I’m sure that I am ignorant the the actual process of how HIV or AIDS kills a person, but it is my understanding that AIDS itself doesn’t kill you…it simply causes a depletion of T cells and such that control immunity and ultimately you succomb to a minor diesease or something that the average body could fight off.
So hypothetically if an infected person was kept in an air sealed room and not exposed to anything outside, would they live longer or even until they die of normal processes? Or am I completely on the wrong track and an actual element of the virus itself is lethal?
AIDS does destroy T cells, so basically your immune system is shot. Yes, keeping patients completely isolated could theoretically keep them going longer, but not indefinitely. AIDS patients are usually on different sorts of antibiotics as soon as their T cell counts get to a certain level, in an attempt to prevent certain likely infectious agents from getting hold.
However, AIDS also has a nasty habit of causing different sorts of cancers (Kaposi’s sarcoma, lymphomas), which the clean room wouldn’t help. And the virus also affects the brain, if it infects immune cells in that area. Not to mention that the depressed T cell function allows a reappearance of dormant viral infections such as Epstein-Barr and Herpes.
So, while it’s a good idea in theory, it would only keep away some of the possible killers.
In immune supressed people, whether from AIDS, bone marrow transplant or other immune deficiency, patients become infected by the friendly bacteria they carry in their own bodies. so, no, keeping an immune deficient person isolated will not protect them from infection.
While I worked with bone marrow transplant patients, we did our best to sterilize their GI tracts, but even with that, things like the Varicella virus that causes chicken pox, and shingles, since it lies dormant in our nerve roots, would sometimes overwhelm them.
The immune system plays a role in killing cancer cells of all types, so it is possible that someone with a severly disrupted immune system may well end up with cancers driven by cell lines that would be ordinarily killed by a healthy immune system.