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Old 05-06-2007, 06:57 PM  
notabook
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Join Date: Apr 2006
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Posts: 9,748
Quote:
Originally Posted by Screaming View Post
I have always heard no and that AIDS isnt transmitted easily, what I mean is that you have to close person contact like sexual, shared needle, things of this nature. I thought it could be transmitted through day to day contact with the public and that.
You wouldn't think so when you look at the devastation it causes to tens of millions of people, but the HIV virus is quite fragile. Almost all foreign environments start to kill it within seconds, after a few minutes of exposure to oxygen it dies. That is why it is so rare to actually be exposed to it from the every day environment. HIV coming into contact on your skin is going to do nothing unless you have skin lesion or open wounds, after a few minutes the virus is dead. There is still a lot of 'fear mongering' out there about HIV but save from unprotected sex and tainted blood (which is almost impossible to get in a first world nation) you really have a better chance of getting struck by a meteorite than getting the HIV virus.

To give you a gauge of how unlikely it is to contract HIV from the open environment (i.e. not explicitly sexually related), there has been only one "confirmed" case of contracting HIV from an open mouth kiss. That's 1 case in 47.3 MILLION cases of HIV.

The odds of winning a state lottery? Approximately 1 in 15 million.
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