Questions about AIDS knowledge 1. What is AIDS?
The full medical name of AIDS is "Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome" (AIDS for short), which is a disease in which HIV invades human body, destroys human immune function, causes various incurable infections and tumors, and finally leads to death. This name covers three clear definitions of AIDS:
(1) Acquired: indicating that the cause is acquired rather than innate;
⑵ Immunodeficiency: The pathogenesis is that the virus entering the human body causes the destruction or even failure of immune function, which is easy to infect various pathogens and prone to tumors;
⑶ Syndrome: refers to the complex symptom group caused by opportunistic infections and tumors in various systems due to immune deficiency.
Therefore, AIDS patients mainly show serious damage to the immune system, decreased body resistance, and even induce serious infections and some rare cancers. Aids has attracted great attention from governments all over the world, both in terms of personnel and funds. China lists it as a Class B legal infectious disease, which is one of the infectious diseases monitored by frontier health.
2. What is HIV?
HIV is the abbreviation of AIDS virus, namely human immunodeficiency virus. This is a virus that can live in human lymph nodes and blood and attack human immune system. It is aimed at the most important T4 lymphocytes in human immune system, which can devour and destroy a large number of T4 lymphocytes, thus destroying the whole human immune system, and eventually the human body loses its ability to resist various diseases, leading to death.
HIV is a retrovirus with very strong mutation ability. This feature not only makes it difficult for human immune system to resist its invasion, but also brings difficulties to the development of specific therapeutic drugs and preventive vaccines.
3. Where does HIV mainly exist in the human body?
HIV is widely found in blood, semen, vaginal secretions, saliva, urine, milk, cerebrospinal fluid and brain tissue of patients with nervous system symptoms. It mainly invades human T lymphocytes, but also B cells, macrophages, Langerhans cells, intestinal epithelial cells, astrocytes and oligodendrocytes in the brain, capillary endothelial cells and so on, and can lurk in these cells for a long time.
Although HIV is widely distributed in human body, it mainly exists in blood, semen, vaginal secretions, milk and wound exudates of HIV-infected people, and it is highly contagious. Other body fluids, such as tears, saliva and sweat, exist in small quantities and generally do not lead to the spread of AIDS.
4. What is the difference between HIV-infected people and AIDS patients?
HIV-infected people refer to HIV carriers who have no clinical symptoms after being infected with HIV. During this period, the human immune system can show resistance to HIV, but there is no discomfort and symptoms in clinic. This asymptomatic HIV-infected group can move freely and is not easy to be found, which has become a very important source of HIV infection. Aids patients refer to patients who have been infected with HIV and have obvious clinical symptoms. The similarity between the two is that they both carry HIV and are contagious. The difference is that AIDS patients have obvious clinical symptoms, while HIV-infected people have no obvious clinical symptoms. They look like healthy people. The average symptoms will not appear until several years later. The period from HIV infection to onset is also called incubation period. The incubation period of each infected person is different, with an average of 7-8 years.
Many people may be infected with HIV and become the source of infection without knowing it. Therefore, they will not restrain their behavior, thus causing the continuous spread of diseases, and may miss the opportunity of the best anti-virus and opportunistic infection prevention and treatment.
5. How does 5.HIV destroy the human immune system?
As we all know, when people are infected by viruses and bacteria, the immune system will immediately fight back and destroy these "intruders". However, HIV specifically attacks the human immune system and accumulates and multiplies in macrophages and CD4+T lymphocytes, thus destroying or even completely destroying the human immune system.
After HIV enters the human body, it is mainly parasitic in T4 lymphocytes of the immune system, which is stronger than the combination between T4 lymphocytes and other normal components of the human immune system. The human body has no ability to separate them. Natural killer cells and other killer cells can kill and dissolve HIV-infected cells through antibody-dependent cytotoxicity. The body destroys its own immune system while removing the virus. However, due to the constant variation and recombination of HIV, it can escape immune surveillance, and the human immune system cannot completely eliminate it. Therefore, when the HIV invades the human body from the latent state to the active state, the virus in the cell will be stimulated to replicate thousands of HIV, and the newly manufactured HIV will be released from the cell and invade other healthy T4 lymphocytes. In this way, the HIV continues to proliferate in the infected body, while the T4 lymphocytes are constantly destroyed, which eventually leads to the gradual loss of immunity of the infected person and the death of various complications.
6. What is the window period and how long is it?
Window period is a unique concept in AIDS, which has attracted much attention. After HIV enters the human body, it takes some time for the body to produce anti-HIV antibodies, during which the blood antibody test is negative, which is the window period. Once the blood antibody turns positive, it means the end of the window period, so the window period is also called "antibody turning positive period". Infected people in this period may have symptoms of acute infection, or they may not have any symptoms. However, the infected people in this period are highly contagious.
It is precisely because even if infected with HIV, if the test results are still negative within the window period, many people are not at ease with the test results and then continue to do various tests. So how long is the window period?
At present, there are many opinions about the window period. Unfortunately, because different individuals have different immune responses to AIDS, the time when antibodies appear is not consistent, and the quality and technology of detection methods and reagents may be different, so there is no unified window period for different individuals. However, according to a lot of clinical experience and scientific research, the official window period in China is currently set at 3 months, that is, after 3 months of possible infection, when the blood test for HIV antibody is still negative, the possibility of HIV infection can generally be ruled out; However, if this person has high-risk behavior, it should be reexamined again after 2 ~ 3 months. If it is still negative, it can be ruled out.
7. Is the length of the window period related to the virus intake?
Window period refers to the period from being infected by virus to producing HIV antibodies that can be detected by existing detection methods. It can be seen that there are two factors that affect the window period. One is the speed at which the body produces anti-HIV antibodies, and the other is the sensitivity of the detection method. Scientists have shortened the window period by constantly improving the detection methods, but the speed at which each individual produces HIV antibodies is still very different. Although the amount of virus ingested by a single individual may affect the speed of antibody production, it is difficult to infer the length of the window period from the amount of virus ingested because of the great differences among individuals. Should be implemented in accordance with the above requirements.
8. Is AIDS a sexually transmitted disease?
Sexually transmitted diseases are a group of infectious diseases, which can be spread through sexual contact. In this sense, AIDS is a sexually transmitted disease. However, the spread of AIDS is not entirely through sexual contact, but also through blood contact and mother-to-child transmission. Therefore, AIDS has long been regarded as a separate disease in the world, and AIDS is different from sexually transmitted diseases. Technically, it's a chronic disease.
Of course, the correlation between AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases is extremely high. A large number of materials prove that patients with ulcerative or inflammatory diseases are 3 to 5 times more likely to be infected with HIV than normal people. At the same time, HIV infection will also increase the prevalence of some ulcerative sexually transmitted diseases. This fully shows that HIV infection and sexually transmitted diseases have synergistic effects in epidemiology. In medicine, we call STD patients the high-risk group of AIDS, and think that general STD will promote the spread of AIDS. The main reasons for this phenomenon are:
(1) Almost all sexually transmitted diseases are transmitted through sexual contact, which is the main route of transmission of AIDS.
⑵ Most patients with sexually transmitted diseases have ulcers in their genitals and genitals, which provides favorable conditions for the invasion of HIV, making it easy to enter the human body and spread rapidly.
(3) When sexually transmitted diseases infect people, they often cause inflammatory reaction, and inflammation increases lymphocytes. Because lymphocytes are the target cells attacked by HIV, their rapid increase has played a role in attracting the invasion of HIV.
(4) STD patients are mainly infected through promiscuity and unclean life, and their sexual partners are often infected with various sexually transmitted diseases. Similarly, HIV infection can also be combined.
5. HIV-infected people with sexually transmitted diseases excrete more HIV from the reproductive tract than HIV-infected people without sexually transmitted diseases, which improves the infectivity of HIV.
Therefore, timely diagnosis and effective treatment of sexually transmitted diseases can not only effectively prevent and treat sexually transmitted diseases, but also effectively prevent AIDS.
9. What is the relationship between tuberculosis and AIDS?
Some people say that tuberculosis and AIDS are like a pair of "twins", which are almost inseparable from the "old and new diseases".
Tuberculosis is one of the most common opportunistic infections among AIDS patients, accounting for about 20% ~ 50% of AIDS patients. HIV is the strongest inducing factor of tuberculosis. Once HIV-infected people are infected with tuberculosis again, the probability of suffering from tuberculosis is 30 times that of ordinary people. Aids can promote the onset of tuberculosis infection and worsen and spread tuberculosis. Similarly, tuberculosis can also promote the development of AIDS and lead to death. Tuberculosis is the main cause of death of AIDS patients, and13 of AIDS patients worldwide die of tuberculosis.
Worryingly, many cases of AIDS complicated with tuberculosis have been reported in China. Due to the further spread of AIDS, tuberculosis control in China will face more severe challenges.
In view of this dangerous situation, the World Health Organization and the Government of China call for popularizing tuberculosis screening and anti-tuberculosis drugs among HIV-infected people, and combining them with AIDS drug treatment, so as to improve the quality of life of patients, prolong their lives and reduce the impact of these two diseases on human beings.
10, what is high-risk behavior?
High-risk behaviors are aimed at the risk of HIV infection, and behaviors that are easy to cause HIV infection are collectively referred to as AIDS high-risk behaviors. Specifically, high-risk behavior refers to the behavior of exchanging body fluids with others or using needles, that is, other people's body fluids enter their bodies, or their body fluids enter other people's bodies, or HIV drug users spread HIV to others through needles. Specific high-risk behaviors are as follows:
⑴ High-risk behaviors through sexual channels include unprotected sexual intercourse, multiple sexual partners and male-to-male contact.
⑵ The high-risk behaviors through blood route are: intravenous drug use; * * * Use a syringe or * * use other instruments that can puncture the skin with others; Using untested blood or blood products, iatrogenic transmission.
⑶ The high-risk behaviors transmitted from mother to child are: HIV-positive women are pregnant and giving birth, and HIV-positive mothers are breastfeeding, which may cause their children to be infected with HIV.
(4) Other ways that can cause blood infection, such as cutting tools used for hairdressing, beauty, tattooing, ear piercing and pedicure. Not disinfected; * * * Use razors and electric razors with others; At the same time suffering from sexually transmitted diseases.
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