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Written by Kimberly Dayton
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Living with HIV is complicated. Taking anti-retrovirals is not enough to stay healthy, because medication does not cure the disease; it only slows its progression. Although most recent data indicate that the state-of-the-art treatment, Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Treatment or HAART, can lengthen the lifespan of HIV-infected people by anywhere between 4 and 12 years, and reduce the death rate by 80%, the side effects of HAART are considerable, and up to half of HIV-infected people who begin HAART do not benefit from it because they don't take their medications as instructed, or they quit at the wrong times.
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Written by Kimberly Dayton
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HIV infections cannot be cured. The virus will never leave the body once it has invaded. However, HIV symptoms can be treated with medicine that slows down the reproduction of the virus inside the blood stream. As soon as a person is infected with HIV, his immune system begins producing antibodies. The two most common types of HIV test -- "rapid test" and home test -- scan the bloodstream for evidence of these antibodies. If they are present, the person is infected. The US government has approved several highly effective HIV tests with accuracy rates of over 99.9 percent. |
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Written by Kimberly Dayton
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According to the Center for Disease Control, more than a million people in the United States are HIV-positive, and 21% of them don't know it.
The most effective way to find out if you're infected is to get an HIV test. The virus causes few symptoms until very late in the progression of the disease, when it has spread so far throughout the body and done so much damage to the immune system that the body has deteriorated into full-blown AIDS. At this point, most HIV-infected people have about a year left to live, and they may have been spreading the virus to their sexual partners for over a decade. |
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