Question: how do you cure hiv

Amy MacQueen answered on 17 Jun 2011:

Hi Josephine! Thanks for the question!

At the moment it is not possible to cure HIV – only to help treat people who have it. One of my friends works in a drug company that produces and sells medicines to help people with HIV – its really important. It is estimated that about 33.3 million people in the world have HIV – so its a serious problem!

The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) attacks the body’s immune system. Our immune system is what normally fights infection for us in our body. HIV infects a particular type of cell in your immune system called the CD4 T cell. These are white blood cells that are found in the blood and normally protect us from getting sick (they are the type of cell I work on!).

CD4 cells are responsible for fighting infection but if a person has HIV they have a virus that infects these important cells. So the HIV virus is actually attacking your bodies way of fighting diseases!

After they become infected, the CD4 cells are destroyed by the HIV which uses the cell to make lots more copies of itself and then release more virus particles into the blood. Our bodies try and produce more CD4 cells to replace the ones we have lost but eventually we will not have enough and our immune system will stop working properly.

HIV is hard to treat because the virus often mutates and changes quite quickly so medicines will stop working against it. AIDS is what we call the late stages of HIV infection – by this point a persons immune system is extremely broken and so they can develop a number of life-threatening conditions like pneumonia. Because their bodies can no longer fight this they are likely to die of it.

I hope this answered your question – if not just leave a comment!

Have a great day! 🙂