HIV, your health, and the world.....serious shit!

As if we didn’t have enough to worry about, scientists in Paris have discovered a new strain of HIV. Previous strains came from chimpanzees transmitted to humans when humans ate chimp meat. I dunno about you but I’d have to be literally starving to death to eat chimp meat. I guess the poor souls in Africa are indeed THAT hungry.

The new strain? It comes from gorillas and can’t be detected by current HIV tests! Great. Just great. The woman infected with this new strain adamantly denies eating gorilla meat, so that means that she got the virus from another human being. Probably one that ate gorilla meat. Which makes me wonder, how many people out there have this strain of HIV and don’t know it?



Currently there are three variations of HIV. This one represents a fourth. It’s frightening how this disease has spread from one species to another and how quickly it has mutated. HIV can lead to AIDS and currently there are an estimated 33 million cases of AIDS worldwide. Many people are HIV positive and don’t know they have the disease. It’s estimated that every 9 ½ minutes someone becomes infected with HIV. That’s 56,000 people every year. The CDC estimates that one in every five people with HIV in the U.S. don’t know that they have the disease. Think about that. It means that over 200,000 people in the U.S. have HIV and don’t know it and ARE SPREADING IT! More than 14,000 people die from AIDS every year.

The CDC is encouraging everyone to get tested for HIV when they go into their doctor’s office for their next annual physical and I wholeheartedly agree. Would you really WANT to spread the disease to another person if you had it? Would you really WANT to live with that kind of guilt? Would you want to get infected because someone else didn’t get tested? The thing is that getting tested could not only save YOUR life, but the lives of others as well. The thing is this, 40% of people contract AIDS just one short year after being diagnosed with HIV because they weren’t diagnosed early enough for life-saving drugs to prevent the progression of the disease.

My advice is two-fold. Get tested and use condoms. It’s that simple.