PREVENTATIVE MEDICINE
Prevention and Management of HIV in the 21st Century By Moses Alfaro, BSA and Colton Blinka, BSA
O
nce thought to be an untreatable disease, HIV is now largely preventable and manageable with new therapeutics that have been developed since the AIDs epidemic in the 1980s. While society has made great strides in developing treatments that allow people living with HIV to lead normal lives, there are still clusters of individuals who go untreated and mistakenly transmit this disease. Our article explores the numerous ways to prevent transmission of HIV and what options are available for treatment if one is to contract this disease.
In addition to these prevention tips, there are some medications available to aid in prevention like PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) or PEP (post-exposure prophylaxis). PrEP is a prescribed medication that is taken as a pill and can reduce the risk of contracting HIV by 99% when taken as prescribed.3 It’s generally recommended to keep using a condom with PrEP to prevent other sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), as PrEP only works against HIV.3 As for PEP, this is used whenever you have been possibly exposed to HIV and should be used within 72 hours of the expsoure.4
Transmission and prevention The way HIV is transmitted plays a crucial role in how to prevent contracting it. HIV is transmitted through bodily fluids like blood, semen, pre-seminal fluid, rectal fluids, vaginal fluids and breast milk.1 In the United States, the most common activities that lead to transmission are having sex with someone who has HIV, sharing injection equipment (e.g., needles), or from mother to child during pregnancy or birth through breastfeeding.1 Not sharing needles, using condoms during anal or vaginal sex, or practicing abstinence by not having sex help in the prevention of HIV.2 Some individuals might not be aware that these activities can post a high risk of contracting HIV, so its paramount to spread this awareness.
Diagnosis and symptoms Early diagnosis of HIV is paramount because it can aid in receiving treatment that can prevent any complications or unwanted symptoms, and it can help in reducing the spread of the disease to any other individuals. A common way that HIV can be diagnosed is through the ELISA (enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay) test, which can detect antibodies to the virus through a blood draw.5 However, antibodies to the HIV infection aren’t produced immediately when you are infected, so there can be a window of a couple of weeks where ELISA cannot detect an infection due to the lack of antibodies produced, causing a false negative.5 If the ELISA is positive for antibodies, a western blot test will be ordered to confirm the results because it is very sensitive to
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SAN ANTONIO MEDICINE • June 2022
