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You know what to do, gentlemen: Go use a condom. Because you hafta take care of yourself, man: There is no known cure for HIV. You can keep the virus under control, but generally speaking, there is no cure.

What happens when HIV enters your body?
Nothing immediate, really. Symptoms don’t come right away. There are some folks who get sick three to six weeks after exposure but it can easily be mistaken for the regular flu.

The more serious symptoms that you’ll have to watch out for don’t come until after several years, a decade even, after HIV enters the body. And when they do this is what happens: It attaches itself to your white blood cells. From there, it befriends your other letters of the alphabet—the RNA, DNA, and so on and so forth until it takes over the entire cell.

So the viral count escalates, while your White Blood cells is depleted. What does the body do? It attempts to create more WBC. Depending on your general health, the body will be successful in creating more of the good stuff…but so will the virus be. Just as the body produces new cells, so will the virus. All this can happen without a single symptom.

And then the body wears off. And the virus wins. By this time, the regular WBC count of a healthy person will have dwindled down below 200, from 500-1000. Yikes. That’s when all the horrible sickness, of opportunistic infections, happen.

And what are opportunistic infections?
According to hivsymptomsonline, “Opporunistic infections are caused by bacteria, virus, fungi, and parasites.” Tubercolosis, Viral, Hepatitis, Herpes, and HPV are just some of the most common opportunistic infections that affect HIV positive persons.