Respect & Protect

You might have noticed the sudden burst of carnival-ish atmosphere at your local shopping malls, mostly in red. And the people involved always stick a red ribbon to your chest. "What's that for?", you think. Well, my dear friends, it's for World AIDS Day, which falls on 1st December.



Self-compiled facts from Channel [V] and Wikipedia you should take time to read:



MYTH: HIV and AIDS are the same.
FACT: HIV is the name for the virus, Human Immunodeficiency Virus . AIDS stands for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.

According to Wikipedia, HIV is a retrovirus that causes AIDS, a condition in which the immune system begins to fail, leading to life-threatening opportunistic infections.



MYTH: We can contract AIDS by touching tainted blood and sitting on infected syringes.
FACT: NO, we cannot. The virus HIV cannot live outside a hosts' body for long.

Its chances of survival outside a human body (for example, blood in a syringe) after two hours is very slim.


MYTH: We can get AIDS by having contact with a HIV-positive person.
FACT: NO, we CANNOT get HIV/AIDS from touching, kissing, holding hands or hugging a HIV-positive person. There are only three ways HIV/AIDS can be contracted.

One, through unprotected sex.
Two, through sharing of contaminated needles.
Three, from an infected mother to her child through birth or breast milk.

A person can also contract HIV/AIDS through contaminated blood transfusion, but this rarely happens nowadays.



Don't treat HIV-positive people differently than you treat HIV-negative people. Get over that social stigma.