What is HIV?
Human = that means you and me. HIV only affects humans and is passed on from human to human
Immunodeficiency = immuno means your immune system and deficiency means not having enough of something
Virus = is a germ that replicates (make more of itself) in the body and can cause illness
HIV attacks the body’s immune system so it gets too weak to fight off certain infections. With medication people can live long, healthy lives. Without medication, it takes on average 10 years for HIV to lead to AIDS.
What is AIDS?
Acquired = that means that you can get infected with it.
Immune Deficiency = this means a weakness in the body’s immune system.
Syndrome = this is the word for a group of health problems that make up a disease.
Someone has AIDS when their immune system is weakened so much by HIV that they get specific illnesses, or their immune system falls below a defined level (CD4 count below 200-250).
What is the difference between HIV and AIDS?
Many people get confused about both HIV and AIDS so it is very important to know that there is a difference.
HIV is the name of the virus. When someone gets tested for HIV, the test results can be negative or positive. If a person is HIV positive this means they are carrying the virus. This does not mean that the person has AIDS. Many people live with HIV and remain very healthy for a long time.
AIDS is caused by HIV damaging the immune system cells until the immune system can no longer fight off other infections that it would usually be able to prevent like flu, Tuberculosis (TB) and pneumonia. If left untreated, it takes around ten years on average for someone with HIV to develop AIDS. However, if someone is malnourished they may well progress from HIV to AIDS more quickly.
Doctors have not yet found a cure, so many people have died as a result of AIDS.
Click on page 2 to find out more about your immune system
Click on page 3 to find out about the science of HIV
Watch this video about HIV try and spot the answers to these questions:
- What is HIV?
- How do most people get infected with HIV?
- Is HIV treatable?
How much did you learn? Check your knowledge by taking the HIV Quiz!
Find out more on our How do you get HIV? page
How many people have HIV?
Although HIV is preventable and controllable, roughly 35 million people are living with HIV around the world. That's pretty hard to imagine so try this - in the last year alone about 3 million people were newly infected with the virus (UNAIDS, 2009), that's the same number of people that can fit into 46 football stadiums! Around the same number of people, 3 million, died from AIDS related illnesses last year.
This map shows how many people are living with HIV around the world. You can see there is almost no place on earth the virus hasn't got to, but some parts of the world are affected worse than others (the darker colours).
Find out more about HIV and AIDS around the world
Take Action!
Find out how to get involved with the global Three Zeros Campaign to achieve Zero Infections, Zero Deaths, and Zero Stigma and Discrimination to stop HIV and AIDS!
Do you have any questions about HIV & AIDS?
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Hidden User
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Jo (Facilitator) S
6 months agoHey guys - wow! A lot of great questions :) There are a few that are quite similar around why we're not doing more to prevent the spread of HIV or to cure it. This is THE question! A lot of great people ARE doing things to stop AIDS like medical researchers and activists around the world. Unfortunately there are lots of reasons why people aren't doing enough to actually stop AIDS - a huge factor is MONEY!
Medical researchers need to get paid to do research - if the medicine companies don't think there will be enough profit in making certain types of drugs e.g. drugs for children living with HIV (because they don't earn money and 90% of them live in sub-Saharan African therefore most of their parents don't earn that much money either) then they won't pay the researchers to do the work.
Also, if you bought ARVs (the medicines for people living with HIV or AIDS) directly from the drug companies they would cost you about $5000 every year. We need the drug companies to lower their prices, but if they're the only ones making the medicine then why should they? There's no competition from other drug companies. An answer to BOTH these problems in the Patent Pool which activists helped to set up in Oct 2010 (YEY!) and now we're REALLY trying to get drug companies to agree to help. Go onto HIV360 Action Group and find the 'tell Johnson&Johnson to join the Patent Pool' in the 'Take Action' box to check out more about that.
ANOTHER huge reason is because most people don't know enough about HIV. They think it only affects African people, or only homosexual men which just ISN'T TRUE. It's the HUMAN Immunodeficieny Virus and it can infect ANY human being.
There are also lots of different reasons about why people don't know about it! A lot of teachers aren't comfortable talking to their students about sex and therefore don't want to talk about HIV because unprotected sex is one of the ways it can be transmitted. Governments don't put money behind big public awareness campaigns. Is HIV in your school curriculum in the USA??? In the UK it's only in Biology and then covered as a sexually transmitted disease which is not going to help people understand enough about it as all the social factors around it are so complex and it's not just a sexually transmitted disease!
Some governments have provided clean needles for people to use when injecting drugs which has helped slow down HIV transmission a LOT.
SO MANY THINGS TO TALK ABOUT!!! What do you all think people should do - as a person, as a country, as a world???
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Hidden User
6 months ago[Comment hidden. Log in to view user comments.]
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Jo (Facilitator) S
6 months agoHey Jared, all the diseases we face today have come into being throughout history, so they didn't all exist at the beginning of time. We're not sure exactly when HIV came into existence, but the first time anyone identified AIDS was in 1981 after some men in the USA were dying from a disease and no one knew what it was. They then discovered that HIV caused AIDS a few years later. Check out the 'where do HIV and AIDS come from?' page for more info :) 0
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Hidden User
6 months ago[Comment hidden. Log in to view user comments.]
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Jo (Facilitator) S
6 months agoGreat question Erika - see my LONG answer below! :) Could you take more action to prevent it as a student? What do you think you could do? 0
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Jessica A
6 months agoOo new comments are now at the top of the thread so this answer is above!
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Hidden User
6 months ago[Comment hidden. Log in to view user comments.]
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Jo (Facilitator) S
6 months agoAs soon as people know about it, I don't think they do - I just don't think people know enough about it and see some ideas about why that is in LONG answer below... 0
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Hidden User
6 months ago[Comment hidden. Log in to view user comments.]
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Jo (Facilitator) S
6 months agoGood question - see my LONG answer below! :) Do you think you could be active in preventing it as a student? What could you and classmates do? 0
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Hidden User
6 months ago[Comment hidden. Log in to view user comments.]
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Jo (Facilitator) S
6 months agoHey Michele, I think there are 2 reasons - the virus mutates SO often its harder for a researcher to find a cure, and also HIV 'hides' in certain cells in your immune system, so you wouldn't want a medicine that killed those cells because then your immune system would collapse, so they have to find something that will find only the immune system cells that HAVE HIV in them - I'm not a researcher but I think that's what's difficult. They're trying really hard though! And have been for 30 years! Considering it's taking so long its SO important to also be preventing the spread of HIV and not just waiting for a cure. 0
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Hidden User
7 months ago[Comment hidden. Log in to view user comments.]
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Jo (Facilitator) S
6 months agoGreat question Ping - see my LONG answer below! :) 0
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