AIDS 3rd revision

Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome or AIDS as we commonly know it, is a life threatening condition a person wouldn’t want to be caught into. It was discovered in the United States way back in 1981.  Since then, it has been a major problem of the world.

Until now, there is no known cure for AIDS, a very alarming fact because anyone could get infected. AIDS is caused by a virus know to kill or damage cells of the body’s immune system.

That virus is what we commonly know as HIV (human immunodeficiency virus). Because of its destructive behavior against the cells of the immune system, HIV disables the body’s capability to fight infections and cancer causing agents.

When a person has AIDS, he or she is prone to getting life-threatening ailments because their bodies cannot fight the build-up of infections (“Women, Children and HIV”, 2006).

Reports show that dating back to 1981, there has been more than a million cases of AIDS recorded. Statistics show that 25% of these people are unaware of the HIV infection. Because of this, they are likely to infect other people and transmit the virus (“HIV infections”, 2006).

Symptoms of HIV Infection

If not diagnosed early, HIV is hard to detect. Upon infection, you will not experience any symptoms. But it is possible to feel a flu-like ailment after 1-2 months of exposure to HIV. It could include fever, headache, enlarged lymph nodes and a certain feeling of tiredness.

These symptoms are gone after one week to one month and are usually associated with other diseases. At this time, people can easily infect others, and the virus is greatly concentrated in the genital fluids. This is a very critical time for infecting other people because you don’t know that you have the disease.

And when you have multiple sexual partners, it is likely to infect them with the virus. This is the period where you need to wear protection, in order not to infect others. The next set of symptoms may not surface for 10 years or more after you first got infected with the virus. This is varying for some people.

Some may experience these symptoms just after a few months while others may not and continue living normally for more than 10 years. This is known as the asymptomatic period.

During the asymptomatic period,  the cells of the immune system are slowly being killed by the rapid multiplying and infecting of the virus.  Infected cells serve as hiding places of the HIV and lays there for some period of dormancy.

The most evident outcome of the viral infection is a decrease in a component of the blood, the number of CD4 positive T cells drastically decreases. These cells are the immune system’s infection fighters. These cells are destroyed slowly without any symptoms. Because of this, the situation of the immune system gets worse, where various complications begin to surface.

The primary signs of infection are swollen lymph nodes all over the body lasting for about three months. Other symptoms that occur before the onset of AIDS include lack of energy, weight loss, frequent fevers and sweats, rashes, flaky skin, memory loss and inflammation of the pelvis in women.  Others could develop sores in their mouth, sex organs or in their anus.

Raising Doubts against AIDS and HIV

Not everyone is convinced about the HIV/AIDS theory. The explanation was HIV is a virus that attacks the immune system and then matures into AIDS, thus further destroying the immune system until there is nothing left to destroy.

Some researchers question the credibility of this theory on many accounts. One of them is Peter Duesberg, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. He is concerns are on the field of virology and wrote about HIV/AIDS in 1987. As these issues continued to shock and amaze the world, Duesberg was unmoved.

He accepts the fact that HIV is real, but poses no real harm on people, and that AIDS is caused by some other factors which are not infectious and cannot be contacted to other people. There are also other people that rebuke the theory about HIV/AIDS. They are known as denialists by their enemies.

These people include a group of medical scientists and researchers from Australia known as the Perth Group. They claim that nobody has yet discovered any proof for the existence of HIV, so there is basically no foundation on claims that HIV causes AIDS.

Defining AIDS: What is and what is not

AIDS doesn’t show specific symptoms. There is only a distinct characteristic of the human body when it has AIDS. It lacks a certain type of white blood cells, which is very important in order to live a healthy life. These white blood cells are the ones responsible in fighting infections off the body.

Normal people usually have around 600 to 1,500 CD4+ Cells, or the helper T cells, per cubic millimeter of blood. People with AIDS have much lower levels of these helper T cells in their blood, causing immune deficiency, responsible for their vulnerability to ailments.

Way back in the 80’s, no one knows what really caused AIDS. They based their definition on the findings of one of 13 diseases of high rarity, which is connected to immune deficiency.

As years passed, the definition was sharpened by thousands of similar occurrences that have been recorded, though sometimes it involves other ailments, but are related thru the same immune deficiency.