What is AIDS?
The virus caused by HIV.
About the Virus
IDS stands for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome:
- Acquired means you can get infected with it;
- Immune Deficiency means a weakness in the body's system that fights diseases.
- Syndrome means a group of health problems that make up a disease.
AIDS is caused by a virus called HIV, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus. If you get infected with HIV, your body will try to fight the infection. It will make "antibodies," special molecules to fight HIV.
Tests for HIV look for these antibodies in your blood or mouth lining. If you have them in your blood, it means that you have HIV infection. People who have the HIV antibodies are called "HIV-Positive."
How one gets AIDS?
You don't actually "get" AIDS. You might get infected with HIV, and later you might develop AIDS. You can get infected with HIV from anyone who's infected, even if they don't look sick and even if they haven't tested HIV-positive yet. The blood, vaginal fluid, semen, and breast milk of people infected with HIV has enough of the virus in it to infect other people. Most people get the HIV virus by:
- having sex with an infected person
- sharing a needle (shooting drugs) with someone who's infected
- being born when their mother is infected, or drinking the breast milk of an infected woman
Getting a transfusion of infected blood used to be a way people got AIDS, but now the blood supply is screened very carefully and the risk is extremely low.
What happens?
You might not know if you are infected by HIV. Within a few weeks after being infected, some people get fever, headache, sore muscles and joints, stomach ache, swollen lymph glands, or a skin rash for one or two weeks. Most people think it's the flu. Some people have no symptoms.
The virus will multiply in your body for a few weeks or even months before your immune system responds. During this time, you won't test positive for HIV, but you can infect other people.
When your immune system responds, it starts to make antibodies. When this happens, you will test positive for HIV.
Is there a cure?
Though there are two cases of people who have been cured, there is currently no safe cure for HIV. There is no way to "clear" HIV from the body. Antiretroviral therapy can slow down the HIV virus, and slow down or reverse the damage to your immune system. Most people stay healthy if they stay adherent to ART.
Other drugs can prevent or treat opportunistic infections (OIs). ART has also reduced the rate of most OIs. A few OIs, however, are still very difficult to treat.
AIDS by the Numbers
- About 35 million people worldwide have HIV/AIDS, according to 2013 WHO figures. Of these, 3.2 million were children under age 15.
- Africa is most affected by HIV, with 24.7 million people living with the virus 2013. This means that 71 percent of all people who have HIV are living in Africa.
- Despite lower rates of newly infected people, and the fact that fewer people are dying of AIDS, the number of people who currently are HIV-positive has grown from 29.8 million in 2001 because of new infections, people living longer with HIV and general population growth, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.