Simple facts about HIV/AIDS

HIV is a virus and it should be pointed out that viruses cannot grow or reproduce on their own, they need to infect the cells of a living organism in order to make new copies of themselves, which is know as replicating. The human immune system usually finds and kills viruses fairly quickly, but HIV attacks the immune system itself, bad news because that is the very thing that would normally get rid of a virus. Sadly the infection rate for HIV is not decreasing and in 2007 alone nearly 3 million people became infected with the infection

Often people do not understand that HIV is not AIDS but it does cause AIDS by damaging the immune system cells until the immune system can no longer fight off other infections that it would usually be able to prevent. For an average person with a good diet it would probably take around ten years to develop AIDS, a malnourished person would develop this much sooner. HIV can be treated with antiretroviral drugs keep the levels of HIV in the body at a low level, so that the immune system is able to recover and work effectively. Antiretroviral drugs enable many HIV positive people to live long and healthy lives. The important thing though is to act fast; anyone who thinks that they may have come into sexual contact with someone with HIV should take a test at one of the many testing centres throughout London and the other major cities in the UK.