Sky News published this video item, entitled “Infected blood inquiry: Lord Fowler defends shocking AIDS campaign ad” – below is their description.
The former Health Secretary, Lord Fowler, has told an inquiry that the public information campaign on Aids in the 1980s was an ‘enormous success’. The campaign stamped AIDS as a death sentence with the image of a tombstone.
Around 2,400 people died in the UK after being infected with HIV or hepatitis because of contaminated blood products.
Sky’s health correspondent Ashish Joshi reports.
Sky News YouTube Channel
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In This Story: HIV
The human immunodeficiency viruses (HIV) are two species of Lentivirus (a subgroup of retrovirus) that infect humans. Over time, they cause acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), a condition in which progressive failure of the immune system allows life-threatening opportunistic infections and cancers to thrive.
Without treatment, average survival time after infection with HIV is estimated to be 9 to 11 years, depending on the HIV subtype. In most cases, HIV is a sexually transmitted infection and occurs by contact with or transfer of blood, pre-ejaculate, semen, and vaginal fluids. Research has shown (for both same-sex and opposite-sex couples) that HIV is untransmittable through condomless sexual intercourse if the HIV-positive partner has a consistently undetectable viral load.
Non-sexual transmission can occur from an infected mother to her infant during pregnancy, during childbirth by exposure to her blood or vaginal fluid, and through breast milk. Within these bodily fluids, HIV is present as both free virus particles and virus within infected immune cells.
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