Facts about HIV/AIDS

Dear Friends!!!
Its good to be well informed about HIV. There was a story on junk some days back where it is said that a boy got infected by HIV virus by eating pani-puri. And there have also been rumors where people are affected by the HIV virus when they got pricked by an HIV infected needle in theaters which is rubbish.
I received this mail in my mailbox and thought of sharing with you but still please please enquire and educate yourself properly before jumping to any conclusion.
So read along!
RANBAXY....
I have seen this below mentioned mail floating across group email & I feel its my moral responsibility to correct all misconceptions
regarding HIV /AIDS.
I can do this because I am educated enough to comment on this and for those who don't know my profession ...I am serving as Brand Manager (Product Manager) handling anti HIV/AIDS portfolio (called as Antiretroviral Drugs) in Ranbaxy.

Please read following points carefully & don't send emails related to Medical ailments without having complete knowledge about it (even partial knowledge could be grossly dangerous).

* HIV (virus) requires *ONLY* *Blood or Semen* as medium to transmit from one body to another.

* HIV *can not* transmit even through *Saliva*(mucous) i.e. even if
HIV-infected patient coughs or smooches and another person is exposed to his sputum (cough) or saliva, the virus still can not transmit because concentration of virus particles in sputum is almost NIL & exposure to air anyway kills virus in fraction of seconds.

* In case an HIV-infected person gets an injury (like the cut in
below mentioned story) and he is bleeding, the virus can transmit to another person only if another person has a cut/wound in his body & that too when blood from both person comes in contact with each other* (this is also very very rare unless bleeding is very high) and not otherwise.

* HIV can *never survive in any other liquid* medium also other than blood or semen (& please for God sake ... never in Pani Puri wala pani)

* Even if one drinks an HIV infected blood (or semen) of someone
(ingest through Gastro Intestinal track), the virus can not survive in the acidic pH of stomach*. Highest extent of acidity is 0 (practically not possible) so imagine 1 as pH which is in our stomach. (This pH can burn your own finger in less than a second if you dip in that acid).

* Exposure of less than 1 second in AIR KILLS the HIV virus*(hence
story of needle pricks in Cinema theatres is crap). Even if blood from a wound (of infected person) dries up (*blood clot*), *the virus dies*and can not infect anyone else

* HIV transmission is *ONLY* an *INFECTION* i.e.entrance of virus in one's body. It *DOES NOT MEAN AIDS*.

** An HIV-infected person (after entrance of virus) can progress to a condition of AIDS only after *8 to 10 YEARS *(not in 15 days as in the Pani Puri story)

* It is *not HIV (virus) that kills a human* .....the virus attacks
immune cells (cells that fight against foreign pathogens/antigens) and hence a person's ability to fight against infections & diseases slowly diminishes and person ultimately dies of a disease which could be as simple as TB

* Most importantly, HIV is no longer a dreadful disease ... it is
"*CHRONIC MANAGEABLE DISEASE*" just like Diabetes or Hypertension.

* If there is anything you need to be careful from to prevent HIV is Unsafe sex*, *Blood transfusion* (check before taking) /Blood donation (use sterilized needles only) and any *blood contact during an accident *or so where amount of bleeding is very high.

PLZ O PLZ spread this message to avoid rumors and to educate people.

Now Home Entertainment : the next booming sector

You would have always wished to get rid of Monopoly of these Cablewalllahs..... who every month rake in lot of money despite poor transmission quality and Customer Service...
Now it seems this home entertainment sector is going to get revolutionised... like telecom in India. Yes, many private players are planning a foray, with cutting edge technology, quality customer services, and off course a price battle is expected.
Neverthless, people are going to get benefitted out of it. A very well knitted article on Rediff giving clues about developments in this sector....

"A cranked up direct-to-home platform and digitised cable content means you'll get the finest content, sound and picture quality as home entertainment goes retail.

You love them, and you hate them, and now you can do without them. Which gives you the choice to sit back and look at their offerings - which aren't too pretty - to decide whether you want to live with your cablewallah, or start a dalliance with any of a slew of new services, all of it guaranteed to give you hundreds of channels, 24x7, with clear transmission quality, pay-per-view films and programmes, and a whole set of choices hitherto unknown to the Indian television viewer.

Better than cable? Apparently so. Even better: you won't have to deal with your grouchy cablewallah and his lousy customer service because he's changing his set-up too. Already, select cable operators have begun to shift from the analog format (which is what you watch) to the digital in a bid to protect their turf.

But the big news is the direct to home (DTH) format to leverage its superior technology and woo away discerning customers from cable. DTH isn't new but it's the biggest thing that's happening to television viewing.

And on Tuesday, television viewers will get another taste of independence as Tata-Sky (a joint venture between Tata and Star TV) hits the markets with its DTH platform, ending the two-year monopoly of Subhash Chandra's Dish TV (which has 1.3 million subscribers in the private DTH platform space, so far restricted to non-metros).

At an introductory price of Rs 2,999 as upfront charges, and Rs 200 a month for 55 channels, Tata-Sky has already brought the battle straight into the cable operators' court.

Says Vikram Kaushik, managing director of the new company, "We are already cheaper than what customers pay monthly, which is an average of Rs 220 for cable. We will be disappointed if we don't become the leader in DTH in the first year. What we will offer customers is service, which they have never enjoyed before."

Not that Dish TV is willing to relinquish its first-mover advantage. So far, it had concentrated its spread in regions where cable was not available, but is now correcting that to make a grab for the larger metro and city markets.

Says Dish TV boss Jawahar Goel, "We estimate that 60 per cent of the incremental subscriber base will come from urban markets which were only 15 per cent of our business till now. But now we have both the Star and Sony bouquets on our platform (which have been made available only a week or two ago), so it makes sense to tap the metros."

Tata-Sky has already tied up with 15,000 apartments and housing societies in Mumbai and around Delhi by installing a single dish antenna (instead of separate antennas for every connection, which can be cumbersome in a condominium).

But that's a move that has met with stiff opposition from cable operators who are crying hoarse and have already complained to the regulator (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, or TRAI) that the move is anti-competitive as it deprives them entry into these societies. (Tata-Sky ripostes that it is for each housing society to make its choice, and individual flat-owners can say no, so how is it monopolistic?)

The cable operators haven't simply rolled over to allow DTH access to their traditional turf. Big cable operators like IN Cable or Hathway have begun investments to move from analog to digital, and are putting up a fibre optic cable backbone in the major metros to offer value-adds like broadband (and perhaps also telephony) at a bundled pricing.

Their expectation is that at least 30 per cent of the existing cable customers (around 2 million) will choose digital cable (with a set top box) in the metros once conditional access system (CAS) gets implemented. Come Diwali then, IN Cable will launch pay TV with both Hindi and English movies on demand."

Read Freedom from the cablewallah!

IBM's silent revolution

IBM may no longer make personal computers but 25 years ago -- on August 12, 1981 -- it triggered a silent unplanned revolution when it announced the smallest lowest-priced computer system (IBM Personal Computer-5150), pricing it at $1,565.

An analyst was quoted as saying that 'IBM bringing out a personal computer would be like teaching an elephant to tap-dance.'

It had an enhanced version of the Microsoft BASIC programming language (we have XP today and Vista to follow); an 83-key adjustable keyboard (we may laugh at it today); and 16 KB (512 MB and 1 GB are household memory names today) memory.

This was the just the basic system for home use. It did not include a monitor, video card, parallel or serial port, operating system, or floppy drive. If you wanted a 64 KB (remember Bill Gates saying this was enough?) one, including a single diskette drive (where are they today?) and display (those monitors with a greenish tinge), it would cost a little over $3000.

An expanded system for business with colour graphics, two diskette drives, and a printer would cost about $4,500. Today, for these amounts (the value of money has changed over the years), you can buy a dozen computers with hyper-threading capabilities (HT technology) that are a hundred times faster, and store gigabytes of data and video (computers did not even have a hard drive in those days.

Read the revolution