31 Oct 2016

eKhaliyan

HIV, A Social Disease!

HIV and it’s prevention

 The Picture
One has HIV, one doesn’t deserve to live. This has been the traditional mentality of certain orthodox communities in the world and this sure, needs to change today. A person suffering from ACQUIRED IMMUNODEFICIENCY SYNDROME ( AIDS) isn’t necessarily someone having multiple sexual encounters with multiple partners, This conventional train of thoughts need to stop now. With an attempt to put some light of the day on this highly disputable social topic, here’s everything you need to know about HIV and AIDS

Clearing out the misconceptions :

HIV is not a disease! HIV is the organism ( virus ) causing the disease whereas AIDS is the disease manifested. HIV is short for HUMAN IMMUNODEFICIENCY VIRUS.
As the name suggests, it renders the affected individual deficient of immunity and thus , makes one more susceptible to secondary infections. That’s how HIV works, doesn’t itself cause a disease but makes the individual more prone to other infections , thus rendering him morbid. Having said that, this disease is one of the most less understood disease in current times and therefore has an indistinct treatment.

 Prevention is therefore the best way of cure. This can be achieved by-

-         Use of condoms: 
     Condoms have shown effective decrease in the number of HIV infected population , by reducing the transmission at source. Patients infected with HIV , when use a condom
 , fail to transmit the virus to the partner, thus decreasing the disease multiplication

  


-         Pre exposure prophylaxis: 
     This essentially includes treating individual with an already compromised immunity  can be (acquired/ congenital/ developmental), with anti retroviral drugs. These drugs prevent viral multiplication in the host body and thus provide an effective defense



-         Prevention of vertical transmission :
     Meaning prevention of mother to son transmission, this involves treating the mother with antiretroviral therapy during her time of pregnancy, feeding the born child with bottle feed milk instead of breastfeeding, from an infected mother, etc.
   
-         Effective blood screening programmes:  
a    Various institutes today offer blood collection, which is used for blood transfusion, cryo therapy, fresh frozen plasma preparation, etc. A lot of times, these blood collection drives are employed by sub-experienced staff, and this has led to multiple occasions of blood infection, in which HIV has found to be one of the mainstay infections. If this human error could possibly be eliminated, a major chunk of infection can be barred , thus lowering down the AIDS incidence in the nation
         


-         Tattoos : 
      Many a times, the tattoo professionals fail to use sterile syringes and this may lead to HIV transmission from an infected person to a healthy one. Thus tattoos are highly disadvocated and even if they’re encouraged, sterility needs to be maintained




These are the basic principles one must keep in mind to prevent transmission of this seriously fatal disease. AIDS is one of the most severely debilitating disease and it’s prevention is the only definite method of cure