HOW LONG DOES H.I.V SURVIVE OUTSIDE THE BODY?
Taken from: www.cdc.gov (Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, USA October 2006: Scientists and medical authorities agree that HIV does not survive well outside the body, making the possibility of environmental transmission remote. Whilst HIV is found in varying concentrations or amounts in blood, semen, vaginal fluid, breast milk, saliva, and tears, to obtain data on the survival of HIV, laboratory studies have required the use of artificially high concentrations of laboratory-grown virus. Although these unnatural concentrations of HIV can be kept alive for days or even weeks under precisely controlled and limited laboratory conditions, CDC studies have shown that drying of even these high concentrations of HIV reduces the amount of infectious virus by 90 to 99 percent within several hours. Since the HIV concentrations used in laboratory studies are much higher than those actually found in blood or other specimens, drying of HIV-infected human blood or other body fluids reduces th
