AIDS, or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, is the medical designation for the latter phase of infection with HIV or human immunodeficiency virus. This infection, spread by sexual contact, shared needles and contaminated blood most often, eventually develops into AIDS. AIDS itself does not kill you, but it depletes your immune system drastically which allows other diseases to affect you that normally your body could fight. Symptoms of AIDS vary from mild to severe.
Chronic Diarrhea
While loose stools and diarrhea happen to everyone now and again, when an HIV infection has developed into full-blown AIDS, you may experience diarrhea most of the time. This happens because the body does not have a strong enough immune system to fend off infections that are opportunistic.
Night Sweats
Night sweats, as the name implies, is sweating at night. This is not typical, normal perspiration, however. The Mayo Clinic states that night sweats are severe episodes of perspiration. Even if you sleep in a cold room, this type of sweating can drench your bedding and your pajamas or other night clothes. While the Mayo Clinic states these night sweats do not always mean you have a serious illness, if you have other symptoms of HIV infection and AIDS, they can be serious. For AIDS sufferers, night sweats may occur often, they may interrupt your normal sleep and they may occur with fevers and chills.
Vision Problems
When you have AIDS, you also may develop some difficulties seeing the world around you. This can manifest as an inability to focus your vision, resulting in blurriness. AIDS may also allow infections that distort vision to attack the body.
Chronic Fatigue
Because your immune system is so weakened by AIDS, your body does not function as it normally should. One of the many symptoms of this may be feeling tired most or all of the time, or feeling very weak, as if you have done strenuous work or exercise. This fatigue, the Mayo Clinic reports, may be unexplainable and persistent.
Fever and Chills
AIDS is caused by a virus, so it does have some of the common symptoms of a virus, although eventually more severe. Among these symptoms at most stages of the disease is a fever. By the time the disease has developed into AIDS, these fevers may continue for several weeks at a time. Usually, the fever will be above 100F. Along with these fevers, you also may experience shaking chills.
