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There are many misconceptions about HIV/AIDS, such as the belief that it can be transmitted by casual non-sexual contact. [23] The disease has become subject to many controversies involving religion, including the Catholic Church's position not to support condom use as prevention. [24]
Disease-specific drugs can also alleviate symptoms of AIDS and even cure specific AIDS-defining conditions in some cases. Medical treatment can reduce HIV infection in many cases to a survivable chronic condition. However, these advances do not constitute a cure, since current treatment regimens cannot eradicate latent HIV from the body.
In most cases, HIV is a sexually transmitted infection and occurs by contact with or transfer of blood, pre-ejaculate, semen, and vaginal fluids. [5] [6] Non-sexual transmission can occur from an infected mother to her infant during pregnancy, during childbirth by exposure to her blood or vaginal fluid, and through breast milk.
Criminal transmission of HIV is the intentional or reckless infection of a person with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). This is often conflated, in laws and in discussion, with criminal exposure to HIV, which does not require the transmission of the virus and often, as in the cases of spitting and biting, does not include a realistic means of transmission. [1]
AIDS, in particular, has a long asymptomatic period—during which time HIV (the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS) can replicate and the disease can be transmitted to others—followed by a symptomatic period, which leads rapidly to death unless treated. HIV/AIDS entered the United States from Haiti in about 1969. [123]
In July 2010, the White House announced a major change in its HIV/AIDS policy; the "National HIV/AIDS Strategy for the United States" stated that "the continued existence and enforcement of these types of laws [that criminalize HIV infection] run counter to scientific evidence about routes of HIV transmission and may undermine the public health goals of promoting HIV screening and treatment."
HIV can be transmitted from an infected mother to the neonate in three circumstances: across the placenta during pregnancy (in utero), at birth due to fetal contact with infected maternal genital secretions and blood, or postnatally through the breast milk. [8] This type of viral transmission is also known of as vertical transmission.
Each virus can be contracted individually, or they can be contracted together in what is referred to as co-infection. HIV-2 seems to have lower mortality rates, less severe symptoms and slower progression to AIDS than HIV-1 alone or the co-infection. In co-infection, however, this is largely dependent on which virus was contracted first.