AIDS & HIV®
Acquired immune deficiency syndrome

Aids

An acquired defect of cellular immunity associated with infection by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), a CD4-positive T-lymphocyte count under 200 cells/micro liters or less than 14% of total lymphocytes, and increased susceptibility to opportunistic infections and malignant neoplasm’s. Clinical manifestations also include emaciation (wasting) and dementia. These elements reflect criteria for AIDS as defined by the CDC in 1993.

(Aids) Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome

Acquired immune deficiency syndrome or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) is caused by an infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).
AIDS is now a pandemic. As of 2009, AVERT estimated that there are 33.3 million people worldwide living with HIV/AIDS, with approximately 2.6 million new HIV infections per year and 1.8 million annual deaths due to AIDS. In 2007, UNAIDS estimated: 33.2 million people worldwide had AIDS that year; AIDS killed 2.1 million people in the course of that year, including 330,000 children, and 76% of those deaths occurred in sub-Saharan Africa. According to UNAIDS 2009 report, worldwide some 60 million people have been infected, with some 25 million deaths, and 14 million orphaned children in southern Africa alone since the epidemic began

In excess of time, HIV infection destroys the helper T cells of the body's resistant system, resulting in a critical fall of the resistant system and the ability of the body to fight infection. Advanced HIV infection is called AIDS.
AIDS is frequently a sexually transmitted disease. HIV which causes AIDS is most often passed from one person another during sexual contact that involves vaginal, oral, or anal sex. HIV can also be passed to another person through other means, such as through contact with blood or body fluids. This can occur through such processes as blood transfusions or sharing needles contaminated with HIV.

HIV can also be passed from an infected mother to her baby during pregnancy, birth of child or breastfeeding. Early infection with HIV often produces no symptoms. When there are symptoms, they can include flu-like symptoms that occur about four to eight weeks after infection. These symptoms generally go away within several weeks. There then may be no symptoms for months to years. Eventually a person with HIV infection develops serious, life-threatening complications. This is generally when a diagnosis of AIDS is made. For more details on complications and symptoms, refer to symptoms of AIDS.

The person that engages in sexual activity can effect the HIV infection, which causes AIDS. This includes homosexual, heterosexual and bisexual men and women. The more sexual partners a person have the greater the risk of catching and passing on an HIV infection. Having another type of sexually transmitted disease, such as Chlamydia, genital, HPV or gonorrhea, also puts a person at greater risk for contracting an HIV infection and eventually developing AIDS.
The diagnostic test for HIV is a blood test that can reveal the presence of the specific antibodies (infection-fighting substances) that the body makes in response to an HIV infection. However, HIV may not be detectable in the first one to three months after infection. A diagnosis of AIDS is generally made when HIV infection has resulted in serious complications and opportunistic infections are occurring. These can include Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, cytomegalovirus infections Kaposi's sarcoma and tuberculosis.

Whenever the diagnosis of AIDS Physicians will take a medical & sexual record to find out health and immune system status. An entire physical and pelvic examination for women and physical and examination of the penis and testicles for men is also done. Additional tests will be done to test for the presence of other potential disorders and diseases, including sexually transmitted diseases.

Since here are frequently no symptoms in the early stages, some people with AIDS may be unaware of an HIV infection, and identification can be missed or delayed.

AIDS is an extremely avoidable disease. Prevention of AIDS is best accomplished by abstaining from sexual activity or having sex only within a mutually monogamous relationship in which neither partner is infected with HIV. Latex condoms may provide some protection from HIV and AIDS if used properly.
There is no treatment currently for HIV infection and AIDS. but, prompt diagnosis and treatment of HIV infection could help to delay the beginning of AIDS and serious complications, such as opportunistic infections, improve the quality of life, and minimize the spread of the disease to others. Treatment generally includes medications. Hospitalization may be necessary if a person has serious complications, such as meningitis or an opportunistic infection

History & Origin

AIDS was first reported in June 05, 1981, when the United States Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recorded a cluster of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (now still classified as PCP but known to be caused by Pneumocystis jirovecii) in five homosexual men in Los Angeles. In the beginning, the CDC did not have an official name for the disease, often referring to it by way of the diseases that were associated with it, for example, lymphadenopathy, and the disease after which the discoverers of HIV originally named the virus. They also used Kaposi's sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections, the name by which a task force had been set up in 1981
In the general press, the term GRID, which stood for Gay-related immune deficiency, had been coined. 

The CDC, in search of a name, and looking at the infected communities coined “the 4H disease,” as it seemed to single out Haitians, homosexuals, hemophiliacs, and heroin users. However, after determining that AIDS was not isolated to the homosexual community, the term GRID became misleading and AIDS was introduced at a meeting in July 1982.By September 1982 the CDC started using the name AIDS, and properly defined the illness.
The earliest known positive identification of the HIV-1 virus comes from the Congo in 1959 and 1960 though genetic studies indicate that it passed into the human population from chimpanzees around fifty years earlier. A recent study states that a strain of HIV-1 probably moved from Africa to Haiti and then entered the United States around 1969.

The HIV virus descends from the related simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), which infects apes and monkeys in Africa. There is evidence that humans who participate in bush meat activities, either as hunters or as bush meat vendors, commonly acquire SIV. However, only a few of these infections were able to cause epidemics in humans, and all did so in the late 19th—early 20th century. To explain why HIV became epidemic only by that time, there are several theories, each invoking specific driving factors that may have promoted SIV adaptation to humans, or initial spread: social changes following colonialism, rapid transmission of SIV through unsafe or unsterile injections (that is, injections in which the needle is reused without being sterilised), colonial abuses and unsafe smallpox vaccinations or injections,or prostitution and the concomitant high frequency of genital ulcer diseases (such as syphilis) in nascent colonial cities.

A more controversial theory known as the OPV AIDS hypothesis suggests that the AIDS epidemic was inadvertently started in the late 1950s in the Belgian Congo by Hilary Koprowski's research into a poliomyelitis vaccine. According to scientific consensus, this scenario is not supported by the available evidence.

The symptoms of AIDS are basically the result of conditions that do not normally develop in any individuals with healthy immune systems. Normally these conditions are infections caused by bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites that are normally controlled by the elements of the immune system that HIV damages.

Opportunistic infections are common in people with AIDS. These infections affect nearly every organ.

People with AIDS also have an increased risk of developing various cancers such as Kaposi's sarcoma, cervical cancer and cancers of the immune system known as lymphomas. Additionally, people with AIDS often have systemic symptoms of infection like fevers, sweats(particularly at night), swollen glands, chills, weakness, and weight loss. The specific opportunistic infections that AIDS patients develop depend in part on the prevalence of these infections in the geographic area in which the patient lives.

Pulmonary

PCP, which now stands for Pneumocystis pneumonia) is relatively rare in healthy, immune competent people, but common among HIV-infected individuals. It is caused by Pneumocystis jirovecii.
Before the advent of effective diagnosis, treatment and routine prophylaxis in Western countries, it was a common immediate cause of death. In developing countries, it is still one of the first indications of AIDS in untested individuals, although it does not generally occur unless the CD4 count is less than 200 cells per µL of blood.
Tuberculosis (TB) is unique among infections associated with HIV because it is transmissible to immune competent people via the respiratory route, and is not easily treatable once identified, Multi drug resistance is a serious problem. Tuberculosis with HIV co-infection (TB/HIV) is a major world health problem according to the World Health Organization: in 2007, 456,000 deaths among incident TB cases were HIV-positive, a third of all TB deaths and nearly a quarter of the estimated 2 million HIV deaths in that year.
Even though its incidence has declined because of the use of directly observed therapy and other improved practices in Western countries, this is not the case in developing countries where HIV is most prevalent. In early-stage HIV infection (CD4 count >300 cells per µL), TB typically presents as a pulmonary disease. In advanced HIV infection, TB often presents atypically with extra pulmonary (systemic) disease a common feature. Symptoms are usually constitutional and are not localized to one particular site, often affecting bone marrow, bone, urinary and gastrointestinal tracts, liver, regional lymph nodes, and the central nervous system.

Gastrointestinal

Esophagi are is an inflammation of the lining of the lower end of the esophagus (gullet or swallowing tube leading to the stomach). In HIV-infected individuals, this is normally due to fungal (candidacies) or viral (herpes simplex-1 or cytomegalovirus) infections. In rare cases, it could be due to mycobacterium.
Unexplained chronic diarrhea in HIV infection is due to many possible causes, including common bacterial (Salmonella, Shigella, Listeria or Campylobacter) and parasitic infections; and uncommon opportunistic infections such as cryptosporidiosis, microsporidiosis, Mycobacterium avium complex (MAC) and viruses, atrocious, adenovirus, rotavirus and cytomegalovirus, (the latter as a course of colitis).
In some cases, diarrhea may be a side effect of several drugs used to treat HIV, or it may simply accompany HIV infection, particularly during primary HIV infection. It may also be a side effect of antibiotics used to treat bacterial causes of diarrhea (common for Clostridium difficile). In the later stages of HIV infection, diarrhea is thought to be a reflection of changes in the way the intestinal tract absorbs nutrients, and may be an important component of HIV-related wasting.

Neurological and psychiatric

HIV infection may lead to a variety of neuropsychiatric sequelae, either by infection of the now susceptible nervous system by organisms, or as a direct consequence of the illness itself.
Toxoplasmosis is a disease caused by the single-celled parasite called Toxoplasma gondii; it usually infects the brain, causing toxoplasmaencephalitis, but it can also infect and cause disease in the eyes and lungs. Cryptococcal meningitis is an infection of the meninx (the membrane covering the brain and spinal cord) by the fungus Cryptococcus neoformans. It can cause fevers, headache, fatigue, nausea, and vomiting. Patients may also develop seizures and confusion; left untreated, it can be lethal.
Progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML) is a demyelinating disease, in which the gradual destruction of the myelin sheath covering the axons of nerve cells impairs the transmission of nerve impulses. It is caused by a virus called JC virus which occurs in 70% of the population in latent form, causing disease only when the immune system has been severely weakened, as is the case for AIDS patients. It progresses rapidly, usually causing death within months of diagnosis.
AIDS dementia complex (ADC) is a metabolic encephalopathy induced by HIV infection and fueled by immune activation of HIV infected brain macrophages and microglia. These cells are productively infected by HIV and secrete neurotoxins of both host and viral origin.

Specific neurological impairments are manifested by cognitive, behavioral, and motor abnormalities that occur after years of HIV infection and are associated with low CD4+ T cell levels and high plasma viral loads.Prevalence is 10–20% in Western countries but only 1–2% of HIV infections in India.This difference is possibly due to the HIV subtype in India. AIDS related mania is sometimes seen in patients with advanced HIV illness; it presents with more irritability and cognitive impairment and less euphoria than a manic episode associated with true bipolar disorder. Unlike the latter condition, it may have a more chronic course. This syndrome is less often seen with the advent of multi-drug therapy.