英语六级阅读备考：快速阅读练习(7)_大学英语阅读

英语六级阅读备考：快速阅读练习(7)

　　AIDS must have been circulating in the US and Africa during the 1970s. But it was not recognized until 1981 when young gay men and injecting drug users, in New York and California, started to be diagnosed with both an unusual skin cancer called Kaposi s sarcoma, and lethal pneumonias. By the end of that year 121 people in the US had diedthat number would rise to 17,000 over the next six years.

　　Government scientists predicted that the mysterious immune-debilitating illness was due to an infectious agent. In 1984 that agent was identified as HIV by Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in is, France, and Robert Gallo of the National Cancer Institute in Washington DC, US.

　　Soon after the appearance of AIDS in the US, the disease was detected in Europe too and epidemics affecting heterosexual men and women sprang up at an alarming rate in Sub-Saharan Africa. Today one in five people in that region are living with the virus. AIDS epidemics also threaten to devastate the worlds most populous nations, if action is not taken to bring them under control.

　　Defensive Measures

　　HIV is found in body fluids such as: blood, semen, vaginal fluids and breast milk. It can be passed on through penetrative sex, oral sex and sharing contaminated needles when injecting street drugs or in hospitals. It can also be transmitted from a mother to her baby during pregnancy, childbirth or breastfeedingthough many children escape infection. HIV cannot be passed on through kissing, coughing, mosquito bites or touching.