Aids

AIDS, what is AIDS? When one hear this word they will probably think it is a disease that some types of people can have. Not true! Anybody can have AIDS. AIDS could be affecting the person who delivers your mail, the person who sit next to you in class or the person who coaches your soccer team. A person with AIDS could be the singer you see on MTV, the actor in your favorite movie, or the anchor person on your evening news program. There are millions of people in the United States alone who are living with HIV, the virus believed to cause AIDS. Yet unless one of them tells you, you would probably never know that she or he is infected. While many people believed those infected with HIV are all thin and sick looking most people living with HIV or AIDS looks as healthy as everyone else does. And for every women, child, and man living with the effects of HIV or AIDS, there are dozens of uninfected people who are somehow affected by that person's illness. They are the friends, parents, lovers, brothers, and sisters of people living with AIDS and some of them might not even know it. There is no stop to this growing disease. More than half of the United States has been infected with HIV or AIDS. This disease has no sign of stopping unless you make a choice not get infected and protect yourself. I order to understand AIDS, it is important to know what HIV and AIDS are, and how they differ from each other.Unfortunately, this can be very confusing, because people tend to mislabel the different levels of this disease. The difference between HIV and AIDS is actually

very simple: AIDS is a condition, and HIV is the virusthat most scientist believe causes AIDS, it is also ometimes referred to as the AIDS virus. HIV stands for HUMAN IMMUNODEFICIENCY VIRUS. A virus is a microscopic organism that causesa disease. The H stands for human because this virus affects only humans, not animals. The impressive-sounding word immunodeficiency refers to the immune system, the system of the body that fights off infectios. when one is exposed to a virus, it is the immune system that protects one from getting sick by attacking and destroying the virus. If the immune system has a deficiency it is not working as well as it should, and the body can not effectively fight off the viruses that cause infections. AIDS is the abbreviation

for ACQUIRED IMMUNODEFICIENCY SYNDROME or ACQUIRED IMMUNE DEFICIENCY SYNDROME. Saying that AIDS is acquired means that it is not something that you inheret from your parents, like black hair or blue eyes. You have ot get from someone who already has it. A syndrome is simply a group of symptoms that indicates that thare is something wrong. Therefore AIDS is a condition in which

a person has been infected by Hiv and has developed certain infections because his her immune system has been damaged by HIV to the point where it is not able to fight off infections.

"It is a shock when one hears that they have HIV or AIDS. The only thing going through your mind it is death and how did I get and is it the end for me now." Said 'Maria'. In order for you to become infected with HIV, you have to be exposed to someone else who already has the virus. But unlike other viruses like a cold or flu viruses, which can transmit through the air when someone sneezes or by drinking from the same glass as someone who has