I’ve heard this claim rather often, but haven’t really seen much proof. I probably wouldn’t understand the details of the proof anyway, but many skeptics have doubted the validity of the proof, and I would like to know the basics of just how certain scientists are, and why. Right now, I’d say I’m somewhere around 80-90% sure that HIV causes AIDS, but there’s still that 10-20% uncertainty. Obviously, I wouldn’t voluntarily infect myself with HIV, but I’m also a bit apprehensive about going on blind faith in the scientific establishment.
I’ve heard from sources that 100% of AIDs infectees are from HIV, and that’s the only way to get it, by being infected with HIV. But lately there’s been doubt. I think HIV doesn’t directly cause AIDs, but it “opens the door” in a way to allow the virus to kill, or whatever. And there are quite a few cases of HIV free of AIDs, which is my argument.
The scientists that don’t belive that HIV causes AIDS are in a very small minority. Peter Duesberg is the most outspoken on this minority and Cecil discusses him in the second half of his Is AIDS a manmade disease? column.
Gypsy: Tom, I don’t get you.
Tom Servo: Nobody does. I’m the wind, baby.
Huh?
Gypsy: Tom, I don’t get you.
Tom Servo: Nobody does. I’m the wind, baby.
The evidence that HIV causes AIDS: http://hivinsite.ucsf.edu/social/nih_reports/2098.232b.html
What I meant to say, in more clearer terms, apparently, was that HIV is the first step in getting AIDs. You hafta get HIV before AIDs, in otherwords, so unless you have HIV you’re pretty safe. Unless you contract both at the same time. Ehe…
From Luc Montagnier’s book, Virus: The Co-Discoverer of HIV Tracks Its Rampage and Charts Its Future, a section on Duesberg:
"I did not think, when I first began writing this book, that I would have to explain once again why AIDS is an infection, communicable disease caused by a retrovirus, HIV. What in 1983 was only a scientific hypothesis shared by ten or so people quickly became the conviction of tens of thousands of researchers, a conviction based on the accumulation of facts.
A few scientists, however, led by Peter Duesberg and Cary Mullis, persist in defending the indefensible – that AIDS is not an infectious disease but the result of aberrant behavior patterns, especially drug use.
…
The questions [Duesberg] raised at the time had already been asked by many – myself first among them – as early as 1983 to 1984; the accumulation of facts, however, had made it possible to answer them. As in a police investigation, it is more often the accumulation of evidence than an eyewitness report that enables one to identify the guilty party.
Duesberg et al. keep claiming that nobody has presented absolute proof that HIV causes AIDS. And who, of course, would ever voluntarily dare inject himself or someone else with HIV to see if a deadly disease occurred?
The arguments supporting the viral origin are, however, quite numerous. Cited here are those which seem to me the most solid:
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The syndrome is not an arbitrary aggregation of disparate illnesses but is instead biologically characterized by an overwhelming decling in T4 lymphocytes, accompanied by an extreme depression of the immune system. Thus we have seen the emergence of opportunistic infections and cancers which, though they may of course vary according to the relative prevalence of germs in a given geographic location and climate, are always the same ones: tuberculosis and cryptococcosis predomninantly in Africa and Asia, pneumocytosis and toxoplamosis in temperate regions.
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When a monkey is innoculated…with the simian virus SIV … a very similar illness occurs…
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Last but not least, antiretroviral treatments (including the very specific inhibitors of the HIV protease) revive the immune system at least partially and significantly decrease the onset of opportunistic infections and death. The effect of these treatments is particularly significant if they are given during the ‘silent’ period of infection, during which the virus keeps on actively replicating. To deny the role of the virus today would be to deny the evidence of the effectiveness of antiviral drugs. It would be a suicidal attitude for an infected person to assume.
How did Peter Duesberg and Cary Mullis ever come to this dead end? I do not question their good faith. I do, however, believe that, lacking a medical education, they did not take into account the complexity of this immunological disease of viral origin, and confused the cofactors (drugs, other infections) with the primary cause. They now seem to be prisoners of the sensationalization by the media, which has helped to immobilize their position. It would be a tribute to their courage and honor to abandon it, in the face of the overwhelming evidence."
(Incidentally, for those who have been around here a while and remember it, Cary Mullis is the guy who believes he was abducted by aliens in the form of glowing raccoons.)
Question for Jill, since it’s relative to the OP and she’s presumably reading this thread:
Elsewhere on the board you have said that people have died from AIDS – specifically, as opposed to from opportunistic infections that their AIDS prevented them from fighting. I was curious about what you meant by that, but did not have occasion to post and have now lost the thread (I think it was in the Cecil’s Columns thread that covered the subject). Would you explain a bit more on what you meant? I was under the impression that AIDS itself did not kill, but rather opened the door for the slightest exposure to most other pathogens to become fatal. Clearly you as an expert understand otherwise. What gives?