Something you have to know abt HIV/AIDS

AIDS=Acquired immune deficiency syndrome
HIV=Human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS
(Infected by HIV doesn’t necessarrily mean that you will get AIDS. )
TB=tuberculosis

Many Kenyans are infected with HIV. For every eight adults aged 15-49, one is infected. Most of those people don’t know they are infected. There’s no cure for AIDS so far, so this disease can threaten the social and economic well being of the country. However, it is not inevitable as long as we know HIV/AIDS and act.

HIV can be transmitted from one person to another in a number of ways, such as heterosexual contact, perinatal transmission (like HIV/AIDS babies, 30% to 40% of babies of HIV positive mothers are infected, pretty high percentage), and blood transfusion. After he or she is infected by HIV, his or her white cells will drop down rapidly, weakening the immune system. Therefore, he or she will be infected by any disease very easily, like TB, which will make the patient very fragile and die in a few years.

More than 75 percent of AIDS and therefore of resulting AIDS deaths occur to adults between the ages of 20-45. Why?
It is the period when people are most sexually active.
In addition, according to the statistics, infection levels are extremely high for girls and young women in 20-24 age group. This situation is especially serious in the slums. Most girls or young women are not financially independent, which makes them falling into the game for rich, HIV/AIDS positive rich men. In order to get money, girls and young women choose to sleep with HIV positive rich men. So we can see the young women in age groups 15-19 and 20-24 are more than twice as likely to have AIDS as males in the same age group. Africa, of all the regions in the world, is the most hard hit. This may due to poverty, the high prevalence of other sexually transmitted diseases and cultural practices and beliefs.

Social and economic impact of HIV/AIDS:
1. AIDS orphan
2. Cost of health care: the treatment of HIV is pretty expensive and most of the people in the slum can’t afford it.
3. Reduction in the size and experience of the labor force. The age group of the highest infected HIV/AIDS are the most economically productive part of the population, and these deaths constitute a serious economic burden. This is also the age when investments in education are just beginning to pay off. The deaths also have severe consequences for children since most people in the age group are raising young children.
4. unemployment
The way to preventing transmission of HIV
1. promoting abstincnce before narruage and faithfulness to one partner
2. using and availability of condoms
3. controlling othersexually transimitted diseases

It's impossible to ask people practice abstinence, but we can help them to keep them busy. Why? when people get a lot of things to do, they don't have extra time and energy to have intensive sex. To reduce the number of HIV/ AIDS, education and finanacial support is the only way out.