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Aids – Causes and Symptoms

Article Summary: AIDS is a chronic, life-threatening condition caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). By damaging or destroying the cells of your immune system, HIV interferes with your body's ability to effectively fight off viruses, bacteria and fungi that cause disease. This makes you more susceptible to certain types of cancers and to opportunistic infections your body would normally resist, such as pneumonia and meningitis. The virus and the infection itself are known as HIV. The term acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) is used to mean the later stages of an HIV infection.

AIDS is a chronic, life-threatening condition caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). By damaging or destroying the cells of your immune system, HIV interferes with your body's ability to effectively fight off viruses, bacteria and fungi that cause disease. This makes you more susceptible to certain types of cancers and to opportunistic infections your body would normally resist, such as pneumonia and meningitis. The virus and the infection itself are known as HIV. The term acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) is used to mean the later stages of an HIV infection.

Causes

AIDS is caused by a virus called HIV, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus. If you get infected with HIV, your body will try to fight the infection. It will make "antibodies," special molecules to fight HIV.

When the new copies of the virus break out of the host cells and enter the bloodstream, they search for other cells to attack. In the meantime, the old host cells and some uninfected CD4 cells die from the effects of the virus. The cycle repeats itself again and again. In the process, billions of new HIV particles are produced every day.

Perhaps HIV can cause immune-system collapse even when it is no long present in the body. As Gallo put it at an AIDS conference last summer: "The molecular mimicry in which HIV imitates components of the immune system sets events into motion that may be able to proceed in the absence of further whole virus."

AIDS is caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). HIV destroys a type of defense cell in the body called a CD4 helper lymphocyte (pronounced: lim-fuh-site). These lymphocytes are part of the body's immune system, the defense system that fights infectious diseases. But as HIV destroys these lymphocytes, people with the virus begin to get serious infections that they normally wouldn't — that is, they become immune deficient.

Symptoms

The symptoms of AIDS are primarily the result of conditions that do not normally develop in individuals with healthy immune systems. Most of 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.

To be diagnosed with AIDS, your T4 cell count must drop to below 200 per cubic millimeter (in healthy adults, a T4 cell count of 1,000 or more per millimeter is normal) or be infected with an opportunistic infection. Opportunistic infections are so named because they take advantage of your weakened immune system.

The symptoms of AIDS seem to have changed over the years. That's because illnesses and conditions have been gradually added to the group of maladies that are now called AIDS. In the beginning, only 12 conditions were called "AIDS."

Many people have no symptoms when they first get HIV — some have no symptoms for years. It varies from person to person. But some people get a flu-like illness within a month or two after first getting HIV. The flu-like symptoms — fever, headache, fatigue (being a lot more tired than usual, and all the time), swollen lymph nodes (glands in the neck and groin) — often go away within a week to a month.

An HIV-positive person will eventually begin to feel sick. The person might begin to have swollen lymph nodes, weight loss, fevers that come and go, infections in the mouth, diarrhea, or he or she might feel tired for no reason all of the time. Eventually, the virus can infect all of the body's organs, including the brain, making it hard for the person to think and remember things.

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Peter Hutch
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