Adolescence characteristically is an extremely healthy time of life. In general, adolescents do not die off from the kinds of things that strike the rest of us, such as heart disease. The major causes of adolescent deaths are accidents and suicide. The result of this healthiness is that adults tend to assume that adolescents with [...]

MEAN-INDETERMINANT TEST RESULTS The virus is either present or not present—there is no middle ground. But like all tests in medicine, the test for antibodies to HIV does not always give decisive positive or negative results. Indeterminant test results are a gray zone, and they are an obvious source of anguish for the person tested. [...]

HIV affects the body in several different ways. The first way it affects the body is directly, causing an early mononucleosis-like disease or a late dementia called AIDS dementia complex. The second way is by causing the immune system to overreact and attack, not foreign tissue, but the tissues of the body. One example of [...]