What you need to know about HIV and AIDS

In the 1980s and early 1990s, the outbreak of HIV and AIDS swept across the United States and the rest of the world, though the disease originated decades earlier. Today, more than 70 million people have been infected with HIV, and about 35 million have died from AIDS since the start of the pandemic, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Read to learn all you need to know about HIV and AIDS including signs, symptoms and treatments.

What is HIV?

The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is an infection connected with severe disease, stubbornly high costs of treatment and care, an actual number of deaths, and shortened life expectancy.

HIV is a virus that attacks the immune system and causes a lifelong severe illness with a long incubation period.

Sexual contact with an infected person is the main reason for spreading HIV infection, by sharing syringes (mainly for drug injection) with someone who is infected, or, less commonly (and now very infrequently in countries where blood is screened for HIV antibodies), through transfusions of infected blood or blood clotting factors. Babies born to HIV-infected women may become diseased before or during birth or through breastfeeding.

The end-stage of the contagion, an assimilated immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), consequences from the devastation of the immune systems Effective grouping therapies, announced in the middle of 1990 and extensively used in industrialized countries, have had a profound effect on the course of HIV infection, improving the eminence of life and suspending the onset of AIDS and death in HIV-infected persons. Though, narrow-mindedness to side effects and the appearance of resilient strains remains reasons for concern.

What are the symptoms of HIV & AIDS?

HIV abolishes cells in the immune system called CD4 cells or T cells. Without CD4 cells, your body has a hard time fighting off diseases. This makes you more prospective sick from contagions that frequently wouldn’t hurt you. Over time, the damage HIV does to your immune system leads to AIDS.

 If you have AIDS when you get occasional contagions (called unscrupulous infections) or types of cancer, or if you’ve lost a convinced number of CD4 cells. This generally happens about ten years after getting HIV if you don’t take treatment. Treatment can delay or even stop you from ever developing AIDS.

The signs of AIDS include:

  • Thrush (a thick, white coating on your mouth or tongue)
  • Sore throat
  • Bad yeast contagions
  • Chronic pelvic inflammatory disease
  • Getting a lot of harmful infections
  • Feeling dizzy and tired,
  • Headaches
  • Losing much weight quickly
  • Bruising more effortlessly than normal
  • Fevers, diarrhea, or night sweats
  • Swollen or firm glands in your throat, groin, or armpit
  • Deep, dry coughing spells
  • Feeling short of breath.
  • Purplish growths on your skin or inside your mouth
  • Bleeding from the nose, anus, mouth, or vagina
  • Skin rashes
  • Feeling very emotionless in your hands or feet, losing control of your muscles and reflexes, not being able to move, and yield strength in your muscles.

When Should You Start HIV Treatment?

Treatment guidelines from the U.S Department of Health and Human Services suggested that persons living with HIV begin art as soon as possible after diagnosis. Prior art slows the progress of HIV and is capable of keeping you healthy for too many years.

What Is HIV Drug Resistance?

Drug resistance can be a cause of treatment failure for persons living with HIV. As HIV increases in the body, it sometimes changes and crops differences of itself. Variations of HIV that grow while a person is taking ART can lead to drug-resistant strains of HIV.

HIV drugs can’t prevent drug-resistant HIV from increasing. Drug resistance can cause HIV treatment to fail.

An individual can firstly be infected with drug-resistant HIV or develop drug-resistant HIV after starting HIV medicines. Drug-resistant HIV also can spread from person to person. Drug-resistance testing recognizes which, if any, HIV drugs won’t be natural against your specific strain of HIV.

Drug-resistance testing results assist control which HIV medicines to include in an HIV treatment routine.