Does HIV cause AIDS?

Factual Questions
1

I know there’s a significant minority position among scientists that deny, or at least question, the relationship between HIV and AIDS.

I don’t know a lot about the dispute. I know that one of the deniers/skeptics is, or at least used to be, a respected scientist who did some prize-winning early research on retroviruses.

Their claims, as I understand them, are that 1.) retroviruses, or at least this retrovirus, just isn’t built right to cause AIDS, and that 2.) the definition of AIDS is self-referential. It’s impossible to have AIDS without HIV merely because of the way the disease is defined.

I figured it’d be easier to let you guys tell me, rather than to try to figure it out for myself.

2

Nicholas Regush wrote a thought-provoking book detailing one of the other theories on AIDS called The Virus Withing.

I bought it for 3 or 4 dollars and confess I thought it was bio-techno-thriller. But I have read it and - although I don’t know enough to really have an informed opinion - I will say that it was worth taking a look.

Before his death he had been a science and medical reporter for ABC News.

3

[QUOTE=LinusK]
I know there’s a significant minority position among scientists that deny, or at least question, the relationship between HIV and AIDS.

I don’t know a lot about the dispute. I know that one of the deniers/skeptics is, or at least used to be, a respected scientist who did some prize-winning early research on retroviruses.

Their claims, as I understand them, are that 1.) retroviruses, or at least this retrovirus, just isn’t built right to cause AIDS, and that 2.) the definition of AIDS is self-referential. It’s impossible to have AIDS without HIV merely because of the way the disease is defined.

I figured it’d be easier to let you guys tell me, rather than to try to figure it out for myself.
[/QUOTE]

Since you “know” about this significant minority, please tell us more.

4

“The overwhelming majority of the scientific community considers the causative role of HIV to be proven; dissident arguments are felt to be the result of cherry-picking of predominantly outdated scientific data, with the potential to endanger public health by dissuading people from utilizing proven treatments.”

5

[QUOTE=LinusK]

I figured it’d be easier to let you guys tell me, rather than to try to figure it out for myself.
[/QUOTE]

The cause of AIDS is a virus called HIV.

6

Anecdote: The only people I know who have died of AIDS had HIV. That’s all they had in common. They might have something else in common and HIV might have been a marker or vector for it, but that explanation seems unnecessarily complex.

7

Since the screening of donated blood for the presence of HIV was begun, new infections have dropped almost to zero among hemophiliacs and transfusion recipients. (Goedert JJ. Mortality and hemophilia. Lancet 1995; 346: 1425-6.)

Three lab techs inadvertently exposed to HIV-1 (strain HTLV-IIIb) in their labs. All 3 of these technicians developed antibodies to HIV, and within 5 years all 3 showed marked CD4 lymphocyte depletion. (Weiss SH, Goedert JJ, Gartner S, et al. Risk of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV-1) transmission among laboratory workers. Science 1988 Jan 1;239(4835):68-71.)

In chickens. Peter Duesberg is not an epidemiologist or a clinical pathologist. His argument seems to boil down to that HIV fails Koch’s postulates (and it doesn’t) and that gay people are bad because they take a lot of drugs and have a lot of sex. As with global warming or tobacco causing lung cancer, there’s never a shortage of misguided attenrtion whores, or journalist willing to print what they say.

8

A relevant column from Cecil, currently under discussion elsewhere on the board.

9

Let’s take one of the claims, that you can get AIDS without HIV, except if you don’t have HIV they don’t call it AIDS.

Well, that’s sort of true, but misses the point. It is true that other things than Human Immunodeficiency Virus can cause an immune deficiency, and that such deficiency could be said to be acquired, so why isn’t it called AIDS?

Because AIDS was a term invented by doctors to describe a sudden increase in the number of immune deficiency cases before we knew what the cause of that increase was. Sure, other things can cause immune deficiency, other things can cause you to acquire an immune deficiency. But AIDS didn’t refer to those other things, it refered to the thing that was causing this sudden massive increase. There were other things that could cause you to acquire an immune deficiency, but the new patients didn’t have any of those things, they had something new.

And it was discovered fairly rapidly that the cause of AIDS was a virus, and the virus was given the name HIV. Can your immune system be destroyed by other things than HIV? Sure, but why call that getting AIDS? Why not call that other problem by a different name? What is the purpose of calling that other disease caused by different factors by the same name?

And the fact that some people who get HIV don’t develop AIDS doesn’t mean that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. Some people infected with varicella-zoster virus don’t develop chicken pox, does that mean that varicella-zoster virus doesn’t cause chicken pox? Or does the fact that there are other diseases and syndromes that can cause small sores all over the body mean that those other diseases should be called chicken pox too?

I haven’t seen any AIDS deniers who volunteer to be injected with live HIV to demonstrate that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. Perhaps you’d like to be the first?

10

*Duesberg initially gained note, at the age of 33, for being the first scientist to discover a cancer gene (oncogene), which he isolated from a virus.[1]. At 36, he earned tenure at the University of California, Berkeley, and at 49 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He was also the recipient of an Outstanding Investigator Grant (OIG) from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 1986, and from 1986-87 was a Fogarty Scholar-in-Residence at the NIH laboratory in Bethesda, Maryland… On the basis of his experience with retroviruses, Duesberg has challenged the scientific consensus that HIV is the cause of AIDS. * Wikipedia.

I don’t know the guy personally, but it seems like he used to be regarded as a regular scientist. Respected, even. Is there anything else he’s done, that makes him an “attention whore,” other than challenging HIV/AIDS?

Suppose I injected myself with HIV, and didn’t get AIDS. Would that prove the HIV theory wrong?

11

[QUOTE=Lemur866]

I haven’t seen any AIDS deniers who volunteer to be injected with live HIV to demonstrate that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. Perhaps you’d like to be the first?
[/QUOTE]

I remember somebody volunteering but it was sort of an empty bluff since he volunteered under the condition some authority would approve the infection (which they never would)

12

[QUOTE=LinusK]
Suppose I injected myself with HIV, and didn’t get AIDS. Would that prove the HIV theory wrong?
[/QUOTE]

Not with one trial, no. But suppose we selected a group of 2000 people, and selected 1000 at random to be injected with HIV and 1000 at random to be injected with saline solution.

Then we see how many people in the HIV group go on to develop AIDS, and how many people in the control group go on to develop AIDS. What do you think those numbers are going to look like? Would you volunteer to be part of a clinical study where you had a 50/50 chance of being injected with HIV? No you would not. No one would, even the HIV deniers.

Of course, since we have very good reason to believe that HIV causes AIDS, performing this study would be unethical, since it would lead to the deaths of hundreds of people.

13

There used to be plenty of reputable scientists who insisted that the sun and all the heavens wheeled about the earth. They had very complex models of this, too. However, there was a simpler model, which turns out to be more accurate, and espousing which would get you set on fire, thrown in prison, etc.

14

[QUOTE=Lemur866]
Not with one trial, no. But suppose we selected a group of 2000 people, and selected 1000 at random to be injected with HIV and 1000 at random to be injected with saline solution.

Then we see how many people in the HIV group go on to develop AIDS, and how many people in the control group go on to develop AIDS. What do you think those numbers are going to look like? Would you volunteer to be part of a clinical study where you had a 50/50 chance of being injected with HIV? No you would not. No one would, even the HIV deniers.

Of course, since we have very good reason to believe that HIV causes AIDS, performing this study would be unethical, since it would lead to the deaths of hundreds of people.
[/QUOTE]

Well, nobody in the control group would get AIDS, right? I mean, even if they got an AIDS-type disease, it wouldn’t be considered AIDS, because they didn’t have HIV.

15

[QUOTE=Lemur866]

I haven’t seen any AIDS deniers who volunteer to be injected with live HIV to demonstrate that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. Perhaps you’d like to be the first?
[/QUOTE]

Has LinusK given us good reason to believe that he is an AIDS denier? I can’t see any in the OP.

16

[QUOTE=LinusK]
Well, nobody in the control group would get AIDS, right? I mean, even if they got an AIDS-type disease, it wouldn’t be considered AIDS, because they didn’t have HIV.
[/QUOTE]

Perhaps not, if, as you say, the definition of AIDS is self-referential. Even so, it would still be unethical to infect them with a virus which we strongly suspect causes an AIDS-like disease, whether or not it is AIDS!

ETA: not to mention, it’s rather strange to use, as “evidence” that HIV may not cause AIDS, that AIDS is currently defined as the result of HIV! :slight_smile:

17

[QUOTE=LinusK]
Well, nobody in the control group would get AIDS, right? I mean, even if they got an AIDS-type disease, it wouldn’t be considered AIDS, because they didn’t have HIV.
[/QUOTE]

What’s your point? Lemur866 explained how the effect (labeled AIDS) was noted before the cause (labeled HIV) was identified. Isn’t that how science typically works?

18

[QUOTE=LinusK]
Well, nobody in the control group would get AIDS, right? I mean, even if they got an AIDS-type disease, it wouldn’t be considered AIDS, because they didn’t have HIV.
[/QUOTE]

Except some people in the control group could contract HIV the old fashioned way. Unless we’re planning on locking these people in isolation cells for 10 years, some of them are going to have unprotected sex and some of those will have unprotected sex with someone HIV positive.

Look, I don’t understand what the objection is. In today’s medical community AIDS is defined as immune deficiency caused by HIV. There are other causes of immune deficiency, but those aren’t called AIDS, because that’s not how AIDS is defined. There are other causes of rashes of tiny red sores than varicella-zoster virus, but only tiny red sores caused by varicella-zoster virus are called chicken pox. Why is this such a hard concept to understand?

We had an explosion of cases of immune deficiency in the 80s. There were people who had immune deficiencies before, but it was vanishingly rare in healthy young men. Suddenly we had thousands of such cases. The term AIDS was invented to describe these new cases that were so different than previous cases of immune deficiency. It was theorized that these cases had a common cause. That cause was found to be HIV. It certainly is possible that a few of the people diagnosed with AIDS in the 80s were actually suffering from an illness that had a different cause than the majority of cases. Except now that we can test for the presence of HIV antibodies and HIV itself, people with compromised immune systems that weren’t HIV+ wouldn’t be diagnosed with AIDS, they’d be diagnosed with something else. Because now AIDS is defined by HIV infection, just like chicken pox is defined by varicella-zoster virus infection.

100 years ago they diagnosed chicken pox by the symptoms and didn’t understand the cause. Probably several people were diagnosed with chicken pox that were infected with some other virus. Heck, even today people are diagnosed with chicken pox just by the symptoms, we don’t run a blood test to confirm the diagnosis. But if someone came to a doctor with a rash of sores all over their body, and the doctor said, “Hmm, looks like chicken pox”, but then ran a test for varicella-zoster virus that came back negative, the doctor wouldn’t say, “You’ve got the kind of chicken pox that isn’t caused by the chicken pox virus, you’ve got another kind”. Nope, he’d say, “We don’t know what’s causing this rash, it’s a mystery, but it isn’t chicken pox even though it looks like chicken pox”.

I’m sorry if that sounds circular to you, but it seems simple and straightforward to me.

19

Nitpick: AIDS is a syndrome, not a disease. It is composed of multiple diseases in characteristic constellations.

20

Dr. Kary Mullis, the inventor of PCR said (in 1996)

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