How is AIDS acquired?
You don’t actually “get” AIDS. You might get infected with HIV, and later you might develop AIDS. You can get infected with HIV from anyone who’s infected, even if they don’t look sick and even if they haven’t tested HIV-positive yet. The blood, vaginal fluid, semen, and breast milk of people infected with HIV has enough of the virus in it to infect other people. Most people get the HIV virus by: having sex with an infected person. sharing a needle (shooting drugs) with someone who’s infected being born when their mother is infected, or drinking the breast milk of an infected woman. This is a picture of a HIV. The green particles are the HIV infecting the T helper cells. HIV infects the T Helper cell because it has the protein CD4 on its surface. HIV needs to use CD4 to enter cells it infects. This is why the T helper cell is referred to as a CD4 lymphocyte. Once inside a T helper cell, HIV takes over the cell and the virus then replicates. In this process (which takes around a couple
