The Cause
Stanford Dance Marathon creates, educates, inspires, and mobilizes community to combat HIV/AIDS and support international health.
The Global HIV/AIDS Epidemic
What is HIV?
HIV, or the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, attacks the immune system and weakens it over time, leaving the human body defenseless against pathogens that it would normally be able to fend off. A person is said to have AIDS--Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AKA advanced HIV disease)--when the virus has made the immune system so weak that the person’s CD4 count has dropped below 200. CD4 cells basically function as the immune system’s “captain” cells; this count of 200 simply means that the CD4s have been so attacked by HIV that there are very few of them left, leaving no “captain” for the immune system, and thus no coordination of the body's defenses against diseases. Opportunistic infections, like tuberculosis, exploit the weakened immune systems of those with AIDS. Without treatment, such infections eventually lead to death. There is currently no cure for HIV.
There are three modes of transmission for HIV:
- Sexual Transmission (most common around the world)
- Blood to Blood Transmission
- Mother To Child Transmission
All are largely preventable.
Why does it matter?
"AIDS does to society what HIV does to the body."
-Dr. Peter Piot, Director of UNAIDS, at Stanford University in May 2007
There are currently over 33 million people in the world living with HIV. About 5,700 of these individuals die every single day from AIDS-related diseases, while an even greater number are newly infected. There were 2.5 million new infections in 2007 alone.
Since its emergence in the early 1980s, HIV has spread to every continent, impacting every country in the world. The distribution of the disease is not even across the globe, however. 96% of HIV positive people live in a developing country, most of them in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The impact of HIV/AIDS on the societies it touches is tremendous, particularly in areas where poverty makes addressing the issue so much more difficult. HIV/AIDS does not just affect the individuals it infects. It tears apart families and communities, contributes to segregation in stigma-prone societies, breaks apart a population’s work force, disrupts the development of infrastructure, cripples military forces, helps to further gender discrimination in many areas, creates severe orphan crises in the countries it hits hardest (1/5 households are lead by a child in Swaziland), and overwhelms already overburdened health care systems in countries where funding for health care is extremely scarce.
The issues that contribute toward the devastating affects of HIV, as well as become confounded with its spread, include:
- Economic structures and poverty
- Gender issues
- Stigma (discrimination against HIV & people and those associated with them)
- Lack of education
- Lack of infrastructure/security
- Sexual health
- General health concerns
- Children’s rights
But what can WE do?
First of all, by educating ourselves about the epidemic, we are taking the first steps toward protecting ourselves and our local community against the disease, and toward joining with our global community in the fight against the virus and its devastating consequences in resource-poor regions.
There is no cure yet for HIV. Fortunately, there are medications called ARVs that can help HIV positive people live longer, more productive lives, as well as many preventative measures that can be taken to curb the spread of the virus. Treating and preventing the disease is not a simple task, however; the virus affects a community in a number of different ways and is perpetuated by many different issues. That is why Stanford Dance Marathon supports an organization that is addressing the epidemic with this comprehensive view. A multi-faceted approach to the epidemic offers the best chance of effectively working against the continued spread of HIV/AIDS.
For the past two years, this ideology has led Stanford Dance Marathon to support Partners In Health, an international health and social justice organization that has revolutionized how the world thinks about health care in developing countries.
For more information, check out the Dance Marathon Education Zone Facts Sheet PDF, compiled by the Dance Marathon Education Committee.