HIV: truth and misconceptions
5 myths about HIV
Post-science debunks near-scientific myths and clarifies widespread misconceptions. We asked our experts to comment on common myths about HIV infection.
HIV cannot always be detected at an early stage
This is partly true.
Problems with the identification of HIV-infected people currently practically do not exist. In rare cases and for certain conditions, HIV infection is not always possible to detect. However, we know that absolutely effective diagnostic methods do not exist for any disease. For example, it is extremely difficult to diagnose tuberculosis. Laboratory diagnostic methods do not always allow you to do this unequivocally. Detecting cancer in the early stages is also quite difficult, and this is not surprising. The same applies to HIV infection. At an early stage of the disease, when a person has just become infected, the concentration of the virus in the body is still extremely low, and the antibodies in humans to the virus have not yet had time to develop. Then laboratory diagnostic methods will give a negative result. However, this is a very short period of time, which for modern methods is limited to one or two weeks. By the third or fourth week, the probability of detecting an HIV-infected person exceeds 99%. HIV infection is an incurable disease that, in the absence of specialized medical care, leads to the death of the patient 10-15 years after infection. Therefore, I would recommend taking an HIV test regularly. HIV is most often transmitted through sexual contact and parenteral drug use. Parenteral drug addicts are relatively few, but it is difficult to imagine a person aged 18 to 65 years who absolutely does not lead a sexual life. And it's not uncommon for people to neglect the use of condoms. This already suggests that they have a risk of infection. Therefore, it is useful for all adults to be tested for HIV infection every year. Then the disease will be detected in a timely manner, and medical care will also be started on time. This will allow an HIV-infected person to continue living a long, clinically healthy life.
Dmitry Kireev, Candidate of Biological Sciences, senior scientific expert of the Center for Molecular Diagnostics.
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HIV infection can be contracted by airborne droplets or at home
That's not so.
You cannot get an infection from a carrier if he sneezes, shakes your hand, or even kisses you: the virus is not transmitted through saliva, water, or dishes. The proof is the fact that hundreds of thousands of people are in hospitals and in contact with medical personnel, while we do not have a single case of infection in such conditions. The virus must get into the bloodstream for the disease to begin. This is the only way of infection. Nowadays, there are two ways to acquire the virus: reuse dirty syringes after an infected person or have sexual contact with him. For example, even blood transfusion, which in the 1980s could have been dangerous, is now not a method of infection: all blood is tested for HIV infection, so transfusion can be considered safe.
It is impossible to get HIV infection, say, from a mosquito bite. No such cases have been registered. Firstly, it is very unlikely that a mosquito will bite someone infected and transfer it to you. The probability that the ceiling will collapse is incomparably higher. Secondly, even if this is the case, there are enzymes in the mosquito's saliva that destroy viruses.
In addition, it is impossible to get infected through needles that are allegedly scattered in the subway (which, most likely, is also a myth). The infectivity of the virus drops sharply after a few hours in the absence of a carrier. If you have spilled a suspension of the virus on the table, then in a few hours or the next day it will no longer be infectious. The survival strategy of the virus is to be transmitted quickly from person to person. We study the virus and store it in the freezer at -80 °C, because at -40 °C it loses its infectivity quite quickly. And if, say, this freezer breaks down, then that's it, this virus can be thrown away: it will no longer infect anyone.
Leonid Margolis, Doctor of Biological Sciences, Professor, Faculty of Bioengineering and Bioinformatics, Lomonosov Moscow State University.
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Scandinavians are immune to HIV infection due to mutations in their genes
This is partly true.
It is believed that the genetic mutation CCR5-Δ32, which occurs mainly in Scandinavians, makes them immune to HIV infection. The answer to this question lies in the field of population genetics. Scandinavians as a whole are no worse susceptible to HIV infection than others, but in the corresponding populations the frequency of this mutation is indeed higher, that is, the percentage of those who are immune is higher. This is not the result of breeding, since HIV appeared in Europe quite recently in order to have time to isolate an increase in this frequency, but simply a reflection of normal differences in the frequencies of alleles (different forms of the same gene) of any genes in any populations — a game of nature, nothing can be done. The question of whether HIV variants infecting T cells will appear in the absence of the CCR5 receptor has not yet been answered. This may happen, but only time will tell whether the frequency of this allele in human populations is sufficient to make the selection of such variants significant for the prosperity of the virus population, or whether the virus will manage with all other hosts without much damage to itself.
Questions of population genetics are a separate complex topic, which includes many concepts, such as biostatistics, balance and frequencies of alleles, and much more, which it will not be possible to tell on the fingers.
Alexander Apt, Doctor of Biological Sciences, Professor of the Department of Immunology of the Faculty of Biology of Moscow State University, Head of the Laboratory of Immunogenetics of TSNIIT RAMS.
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An HIV-infected woman cannot have a healthy child
Fortunately, this is no longer the case.
Once this statement was true, but quite a long time ago. One of the protective organisms in a woman is the placenta, which protects the fetus from maternal blood with the virus. Indeed, previously an infected woman had a 95% chance of giving birth to an HIV-infected child. But infection does not occur in the womb, with the exception of some pathological, very rare cases, but during childbirth, when the child swallows blood and various fluids through the birth canal. And for quite some time now, perhaps the greatest success in HIV therapy is that you give a woman strong antiviral drugs a few weeks before giving birth. For chronic infections, they are difficult to take: there are too many side effects. But they make it so that the virus practically disappears from the blood. The child is born healthy. With modern methods of childbirth, the probability of infection is less than 1%.
Leonid Margolis.
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There is an AIDS cocktail
This is partly true.
The opinion that there is a certain "cocktail" of drugs that is selected for the treatment of AIDS for the patient is partly erroneous. AIDS therapy is a long and complex process, so patients take medications in a complex way. Such a complex is often called a cocktail, but it is not a panacea, and in each case an individual selection of drugs is required. In other words, this is a case of vulgarization of the name for a difficult treatment process.
Fedor Lisitsyn, Candidate of Biological Sciences, Senior Researcher at the D.I. Ivanovsky Research Institute of Virology.
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