By Carlos Alberto Soares
Psychologist and Sexologist

Until recently, the use of the word syndrome to describe sexual disease occurred only rarely, but the practice became increasingly more common after the AIDS pandemic. A sexual disease renamed syndrome affects our sexuality. A change in perception towards sexuality and sexual practices. Our sex therapist has a word or two on sexual appalls.

It's known that the HIV virus thrives in the human immune system. Its very presence wrecks havoc in our sexuality by rendering the immune system more susceptible to opportunistic diseases, it would ward off under normal conditions.

Its prior cases were made publicly at the beginning of the eighties, as its sudden appearance gave margin to a lot of speculations about the origins of the virus.
As was the cold war still on, it gave raise to the hypothesis mongering of something that might've leaked, whether accidentally or purposely, from a laboratory dedicated to biological warfare production.

Such is a remote hypothesis, however less so than those who pray on doom and gloom of God's wrath over sinful sodomites, for the homosexual population was first hit. Back then, more vulnerable it was thanks to new behavioral trends and freedom-achieved posts sixties' "Sexual Revolution" i.e. free love, sex for the sake of sexual pleasure.

However, the most consistent hypothesis points out to a natural mutation of a virus present in some species of monkeys, which never threatened humans before.
In fact, the massively concentration of various species living together, like for instance, say, the humans, fowl and pigs in the south East Asia region. Therein lies the likelihood of species jumping cross-infections, by sheer offer of hosts, mutation of virus inherent to species bound to pass on to humans: avian influenza to speak out loud.

In continuing major human concentrations, under precarious conditions, as so far described, there might be expected, install in future, outbreaks of new strands of HIV-like virus and extremely lethal flu-like symptoms, likewise the Spanish Influenza, in 1917, or Black Pest that decimated a third of the European population of middle Ages'. As it were, the last one arrived in Genoa on board of an eastbound merchant ship.