What are HIV and AIDS?

 HVI& AIDS

What are HIV and AIDS?

HIV/AIDS affect not only the person who has the infection, but also partners, friends, and family. New drugs and research are making it possible to live longer – and better – with HIV infection or AIDS.

The more you know about HIV/AIDS, the better you can guard your health, minimize the impact of the infection and its treatment and enhance the quality and length of your life.

The Basics

HIV stands for human immunodeficiency virus. This virus causes AIDS. Being infected with HIV, however, is not the same as having AIDS. People who have tested positive for HIV have been known to stay healthy for years, even decades, with proper treatment. Over time – in many cases, a long time -- HIV slowly weakens the immune system until AIDS develops.

AIDS stands for acquired immune deficiency syndrome. In medicine, a syndrome is a group of symptoms that all together indicate the presence of a disease. When a person has AIDS, his or her body has been weakened to the point where it is not longer able to effectively fight disease. As a result, many other health problems develop when a person has AIDS.

Origins of AIDS and HIV

In the United States, AIDS and HIV hit the headlines in the early 1980s. In 1982, public health officials began using the term “acquired immunodeficiency syndrome” or AIDS. Formal tracking of AIDS cases in the United States began in 1982. The following year, scientists participating in an international committee discovered HIV as the cause of AIDS.

With time and research, it has become clear that HIV and AIDS existed decades before 1982. In the mid- to late-1970s, doctors in Los Angeles and New York noted growing numbers of gay men developing rare types of pneumonia, cancer and other illnesses.

An analysis of a blood sample taken from a man in 1959 in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, uncovered HIV-1. (HIV-1 is the most widespread type of HIV in the developed world.) Genetic analysis of the blood sample suggests that HV-1 may have developed from a single virus in the late 1940s or early 1950s.

Precisely how and when HIV came to exist is still being studied. In 1999, an international research team discovered HIV-1 in a group of chimpanzees native to west equatorial Africa. They have suggested that HIV-1 spread to humans when hunters became exposed to infected chimpanzee blood.

Myths and theories about the spread of HIV abound – a promiscuous flight attendant or the purposeful spread of a man-made virus (a conspiracy), for example – have all been suggested. Most of these theories have been discredited or have not proven to have a basis in fact.

What are HIV and AIDS?