What Part of the Human Body Does AIDS HIV Affect?

What part of the human body does AIDS HIV affect? The direct answer is the immune system, but the indirect answer is that it affects the whole entire body and all of its systems. Learning about what body parts HIV AIDS affects involves understanding how the disease works to attack its host.

HIV attacks the body by attacking and destroying CD4 helper lymphocyte cells. These cells are meant to help the body cure itself from many potentially fatal infections. As HIV progresses, more and more of these cells are destroyed.

With each cell that is destroyed, the body is further impaired and becomes unable to fight off even minor infections in the way someone with a normal immune system would be able to. Eventually, after a number of CD4 helper lymphocytes have been destroyed a patient is diagnosed as having full blown AIDS.

Specific Parts of the Body Affected

HIV and AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) attack the immune system in the body and, therefore, HIV AIDS affects the entire body, albeit indirectly. For example, patients with HIV or full blown AIDS can suffer severely from lung conditions such as pneumonia. In normal patients with normal immune systems, pneumonia is typically not fatal. However, in HIV and AIDS patients this and other types of rare diseases such as tuberculosis are common. These conditions can, and often do, lead to death in AIDS patients They die from the underlying infection rather than AIDS itself.

HIV and AIDS patients are also known to suffer from normal cancers and rare blood cancers that are typically fatal in these patients also because their body is unable to fight the cancer.

Other rare conditions such as meningitis, an infection of the area around the brain, and encephalitis, an infection in the brain itself, are also common occurrences for patients affected with HIV or AIDS. The bottom line is that HIV will eventually develop into full blown AIDS and AIDS can affect every system of the body. Therefore, every part of the body is at risk of infection when you have HIV or AIDS.

Transmission of HIV and AIDS

Because HIV AIDS affects so many parts of the body, prevention is key. The prevention for the transmission of HIV or AIDS is quite simple. HIV can only be passed through bodily fluids such as:

• Blood
• Semen
• Vaginal fluid
• Breast milk

Those with other sexually transmitted diseases are also more at risk for transacting the HIV virus when undertaking activities with an affected partner.

The number one way to prevent the transmission of HIV is abstinence from all sexual activity. If you must have sex, you should ensure that you are doing it with a trusted partner and you should always use protection every time. Another way to prevent the transmission of HIV is to ensure that if you are pregnant you do not breast feed your baby if you have tested positive for HIV. 

Curing AIDS

It was a little more than 20 years ago when scientists discovered the deadly HIV, or  Human Immunodeficiency Virus. As of 2010, the disease affects more than 42 million people in the world. Every year more than 3 million die from HIV as it progresses into full blown AIDS.

However, the number of fatalities related to AIDS has slowly dwindled over the years as scientists have discovered ways to suppress the virus and to control the number of ways in which HIV AIDS affects the body. Although efforts have been made to cure those who have HIV, no cure has ever been found.