HIV-AIDS AWARENESS

For information about Food and Drug Administration-approved HIV-related clinical trials being conducted throughout the United States, contact the AIDS Clinical Trials Information Service. 1-800-TRIALS-A (1-800-874-2572)1-888-480-3739 (TTY/Deaf Access)http://www.actis.org/ For federally approved treatment guidelines on HIV/AIDS, contact the HIV/AIDS Treatment Information Service. ...

NIAID-supported investigators are conducting an abundance of research on HIV infection, including developing and testing HIV vaccines and new therapies for the disease and some of its associated conditions. Investigators are testing 29 HIV vaccines in people, and are developing or testing many drugs for HIV infection or AIDS-associated opportunistic infections. Researchers also are ...

Because no vaccine for HIV is available, the only way to prevent infection by the virus is to avoid behaviors that put a person at risk of infection, such as sharing needles and having unprotected sex. Many people infected with HIV have no symptoms. Therefore, there is no way of knowing with certainty whether a sexual partner is infected unless he or she has repeatedly tested negative for ...

When AIDS first surfaced in the United States, there were no medicines to combat the underlying immune deficiency and few treatments existed for the opportunistic diseases that resulted. Over the past 10 years, however, researchers have developed drugs to fight both HIV infection and its associated infections and cancers. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a number of drugs...

Because early HIV infection often causes no symptoms, a doctor or other health care provider usually can diagnose it by testing a person's blood for the presence of antibodies (disease-fighting proteins) to HIV. HIV antibodies generally do not reach detectable levels in the blood for one to three months following infection. It may take the antibodies as long as six months to be produced in ...

The term AIDS applies to the most advanced stages of HIV infection. CDC developed official criteria for the definition of AIDS and is responsible for tracking the spread of AIDS in the United States. CDC's definition of AIDS includes all HIV-infected people who have fewer than 200 CD4+ T cells per cubic millimeter of blood. (Healthy adults usually have CD4+ T-cell counts of 1,000 or more.) In ...

Many people do not have any symptoms when they first become infected with HIV. Some people, however, have a flu-like illness within a month or two after exposure to the virus. This illness may include fever, headache, tiredness, and enlarged lymph nodes (glands of the immune system easily felt in the neck and groin). These symptoms usually disappear within a week to a month and are often mistaken...

HIV is spread most commonly by having unprotected sex with an infected partner. The virus can enter the body through the lining of the vagina, vulva, penis, rectum, or mouth during sex. HIV also is spread through contact with infected blood. Before donated blood was screened for evidence of HIV infection and before heat-treating techniques to destroy HIV in blood products were introduced, HIV ...

AIDS - acquired immunodeficiency syndrome - was first reported in the United States in 1981 and has since become a major worldwide epidemic. AIDS is caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). By killing or damaging cells of the body's immune system, HIV progressively destroys the body's ability to fight infections and certain cancers. People diagnosed with AIDS may get life-threatening ...

In an encouraging development religious leaders in Manipur have joined hands in the fight against the high prevalent of HIV/AIDS in the State. With the aim to spread the awareness of HIV/AIDS and to help fight the stigma and discrimination attached with the disease in the grass root level, a one day seminar of the religious on HIV/AIDS was held on Saturday morning at the Manipur Press Club in ...