Some research I've been doing on HIV/AIDS

I wrote this a while ago. It's posted on another forum as well, but I decided that it might be of interest here.

Lately, I've been doing some research about AIDS and STD's in general. What I've found certainly wipes out forever my will to have unprotected sex.

These are some numbers:

In 1 milliliter of blood (0.034 fl. oz.) from an asymptomatic HIV+ individual there are 10,000 copies of HIV. Therefore considering that an average human being has between 5,000 and 6,000 milliliters of blood, this person is living with between 50,000,000 and 60,000,000 copies of HIV in his/her body.

In 1 milliliter of blood from a patient of full-blown AIDS there are more than 1,000,000 copies of HIV. Therefore, this person is living with at least 5,000,000,000 copies of HIV in his/her body, probably 6,000,000,000 or more.

Imagine that. Enough HIV to infect the whole world. And this is per patient.

"[As of 2006] between 33.4 and 46 million people currently live with HIV. In 2005, between 3.4 and 6.2 million people were newly infected and between 2.4 and 3.3 million people with AIDS died, an increase from 2003 and the highest number since 1981.

Sub-Saharan Africa remains by far the worst affected region, with an estimated 21.6 to 27.4 million people currently living with HIV. Two million [1.5–3.0 million] of them are children younger than 15 years of age. More than 64% of all people living with HIV are in sub-Saharan Africa, as are more than three quarters (76%) of all women living with HIV. In 2005, there were 12.0 million [10.6–13.6 million] AIDS orphans living in sub-Saharan Africa 2005. South & South East Asia are second worst affected with 15%. AIDS accounts for the deaths of 500,000 children in this region. Two-thirds of HIV/AIDS infections in Asia occur in India, with an estimated 5.7 million infections (estimated 3.4 - 9.4 million) (0.9% of population), surpassing South Africa's estimated 5.5 million (4.9-6.1 million) (11.9% of population) infections, making it the country with the highest number of HIV infections in the world. In the 35 African nations with the highest prevalence, average life expectancy is 48.3 years— 6.5 years less than it would be without the disease."

Scary, isn't it?

And worse, as you probably know, There is currently no vaccine or cure against HIV or AIDS. But things can be EVEN worse. HIV is a difficult target for vaccines and cures. Its nearly unique replication method creates huge numbers of mutations (like 1 every 10,000; see numbers above) that are often resistant to the newest treatments.

There are treatments for HIV+ patients, though. The most well known is HAART - Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy. However, none of these treatments is a cure (in fact, it'd take more than the patient's life to completely clean him/her with HAART), and they have lots of unpleasant effects. But it's better than nothing.

Sometimes I think about this and I realize that, while I can protect myself and to some extent I can encourage other people to do so, I can't do anything for those already infected, except wearing the red ribbon that symbolizes solidarity with HIV+ people. I'm not a virologist and never will be, nor am I rich enough to provide funds for the cause.

At least here (Uruguay) some people don't like to hear about the subject of AIDS. So, if this offends anyone, I'm very sorry. That was not my intention.





I used the English version of Wikipedia, licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License, as a source. I know this isn't precisely the best thing written about AIDS, but I license it under the FDL as well. Who knows, maybe someone finds this interesting.

For more information on the subject go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDS and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:HIV/AIDS.

 

I want to make something clear. HIV is not the most resistant of viruses, so it's nearly impossible for a single human being to infect the whole world. All what he/she has to do is having protected sex.

It was just to illustrate the number.