11 HIV myths you can't believe in the 21st century

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Some misconceptions about the immunodeficiency virus can be deadly.

1. HIV is transmitted only among drug addicts, prostitutes and homosexuals

This is not true. People who use intravenous drugs, sex workers, and men who have sex with men are at higher risk than others.

But one of the most common ways of HIV transmission is sexual. For example, in the Volga region, 55% of patients became infected precisely after sexual contact, and not after an injection with a dirty syringe. And this does not depend on the orientation in any way.

HIV is also transmitted from mother to child, through non-sterile medical instruments and even with contaminated donor blood, although this rarely happens.

2. I'm out of risk group

At risk are everyone who:

• Has unprotected sex with a partner whose HIV status is unknown or changes partners frequently.
• Visits hospitals.
• Tattoos and piercings.

Fortunately, using condoms and sterile medical instruments dramatically reduces the risk of infection. Condoms protect by 85%, but sterile instruments cannot convey anything.

3. Condoms are not completely protective, which means they are useless

Condoms are great! 85% is a lot. And those cases in which the infection did occur are mostly associated with the misuse of condoms. After all, they can tear, fly off, and an incorrectly selected lubricant will reduce the protective properties. So the correct size and technique of use is a guarantee of health.

4. They die not from HIV, but from AIDS or other infections, and HIV has nothing to do with it

This is just a confusion in terminology. AIDS is a condition that is caused by the immunodeficiency virus. And if you can keep HIV carriage under control and live with it happily ever after, then if it comes to AIDS, everything is bad.

HIV destroys the immune system, so the stronger the virus, the weaker the body.

This is used by all kinds of infections - viral, bacterial, and fungal. They cling to an organism that cannot resist. And those microorganisms that a healthy immune system can cope with feel great in the patient.

But without HIV, all these infections and diseases would not exist, so the specific virus is to blame, which pulled all the rest of the muck to itself. Most often, HIV-infected people die from tuberculosis and hepatitis.

By the way, cancer also develops more often in an organism weakened by HIV, because cancer cells are not destroyed by the immune system. There is a chance to get cancer along with HIV.

5. Nobody saw HIV

Have seen, and many times. He was photographed and even filmed. For example, here is a photo from a scientific work in which a virus was filmed using an electron microscope: it shows how the virus appears and is separated from the cell.

Those black curves are HIV. And this is what a virus looks like on the surface of a cell. Small bubbles in green circles are all HIV.

For comparison: this is how a healthy cell differs from a sick one (on the left - a healthy lymphocyte).

It is enough to search for scientific publications on the request of HIV microscopy to see both the photos of the virus and all kinds of models based on these photos.

6. People don't live long with HIV

This was not a myth in the 90s, when the first epidemic of infection began, and people who became infected with HIV quickly reached the stage of AIDS and died.

Today the situation has changed. Medicines have emerged with which life expectancy has increased so much that HIV-positive people can live as long as healthy people.

But for this to happen, several conditions must be met:

• Start taking medications as early as possible after infection, and for this you need to be tested regularly.
• Do not scoff at the body and do not make it sick, that is, do not take drugs, do not smoke, generally switch to a healthy lifestyle.
• Take the pill regularly and regularly to keep the virus from showing up, because an increase in viral load can lead to complications.
• If you receive antiretroviral therapy regularly, your viral load drops so much that HIV does not interfere with your life.

7. HIV medications are worse than the disease

Any medicine has contraindications and side effects, and antiretroviral therapy also has them. Once upon a time, carriers of the virus had to drink several pills strictly by the hour during the day, but now the drugs are such that you need fewer pills, and you need to drink them less often, and they are much better tolerated.

Of course, taking pills all the time is unpleasant, but lifelong therapy is nothing new. For example, many are forced to take medicines for hypertension every day or carry an allergy medication with them. It's about the same story with HIV treatment.

8. I have a clean partner, he is healthy

Cleanliness and HIV are not related. HIV is found in blood, and in smaller amounts in semen, vaginal secretions, and breast milk. It doesn't wash off in the shower.

What's more, brushing your teeth, douching or using an enema even increases your risk of contracting HIV through unprotected contact.

This doesn’t mean you don’t have to shower and brush your teeth before sex. This means that you need to use protective equipment, take tests and demand the same from your partner.

HIV is mainly transmitted through blood, which means that any microtrauma turns into the gateway of infection - the place through which the virus enters the body. The more such gates there are, the more convenient it is for the virus. Therefore, when we brush our teeth and scratch the gums, use douching solutions and injure the mucous membranes, we do an HIV service: we cut the way for the virus into the body. Miramistin is not bad, but after sex, not before it. And it is important that you cannot rub anything, so as not to injure the mucous membrane.

9. HIV is a sentence

Today HIV is not a horror story about how we will all die. Medicine is not standing still, and enough attention has been paid to the HIV problem for scientists to achieve good results.

• We found out that you can live with HIV as well as without it.
• Learned how to prevent the transmission of the virus from mother to child. An HIV-positive woman who follows the recommendations of doctors and keeps the virus under control will have a healthy baby.
• They made medicines more convenient, with a minimum of side effects and high efficiency, so that there are couples in which one partner is healthy and the other is infected, but the virus is not transmitted.

Recently, a pre-exposure prophylaxis drug was approved for sale - these are pills that need to be taken by people at risk. For example, those who have many sexual partners. If you drink antiretroviral drugs before unprotected exposure and use them correctly, according to an approved schedule, your risk of getting sick is reduced. Unfortunately, such therapy is very expensive. In addition, judging by the results of the application, there are strains of the virus that are resistant to such prophylaxis.

10. I feel fine, I cannot have HIV

Unfortunately, well-being is not an absolute indicator of health. HIV in the acute stage, when treatment gives the best results, can pretend to have the flu with a high fever, or it can show itself poorly at all, many will not notice the discomfort.

Six months after infection, the infection becomes chronic, in some people it goes without clinical manifestations for years.

11. I got tested once, everything is fine

An HIV test is effective when tested regularly. One test may turn out to be false negative when there is a virus in the blood, but it is not in the test results.

The most common tests do not detect the virus itself, but the antibodies to it, that is, your immune system's response to HIV.

The peculiarity of the virus is that the immune response matures for a long time, up to three months, so the tests cannot catch HIV for several weeks. And sometimes, in the last stages of the development of the virus, the immune system works so poorly that it does not create these same antibodies, so the analysis will also be false-negative.

Therefore, HIV testing always takes place in two stages with a break of several months. There are also more accurate methods, for example, PCR, but this analysis is more expensive, so it is simply not done for free.

HIV should be checked regularly. For those at risk - once every three months.