Maoming CDC experts answer hot issues of AIDS prevention and control →

What disease is AIDS?

What behaviors are at risk of contracting AIDS?

Can high-risk behaviors be remedied?

How to prevent AIDS transmission …

Deng Xinyan, head of the AIDS Prevention and Control Department of Maoming CDC, took the opportunity of the series of publicity activities of World AIDS Day in 2023 to answer questions on the hot issues of AIDS prevention and control that the public is more concerned about.

Three ways of transmission should be known.

Don’t be afraid of daily contact.

Deng Xinyan introduced that AIDS is a systemic disease caused by human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection, which will lead to progressive immune dysfunction. At present, there are three ways of transmission of AIDS, namely blood transmission, sexual transmission and mother-to-child transmission.

The main route of transmission is sexual transmission. If you have unprotected sex with people who don’t know the HIV infection status, you may get infected, especially unprotected homosexual sex between men, and the risk of infection will be higher. Blood transmission is the most direct route of infection, and it is very dangerous to import blood contaminated by virus, use intravenous drugs contaminated by blood without strict disinfection and share syringes. In addition, pregnant women infected with HIV may also spread to the fetus if they do not accept standardized mother-to-child blocking.

Generally speaking, the high-risk behaviors of HIV infection in life include unsafe sex, sharing needles, importing blood or blood products without anti-HIV antibody detection, and occupational exposure history. In addition, daily contact, respiratory droplets and water will not cause the spread of HIV, such as sharing school supplies, eating together, sharing toilets, shaking hands, hugging, etc., AIDS patients or infected people cough or sneeze, and generally will not spread AIDS; Mosquito bites will not spread AIDS in summer. You don’t have to be overly "afraid of AIDS", and you should correctly understand AIDS with a scientific and rational attitude.

After high-risk behavior

Knowing "self-help" is very important.

Deng Xinyan suggested that in life, once a high-risk behavior that may be infected with AIDS occurs, you should immediately go to the local disease prevention and control institutions, medical institutions and testing points for testing and consultation together with those who have high-risk behaviors. Individuals can also buy self-testing reagents for testing. If the test is positive, they should go to medical institutions and CDC in time for further confirmatory testing. Testing is the only way to know whether you are infected with AIDS.

It should be noted that it generally takes 2 to 12 weeks for a human body to produce a sufficient number of antibodies after being infected with HIV before it can be detected by clinical test methods. The period from HIV infection to the detection of HIV antibodies in blood is called "window period". The "window period" is usually half a month to three months, and a few people can reach six months. If the HIV antibody is tested in the "window period", even if there is HIV in the blood and it can spread to others, the test result is still negative. Therefore, during the "window period", what we can do is to calm our minds and stop high-risk behaviors.

"Some people get scared after having high-risk sex. But please don’t be too flustered first. After the exposure of AIDS, it can be prevented and remedied. " Deng Xinyan said that at present, taking post-exposure drug prevention has become one of the important means of AIDS prevention. Post-exposure drug prevention refers to people who have not been infected with HIV. Under the guidance of a doctor, they should use blocking drugs as soon as possible within 1 to 2 hours (or earlier) after exposure, and take them for 28 days at the latest within 72 hours after exposure, which can effectively reduce the risk of HIV infection, and the drug use effect is the best within 2 hours. At present, Maoming Chronic Disease Prevention Center and Dianbai District People’s Hospital can provide post-exposure preventive services.

Do a good job of self-protection

Is the most effective means of prevention

At present, according to Maoming’s AIDS surveillance data, the overall AIDS epidemic in our city remains at a low epidemic level, and the mode of transmission is mainly sexual transmission, which increases the risk of general population involvement. Among the newly reported cases this year, sexual transmission accounted for 95.5%, of which heterosexual transmission accounted for 89.7% and homosexual transmission accounted for 5.8%; The majority of cases are in the senior age group, and the proportion of newly reported cases in the age group over 50 years is basically between 57% and 72% in recent five years. The case was found late and the death rate was high.

"The people who need to focus on prevention and control in our city are concentrated in the elderly and adolescents, mainly due to poor awareness of self-protection, resulting in a high proportion of infections. At the same time, most infected people were diagnosed after entering the AIDS period and missed the best treatment opportunity. " Deng Xinyan said that the difficulty of AIDS prevention and treatment lies in the difficulty of incurability and control. At present, no drugs have been developed to cure AIDS, and there is no effective vaccine to prevent AIDS. Under the current medical level, patients or infected people must take drugs for life. Therefore, it is particularly important to master the knowledge of AIDS prevention.

At present, our city actively promotes the publicity and education work of AIDS prevention and control "into the community, into the enterprise, into the hospital, into the campus and into the family". From January to November this year, Maoming CDC went into 17 towns (streets) in various districts (county-level cities) and went to many enterprises, universities and vocational schools to carry out AIDS publicity and education activities. Up to now, more than 80 AIDS "Five Enters" publicity activities have been carried out, covering more than 50,000 people.

In December, taking the 2023 "World AIDS Day" series of publicity activities as an opportunity, Maoming CDC successively carried out publicity activities to eliminate AIDS free clinics, "promoting buses to enter the campus and the community", intervention activities for men who have sex with men, "World AIDS Day" and related knowledge publicity. Through the development and promotion of activities, the public’s awareness of AIDS prevention and control has been significantly improved, and good results have been achieved, which has played a positive role in the in-depth development of AIDS prevention and control work in our city.

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