Where is hiv come from

The best way to protect yourself from HIV is to not have sex vaginal, oral, or anal and not share needles. Understanding how HIV spreads can help you make safer choices about sex. Talk to your doctor if you have any questions about HIV and if you want to get tested. Reviewed by: Robyn R. This info sheet provides basic information about HIV. Other Resources.

Get tailored information about your risk and learn how to protect yourself. Top of Page. More HIV Topics. Follow HIV. Links with this icon indicate that you are leaving the CDC website. The AIDS crisis, as we generally think of it, began in the s. First as a mysterious illness primarily infecting gay men in urban areas in the United States. Imagine, for a moment, that the HIV virus in that sample had been studied and identified.

If, in the s, the scientific community realized the potential harm this new virus could unleash. What could we have done? What therapies could we have developed before it became one of the deadliest pandemics in human history? Scientists have traced the origin of HIV back to chimpanzees and simian immunodeficiency virus SIV , an HIV-like virus that attacks the immune system of monkeys and apes. Chimps, the scientist later discovered, hunt and eat two smaller species of monkeys—red-capped mangabeys and greater spot-nosed monkeys—that carry and infect the chimps with two strains of SIV.

These two strains likely combined to form SIVcpz, which can spread between chimpanzees and humans. Researchers believe the first transmission of SIV to HIV in humans that then led to the global pandemic occurred in in Kinshasa, the capital and largest city in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The virus spread may have spread from Kinshasa along infrastructure routes roads, railways, and rivers via migrants and the sex trade. International travel from the United States helped the virus spread across the rest of the globe. In , the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention CDC published a report about five previously healthy homosexual men becoming infected with Pneumocystis pneumonia , which is caused by the normally harmless fungus Pneumocystis jirovecii.

This type of pneumonia, the CDC noted, almost never affects people with uncompromised immune systems. The following year, The New York Times published an alarming article about the new immune system disorder, which, by that time, had affected people, killing of them.

Because the disease appeared to affect mostly homosexual men, officials initially called it gay-related immune deficiency, or GRID. The tests can be done on blood, saliva, or urine, though the blood tests detect HIV sooner after exposure due to higher levels of antibodies.

By the end of , there were more than 20, reported cases of AIDS, with at least one case in every region of the world. The regimes work by preventing the virus from multiplying, giving the immune system a chance to recover and fight off infections and HIV-related cancers. The therapy also helps reduce the risk of HIV transmission, including between an infected mother and her unborn child.