“Important message from Delhi police to India:
For the next few weeks, do not drink any product of Frooti, as a worker from the company has added his blood contaminated with HIV (AIDS). It was shown yesterday on NDTV… Please forward this message urgently to people you care about… Take Care!!
Share it as much as u can.”
How many of you have been ‘fortunate’ enough to be blessed with this warning message over WhatsApp or Facebook?
Well, let me tell you, this is a HOAX. It is either a deceptive marketing trick to jeopardize Frooti sales or just some nincompoop trying to mess with your uneducated mind.
If you are old enough to read, you’re old enough to know all of the following facts. As Francis Bacon once said, “Knowledge is power.”
1. What actually is HIV-AIDS?
HIV-AIDS1 stands for Human Immunodeficiency Virus. So it is a virus! And no amount of antibiotics2 is going to cure it.
2. No, HIV didn’t come into existence due to a lab experiment or because someone tried to have sex with the monkey! (zoophilia is the desire to have sex with animals)
HIV came into existence because of the ingestion of chimpanzee meat containing Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV)3, which somehow managed to acclimatize and adapt to the human body environment. Thereby giving rise to HIV.
3. AIDS chhune se nahi phelti.
It is TRUE.
Casual contact with someone can infect you with Leprosy. Not AIDS.
Being in the same room with an HIV positive person has a 0.01% chance of getting you infected (Like if the glass window breaks and falls on the person having AIDS and he bleeds into your wound! Too much of Bollywood, right?) but if it’s a Tuberculosis positive person then cross your heart and hope to die.
HIV-AIDS is transmitted through the exchange of body fluids (blood and other body fluids, not sweat or saliva, though!) by sexual contact or infected needles or from mother to baby.
4. Why has this disease caused so much hysteria?
That is because, for a long time, people couldn’t figure out what it was. There was widespread confusion and panic. When they finally identified the organism responsible for AIDS in France in 1983, they didn’t know how to cure it. It is extremely onerous to find a drug against HIV because there are so many different forms that it can exist in! And it mutates very frequently.
5. HIV is basically a lion inside the house but a mouse outside!
HIV is a frail and fragile virus outside the human body. And it is easily killed (within minutes!). So much for all the nuisance it causes.
If you ingest it by any chance (Say the hypothetical contaminated Frooti pack), your stomach would take care of it. The stomach’s acidic environment is detrimental to the existence of the virus, thus leading to its not-at-all-sad demise.
6. If you actually have HIV-AIDS, you would have to be apprehensive about all the other monsters out there but not HIV.
That is because people infected with AIDS never really die of it. They die because of some other cause. Something as trifling as saying common cold!
It’s kind of like common cold suddenly got a promotion from being a janitor to the Vice-president at the kingdom of death.
7. Condoms do indeed protect you from acquiring HIV infection. Pills don’t.
Next time you get excited about a one-night stand or that one drunk night that can turn your worst nightmare into a reality, beware!
*Peace out*
- Piot, Peter, et al. “The global impact of HIV/AIDS.” Nature 410.6831 (2001): 968-973. ↩︎
- Mohr, Kathrin I. “History of antibiotics research.” How to Overcome the Antibiotic Crisis: Facts, Challenges, Technologies and Future Perspectives (2016): 237-272. ↩︎
- Desrosiers, Ronald C. “The simian immunodeficiency viruses.” Annual review of immunology 8.1 (1990): 557-578. ↩︎
Last Updated on by NamitaSoren
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