TODAY.AZ / Society

There is life after HIV diagnosis

01 December 2015 [15:11] - TODAY.AZ

/By AzerNews/

By Amina Nazarli

For more than five years, a forty-year-old woman is living with HIV virus, not losing faith in the future.

The mother of two children, who agreed to share her views to AzerNews, still does not know the cause of the infection, explaining that it could be during a visit to a dentist, or surgery which she underwent at the time.

But she knows only one thing, if not the support of her relatives and husband at the time, she could make away with herself.

“I was very sad when hearing about this diagnosis. I was so depressed that wanted to commit suicide," she said. "But then I thought that I should get used to it, because I'll live with it. I console myself that there are even worse diseases in the world than this one.”

Having learned about the illness, she first told her sister, a medical officer, who gave her the moral support, explaining that it is possible to live a normal life with this.

The society negatively perceives such people, thinking that the lives of these people are finished. However, it is not true, she said. It is not a deadly disease and one can live a normal life through treatment.

“Never give up and live by faith in the best,” she ended, thanking thereby the Center for Struggle Against AIDS, where she undergoes treatment, for good services rendered to her.

At the end of the 1980s, most people in Azerbaijan considered AIDS as an exotic disease that people get sick and die in faraway Africa or America. But in our days, the disease has become much closer, because the viruses do not recognize territorial boundaries.

When the world just began to know about this disease, "AIDS" had quite scary echo for many alerting people to be more careful with their health. As years passed the frightening acronym has become common to the lexicon of humanity, almost losing its edge.

At the time, people called AIDS "the plague of the 20th century," as they really believed that the way it is. Now the disease is already called "the plague of the 21st century", but simply out of habit, since many studies show, that diseases such as cancer and tuberculosis, carry even more lives than AIDS.

But still it would be unwise to include AIDS among the diseases, which do not pose a particular danger to mankind, as immunodeficiency virus is very crafty, claiming millions of lives around the world every year.

Today the achievements in modern medicine not only allow extend the lives of HIV-infected people, but also give birth to healthy children.

Specialists claim that the infection can be avoided if to diagnose the disease on time. Even an infected woman can give birth to a healthy baby and not every child born by infected women is a carrier of the human immunodeficiency virus.

Natig Zulfugarov, Head of the Center for AIDS Department of the Health Ministry, noted that all infected people should undergo treatment, since avoiding drug treatment by HIV patients may lead to transition of the disease to the late stage -- AIDS.

The Center for AIDS with support from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria for the first time in Azerbaijan began to treat patients by free of charge from November 2006.

The doctor said ARV therapy, can completely reduce the risk of transmission of the disease to AIDS stage, thus giving the chance to such people enjoy a normal life.

ARV-therapy is quite expensive treatment, requiring constant sessions. The government has provided patients with free medicines necessary for the treatment since 2014.

After the free treatment the number of HIV / AIDS patients undergoing ARV-therapy increased from 470 people in 2013 to 605 people in 2014.

The therapy is very sensitive and if the drug will be taken twice at the wrong time during a month, their effectiveness is reduced by 60 percent.

According to How AIDS changed everything from UNAIDS, 1.2 million people worldwide died of AIDS-related illnesses in 2014. By the end of 2014, as many as 36.9 million people around the world were living with HIV.

Azerbaijan, where HIV infection was first founded in 1987, is among the countries with a low level of the disease. As of 2015 some 4,453 cases of HIV infection were reported in the country. As much as 73.1 percent of them are men and 26.9 percent are women.

According to the observations of the past few years, the number of cases with HIV infection stabilizes in the country, declining by 11.7 percent from 2011 to 2013.

During eleven months of this year 618 people were infected HIV virus, with 598 Azerbaijani citizens and 20 foreign nationals.

The epidemic is largely spread among risk groups such as drug users, which accounts for about 60 percent of the cases, while cases of unprotected sex is about 30 percent.

The risk of HIV infection is higher among men than women in the country, estimating 80 and 20 percent respectively. Some 35 percent of infected are people aged between 40 and 49.

Annually, December 1 is worldwide dedicated to raising public awareness of the AIDS pandemic caused by the spread of the HIV infection.

World AIDS Day is an opportunity to harness the power of social change to put people first and close the access gap.

That’s why we all should be tolerant towards these patients to lending a helping hand to them.

Human immunodeficiency virus infection and acquired immune deficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) is a disease spectrum of the human immune system caused by infection with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

Following initial infection, a person may experience a brief period of influenza-like illness. This is typically followed by a prolonged period without symptoms.

As the infection progresses, it interferes more and more with the immune system, making the person much more susceptible to common infections like tuberculosis, as well as opportunistic infections and tumors that do not usually affect people who have working immune systems.

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