. Whooping cough is also met with." Indian children were removed to white boarding schools and diagnosed with a wide range of diseases, including tuberculosis, trachoma, measles, smallpox, whooping cough, influenza, and pneumonia.[ citation needed ]

The Sioux were victims of a syndemic of interacting infectious diseases including the 1889–1890 flu pandemic, inadequate diet, and stressful and extremely disheartening life conditions, including outright brutalization with events like the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 and the murder of their leader Sitting Bull. While the official mortality rate on the reservation was between one and two percent, the death rate was probably closer to 10 percent.[ citation needed ]

Influenza

There were three influenza pandemics during the 20th century that caused widespread illness, mortality, social disruption, and significant economic losses. These occurred in 1918, 1957, and 1968. In each case, mortality rates were determined primarily by five factors: the number of people who became infected, the virulence of the virus causing the pandemic, the speed of global spread, the underlying features and vulnerabilities of the most affected populations, and the effectiveness and timeliness of the prevention and treatment measures that were implemented.[ citation needed ]

The 1957 pandemic was caused by the Asian influenza virus (known as the H2N2 strain), a novel influenza variety to which humans had not yet developed immunities. The death toll of the 1957 pandemic is estimated to have been around two million globally, with approximately 70,000 deaths in the United States. A little over a decade later, the comparatively mild Hong Kong influenza pandemic erupted due to the spread of a virus strain (H3N2) that genetically was related to the more deadly form seen in 1957. The pandemic was responsible for about one million deaths around the world, almost 34,000 of which were in the United States. In both of these pandemics, death may not have been due only to the primary viral infection, but also to secondary bacterial infections among influenza patients; in short, they were caused by a viral/bacterial syndemic (but see Chatterjee 2007).

The worst of the 20th-century influenza pandemics was the 1918 pandemic, where between 20 and 40 percent of the world's population became ill and between 40 and 100 million people died. More people died of the so-called Spanish flu (caused by the H1N1 viral strain) pandemic in the single year of 1918 than during all four-years of the Black Death. The pandemic had devastating effects as disease spread along trade and shipping routes and other corridors of human movement until it had circled the globe. In India, the mortality rate reached 50 per 1,000 population. Arriving during the closing phase of World War I, the pandemic impacted mobilized national armies. Half of U.S. soldiers who died in the "Great War," for example, were victims of influenza. It is estimated that almost 34 of a million Americans died during the pandemic. In part, the death toll during the pandemic was caused by viral pneumonia characterized by extensive bleeding in the lungs resulting in suffocation. Many victims died within 48 hours of the appearance of the first symptom. It was not uncommon for people who appeared to be quite healthy in the morning to have died by sunset. Among those who survived the first several days, however, many died of secondary bacterial pneumonia. It has been argued that countless numbers of those who expired quickly from the disease were co-infected with tuberculosis, which would explain the notable plummet in TB cases after 1918.[ citation needed ]

Climate change

As a result of the floral changes produced by global warming, an escalation is occurring in global rates of allergies and asthma. Allergic diseases constitute the sixth leading cause of chronic illness in the United States, impacting 17 percent of the population. Asthma affects about 8 percent of the U.S. population, with rising tendency, especially in low income, ethnic minority neighborhoods in cities. In 1980 asthma affected only about three percent of the U.S. population according to the U.S. CDC. Asthma among children has been increasing at an even faster pace than among adults, with the percentage of children with asthma going up from 3.6 percent in 1980 to 9 percent in 2005. Among ethnic minority populations, like Puerto Ricans the rate of asthma is 125 percent higher than non-Hispanic white people and 80 percent higher than non-Hispanic black people. The asthma prevalence among American Indians, Alaska Natives and black people is 25 percent higher than in white people.[ citation needed ]

Air pollution

Increases in asthma rates have occurred despite improvements in air quality produced by the passage and enforcement of clean air legislation, such as the U.S. Clean Air Act of 1963 and the Clean Air Act of 1990. Existing legislation and regulation have not kept pace with changing climatic conditions and their health consequences. Compounding the problem of air quality is the fact that air-borne pollens have been found to attach themselves to diesel particles from truck or other vehicular exhaust floating in the air, resulting in heightened rates of asthma in areas where busy roads bisect densely populated areas, most notably in poorer inner-city areas.

For every elevation of 10 μg/m3 in particulate matter concentration in the air a six percent increase in cardiopulmonary deaths occurs according to research by the American Cancer Society. Exhaust from the burning of diesel fuel is a complex mixture of vapors, gases, and fine particles, including over 40 known pollutants like nitrogen oxide and known or suspected carcinogenic substances such as benzene, arsenic, and formaldehyde. Exposure to diesel exhaust irritates the eyes, nose, throat and lungs, causing coughs, headaches, light-headedness and nausea, while causing people with allergies to be more susceptible allergy triggers like dust or pollen. Many particles in disease fuel are so tiny they are able to penetrate deep into the lungs when inhaled. Importantly, diesel fuel particles appear to have even greater immunologic effects in the presence of environmental allergens than they do alone. "This immunologic evidence may help explain the epidemiologic studies indicating that children living along major trucking thoroughfares are at increased risk for asthmatic and allergic symptoms and are more likely to have respiratory dysfunction." according to Robert Pandya and co-workers.[ citation needed ]

The damaging effects of diesel fuel pollution go beyond a synergistic role in asthma development. Exposure to a combination of microscopic diesel fuel particles among people with high blood cholesterol (i.e., low-density lipoprotein, LDL or "bad cholesterol") increases the risk for both heart attack and stroke above levels found among those exposed to only one of these health risks. According to André Nel, Chief of Nanomedicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, "When you add one plus one, it normally totals two... But we found that adding diesel particles to cholesterol fats equals three. Their combination creates a dangerous synergy that wreaks cardiovascular havoc far beyond what's caused by the diesel or cholesterol alone." Experimentation revealed that the two mechanisms worked in tandem to stimulate genes that promote cell inflammation, a primary risk for hardening and blockage of blood vessels (atherosclerosis ) and, as narrowed arteries collect cholesterol deposits and trigger blood clots, for heart attacks and strokes as well.[ citation needed ]

A Note on Mathematical Models

A mathematical model is a simplified representation using mathematical language to describe natural, mechanical or social system dynamics. Epidemiological modelers unite several types of information and analytic capacity, including: 1) mathematical equations and computational algorithms; 2) computer technology; 3) epidemiological knowledge about infectious disease dynamics, including information about specific pathogens and disease vectors; and 4) research data on social conditions and human behavior. Mathematical modelling in epidemiology is now being applied to syndemics.[ citation needed ]

For example, modelling to quantify the syndemic effects of malaria and HIV in sub-Saharan Africa based on research in Kisumu, Kenya researchers found that 5% of HIV infections (or 8,500 cases of HIV since 1980) in Kisumu are the result of the higher HIV infectiousness of malaria-infected HIV patients. Additionally, their model attributed 10% of adult malaria episodes (or almost one million excess malaria infections since 1980) to the greater susceptibility of HIV infected individuals to malaria. Their model also suggests that HIV has contributed to the wider geographic spread of malaria in Africa, a process previously thought to be the consequence primarily of global warming. [50] Modelling offers an enormously useful tool for anticipating future syndemics, including eco-syndemic, based on information about the spread of various diseases across the planet and the consequent co-infections and disease interactions that will result. [51]

PopMod is a longitudinal population tool developed in 2003 that models distinct and possibly interacting diseases. Unlike other life-table population models, PopMod is designed to not assume the statistical independence of the diseases of interest. The PopMod has several intended purposes, including describing the time evolution of population health for standard demographic purposes (such as estimating healthy life expectancy in a population), and providing a standard measure of effectiveness for health interventions and cost-effectiveness analysis. PopMod is used as one of the standard tools of the World Health Organization's (WHO) CHOICE (Choosing Interventions that are Cost-Effective) program, an initiative designed to provide national health policymakers in the WHO's 14 epidemiological sub-regions around the world with findings on a range of health intervention costs and effects. [52]

Future research

First, there is a need for studies that examine the processes by which syndemics emerge, the specific sets of health and social conditions that foster multiple epidemics in a population and how syndemics function to produce specific kinds of health outcomes in populations.[ citation needed ] Second, there is a need to better understand processes of interaction between specific diseases with each other and with health-related factors like malnutrition, structural violence, discrimination, stigmatization, and toxic environmental exposure that reflect oppressive social relationships. There is a need to identify all of the ways, directly and indirectly, that diseases can interact and have, as a result, enhanced impact on human health. Third there is a need for the development of an eco-syndemic understanding of the ways in which global warming contributes to the spread of diseases and new disease interactions. There is a need for a better understanding of how public health systems and communities can best respond to and limit the health consequences of syndemics. Systems are needed to monitor the emergence of syndemics and to allow early medical and public health responses to lessen their impact. Systematic ethno-epidemiological surveillance with populations subject to multiple social stressors must be one component of such a monitoring system.

See also

Related Research Articles

The Duesberg hypothesis is the claim that AIDS is not caused by HIV, but instead that AIDS is caused by noninfectious factors such as recreational and pharmaceutical drug use and that HIV is merely a harmless passenger virus. The hypothesis was popularized by Peter Duesberg, a professor of biology at University of California, Berkeley, from whom the hypothesis gets its name. The scientific consensus is that the Duesberg hypothesis is incorrect and that HIV is the cause of AIDS. The most prominent supporters of the hypothesis are Duesberg himself, biochemist and vitamin proponent David Rasnick, and journalist Celia Farber. The scientific community generally contends that Duesberg's arguments in favor of the hypothesis are the result of cherry-picking predominantly outdated scientific data and selectively ignoring evidence that demonstrates HIV's role in causing AIDS.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Safe sex</span> Ways to reduce the risk of acquiring STIs

Safe sex is sexual activity using methods or contraceptive devices to reduce the risk of transmitting or acquiring sexually transmitted infections (STIs), especially HIV. "Safe sex" is also sometimes referred to as safer sex or protected sex to indicate that some safe sex practices do not eliminate STI risks. It is also sometimes used colloquially to describe methods aimed at preventing pregnancy that may or may not also lower STI risks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">HIV/AIDS in Africa</span>

HIV/AIDS originated in the early 20th century and has become a major public health concern and cause of death in many countries. AIDS rates vary significantly between countries, with the majority of cases concentrated in Southern Africa. Although the continent is home to about 15.2 percent of the world's population, more than two-thirds of the total population infected worldwide – approximately 35 million people – were Africans, of whom around 1 million have already died. Eastern and Southern Africa alone accounted for an estimate of 60 percent of all people living with HIV and 100 percent of all AIDS deaths in 2011. The countries of Eastern and Southern Africa are most affected, leading to raised death rates and lowered life expectancy among adults between the ages of 20 and 49 by about twenty years. Furthermore, life expectancy in many parts of Africa is declining, largely as a result of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, with life-expectancy in some countries reaching as low as thirty-nine years.

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Men who have sex with men</span> Behavioral category

Men who have sex with men (MSM) are men who engage in sexual activity with other men, regardless of their sexual orientation or sexual identity. The term was created by epidemiologists in the 1990s, to better study and communicate the spread of sexually transmitted infections such as HIV/AIDS between all sexually active males, not strictly those identifying as gay, bisexual, pansexual or various other sexualities, but also for example male prostitutes. The term is often used in medical literature and social research to describe such men as a group. It does not describe any specific kind of sexual activity, and which activities are covered by the term depends on context. The alternative term "males who have sex with males" is sometimes considered more accurate in cases where those described may not be legal adults.

Coinfection is the simultaneous infection of a host by multiple pathogen species. In virology, coinfection includes simultaneous infection of a single cell by two or more virus particles. An example is the coinfection of liver cells with hepatitis B virus and hepatitis D virus, which can arise incrementally by initial infection followed by superinfection.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of HIV/AIDS</span>

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Epidemiology of HIV/AIDS</span> Pandemic of HIV/AIDS

The global pandemic of HIV/AIDS began in 1981, and is an ongoing worldwide public health issue. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), by 2023, HIV/AIDS had killed approximately 40.4 million people, and approximately 39 million people were infected with HIV globally. Of these, 29.8 million people (75%) are receiving antiretroviral treatment. There were about 630,000 deaths from HIV/AIDS in 2022. The 2015 Global Burden of Disease Study estimated that the global incidence of HIV infection peaked in 1997 at 3.3 million per year. Global incidence fell rapidly from 1997 to 2005, to about 2.6 million per year. Incidence of HIV has continued to fall, decreasing by 23% from 2010 to 2020, with progress dominated by decreases in Eastern Africa and Southern Africa. As of 2023, there are about 1.3 million new infections of HIV per year globally.

Following infection with HIV-1, the rate of clinical disease progression varies between individuals. Factors such as host susceptibility, genetics and immune function, health care and co-infections as well as viral genetic variability may affect the rate of progression to the point of needing to take medication in order not to develop AIDS.

Merrill Singer is a medical anthropologist and professor emeritus in Anthropology at the University of Connecticut and in Community Medicine at the University of Connecticut Health Center. He is best known for his research on substance abuse, HIV/AIDS, syndemics, health disparities, and minority health.

Serosorting, also known as serodiscrimination, is the practice of using HIV status as a decision-making point in choosing sexual behavior. The term is used to describe the behavior of a person who chooses a sexual partner assumed to be of the same HIV serostatus to engage in unprotected sex with them for a reduced risk of acquiring or transmitting HIV/AIDS.

Diseases of poverty, also known as poverty-related diseases, are diseases that are more prevalent in low-income populations. They include infectious diseases, as well as diseases related to malnutrition and poor health behaviour. Poverty is one of the major social determinants of health. The World Health Report (2002) states that diseases of poverty account for 45% of the disease burden in the countries with high poverty rate which are preventable or treatable with existing interventions. Diseases of poverty are often co-morbid and ubiquitous with malnutrition. Poverty increases the chances of having these diseases as the deprivation of shelter, safe drinking water, nutritious food, sanitation, and access to health services contributes towards poor health behaviour. At the same time, these diseases act as a barrier for economic growth to affected people and families caring for them which in turn results into increased poverty in the community. These diseases produced in part by poverty are in contrast to diseases of affluence, which are diseases thought to be a result of increasing wealth in a society.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">HIV/AIDS</span> Spectrum of conditions caused by HIV infection

The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is a retrovirus that attacks the immune system. It is a preventable disease. There is no vaccine or cure for HIV. It can be managed with treatment and become a manageable chronic health condition. While there is no cure or vaccine, antiretroviral treatment can slow the course of the disease and enable people living with HIV to lead long and healthy lives. An HIV-positive person on treatment can expect to live a normal life, and die with the virus, not of it. Effective treatment for HIV-positive people involves a life-long regimen of medicine to suppress the virus, making the viral load undetectable. Without treatment it can lead to a spectrum of conditions including acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">HIV/AIDS in Zimbabwe</span> Major public health issue

HIV and AIDS is a major public health issue in Zimbabwe. The country is reported to hold one of the largest recorded numbers of cases in Sub-Saharan Africa. According to reports, the virus has been present in the country since roughly 40 years ago. However, evidence suggests that the spread of the virus may have occurred earlier. In recent years, the government has agreed to take action and implement treatment target strategies in order to address the prevalence of cases in the epidemic. Notable progress has been made as increasingly more individuals are being made aware of their HIV/AIDS status, receiving treatment, and reporting high rates of viral suppression. As a result of this, country progress reports show that the epidemic is on the decline and is beginning to reach a plateau. International organizations and the national government have connected this impact to the result of increased condom usage in the population, a reduced number of sexual partners, as well as an increased knowledge and support system through successful implementation of treatment strategies by the government. Vulnerable populations disproportionately impacted by HIV/AIDS in Zimbabwe include women and children, sex workers, and the LGBTQ+ population.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">HIV-affected community</span> Medical condition

The affected community is composed of people who are living with HIV and AIDS, plus individuals whose lives are directly influenced by HIV infection. This originally was defined as young to middle aged adults who associate with being gay or bisexual men, and or injection drug users. HIV-affected community is a community that is affected directly or indirectly affected by HIV. These communities are usually influenced by HIV and undertake risky behaviours that lead to a higher chance of HIV infection. To date HIV infection is still one of the leading cause of deaths around the world with an estimate of 36.8 million people diagnosed with HIV by the end of 2017, but there can particular communities that are more vulnerable to HIV infection, these communities include certain races, gender, minorities, and disadvantaged communities. One of the most common communities at risk is the gay community as it is commonly transmitted through unsafe sex. The main factor that contributes to HIV infection within the gay/bisexual community is that gay men do not use protection when performing anal sex or other sexual activities which can lead to a higher risk of HIV infections. Another community will be people diagnosed with mental health issues, such as depression is one of the most common related mental illnesses associated with HIV infection. HIV testing is an essential role in reducing HIV infection within communities as it can lead to prevention and treatment of HIV infections but also helps with early diagnosis of HIV. Educating young people in a community with the knowledge of HIV prevention will be able to help decrease the prevalence within the community. As education is an important source for development in many areas. Research has shown that people more at risk for HIV are part of disenfranchised and inner city populations as drug use and sexually transmitted diseases(STDs) are more prevalent. People with mental illnesses that inhibit making decisions or overlook sexual tendencies are especially at risk for contracting 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.

HIV prevention refers to practices that aim to prevent the spread of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). HIV prevention practices may be undertaken by individuals to protect their own health and the health of those in their community, or may be instituted by governments and community-based organizations as public health policies.

Health in Nicaragua is influenced by several factors including public health policies, the availability of healthcare facilities, environmental influences, individual lifestyle choices, and socioeconomic circumstances.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Signs and symptoms of HIV/AIDS</span>

The stages of HIV infection are acute infection, latency, and AIDS. Acute infection lasts for several weeks and may include symptoms such as fever, swollen lymph nodes, inflammation of the throat, rash, muscle pain, malaise, and mouth and esophageal sores. The latency stage involves few or no symptoms and can last anywhere from two weeks to twenty years or more, depending on the individual. AIDS, the final stage of HIV infection, is defined by low CD4+ T cell counts, various opportunistic infections, cancers, and other conditions.

Risky sexual behavior is the description of the activity that will increase the probability that a person engaging in sexual activity with another person infected with a sexually transmitted infection will be infected, become unintentionally pregnant, or make a partner pregnant. It can mean two similar things: the behavior itself, and the description of the partner's behavior.

References

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