Many people especially the young have began saying that HIV is no longer scarely since there are drugs. But people should understand the agony, side effects, despair that HIV disease brings to a human body. Many people mistakenly have not yet known that HIV causes chronic illness because despite of the availability of the potent anti-retrovirals. Some communities have developed an ill informed opinion that HIV/AIDS is completely controlled by medications. The belief that HIV/AIDS is no longer a health threat has caused many to become complacent about avoiding infection and has also caused many to view the illnesses of the HIV infected as unimportant. Most people do not know that the anti-HIV medications do not eliminate the entire virus from the body; they merely reduce levels of the virus to undetectable levels, or less than 75 copies per milliliter of blood with commonly used tests. At these undetectable levels, the blood of a 180 pound man may contain as much as 431K copies of HIV. That viral load does not include the unknown thousands of HIV copies lurking about the body. At these levels the virus still has an inflammatory effect on the body. This volume of HIV also creates an environment in which over time the virus can mutate and become resistant to medications. We have been very lucky thus far that researchers have been able to develop new medications that attack the virus at different stages in its replication cycle. However, researchers are beginning to find that despite treatment with anti-HIV medications, long term HIV infection causes physical and neurological damage. People with HIV sometimes have declines in memory and other cognitive abilities, but information about how the virus actually damages the brain has been scarce. Notably, neurological effects of long term HIV infection have been noticed in various HIV /AIDS victims. For example one person confessed that he was diagnosed of HIV infection in 1994 and in 2004 his personality dramatically changed. He went from a happy go lucky guy to an angry guy who would pick fights over the least insult. “People at my work place became so concerned about my behavior after a series of noisy fights punctuated with expletives. I would stare balefully at people in restaurants if I thought they were insulting me.” He said HIV infects cells in the brain that, when they die, release chemicals that cause adjacent brain neurons to die. This infective process can go on despite anti-HIV meds because The primary targets of HIV are the mood controlling structures in the brain and then later the cognitive parts of the brain and then those parts that control the limbs. The cognitive effects of HIV infection are primarily in the executive brain functions which allow us to choose between competing actions, to assimilate new information, and to analyze data. Because the executive functions are most used by professionals, early HIV dementia is most often diagnosed among those people. People who turn with behaviours like the victim mentioned above shows that the virus has damaged the executive function. Important to know is that HIV ravages the body, leading to what are normally the diseases of old age, dementia, osteoarthritis, and osteoporosis. Ends
