Whether in outpatient clinics or in the current booming Internet healthcare, I am often asked questions such as I may have forgotten to change the needle when the nurse stuck the needle for a blood test, what if the last patient happened to be an AIDS patient? What if my hands came in contact with an unknown liquid, I masturbated with my hands or ate something without washing my hands, etc.? In fact, the most important question for most of our friends is the probability of being infected with HIV in daily life. The next question is how viable is HIV outside the body? Is my behavior considered high-risk behavior? Can my negative antibody test be completely ruled out at this point? Today I want to talk about HIV in several parts.
What is HIV?
HIV is the human immunodeficiency virus HIV, the virus leads to infection by a series of symptoms become human acquired immunodeficiency syndrome AIDS, since the discovery of the first AIDS patients in the 1980s, HIV infection and AIDS has now spread throughout the world, in fact, the number of infected people and therefore caused death is alarming, anyway, in a word to a lot of people. And with the opening of the concept of sex, the trend of people infected with HIV is more and more, prevention of HIV infection and AIDS situation can not wait!
What is the ability of HIV to survive in the outside environment?
Once HIV leaves its host, its ability to survive in the outside environment will soon disappear. HIV’s resistance to physical and chemical factors in the environment is weak, much lower than that of hepatitis B virus. Therefore effective disinfection and inactivation methods for HBV are applicable to HIV. HIV resistance to temperature: HIV is sensitive to heat and tolerates low temperature better than high temperature.
HIV inactivation: The CDC has demonstrated that HIV activity in a dry environment is reduced by 90%-99% within a few hours. HIV can survive for more than 15 days in a room temperature liquid environment; HIV can be made uninfectious to T lymphocytes in vitro after 30 minutes of treatment at 56°C, but it cannot completely inactivate HIV in serum; HIV in serum cannot be detected as infectious after 3 hours of action at 60°C or 30 minutes at 80°C. The current WHO recommended method of retroviral inactivation is 100°C for 20 minutes.
Resistance of HIV to chemicals HIV is sensitive to chemical factors: at room temperature, 0.5% sodium hypochlorite or 70% alcohol takes only 1 minute; 0.2% sodium hypochlorite, 0.1% household bleach, 0.1% glutaraldehyde, 0.5% polymethanol for 5 minutes; 30% alcohol for 5 minutes, 20% alcohol for 10 minutes can inactivate HIV. HIV is resistant to bases but not acids. Human gastric juice can secrete gastric acid, HIV is difficult to pass the barrier of gastric acid, so HIV can not be transmitted through the digestive tract.