TheBody

Gut health plays a crucial role in maintaining your overall health. This explainer delves into the basics of how HIV affects gut health, and some of the steps you can take to promote better gut health if you’re living with HIV. The gut is responsible for digesting food, absorbing nutrients, and getting rid of food waste products. While the entire gastrointestinal or digestive tract starts at the mouth and ends at the anus, most of the gut’s work takes place in the stomach and intestines.

Living with HIV can affect lung health, particularly when the virus is not well controlled. People who have a consistently detectable viral load and low CD4 count are more likely to develop lung conditions. Consistently taking antiretroviral therapy (ART) to achieve and maintain viral suppression is the single most important step in protecting lung function and supporting overall health.

When Matthew Hurley was looking to take PrEP to prevent HIV, the doctor hadn’t heard of the medicine, and when he finally did prescribe PrEP, the bills sent to Hurley were expensive … and wrong.

On the 18th of October in Thailand, the world lost one of its most dedicated public servants in Alvan Quamina, J.D., Ph.D., M.P.H. Quamina was—and remains—one of the grand giants in the field of HIV care and health equity; he emulated what it really meant to be a servant-leader. He represented the best of us: someone who dedicated his life to uplifting all those around him. For many of us in the HIV field—specifically Black gay, bisexual, and same-gender-loving men—Quamina was a constant.

Aracelis Quinones: We need to be together and we need to as Latinos, to be one, to get educated more, to feel free talking about sexual health and to be united. Why is it so important for Latino families to have conversations about sexual health and HIV? Aracelis Quinones: I have been blessed with my mom because my mom, when my sister and myself, when we were little, my mom always talked about sexual health. She was very open, and we learned a lot from her.

HIV advocates have been concerned about the private health data of people living with HIV getting into the wrong hands and being used in HIV criminalization cases ever since the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) began requiring states to report HIV resistance testing results to the agency in 2018.

Eye problems related to HIV have become much rarer than they were in the past. This is because many people currently living with HIV take combination antiretroviral therapy (ART) and have an undetectable viral load, which is the best way to ensure good eye health. Sight problems related to HIV tend to happen when the CD4 cell count—an important immune marker—is very low.

Robert Suttle: I am just an optimistic person and a person that fights with what's right and just fights for life. Life comes at you, and so you have to be able to stand on something. What have you done to work on your mental health and to find peace with your HIV status? Robert Suttle: I was a person of faith. So being raised in church, I learned how to tap into my faith, how to have hope.

Brain health is an important topic for everyone, but especially for people living with HIV. Before effective HIV medications were made available in the late 1990s, people living with the virus were known to often develop various brain health issues including dementia and difficulty thinking. These issues were largely associated with long-term, untreated HIV.

In 2017, many people with chronic health conditions were concerned that Congress would follow through on then-president Donald Trump’s effort to kill the Affordable Care Act. Rather than sit back and watch it happen, longtime HIV and health/housing activist Jennifer Flynn Walker of Popular Democracy joined forces with Housing Works and other organizations to arrange various protests.