After being infected by HIV, patients will develop symptoms only after an incubation period, but the length of this period is not fixed. The average incubation period of AIDS is usually about 9 years, up to 10 years or even more than 20 years, while a few patients have a shorter incubation period of about half a year. Therefore, there is no fixed time for AIDS patients to develop symptoms.
During the incubation period of HIV, some patients may develop viremia 2-4 weeks after they first become infected with HIV. Symptoms include fever, headache, rash, muscle pain, diarrhea, etc., but they are usually non-specific and thus ignored. When the incubation period is over, the common clinical symptoms of patients are persistent fever and weakness, night sweats, generalized lymph node enlargement, weight loss, and especially significant wasting, etc. At this time, treatment becomes more difficult and survival can be significantly shortened.
If a patient develops unexplained fever, headache, rash and other symptoms 2-4 weeks after having high-risk sex, he/she should go to the hospital to have blood test for HIV-RNA or P24 antigen to rule out the possibility of HIV infection.