Environmental Risks

Takatorige, Toshio; Hirose, Yukio; Nagamatsu, Shingo

In the 1980s, acquired immune deficiency syndrome, known as AIDS, entered human society, and the change of human lifestyles caused the disease to quickly spread throughout the world. When a person infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) develops symptoms, the person is considered an AIDS patient. Early in Japan, AIDS started as drug toxicity where victims had blood transfusion of blood products contaminated with HIV. Recently, is it more of a sexually transmitted disease (STD) where the majority of carriers and patients are male homosexuals. AIDS is now not deadly with the birth of a drug to inhibit the growth of its virus; however, it is still an incurable infection. Since 2007, a number of new HIV infection reports have been over 1000 a year, and the reports of new AIDS patients have been over 400 annually since 2006 in Japan. This means the number of patients is steadily growing in Japan. In the world every year, about 2.1 million are newly infected and about 1.1 million die. The number of patients is over 30 million with about 17 million receiving treatment. AIDS is the biggest infection WHO is fighting now (WHO 2015).