HIV Infection From Eating Street Side Food In India?
I read this small story doing rounds on FaceBook about a 10 year child getting infected with HIV after eating a PineApple. HIV with PineApple This sounds crazy. If you have not read this story, here is the transcript: Dear All, It’s in India – Karnataka – Bangalore A 10 year old boy, had eaten … Read more
I read this small story doing rounds on FaceBook about a 10 year child getting infected with HIV after eating a PineApple.
This sounds crazy. If you have not read this story, here is the transcript:
It’s in India – Karnataka – Bangalore
A 10 year old boy, had eaten pineapple about 15 days back, and fell sick, from the day he had eaten. Later when he had his Health check done…… doctors diagnosed that he had AIDS.
His parents couldn’t believe it…Then the entire family under went a checkup… none of them suffered from Aids. So the doctors checked again with the boy if he had eaten out…..The boy said ‘Yes’. He had pineapple that evening. Immediately a group from the hospital went to the pineapple vendor to check. They found the pineapple seller had a cut on his finger while cutting the pineapple; his blood had spread into the fruit.
When they had his blood checked…the guy was suffering from AIDS…but he himself was NOT aware. Unfortunately the boy is now suffering from it.
Please take care while u eat on the road side (particularly tasty Vadapav & Paani Puri) and pls fwd this mail to your dear one’s..
Take Care
Please Forward This Mail To All The Persons You Know As Your Message May Save One’s Life !!!!!
The story can really send your mind to a thought process where you come out believing that it can really be dangerous to eat street side food. Isn’t it? You would certainly share it with your friends and would certainly try to minimize your outside eating if not stop it completely. Well, it is good to eat more of home cooked food than the street food for healthy reasons and NOT for HIV’s scare.
I am certainly not an expert in medicine but did a bit of checking on reliable online resources along with some common sense and feel that it is NOT possible to transmit HIV in the manner specified above.
Here are the reasons:
The HIV can only be transmitted if there is a direct contact of the HIV infected blood with the non-infected blood. There are very rare chances of this particular scenario where there were some open mouth sores with blood in this child’s mouth that could have caused the infected blood to get through his blood stream.
Also, the HIV virus dies within hours of it coming in contact with air. The only possibility of transmission here is that the child was actually drinking the blood of Pineapple cutter at the same time which he was cutting it along with his fingers!!
HIV is not passed through food, water, or air, or by touching any object that was handled by, touched by, or breathed on by a person who has HIV.
So, do not worry and enjoy your food.
Source: New York Department Of Health
While HIV may live for a short while outside of the body, HIV transmission has not been reported as a result of contact with spillages or small traces of blood, semen or other bodily fluids. This is partly because HIV dies quite quickly once exposed to the air, and also because spilled fluids would have to get into a person’s bloodstream to infect them.
Scientists agree that HIV does not survive well in the environment, making the chance of environmental transmission remote. To obtain data on the survival of HIV, laboratory studies usually use artificially high concentrations of laboratory-grown virus. Although these concentrations of HIV can be kept alive for days or even weeks under controlled conditions, studies have shown that drying of these high concentrations of HIV reduces the amount of infectious virus by 90 to 99 percent within a few hours.
Since the HIV concentrations used in laboratory studies are much higher than those actually found in blood or other specimens, the real risk of HIV infection from dried bodily fluids is probably close to zero. Incorrect interpretation of conclusions drawn from laboratory studies have unnecessarily alarmed some people.