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- What is AIDS?
- Symptoms of AIDS
- Causes of AIDS
- Prevention of AIDS
- Risk factors for AIDS
- Complications of AIDS
- When to see a doctor about AIDS
- Diagnosis of AIDS
- Conventional treatment of AIDS
- Alternative/complementary treatment of AIDS
- Living with AIDS
- Caring for someone with AIDS
There are many theories on the origin of AIDS and the human immuno-deficiency virus (HIV), but no real answers.
The sole and only cause of AIDS is the human immuno-deficiency virus (HIV), which attacks the immune system and kills off certain white blood cells which would normally protect the body from illness and infection, but which becomes weakened and allows opportunistic diseases to take hold, which ultimately ends in the death of the person with AIDS.
The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) can be caught by any of the following ways:
- Unprotected sex - anal, vaginal, oral (less common)
- Sharing needles - using a needle that has already been used by someone else either to inject drugs or to draw out blood
- Mother to child - HIV can be passed onto an unborn child from the mother through the placenta.
Circumstantial evidence suggests that AIDS may have been started in the late 1950's in Africa, when millions of people were vaccinated with attenuated poliomyelitis virus (to inoculate them against polio). It has been suggested that the virus was grown in the kidneys cells of a monkey which was contaminated with a monkey virus with HIV-like properties. This theory, while it is a very plausible explanation, has never been proven (but neither has it been disproven).
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