does saliva contain hiv
The saliva does not carry HIV that could be infectious or contagious. This is because; the saliva does not offer a very favorable condition for the sustenance of HIV. In fact, saliva is a good agent of destroying this virus. It carries special antibodies that fight the HIV components.
Significant amounts of blood can be released into saliva after brushing the teeth â at least ten times as much as after kissing or eating. Whether the HIV contained in blood would be infectious, or would be diluted and inactivated by saliva is unclear. HIV has also been found in saliva. However, the neutralising effects of enzymes (SLPI) and HIV antibodies make HIV difficult to isolate from saliva, and make its possible infectiousness hard to estimate. One study found extremely low levels of virus in the saliva of HIV-positive people â one infectious particle per ml. However, another study by the same research team found high levels of HIV in the saliva of several patients with AIDS when they used a more sensitive HIV PCR viral load test.