World AIDS Day 2024: 8 essential tips for supporting people with HIV/AIDS

A global reminder of the ongoing struggle against HIV/AIDS and the significance of assisting people who are afflicted with the illness, World AIDS Day 2024 is scheduled to take place in 2024. Compassion, understanding, and practical expertise are all necessary components of providing care for those living with AIDS in order to preserve the persons' physical and mental well-being.

This book provides carers, friends, and loved ones with eight vital ideas that will assist them in providing effective assistance, promoting dignity, and creating an atmosphere in which individuals living with AIDS feel respected and empowered.

Being sensitive to the patient

No matter how well prepared a patient might be for bad news, an HIV diagnosis is a deep and life-altering experience. This requires physicians to be sensitive to this and immediately mobilise a support system for the newly diagnosed patient, even as antiretroviral therapy is initiated.

Active support system

The physician and health care provider should immediately activate a support system, who can spend time talking to the newly diagnosed person and ensuring that he/she is emotionally stable and ready to begin therapy.

Initiating Appropriate Treatment

Combination Antiretroviral Therapy (ART), used since the early 1990s, sometimes referred to as Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy (HAART), is first line in the management of HIV and should be commenced as early as possible following an HIV diagnosis. Using effective ART — along with other treatment and preventive interventions — at the right time is essential for each patient to have the opportunity to live a long, healthy life with HIV.

HIV Diagnosis is not a death sentence

In contrast to the earlier days of the epidemic, a diagnosis at HIV infection needs no longer be Equated with having an invariably fatal disease. The physician/health care provider is responsible for providing each patient with appropriate counselling and education concerning their disease as part of a cure plan.

Chronic Infection needs lifelong therapy

Treatment decisions for HIV must consider the fact that it is a chronic infection that requires daily and lifelong therapy and the need for adherence to the prescribed regimen: patients started on ART should remain on ART.

Indictable virus does not mean cure

ART/HAART for HIV infection does not cure or eradicate HIV. Though the virus itself may be undetectable in blood tests, it is nonetheless still in the body, and, if those with HIV do not continue with effective ART, HIV can still be transmitted to other bodies.

Safe Sexual and personal Hygiene practices

It is important to be aware that any person who has ever been diagnosed with HIV will have the virus present & capable of being transmitted in the absence of ART. Patients who are not HAART must use safe sexual practicals (using conclusions) and retrain from sharing saliva and other parts used in the iliac diary use.

When the virus level becomes undetectable with treatment, there is essentially no chance of sexual transmission to the person’s sexual partner, which means undetectable equals un-transmittable.

Myths about Transmission

The primary mode of HIV transmission is through sexual contact (male to female and male to male), blood and blood products, and from infected mother to child (intrauterine, at delivery, or while breastfeeding). There is no evidence at HIV being transmitted through solitary by lasting acting together or by close personal contact sharing clothes. It is not travel by jeans sweat, urine.

Marriage and family

People attached by HIV can marry and start a family if they are on HAART. The rate of months of child transmission has fallen to less than 1:1 in pregnant women who are receiving HAART for HIV infections.

-          Dr Tanmay Sahu, Consultant Internal Medicine Specialist, Manipal Hospital, Bhubaneswar