Things To Know About Hiv Suppression
A vial of blood
A vial of blood
Development of antiretroviral drugs to treat HIV has turned what was once an almost always fatal infection into a manageable chronic condition. Daily antiretroviral therapy can reduce the amount of HIV in the blood to levels that are undetectable with standard tests. Staying on treatment is crucial to keep the virus suppressed. NIAID-supported research has demonstrated that achieving and maintaining a durably undetectable viral load not only preserves the health of the person living with HIV, but also prevents sexual transmission of the virus to an HIV-negative partner.
How Can I Make Sure I Dont Give Hiv To Anyone During Sex
If you find out that you have HIV, try to stay calm. People living with HIV can have normal, healthy relationships and sex lives. But its important to take precautions to help your partner stay HIV-free.
There are a few ways that you can avoid giving HIV to other people:
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Always use condoms when you have vaginal and anal sex.
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Start treatment for HIV as soon as possible, and keep taking your HIV medicine. When you take it correctly, HIV treatment can lower or even stop your chances of spreading the virus to your sexual partners .
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Theres a daily pill your partner can take to lower the risk of getting HIV, called PrEP.
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Dont share needles for shooting drugs, piercings, or tattoos.
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Get tested and treated for other STDs besides HIV regularly. Having other STDs makes it easier for you to spread HIV to others.
If you test positive for HIV, its important to tell your sexual partners about it so they can be tested, too. Even if youre really careful to not spread HIV, be honest with your future partners about your status so you can both be informed and help each other stay healthy. Read more about talking with your partners about HIV.
Take Time To Process The News
- Receiving an HIV diagnosis can be life changing. You may feel many emotionssadness, hopelessness, or anger.
- Allied health care providers and social service providers can help you work through the early stages of your diagnosis. They are often available at your health care providers office.
- Learn more about what a positive test result means.
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Questions To Ask Your Vet
False positive results on FIV tests are real problem. A positive result in an apparently healthy cat should always be confirmed by at least one other type of test. Cats who have been vaccinated against FIV will test positive on screening tests and Western Blot tests. Cats under the age of six months will sometimes erroneously test positive on FIV screening tests because they have maternal antibodies against the disease in their bloodstream. If you have any doubts as to your cats diagnosis, ask your veterinarian to show you the results of at least two different types of FIV tests and explain why he or she has reached the conclusion that your cat does indeed have FIV.
FIV is not a highly contagious disease, but it can be passed from cat to cat, primarily through bite wounds. There is also a small risk of disease transmission associated with sharing food bowls, mutual grooming, and other activities that could expose an uninfected cat to an infected cats saliva. If you live in a multiple-cat household, have all your cats tested for FIV and ask your veterinarian whether you should vaccinate your FIV-negative cats against the disease.
Treating The Rash At Home
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Ways Hiv Cannot Be Spread
HIV is not spread by:
- Air or water
- Mosquitoes, ticks or other insects
- Saliva, tears, or sweat that is not mixed with the blood of a person with HIV
- Shaking hands hugging sharing toilets sharing dishes, silverware, or drinking glasses or engaging in closed-mouth or social kissing with a person with HIV
- Drinking fountains
Treatment Reduces The Amount Of Hiv In The Blood
- The amount of HIV in the blood is called viral load.
- Taking your HIV medicine as prescribed will help keep your viral load low and your CD4 cell count high.
- HIV medicine can make the viral load very low . Viral suppression is defined as having less than 200 copies of HIV per milliliter of blood.
- HIV medicine can make the viral load so low that a test cant detect it .
- If your viral load goes down after starting HIV treatment, that means treatment is working. Continue to take your medicine as prescribed.
- If you skip your medications, even now and then, you are giving HIV the chance to multiply rapidly. This could weaken your immune system, and you could become sick.
- Getting and keeping an undetectable viral load is the best way to stay healthy and protect others.
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Whats The Worst That Could Happen
Over time, HIV and AIDS keep your body from being able to fight off diseases. People who have HIV are at a higher risk for certain serious or life-threatening infections. HIV can cause dangerous weight loss, mental problems, cancer, blindness, and even death. A mother who has HIV can pass it on to her baby before the baby is born, during childbirth, or through her breast milk.
How To Get Rid Of An Std At Home
Its bad enough that STDs can produce a number of painful symptoms and generate a variety of serious health conditions including potentially fatal problems. For many people, the stigma associated with STDs can be even worse than the infection itself. And while its understandable that many would like to know how to get rid of an STD at home with natural remedies, the reality is that you cant. Home remedies, over-the-counter medications, and natural cure-alls WILL NOT treat STDs. The only way to cure an STD is through proper medical attention.
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Curing Hearing Loss: Looking Towards The Future
Since hearing loss is such a prevalent problem in the United States and around the world, there are a number of organizations dedicated to finding a cure for hearing loss. The Stanford Initiative to Cure Hearing Loss is part of the Stanford School of Medicine and states that the goal of SICHL is to devise treatment that repair the damaged inner ear and restore loss hearing, quiet tinnitus, and improve balance. They are concentrating on four key areas of research: stem cell therapy, gene therapy, molecular therapy, and targeted neural stimulation. Stem cell therapy explores the possibility of repairing damaged cells or growing new parts from a persons own skin cells. Research into genetic hearing loss has shown that the majority of hearing loss are caused by mutation in only three genes, which gene therapy intends to target. Molecular therapy looks into utilizing drugs as a cure for hearing loss, and targeted neural stimulation aims to use work with auditory nerves to make hearing clearer as well as louder.
Researchers at the department of otolaryngology at Columbia University Medical Center are also working hard to develop a hearing loss cure. The scientists there are using gene therapy to combat genetic hearing loss, which could mean that children born with hearing loss will be able to hear. Researchers are also studying cochlear bone development to learn more about conditions that cause hearing loss due to defective bone development.
How Do I Know If I Have Genital Herpes
Most people who have genital herpes have no symptoms, or have very mild symptoms. You may not notice mild symptoms or you may mistake them for another skin condition, such as a pimple or ingrown hair. Because of this, most people who have herpes do not know it.
Herpes sores usually appear as one or more blisters on or around the genitals, rectum or mouth. The blisters break and leave painful sores that may take a week or more to heal. These symptoms are sometimes called having an outbreak. The first time someone has an outbreak they may also have flu-like symptoms such as fever, body aches, or swollen glands.
People who experience an initial outbreak of herpes can have repeated outbreaks, especially if they are infected with HSV-2. Repeat outbreaks are usually shorter and less severe than the first outbreak. Although the infection stays in the body for the rest of your life, the number of outbreaks may decrease over time.
You should be examined by your doctor if you notice any of these symptoms or if your partner has an STD or symptoms of an STD. STD symptoms can include an unusual sore, a smelly genital discharge, burning when urinating, or bleeding between periods.
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How Is Hiv Treated
HIV is treated with HIV medications . These medications have to be taken as prescribed by your doctor. They cannot get rid of HIV but they can keep it under control.
If you are diagnosed with HIV, the sooner you start treatment, the better it is for your health.
Taking HIV treatment exactly as prescribed and maintaining a suppressed viral load also prevents HIV transmission.
Without HIV treatment, your immune system can become too weak to fight off serious illnesses, and you can eventually become sick with life-threatening infections and cancers. This is called AIDS . But thanks to effective HIV treatment, these days most people with HIV never get AIDS.
Antibiotic Molecule Enables Immune System To Kill Hiv Infected Cells
Researchers have discovered an unexpected potential weapon against HIV protein.
Ever since the first cases of a mysterious disease in the early 1980s exploded into the HIV/AIDS pandemic, researchers have been searching for ways to outsmart the deadly virus. Now thanks to anti-retroviral therapy, people living with HIV can live relatively normal lifespansas long as they take their medications every day.
If they ever stop, in short order the virus rebounds and resets at the high levels seen before starting and that seems to be the case even after decades of therapy, says Mark Painter, Ph.D., a graduate student in the University of Michigan Medical Schools department of microbiology and immunology.
The reason is that HIV can hide inside the human genome, lying dormant and ready to emerge at any time. Because of this, a true cure for HIV relies on waking the latent virus and eliminating it before it has a chance to again take hold of the bodys cells, an approach known as shock and kill.
The research tried to determine if there was an FDA-approved drug or molecule already on the market that could override Nef, restore the functioning of MHC-I and allow the bodys own immune system, specifically cells known as cytotoxic T lymphocytes, to recognize the HIV-infected cells and destroy them.
After screening approximately 30,000 molecules, they discovered that a class of antibiotic molecules called pleicomacrolides inhibited Nef.
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Doctors Say Experimental Treatment May Have Rid Man Of Hiv
A Brazilian man infected with the AIDS virus has shown no sign of it for more than a year since he stopped HIV medicines after an intense experimental drug therapy aimed at purging hidden, dormant virus from his body, doctors reported Tuesday.
The case needs independent verification and it’s way too soon to speculate about a possible cure, scientists cautioned.
“These are exciting findings but they’re very preliminary,” said Dr. Monica Gandhi, an AIDS specialist at the University of California, San Francisco. “This has happened to one person, and one person only,” and it didn’t succeed in four others given the same treatment, she said.
Another UCSF specialist, Dr. Steven Deeks, said: “This is not a cure,” just an interesting case that merits more study.
The case was described at an AIDS conference where researchers also disclosed an important prevention advance: A shot of an experimental medicine every two months worked better than daily Truvada pills to help keep uninfected gay men from catching HIV from an infected sex partner. Hundreds of thousands of people take these “pre-exposure prevention” pills now and the shot could give a new option, almost like a temporary vaccine.
If the Brazil man’s case is confirmed, it would be the first time HIV has been eliminated in an adult without a bone marrow or stem cell transplant. Independent experts want to see whether his remission lasts and for the intense drug combination that he received to undergo more testing.
What Happens If I Stop Taking Antiretroviral Therapy
When therapy is stopped, viral load rebounds, and the risk of transmitting HIV to a sexual partner in the absence of other prevention methods returns. NIAID-supported research has provided clear-cut scientific evidence to support the benefits of staying on continuous antiretroviral treatment. In 2006, NIAIDs large clinical trial called SMART showed that people receiving intermittent antiretroviral treatment had twice the rate of disease progression compared to those receiving continuous treatment.
Taking antiretroviral treatment daily as directed to achieve and maintain durably undetectable status stops HIV infection from progressing, helping people living with HIV stay healthy and live longer, while offering the benefit of preventing sexual transmission. Stopping and re-starting treatment can cause drug resistance to develop, making that treatment regimen ineffective and limiting future treatment options.
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A Woman May Have Been Cured Of Hiv Without Medical Treatment
In dozens of other patients who suppress the virus without drugs, it seems to have been cornered in parts of the genome where it cannot reproduce, scientists reported.
A woman who was infected with H.I.V. in 1992 may be the first person cured of the virus without a risky bone-marrow transplant or even medications, researchers reported on Wednesday.
In an additional 63 people in their study who controlled the infection without drugs, H.I.V. apparently was sequestered in the body in such a way that it could not reproduce, the scientists also reported. The finding suggested that these people may have achieved a functional cure.
The research, , outlines a new mechanism by which the body may suppress H.I.V., visible only now because of advances in genetics. The study also offers hope that some small number of infected people who have taken antiretroviral therapy for many years may similarly be able to suppress the virus and stop taking the drugs, which can exact a toll on the body.
It does suggest that treatment itself can cure people, which goes against all the dogma, said Dr. Steve Deeks, an AIDS expert at the University of California, San Francisco, and an author of the new study.
Even among viruses, H.I.V. is particularly wily and difficult to eradicate. It inserts itself into the human genome and tricks the cells machinery into making copies. H.I.V. naturally prefers to lurk within genes, the most active targets of the cells copiers.
To Avoid Sexual Transmission Of Hiv
1. Always use condoms.Male or females condoms can reduce your risk of getting HIV.2. Be faithful to one partner or have fewer partners.Having one sexual partner or fewer sexual partners can reduce your risk of being exposed to HIV infection or other STDS, which in turn can reduce your risk of HIV infection.3. Male circumcisionIf youre a man, consider getting circumcised. Male circumcision in a hospital or clinic setting is shown to reduce the risk of getting HIV from a woman by 50 per cent. In comparison, female circumcision or female genital cutting/mutilation hasnt been shown to be preventative for HIV infection.4. If youve got an unusual discharge, sores, or pain when you urinate get tested for STDs.These symptoms are signs that something is wrong. Chlamydia, gonorrhoea, syphilis, genital herpes, trichomoniasis, and bacterial vaginosis have all been shown to increase your risk of getting and spreading HIV. So if you have these symptoms, get them checked out. Also, let your partner know, so he or she can get tested or treated too.5. Get tested with your partner for HIV.Whenever youve got a new partner, before having unprotected sex, get tested. You or your partner could be infected with HIV and not know it.
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