Youth and HIV

In Russia, there is an alarming statistic. Among adolescents, the proportion of those who have a confirmed HIV diagnosis is increasing. According to Yevgeny Voronin, the chief freelance children's HIV specialist of the Russian Ministry of Health, the number of infected people may double in five years: "There is a constant increase in the proportion of adolescents among children with HIV infection. If 1.5-2 years ago, adolescents made up only 30% of children with HIV, today they are already 50%, and in 3-4 years, adolescents will make up more than 70% of children with HIV — " Interfax quotes the doctor.  

Youth is a time of constant search and experimentation. Unfortunately, these experiments often involve dangerous unprotected sexual contacts and drug use. Young people, like no one else, need information that would help them protect themselves.

Many people think that HIV and AIDS are the same thing. This is not true. HIV is a virus that suppresses the immune system, and AIDS is a complex of diseases that occur in a person with HIV against a background of low immunity (the final stage of HIV infection). A person living with HIV can look and feel good for many years and not even know that he is infected. Then the immune system weakens, and the person becomes vulnerable to diseases, many of which can usually be avoided.

There are several ways to get infected with HIV infection:

• unprotected sexual contact;
• sharing syringes, needles and other injection tools;
• using non-sterile tools for tattoos and piercings;
• using someone else's shaving accessories, toothbrushes with visible blood residues;
• transmission of the virus from an HIV-positive mother to a child - during pregnancy, childbirth and breast-feeding.

HIV does not have its own symptoms and can disguise itself as any infectious diseases. The only way to find out the presence of HIV in the body is to take a special blood test for HIV, which detects antibodies to the virus.

The immunodeficiency virus is very unstable, it lives only in the human body and quickly dies in the external environment. Therefore, it is impossible to get infected with HIV in the pool, during sports, as well as through an insect bite or communication with animals.

How to avoid infection?

• Maintaining loyalty to one sexual partner and refusing casual sexual relations.

• The use of condoms at every sexual contact. A condom can reduce the risk of contracting HIV, sexually transmitted infections, and unplanned pregnancy.

• Refusal to use drugs.

• The use of disposable injection equipment.

• HIV testing.

Currently, there is no medicine that can destroy HIV in the human body, there is no vaccine that can prevent infection. Only knowledge (about the ways of transmission and prevention of HIV infection) and the behavior of a particular person in "dangerous" situations can protect him from infection. Everyone makes decisions for himself and is responsible for his actions, for his life.

Epidemiologist of the Lipetsk Regional Center for the Prevention and Control of AIDS and Infectious Diseases

Zvyagin Alexey Alexandrovich.