A patient arrives at the Er with the following symptoms: High fever, headache, s

Question

A patient arrives at the Er with the following symptoms: High fever, headache, sever body ache, and congestion. You suppose it is influenza since it is flu season and the patient was not vaccinated. In a subsequent visit 15 days later, the symptoms progressed as follows: all the symptoms above, plus sore indicating HPV all over the body. As a physician, you suspect that the patient is HIV positive.

What hypothesis can you formulate regarding the order of infection of all three viruses (with rationale)?

How can you test both the presence and order of infection of all three viruses?

Explanation / Answer

The people who are infected by HIV do not show any symptoms. But few show flu-like symptoms within few weeks of infection. The early symptoms last in case of HIV infected person for 1 to 6 weeks.

The common early symptoms of HIV infection are fever, chills, severe headache, and sore throat. The swollen lymph nodes appear under the arm pits and groin area and these symptoms last for 3 months. The other symptoms of HIV infection are joints and muscle pain, face or body rash, diarrhea, and vomiting.

Seroconversion illness is the condition in which the blood gets converted from HIV negative to HIV positive. In this condition, antibodies are produced by host body.

The flu symptoms are severe than common cold. The symptoms of flu include sore throat, fever, headache, muscle ache and soreness, congestion, and cough.

HPV is a sexually transmitted disease. It also spreads by skin to skin contact. The most common symptom of this disease is genital warts. The pap test is used to diagnose the disease.

The HIV status is tested by positive results of sexually transmitted diseases like chlamydia, HPV, syphilis, gonorrhea, herpes, viral hepatitis, scabies, trichomoniasis etc.

The flu-like symptoms proceeding to HPV is identified in the patient. Hence, the doctor suspected the patient might be HIV positive.

In the given case, the positive pap test confirms the HPV. The positive pap test has to be followed by immunoassay to confirm the HIV infection.

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