Treatment made HIV survivable, and smoking takes the years back

Smoking causes one in every five deaths in the United States each year. For
someone living with HIV it is worse than that, in two distinct ways.

More likely to get the infections HIV causes

**If you smoke and have HIV, you are more likely to get HIV-related
infections**, including:

• Thrush — a mouth infection, oral candidiasis
• Hairy leukoplakia — white mouth sores
• Bacterial pneumonia
• Pneumocystis pneumonia — a dangerous lung infection

Three of the four are in the mouth or the lungs, which is where smoke arrives
and where it damages the local defences that would otherwise hold these
organisms off.

More likely to get the illnesses smoking causes

**People with HIV are more likely to develop these harmful consequences of
smoking than those without HIV**, including:

• COPD — emphysema and chronic bronchitis
• Heart disease and stroke

So the two conditions are not simply additive. Each makes the other's harms
more likely, and the result is illnesses that **can make you too sick to work,
or lead to an early death.**

Why this is the health message for HIV now

HIV is manageable: once you have it you have it for life, and **HIV harms
your CD4 cells — the immune system's infection fighters — until the body cannot
fight off infection**, at which point it becomes AIDS. Modern treatment
prevents that progression.

Which changes what the biggest threat to a person with HIV actually is.
Treatment handles the virus. It does nothing about the cigarettes, and the
cigarettes are now doing much of the damage.

**Quitting smoking can help people with HIV have a better quality of life and
fewer HIV-related symptoms. When you quit, your risk goes down for many
serious illnesses, including heart attacks and pneumonia.**

Fewer HIV-related symptoms is the part worth noticing. Quitting is not only
protection against a distant heart attack; it changes how the HIV itself is
experienced.

*Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Tips From Former
Smokers®.*