Lia has been exhausted lately and keeps getting sick. She finally goes to see her doctor because she can't get over a common col
d. Her doctor diagnoses her with pneumonia and sends her to the hospital. While in the hospital, the doctors decide to check her white blood cell levels. Lia's white blood cell counts are less than half of what they should be. Which STD/STI might Lia have?
The correct answer would be option B: "HIV/AIDS. When the body has contracted an STD or STI, the immune system kicks in and tries to defend the body from the virus, fungi or bacteria that caused the disease/infection. When this happens, what tends to occur is that the white blood cell (commonly called Leukocytes) numbers rise in an attempt to protect. That is the same thing that happens in an infection with HIV, except, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus has the ability to infect a certain type of White Blood Cell called T Lymphocyte (or T- helper cells) and by doing so, kill the cell, resulting in lower levels of white blood cells.
