HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus, can ultimately result in Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) in humans. Many scientists and public health professionals consider AIDS to be the major epidemic of modern times.

The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infects some human white blood cells and eventually causes them to die. This partial disabling of the human immune system allows opportunistic infections to occur as normally harmless microbes become parasitic. Because this immune deficiency is acquired through infection, and results eventually in a whole set of symptoms, it is called Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Most people, when not infected with HIV, can easily resist microbes such as the cytomegalovirus, the bacterium Mycobacterium avium, or the protist Pneumocystis carinii, but these microbes can cause complications such as fatal pneumonia if HIV partially disables the immune system. The immune system apparently also protects the human body from viruses that can induce certain kinds of cancer, such as Kaposi's sarcoma, which also afflict people infected with HIV.

HIV infection spreads slowly within the body of the victim. After an initial acute phase of infection, during which the immune system launches a partly effective response, a chronic phase of invisible spread follows. It may be several years after HIV infection, during which individuals are HIV-positive, before those individuals exhibit symptoms resulting from the loss of immune competence, at which time they are said to have AIDS. There are different strains of HIV, of which HIV-1 is the most common worldwide. . .

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