What is the main reason to get HIV?

HIV is caused by a virus. It can spread through sexual contact, illicit injection drug use or sharing needles, contact with infected blood, or from mother to child during pregnancy, childbirth or breastfeeding. HIV destroys CD4 T cells — white blood cells that play a large role in helping your body fight disease.

Is it easy to get HIV?

The median person thinks that if you have unprotected sex with an HIV-positive person a single time, you will get HIV for sure. The truth is that it’s not nearly that easy to get HIV – the medical literature estimates that the transmission rate is actually about 0.1% per sex act, or 10% per year.

How did humans get HIV in the first place?

In Africa, HIV–the virus that causes AIDS–had jumped from chimpanzees to humans sometime early in the 20th century. To date, the earliest known case of HIV-1 infection in human blood is from a sample taken in 1959 from a man who’d died in Kinshasa in what was then the Belgian Congo.