How Do You Know if Youre Hiv Positive

In the 1980s and early 1990s, the outbreak of HIV and AIDS swept beyond the United States and rest of the earth, though the illness originated decades earlier. Today, more 70 meg people have been infected with HIV and almost 35 million have died from AIDS since the beginning of the pandemic, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

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What is HIV?

The human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, is a virus that attacks the immune system, specifically CD4 cells (or T cells).

The virus is transmitted through bodily fluids such equally blood, semen, vaginal fluids, anal fluids, and breast milk. Historically, HIV has most often been spread through unprotected sex, the sharing of needles for drug use, and through birth.

Over time, HIV can destroy so many CD4 cells that the trunk tin't fight infections and diseases, somewhen leading to the most severe class of an HIV infection: acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, or AIDS. A person with AIDS is very vulnerable to cancer and to life-threatening infections, such as pneumonia.

Though in that location is no cure for HIV or AIDS, a person with HIV who receives handling early can live well-nigh equally long equally someone without the virus. And a report in 2019 in the medical journal, Lancet, showed that an anti-viral treatment finer halted the spread of HIV.

Where Did AIDS Come From?

Scientists take traced the origin of HIV dorsum to chimpanzees and simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), an HIV-like virus that attacks the immune arrangement of monkeys and apes.

In 1999, researchers identified a strain of chimpanzee SIV called SIVcpz, which was nearly identical to HIV. Chimps, the scientist later discovered, hunt and eat two smaller species of monkeys—red-capped mangabeys and greater spot-nosed monkeys—that deport and infect the chimps with ii strains of SIV. These two strains probable combined to form SIVcpz, which tin can spread betwixt chimpanzees and humans.

SIVcpz likely jumped to humans when hunters in Africa ate infected chimps, or the chimps' infected claret got into the cuts or wounds of hunters. Researchers believe the first manual of SIV to HIV in humans that then led to the global pandemic occurred in 1920 in Kinshasa, the upper-case letter and largest city in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The virus spread may have spread from Kinshasa along infrastructure routes (roads, railways, and rivers) via migrants and the sex trade.

In the 1960s, HIV spread from Africa to Haiti and the Caribbean when Haitian professionals in the colonial Democratic Republic of Congo returned home. The virus then moved from the Caribbean to New York City effectually 1970 and then to San Francisco later in the decade.

International travel from the United States helped the virus spread across the residuum of the globe.

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The AIDS Epidemic Arises

Though HIV arrived in the United States around 1970, it didn't come to the public's attending until the early 1980s.

In 1981, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a report nearly five previously healthy homosexual men condign infected with Pneumocystis pneumonia, which is caused past the normally harmless fungus Pneumocystis jirovecii. This blazon of pneumonia, the CDC noted, almost never affects people with uncompromised allowed systems.

The post-obit twelvemonth, The New York Times published an alarming article most the new immune system disorder, which, by that fourth dimension, had afflicted 335 people, killing 136 of them. Because the disease appeared to touch on by and large homosexual men, officials initially chosen it gay-related immune deficiency, or GRID.

Though the CDC discovered all major routes of the affliction'south transmission—likewise as that female partners of AIDS-positive men could exist infected—in 1983, the public considered AIDS a gay disease. It was fifty-fifty called the "gay plague" for many years after.

In September of 1982, the CDC used the term AIDS to describe the illness for the first time. By the terminate of the year, AIDS cases were also reported in a number of European countries.

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The HIV Test Arrives

In 1984, researchers finally identified the cause of AIDS—the HIV virus—and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) licensed the first commercial claret test for HIV in 1985.

Today, numerous tests tin detect HIV, most of which work by detecting HIV antibodies. The tests can exist done on blood, saliva, or urine, though the blood tests detect HIV sooner after exposure due to higher levels of antibodies.

In 1985, actor Stone Hudson became the first high-profile fatality from AIDS. In fear of HIV making it into claret banks, the FDA also enacted regulations that ban gay men from donating blood. The FDA would revise its rules in 2015 to allow gay men to requite claret if they've been chaste for a yr, though blood banks routinely test blood for HIV.

By the cease of 1985, at that place were more than 20,000 reported cases of AIDS, with at least one case in every region of the globe.

AZT is Adult

In 1987, the first antiretroviral medication for HIV, azidothymidine (AZT), became available.

Numerous other medications for HIV are now available, and are typically used together in what's known equally antiretroviral therapy (ART) or highly active antiretroviral treatment (HAART).

The regimes piece of work by preventing the virus from multiplying, giving the allowed arrangement a risk to recover and fight off infections and HIV-related cancers. The therapy too helps reduce the risk of HIV transmission, including between an infected female parent and her unborn kid.

The World Health Arrangement (WHO), in 1988, declared December 1st to be Globe AIDS Day. By the end of the decade, there were at to the lowest degree 100,000 reported cases of AIDS in the United States and WHO estimated 400,000 AIDS cases worldwide.

HIV/AIDS in the 1990s and 2000s

In 1991, the red ribbon became an international symbol of AIDS awareness.

In that yr, basketball player Magic Johnson announced he had HIV, helping to farther bring awareness to the outcome and dispel the stereotype of it being a gay disease. Soon after, Freddie Mercury—pb vocaliser of the ring Queen—appear he had AIDS and died a day subsequently.

In 1994, the FDA approved the first oral (and not-blood) HIV test. Two years later, it canonical the first home testing kit and the first urine test.

AIDS-related deaths and hospitalizations in developed countries began to decline sharply in 1995 thanks to new medications and the introduction of HAART. Still, by 1999, AIDS was the fourth biggest cause of expiry in the globe and the leading cause of expiry in Africa.

HIV Treatment Progresses

Sentry: 30 Years of AIDs Research

In 2001, generic drug manufacturers began selling discounted copies of patented HIV drugs to developing countries, leading to several major pharmaceutical manufacturers slashing prices on their HIV drugs. The following year, the Joint United nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) reported that AIDS was past far the leading cause of decease in sub-Saharan Africa.

In 2009, President Barack Obama lifted a 1987 U.S. ban that prevented HIV-positive people from entering the country.

The FDA approved pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, for HIV-negative people in 2012. When taken daily, PrEP can reduce the gamble of HIV from sex by more than ninety percent and from intravenous drug employ by 70 percent, co-ordinate to the CDC. A major study completed in 2019 showed that over 750 gay men on an anti-viral treatment did not transmit the virus to their partners. "Our findings provide conclusive bear witness that the risk of HIV transmission through anal sex when HIV viral load is suppressed is effectively zip," the paper, published in Lancet, stated.

At the end of 2019, some 38 meg people were living with HIV/AIDS worldwide, and 940,000 people died from AIDS-related illnesses that year, according to WHO. Sub-Saharan Africa remains the near severely affected region, accounting for nearly two-thirds of the world's current HIV cases.

Sources:

Origin of HIV and AIDS: Avert.
HIV Originated With Monkeys, Not Chimps, Study Finds: National Geographic.
HIV pandemic originated in Kinshasa in the 1920s, say scientists: The Guardian.
America'south HIV outbreak started in this city, x years before anyone noticed: PBS.
HIV Testing: CDC.
Near HIV/AIDS: CDC.
How HIV spread beyond the Due west: CNN.
Obama Lifts a Ban on Entry Into U.South. by H.I.V.-Positive People: The New York Times.
Global Wellness Observatory (GHO) data: World Health Organization.

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