1.- INTRODUCTION

In the early nineteen eighties, a new disease entity was first detected in the United States and soon thereafter in Europe. Because of its special features, this disease quickly became the center of attention of the world's health services, healthcare organizations and public opinion. In somewhat less than two decades since then, the retrovirus known as Human Immunodeficiency Virus-HIV 1 and HIV2-has gone from a mere biological finding to a development which is at the center of social interest and concern.
As is well known, HIV destroys the body's immune defenses over a relatively long asymptomatic course. Its effects become manifest later, through clinical presentations attributable to as many as 30 specific diseases, common infections or cancerous processes.
In October 1980, Dr. M.S. Gottlieb et al, of Los Angeles, first reported on five patients whose pneumonia was associated with a deficiency in CD4 lymphocytes. Subsequently, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta alerted the world to a sudden and unusual increase in the incidence of Kaposi's sarcoma in young men living in New York and San Francisco. The uneasiness created by the report led to the careful monitoring of new alarming signs. These cases coincided with a decisive fact in the history of HIV infection-the infected patients from California and New York were homosexuals. Although HIV infections and tumors soon affected other heterosexual male and female populations, names like the gay plague, gay cancer, gay pneumonia or gay- related immunodeficiency (GRID) began to appear in the literature.
Epidemiological data soon revealed the extent of the disease. In 1982, these "abnormal" patients numbered 200 and began to be spread out beyond the initial disease enclaves and affected groups. Cases of HIV-infected heroin addicts, and the first instances of infected hemophiliacs, had already been found. Also, research by organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO) confirmed the emergence of similar HIV infection throughout the world. This gave rise to the idea that a virus acting much like the hepatitis B virus might be behind the incipient plague.
By September 1982, the Centers for Disease Control had coined a more neutral term to define the set of clinical presentations related to the immune deficiency: AIDS or Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, which was soon adopted the world over in its various translations.
Advances in defining the syndrome that characterizes the disease made it possible to single out groups at risk and to determine early public health measures. Nevertheless, by 1988, AIDS had become the leading cause of mortality among New York City's men and women 23 to 34 years of age.
In 1983, Luc Montagnier, of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, identified the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), and some time thereafter Robert Gallo, of the National Cancer Institute at Bethesda, Maryland, also succeeded in isolating the virus. Unfortunately, over the next 10 years, the two institutions were mired in a dispute regarding the paternity of the discovery; the matter was finally settled by an agreement to share the copyright.With the identification of the virus, the acronym AIDS (SIDA in Spanish) became the official name of the disease syndrome caused by the HIV retrovirus.
Today, AIDS is considered a pandemia. According to WHO, it has spread to the entire planet following various routes. In developed countries, homosexual males and users of injected drugs have been particularly affected. Subsequently, an increase in the transmission of the disease to heterosexuals has been reported. Throughout the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa, the form of transmission is basically heterosexual. In Southeast Asia, the disease emerged even later-in the mid-1980s-but spread rapidly by heterosexual transmission and the use of injected drugs.
The short but intense history of AIDS has outpaced modern social perception of disease, carrying us back to dark times we thought had been gone forever. When victory over all infectious disease appeared to be at hand, AIDS opened up a new war front, right behind the lines of world's health system and global awareness. HIV brought on a new social crisis which extended beyond transmission of the disease and affected both carriers and non-carriers of the infection.
Along with scientific efforts to gain a better understanding of how HIV works-to at least reduce AIDS to the status of a chronic disease while waiting for a cure, and to develop a vaccine against the virus- it is necessary to encourage new thinking and a social debate, and thus awaken more minds and move them into action as we face the undeniable fact that AIDS has brought back problems that go beyond disease itself, affecting the social fabric of life, human relations, and ethical and political principles. Our avowed purpose is to extend the debate to the social problems exposed by the disease. The impact of HIV has reached beyond people who have been infected in one way or another, to the point of altering behavior and habits. Without actually being present as an infection, AIDS has invaded the factory, the school, the media...and many other spheres of human activity. It has affected men, women and children differently. It has moved into both poor and developed countries. In short, it has engendered all kinds of social responses, except indifference. The fight against AIDS must not merely target the virus, but must provide an opportunity for us to think and to defend ourselves against opportunistic social diseases clearly stimulated by the disease. This project intends to start out in that direction and with that objective, while encouraging related activities.
The AMAS Project is to be an element that contributes to the research process at the same time being an information and discussion element regarding HIV, which in turn can stimulate other initiatives.