HIV

HIV also was known as the Human Immunodeficiency virus is a virus that causes a sexually transmitted infection called AIDS. This infection is usually spread by infected blood, from a mother to child during pregnancy, breastfeeding or by having unprotected sexual intercourse with the infected person.This infection may take up to several years before HIV impairs your immune system to such an extent that categorize you as an AIDS patient.

There is still no cure for HIV/AIDS, but with the help of certain medications progression of this disease can be dramatically slowed down.

Symptoms of the Primary Infection
The people who get infected by the HIV tend to develop flu kind of illness within a month after the virus makes its entry into the body. This is also known as primary or acute HIV infection, which may last for a few weeks. The symptoms of this are

• Fever
• Muscle soreness
• Rash
• Headache
• Sore throat
• Mouth or genital ulcers
• Swollen lymph glands, mainly on the neck
• Joint pain
• Excessive sweating
• Diarrhea

Usually the symptoms of primary HIV infection are so mild that they most of the time are unnoticed, the viral load or the amount of virus in the blood is too high during this period which causes the HIV infection to spreads more quickly during primary infection as compared to the other stages of infection.

Clinical Latent Infection :
In clinical latent HIV infection phase some people may experience persistent swelling of lymph nodes. There are, however, no specific signs and symptoms in this stage. HIV stays in the body, as a free virus and in infected the white blood cells. Clinical latent infection usually lasts for 8 to 10 years. however, others progress to more-severe disease much sooner.

Clinical latent infection typically lasts eight to 10 years. A few people stay in this stage even longer, but others progress to more-severe disease much sooner.

Early symptomatic HIV infection :
The HIV virus rapidly continues to multiply and kill the immune cells, that may result in the development of milder infections or chronic symptoms like flu, fever, swelling in the lymph nodes, diarrhoea, weight loss, cough and shortness of breath, which are the first signs of HIV infection