2023-06-07 04:12:00
42 years ago, on June 5, 1981, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States first reported the immunodeficiency virus. According to them, several dozen people were diagnosed with similar symptoms: pneumonia caused by a fungus, or sarcoma.
As the agency writes NEWS.ruat first this disease was called “gay-related immunodeficiency”, but later it turned out that it was detected not only in homosexuals.
Then it was renamed the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), which develops as a result of infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). NEWS.ru answers the most common questions regarding the disease, its consequences and their treatment.
How is HIV different from AIDS
HIV is a virus, and AIDS is a severe syndrome caused by HIV that has not been treated. Once in the body, HIV destroys the cells of the immune system that are responsible for the destruction of viruses, primarily T4 and T8 lymphocytes.
If an infected person does not undergo therapy, over time he develops various pathologies. For example, specific oncological diseases (Kaposi’s sarcoma, lymphogranulomatosis, carcinoma and other types of tumors), lung infections (pneumocystis pneumonia, tuberculosis), inflammation of the esophagus, diarrhea, toxoplasmosis and other diseases.
Without treatment, the terminal stage of HIV-AIDS sets in. If an HIV-positive person takes the right drugs, they will not get AIDS.
How do people get HIV
HIV is found in all human body fluids, but the virus is present in sufficient quantity to infect only in blood, semen, vaginal secretions, and breast milk.
There are several ways to get HIV infection:
- unprotected penetrating sexual contact;
- sharing of non-sterile injection equipment;
- sharing non-sterile piercing and tattoo equipment;
- from an HIV-infected mother is transmitted to the child during pregnancy, childbirth or breastfeeding.
“Everyone can get HIV, regardless of gender, age, nationality, sexual orientation, material wealth or belonging to any social group. By and large, there are no “risk groups”, but there are risky behaviors that anyone can practice in various circumstances, ” – says the materials of the AIDS Center Foundation.
How to recognize the first signs of HIV
About a month following infection, the patient begins to have a fever, as with the flu or SARS. The person will feel pain in the throat, muscles and joints, his body will be covered with a rash. For several years, an infected person may not know regarding their HIV-positive status, since at the initial stage the immune system does not suffer.
After a while, the temperature is 38.5 degrees, diarrhea and other symptoms will not go away as quickly as in the first months. If you do not start taking special drugs, it can develop into AIDS.
“There are practically no signs of HIV infection. There may be a high temperature. There may be enlarged lymph nodes. There may be any cold symptoms. Therefore, it is difficult to understand here, and the only way to find out your status is to take an HIV test,” — explained the publication of the head of the charity fund to support people with HIV Svetlana Izambaeva.
How and where to get tested for HIV
In any clinic or medical center, you can get an HIV test anonymously. Citizens of the Russian Federation have access to a voluntary examination in specialized rooms at state medical institutions. For this you need a Russian passport.
In pharmacies and some non-profit organizations that support HIV-infected people, you can find home rapid tests.
How many people with HIV in Russia
As Aleksey Mazus, the chief freelance HIV specialist of the Ministry of Health, said at the end of 2022, as of 2021, there were more than 851.7 thousand HIV carriers in the Russian Federation. Rospotrebnadzor called other data.
Yes, a representative Vadim Pokrovsky claimed that as of November 2022, 1.5 million citizens, or 1% of the population, were infected in the country. The Ministry of Health officially stated that these figures “are not verifiable, are of a technical, evaluative nature and cannot serve as objective indicators reflecting the current epidemiological situation.”
In December, the Statista portal, citing data from the UN HIV/AIDS program, reported that Russia ranked fifth in the list of countries in the world with the highest number of new HIV infections, following South Africa, Mozambique, Nigeria and India. According to the service, a total of 1.5 million new cases of the disease were recorded in 2021, of which 3.9% (58.5 thousand) were in the Russian Federation.
However, the Russian Ministry of Health denied this information, emphasizing that the data collected from various open sources do not allow us to assess the situation with the spread of HIV.
The ministry said that, according to official statistics, the incidence in Russia is steadily declining: by 6.8% in 2019 compared to 2018, by 24.8 in 2020 compared to 2019, by 2.0% in 2021 year compared to 2020.
In total, the incidence from 2018 to 2021 decreased by 31.4%, from 58.6 to 40.2 per 100,000 population, the department noted. Last year, the number of people living with HIV in Russia reached 851,754 people, which is regarding 0.58% of the country’s population.
Which regions of Russia have the most HIV patients
According to Rospotrebnadzor, the first stage of the HIV epidemic has been recorded in nine constituent entities of the Russian Federation. The regions of Russia most affected by HIV infection are the Urals, the Volga region, Siberia, St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region.
According to Rosstat, in January 2023, 4,403 cases of HIV infection were detected in the Russian Federation. Most of them were recorded in the Krasnodar, Krasnoyarsk and Perm regions, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Irkutsk, Kemerovo, Nizhny Novgorod, Novosibirsk, Rostov, Samara, Sverdlovsk and Chelyabinsk regions.
How not to get HIV
In order not to become infected with HIV, hygiene and sterility should be monitored. Use only your razor, toothbrush, or nail clippers. During sexual intercourse, do not forget regarding a condom, and when visiting doctors or beauticians, make sure that they take a disposable syringe.
How is HIV treated?
HIV is treated with antiretroviral therapy (ARVT), which involves taking appropriate drugs. It is a combination of several (usually three or four) drugs that block the reproduction of virus cells at different stages.
So far, this therapy is not able to completely destroy the virus, but it helps to improve the patient’s quality of life. Studies show that a person who starts therapy early and is treated lives regarding the same as someone without HIV.
The psychologist told the agency regarding the essence of this therapy Svetlana Izambaevawho became the first woman in the Russian Federation to openly declare her positive HIV status.
“There are different ARVT drugs – each of them is suitable for different patients in different ways. There are pills that are used twice or once a day, there are injections. Each drug affects something specific – these are protease inhibitors, integrases, and reverse transcriptases. They make sure that HIV “sleeps” all the time, and the immune status is at a good level, ” Izambaeva said.
There is also preventive therapy for people who have risky sex with HIV-positive people without condoms. In this case, people are prescribed prescription drugs that reduce the risk of contracting HIV through sex to zero.
The AIDS Center Foundation emphasizes that if a person is diagnosed with HIV, this does not mean that he should give up sex and relationships. In this case, it is necessary to start therapy as soon as possible.
“Despite the fact that in the past many HIV drugs were very toxic, today they are no more dangerous than other drugs. They also have their side effects, but all of them can be avoided if you choose the right treatment regimen, ” – explained in the “AIDS Center”.
The doctor prescribes drugs and recommends a schedule for taking into account the individual characteristics of the patient. For example, if an HIV-infected person suffers from the side effects of a drug, the specialist should offer him an alternative therapy option.
How three patients recovered from HIV
In the entire history of HIV/AIDS, there have been three patients who have been cured. One of them – Timothy Ray Brownknown as the “Berlin patient” (2007), the second – Adam Castillejo, or “The London Patient” (2019). They were accidentally helped by transplantation of stem cells involved in hematopoiesis. This operation was carried out for other indications.
Brown was treated for leukemia (from which he died in September 2020) and Castillejo for Hodgkin’s lymphoma. It turned out that stem cell donors had a genetic mutation that greatly reduces the likelihood of contracting HIV.
According to doctors, two successful cases are due to the fact that the Berlin and London patients had a complication during transplantation.
As the donor’s immune cells attacked the new host, Brown and Castillejo developed diarrhea, rashes, liver damage, and other adverse symptoms. The researchers believe that the aggressive reaction of the body helped to completely destroy HIV.
In February 2022, US scientists reported the third person in the world to have been cured of HIV. This was a woman diagnosed with immunodeficiency in 2013 and then diagnosed with leukemia requiring a bone marrow transplant.
In August 2017, she underwent a cord blood stem cell transplant and an additional bone marrow transplant from a donor who was only partially compatible with her.
Cord blood cells adapt faster in the body, but their small number had to be compensated by additional cell transplantation from a bone marrow donor.
Three years following the operation, the woman stopped taking HIV drugs, as a new test showed the absence of this virus in her body.
These cases did not mean that the world had learned how to treat HIV. The fact is that stem cell transplantation is a dangerous and expensive procedure, only allowed in case of urgent need, such as lymphoma or leukemia, the treatment of which would be impossible without such procedures.
Why there is no HIV vaccine
When a person becomes infected with HIV, he does not develop acquired immunity, as with measles and smallpox. This was told to the publication by the head of the specialized research department of epidemiology and AIDS prevention of the Central Research Institute of Epidemiology of Rospotrebnadzor, Professor Vadim Pokrovsky.
According to him, the virus is introduced into the DNA cells of an infected person, modern means will not help here. According to Pokrovsky, new drugs for the treatment of HIV infection are already being tested, which differ in their action and belong to the so-called gene therapy.
“One method that is being explored is to kill the virus by activating it. That is, you first need to activate the virus, which is in a latent form, and then kill it with drugs. But so far this has not been possible. Another idea is to get the virus right in the genome, this is the so-called gene therapy,” Pokrovsky said.
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