Facts Conquer Fears: HIV/AIDS is not easily transmitted
(Source: Centers for Disease Control)


“I was so ignorant and uninformed about HIV that I thought if I began to minister to people who had it, touching them, loving them, and ministering to them would make me sick, too. Now I know you can’t catch HIV that easily. It’s not airborne. You can’t get it by sitting next to somebody, eating after somebody, hugging, touching, or loving them. It doesn’t spread that way.

“HIV/AIDS is spread through blood. It’s spread through babies born to mothers who are HIV positive. It’s spread through HIV positive mothers who breast feed their babies. It is a sexually transmitted disease. It is not spread by you loving and ministering to somebody who is HIV positive. But I didn’t know that. That’s why, even though I told God I was willing [to minister to those with HIV/AIDS], I was so afraid.” -- Kay Warren


How HIV is Transmitted

HIV is spread by sexual contact with an infected person, by sharing needles and/or syringes (primarily for drug injection) with someone who is infected, or, less commonly (and now very rarely in countries where blood is screened for HIV antibodies), through transfusions of infected blood or blood clotting factors. Babies born to HIV-infected women may become infected before or during birth or through breast-feeding after birth.  The only way a person can know if they are HIV positive is to be tested.

In the health care setting, workers have been infected with HIV after being stuck with needles containing HIV-infected blood or, less frequently, after infected blood gets into a worker’s open cut or a mucous membrane (for example, the eyes or inside of the nose). There has been only one instance of patients being infected by a health care worker in the United States; this involved HIV transmission from one infected dentist to six patients. Investigations have been completed involving more than 22,000 patients of 63 HIV-infected physicians, surgeons, and dentists, and no other cases of this type of transmission have been identified in the United States.

Some people fear that HIV might be transmitted in other ways; however, no scientific evidence to support any of these fears has been found. If HIV were being transmitted through other routes (such as through air, water, or insects), the pattern of reported AIDS cases would be much different from what has been observed. For example, if mosquitoes could transmit HIV infection, many more young children and preadolescents would have been diagnosed with AIDS. Learn more >>