I probably should have gone to another message board for this but I like you guys better. Besides its non-controversial…
I work with a guy who is a bit of a conspearacy theorist and he’s pretty certain AIDS was manufactured by the govt. Ill admit its a more believable story than some of them.
It posses a few questions for me though. If it was man-made I would assume it is then curable and possily a cure was created with the disease at the get-go. This assumption leads me to wonder why if such a cure exists and is possible, why hasn’t someone else come up with it yet? Also, if this was created that says science has more knowledge of what a virus is than most of us are aware of, and I find it hard to believe only high-powered govt. scientists have stumbled upon this type of discovery.
Another thought… Why create a population contolling method that is sexually transmitted? The most obvious answer is that everyone has sex and not only will it kill people but cause them to refrain from having sex to some level. A missed point though is that AIDS “attacks” humans most common and natural population controll method: The homosexual male. When I say “attacks”, I mean due to the promescuety and easier method of transmitting STD’s during gay sex. So if homosexuality is natures way of pop. controll (which I feel is a legitamate possability) why interfere with it? It would be a Govt. created catch-22.
Viruses are just a DNA strain & a dab of proteins or lipids.
They cannot be genetically engineered.
In an environment with no immune individuals, smallpox would be more effective. It would kill millions , in mere months.
Besides–it can take 15 years for the results of HIV infection to manifest themselves. Who would create a disease that would take so long?
How 'bout those Mets, eh? :wally
If you want a good book about the early history of AIDS, I might suggest Shilts’ * And The Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic.* (The book, not the movie… although the movie is worth a watch.) I’m also told Starr’s Blood is a good read.
For the record, AIDS allegedly originated in Africa. To suggest that the government manufactured it is, at best, a tad far-fetched.
No, HIV is not man-made. There’s no evidence for that, and there’s reasonable evidence that its source was a closely related monkey version that transferred to humans in some way. No, I’m not saying there’s someone out there having sex with monkeys. I’ve heard it proposed that it may have been transferred by eating monkey brains, but that’s not important.
The reason there hasn’t been a cure yet is that HIV has a much higher rate of antigenic shift than anything previously encountered - it’s constantly mutating its surface proteins at a very high rate, making it nearly impossible for the immune system to stop.
Science knows very very well what a virus is. That part is easy. The hard part is stopping it.
Oh, and although many viruses are DNA-based, HIV, being a retrovirus, has an RNA genome (though it is transcribed back into DNA during infection). And viruses can be and routinely are genetically engineered. They’re used all the time to get DNA into cells. They cannot, however, be built up from scratch.
My question is why would the government have any interest whatsoever in deliberately killing its citizens? Especially in America - why kill the people that put you into power?? It makes a decent episode of the X-files, perhaps, but doesn’t make much sense in the real world.
I forgot to mention that I do not believe it was manufactured by the govt. I just thought it would spark some interesting conversation here… It doesnt seem SO inconceivable BTW, and the friend I was refering to is quite intelagent (maybe just a little paranoid), so I figured theyre may be some intalect on both sides here…
The CDC has found HIV in a blood sample dating back to 1959; more indirect evidence suggests that HIV must date back to some years before that. I don’t think the technology to whip up new viruses, or radically re-engineer old ones, existed that far back.
In Africa there are areas where 1/3rd of the population or more is infected with HIV. There are concerns in those areas that it will take years to recover from the loss of life because of the virus. In no way, shape, or form is HIV and AIDS attacking homosexuals alone.
For whatever reason in the United States HIV spread primarily through homosexual males in the early years. I’m not sure if the same is true of Europe. But in India they also have an AIDS problem and I don’t believe it struck homosexual males the hardest.
Again I generalized a US audiance. Sorry. I am quite aware HIV doesnt target the gay population, it is just easier to transmit rectaly and I was aslo accounting for the increased promescuity of homosexual individuals (I know not all…) as I did mention in the OP.
Who exactly was AIDS designed to limit the population of? Africans, most of whom were hetrosexual? They were the first victims of the disease. American homosexual males? They were one of the next victims. Poor American blacks and Hispanics? Since many of the white American homosexual male population now has access to AIDS drugs and uses condoms, the victims of the disease in the U.S. have increasingly been poor blacks and Hispanics. And, of course, the disease is spread around the world now. When was this disease created? Recent research has shown that the disease probably jumped from monkeys to humans around 1930.
Like a lot of supposed government conspiracies, this makes no sense. What kind of targeting takes 70 years to spread to its intended victims? Is there any evidence that any group that could be considered a victim of the disease has been decimated by the disease? Are there any less Africans, or American male homosexuals, or poor American blacks and Hispanics? (Somebody’s going to say, “Ah, but they didn’t want to kill them all off. They just wanted to kill some of them.” Huh? In other words, they wanted to kill just enough of them to get them angry enough that they would create conspiracy theories about the creation of the disease.) How could this disease have been artificially created 70 years or even 40 years ago? Even now scientists can’t make viruses mutate to be able to do specific things.
If you’re going to create a government conspiracy theory, at least make it plausible by not having it involve science far beyond what’s presently known and by having the government have some sort of rational motive for it.
More believable than a naturally-occurring virus? Does that mean polio, typhoid, tuberculosis, the bubonic plague and every other devastating disease in history was somehow manufactured? Please. There might be a case, from an historical/pandemic point of view, that Nature has her own forms of population control in these kinds of viruses and diseases, but I’m no expert and wouldn’t guess.
No one’s come up with a cure yet because scientists don’t understand the virus. If some X-Files conspiracy had been involved in creating the virus, they’d have “found” the cure the minute either Magic Johnson was diagnosed with HIV or when the disease started infecting heterosexuals faster than homosexuals.
Go with that gut feeling.
Another logical thought - run with it.
Well, since you seem woefully ignorant of the AIDS epidemic it should be no surprise that you seem equally ignorant of homosexuality (but I’ll expound more in a moment).
Once again, as twisted as this is, go with it.
{sigh} Get thee to the “Ask The Gay Guy!” threads.
HIV and the AIDS virus are no more or less easier to transmit rectally than vaginally.
Homosexuals are no more or less promiscuous than any other group of people.
HIV and AIDS cases are declining among the gay community but increasing among straights, specifically minorities.
Your friend is a nutjob. Get some facts and find new friends.
I agree that the conspiracy theorist is a nutjob, but I have to dispute a couple of things said…
HIV and the AIDS virus are no more or less easier to transmit rectally than vaginally.
Since HIV needs to get in the bloodstream, it can only be transmitted if there is a tear or open sore. Since the rectum is not designed to have a penis thrusting around in it, it is more likely to have the lining torn. I thought that it was pretty commonly accepted that anal sex was much riskier than vaginal sex as far as HIV transmission went. Dr. Drew on Loveline says that it is more likely to cause health problems even if you don’t take disease into consideration.
Homosexuals are no more or less promiscuous than any other group of people.
Huh? ANY other group of people? So homosexuals are no more promiscuous than the Amish? But seriously, surveys have shown that people who identify themselves as homosexuals claim to have had far more partners on average than heterosexuals. It makes sense, if women were as easy as men I’d probably have had a hundred partners or so by now, but it’s hard to find a woman who is willing to have anonymous sex with a stranger. I’m going to look for a cite here in a moment, but
OK, here’s a cite…
43% of white male homosexuals claim to have had sex with over 500 partners. 28% have claimed over 1000.
A.P. Bell and M.S. Weinberg, Homosexualities: A Study of Diversity Among Men and Women (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), pp. 308-309
In a study of the sexual profiles of 2583 older homosexuals showed a mean lifetime number of 251 sexual partners.
Paul Van de Ven, et al., “A Comparative Demographic and Sexual Profile of Older Homosexually Active Men,” Journal of Sex Research 34 (1997): 354.
If you dispute that anal sex is no more likely to cause transmission of HIV than vaginal sex, and that homosexuals are no more promiscuous than heterosexuals, why is it that AIDS is so much more common among homosexuals than heterosexuals? I honestly want to hear an alternate explanation.
If you wanted to control the population with a virus, why choose one that primarily affects gay men? They don’t reproduce very much anyway. (Yes, yes, I know some gay people have children. But nowhere near as many as straight people, for reasons that should be obvious.)
Why not target women between 18 - 35? You not only reduce the population; you also eliminate the offspring they were going to have.
Someone else was right. Your friend is squirrel food.
And AIDS does too target gay men (in the US). Last I heard gay/bisexual men still accounted for most of the AIDS cases in America, including new infections.
What I would like is a reasonable explanation of why it is so common among heterosexuals in Africa. The only ideas I have heard are;[ul]
[li]People in Africa are lying, and are really gay. They are just more likely to be married because of social pressure.[/li][li]Syphillis and gonorrhea are so common that the AIDS virus passes thru the lesions.[/li][/ul]
I read an article in The New Yorker once by this guy who went and lived with a trucker who worked in west Africa (they are considered to be one of the biggest transmission vectors in the African HIV epidemic). There are a number of possible reasons why they (truckers) are so at risk. For one thing, they are extremely promiscuous. They make quite a bit of money compared to the average there and will have sex with a different woman every night when they stop at a new town, usually prostitutes, and often they will hire more than one. They not only don’t use condoms, they actually believe using a condom can CAUSE disease. It is also a common belief that if you catch HIV or any other STD you can cure it by having sex with a virgin. Those last two are actually common beliefs throughout the region, not just with the truckers.
Homosexuality is probably just as common in Africa as it is elsewhere, but there is more denial, and like in Mexico they don’t consider it homosexuality if you are on the giving end so a man might have sex with men all the time yet honestly (to his way of thinking) say he is not homosexual if asked.
I also wonder if FGM might be a factor in the epidemic in Africa, as many forms of it would make the woman more likely to bleed during intercourse.
