Differential diagnosis of chronic diarrhea in patients with HIV infection

Today, when the whole world is overwhelmed by the coronavirus pandemic, few people remember that it was AIDS that was called the plague of the twentieth century. The manifestations of the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome are the terminal stage of infection of the body with the human immunodeficiency virus, which belongs to retroviruses and leads to the development of secondary immunodeficiency. The first case of HIV infection in adults was described in 1981 in America. A young homosexual came to one of the hospitals in the city of San Francisco with a persistent fungal infection. Some time after the treatment, the young man developed pneumonia, from the complications of which he soon died. The human immunodeficiency virus got its name only in 1982, and the disease caused by it began to be called the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. At present, there are more than 40 million infected people in the world, 2/3 of whom live in Africa; in total, since the beginning of the epidemic, almost 100 million people have been infected with HIV, and the number of victims has doubled the number of people who died in the First World War. Despite the fact that this infection is not airborne or transmitted by contact, the growth rate of this disease continues to shock. Thus, about 5 thousand people get infected with HIV every day in the world; annually about 1 million die from complications of this disease. It should be noted that only 71% of those infected are aware of their status, all the rest continue to serve as a potential source of the spread of this terrible infection.