People with HIV look just like everybody else
Around the world, there are a number of different myths about HIV and AIDS. Here are some of the more common ones :
‘You would have to drink a bucket of infected saliva to become infected yourself’ . . . Yuck! This is a typical myth. HIV is found in saliva, but in quantities too small to infect someone. If you drink a bucket of saliva from an HIV positive person, you won’t become infected. There has been only one recorded case of HIV …

HIV is found in the blood and the sexual fluids of an infected person, and in the breast milk of an infected woman. HIV transmission occurs when a sufficient quantity of these fluids get into someone else’s bloodstream. There are various ways a person can become infected with HIV.
Ways in which you can be infected with HIV :

Unprotected sexual intercourse with an infected person Sexual intercourse without a condom is risky, because the virus, which is present in an infected person’s sexual fluids, can pass directly into the body of …

Without drug treatment, HIV infection usually progresses to AIDS in an average of ten years. This average, though, is based on a person having a reasonable diet. Someone who is malnourished may well progress to AIDS and death more rapidly.
Antiretroviral medication can prolong the time between HIV infection and the onset of AIDS. Modern combination therapy is highly effective and, theoretically, someone with HIV can live for a long time before it becomes AIDS. These medicines, however, are not widely available in many poor countries around the world, and millions …

A damaged immune system is not only more vulnerable to HIV, but also to the attacks of other infections. It won’t always have the strength to fight off things that wouldn’t have bothered it before.
As time goes by, a person who has been infected with HIV is likely to become ill more and more often until, usually several years after infection, they become ill with one of a number of particularly severe illnesses. It is at this point in the stages of HIV infection that they are said to have …

The immune system is a group of cells and organs that protect your body by fighting disease. The human immune system usually finds and kills viruses fairly quickly.
So if the body’s immune system attacks and kills viruses, what’s the problem?
Different viruses attack different parts of the body - some may attack the skin, others the lungs, and so on. The common cold is caused by a virus. What makes HIV so dangerous is that it attacks the immune system itself - the very thing that would normally get rid of …