How does HIV cause AIDS? Does the HIV mutate into AIDS?
HIV is the name of the virus (human immunodeficiency virus). AIDS is the syndrome caused by that virus (acquired immune deficiency syndrome). Before the full-blown constellation of symptoms indicative of AIDS, one who has the virus is known as HIV-positive. Most people who are HIV-positive eventually acquire diseases which people who have a normal immune system do not get (opportunistic diseases).
HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) is a virus. AIDS (Advanced ImmunoDeficiency Syndrome) is the condition it causes.
When a person is infected with HIV, they usually don’t know about it for a number of years, unless they get tested. (Some people have a flu-like illness within the first month, which goes away; they tend not to realize the cause.) Silently, the virus and the body’s immune system are having a major war of attrition, with the virus slowly wiping out certain cells that are critical to the body’s ability to fight off infections. Once the amount of these cells has fallen below a certain (very low) level, the person is officially declared to have AIDS, meaning that they’re probably unable to fight off most infections that wouldn’t harm most people with normal immune systems. Most people with AIDS die of opportunistic infections that their immune systems can’t handle, such as obscure forms of pneumonia or meningitis that are caused by germs that wouldn’t harm immunocompetent people.
The NIH has a good overview of HIV/AIDS here .
I’ll answer the second question first: No. HIV is Human Immunodeficiency Virus – an organism. AIDS is Acquired ImmuniDeficiency Syndrome – the disease caused by the HIV organism.
Nutshell answer to the first question: HIV causes AIDS by infecting a certain type of white blood cell called the T cell. Various kinds of T cells attack other cells in the body, both your own and “outsiders”. The cells that a T cell attacks are ones that do not display the correct markers on their surface. So T cells attack bacteria, fungi, cells that have become cancerous, cells that have been infected by other organisms, whatever. Without the correct cell-surface markers, these are all considered to be “outsiders” by the immune system.
When HIV infects a T cell, there are a two important things that happen:
- The T cell’s internal “machinery” gets hijacked to create new HIV particles
- The T cell cannot do its job of attacking foreign intruders or diseased cells
This results in the spread of the HIV particles through the immune system, which then cannot fight off other “opportunistic” infections. AIDS patients are more susceptible to not only the normal colds and flus you and I get, but they also face life-threatening health crises over infections by organisms a healthy immune system would defeat without the person even knowing they had a problem.
As to why you often see a distinction made between, “This person has HIV” and, “That person has AIDS”: It’s just sloppy shorthand language at work. The first means: “This person has tested positive for the presence of the antibodies to HIV but does not yet show any symptoms of the disease.” The second means: “That person is showing the symptoms of the AIDS disease process caused by the HIV virus.”
Does that help?
So a with HIV could “offically” have AIDS, seek treatment, and then not have AIDS?
Maybe I can help by referring you to The
Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy. This manual has what is probably the most-widely accepted standards for what a diagnosis means. Merck’s definition of AIDS is:
Translating:
AIDS is a sickness in the immune system where you get sick from a lot of other things on top of the HIV virus. You also get some odd forms of cancer, damage to your nervous system, and sick in other ways. AIDS is the worst expression of HIV infection, but HIV infection can take many forms.
This definition, and others like it, explicitly define AIDS in terms of the symptoms the disease expresses in the infected person.
Federal and state agencies have a variety of other definitions of AIDS which are used to determine benefits, disease reporting, etc. Insurance companies also have their own, but these are usually derived from Federal standards.
Under these standards, then, yes, a person can be diagnosed with AIDS, meet the standards for benefits or disability insurance or whatever, be treated, no longer express these symptoms, and be consider to no longer have AIDS.
The biological reality, however, is that the person is still infected with HIV. Magic Johnson, for example, has had blood tests that fail to show any HIV virus particles or antibodies. He is still infected and is not “cured”. There is, as of yet, no cure for HIV infection. Various combination drug regimens can cause the mitigation of symptoms and prevent the neurological effects and opportunistic infections. They cannot, so far as we know, completely eliminate the virus from the patient.
Is that what you are looking for?
To add to **paperbackwriter[/b['s post, people on the drug regimens who have no detectable levels of the virus in their blood have their viral levels shoot up if they go off the medications, meaning that they’re not cured. The levels of virus are being suppressed. Additionally, the virus mutates frequently within a person’s body, meaning that over time, people become resistant to one set of drugs and need to switch to another, then another, and so on. No treatment thus far has ever permanantly cured anyone of HIV. (These people tend to have normal levels of immune cells, and thus don’t have AIDS anymore, but would develop it again if they ever went off the drugs.)
Every once in awhile, you hear of someone who comes out to say that HIV does not cause AIDS. A few years ago some leader in Africa came out with a statement to that effect, and as should be expected, set off a shitstorm.
AFAIK, the link between HIV and AIDS is quite well established. When people claim otherwise, what do they think causes AIDS? What do they think HIV does? And what do they think of the fact that everyone with AIDS just happens to also have HIV? Or do they have some ulterior motive to say so (knowing that it is false), and if so what is that ulterior motive?
The African leader you are referring to is probably Thabo Mbeki, the President of South Africa. Do not judge President Mbeki too harshly. He has a nearly impossible situation to deal with. South Africa has a population of about 43 million with an AIDS rate of about 20%. There are an estimated 5-8.5 million HIV/AIDS patients, in a country where the per capita income is $9,400.00 a year and literally half the population is below the poverty line. If the average yearly cost of the “AIDS cocktail” is $9 - $12,000.00, the yearly cost of treatment for South Africa is $45 - 102 billion. The entire national GDP is only $412 billion.
In other words, President Mbeki is faced with an insoluable problem. I an interview with the BBC, he said:
Note: That website is highly biased, and questionable, on the HIV/AIDS issue. But it’s the only one that I could find the quote on
With this kind of crisis, it is not suprising that Mbeki listened to the fringe “Reappraising AIDS” camp. In a desperate situation, he listened to a group that offered an easy way out.
He never stopped the work of the Health Ministry, and he never told patients to throw their medicines (if they had any) away, like some of the fringe have. South Africa hosted the 2000 World AIDS Conference, and his government was represented when the conference issued a statement strongly affirming that AIDS is caused by HIV.
The SA government has also backed away from Mbeki’s earlier statments. Instead, they now question whether SA can provide Western-style drug regimens for all its infected citizens. I think it’s clear they can’t.
I know South Africa has a dire AIDS problem (although not the worst on the continent, I think), but why would that encourage Mbeki to listen to a fringe group that thinks HIV doesn’t cause AIDS? Specifically,
-
Who is this group? HIV deniers? Is it an organized group? What are their backgrounds?
-
Why don’t they believe HIV causes AIDS?
-
What do they think causes AIDS? What do they think HIV does? How do they explain the correlation between the two?
-
What is the easy way out they are suggesting? Saying HIV doesn’t cause AIDS means, essentially, our research hasn’t gotten us anywhere, and presumabley that the “AIDS coctail” doesn’t work. How is removing a (although essentially unaffordable) treatment option an easy way out?
It’s primarily (or at least, he’s the most famous), Dr. Peter Deusberg, a professor of molecular biology at Berkley.
Deusberg argues that “AIDS” is really just a collection of already known diseases…Karposi’s Sarcoma, pneumocystic pneumonia, etc. When somebody has the disease without HIV, we just call it the disease. When somebody has the disease with HIV, we call it AIDS.
He’s not sure what causes the immune suppression, but he suspects it’s drug abuse.
Anyway, that’s his argument.
Because, as it stands now, scientists and doctors are telling him his country is going to turn into a flaming wreck, a tiny corner of hell, or the world’s largest open-air hospice, depending on your viewpoint. Deep down, I suspect he realizes he’s chasing a forlorn hope. But after all, its the only thing he can do. The “alerternative treatment gurus” may be sadly mistaken, but they offer him some slim hope, and he can at leaast take that to his people.
Because accepting the mainstream means he has to turn aorund and tell South Africans, “Most of you are going to die, painfully and horribly, and there isn’t a damned thing I can do about it.” Not many people can stand there and say that.
I think the smiling one nailed it. Already the Health Ministry has had to admit to not being ably to cope with the epidemic:
Because some on the fringe believe that anti-retrovirals, which are part of the “AIDS Cocktail” regimens, are the actual cause of AIDS, not a treatment. The underlying “real” problem is nutritional, or a mineral deficiency, or a lack of a balanced aura, or some other nonsense. They offer the standard palliatives: you can cure AIDS with these herbs, or that diet, or the other shark cartilige. Furthermore, the American Drug Companies are Supressing The Evidence because they don’t want you to know The Truth! Free your mind! If they were right, then Mbeki could offer better hope to his people.
I might have to dial back my earlier comments that the SA government has moved away from these reappraising AIDS elements. In fact, one of the prominent ones was appointed in March to a government panel:
In today’s news:
To me, the most interesting thing Duesberg says is that there is not one single study that definitively shows that being infected with HIV and nothing else will cause someone to have AIDS.
Rather, Duesberg believes that people just started saying “HIV causes AIDS,” and they cite to other people saying “HIV causes AIDS,” so there’s no “first source” that absolutely proves this.
Also, the efforts to fully and finally determine whether HIV causes AIDS in humans* are hampered by the fact that it’s really impossible to do a study on this with a control group (people with HIV that don’t take the AIDS cocktail) and a test group (people with HIV that do take the AIDS cocktail).
First, know that Duesberg thinks that we call AIDS is really simply the combination of two unrelated events: (1) a disease that a person gets after having his immune system hurt by long-term drug use and (2) HIV infection in the blood. In other words, if someone gets one of the “AIDS diseases” and doesn’t have HIV in their blood, then they don’t have AIDS; if they do, then they do. By the way, Duesberg believes that the AIDS cocktail people with HIV take is one of the types of drugs that hurt the immune system with long-term use.
Now, the problems: (1) You can’t get people to answer truthfully about the drugs they are taking (in the non-AIDS cocktail taking group) or not taking (i.e., the AIDS cocktail taking group may not be sticking to their meds, which I understand is hard to do because of the quantity of them and the frequency with which they must be taken); (2) many scientists would think it was unethical to essentially let people choose to die by not taking the AIDS cocktail, even if they agree to do so fully knowing what the “establishment” (for lack of a better word) believes to be the truth.
So, anyone wanna take a stab at finding the first source for the statement “HIV causes AIDS”? You’ve gotta find a source that quotes a study (or performs a study), not a source that quotes another statement that “HIV causes AIDS.”
By the way, I find Duesberg’s argument interesting and I don’t think that it’s completely absurd, but I’m also not a full supporter of his or anything like that. Rather, I realize that I’m not equipped to decide the issue myself, and I thank god that I’m not in a position to have to decide the issue for myself.
*Duesberg says that no study of monkeys infected with HIV has ever shown that a monkey later developed AIDS. Others have countered this point by saying that monkeys are immune to HIV.
On another note (while I’m playing Duesberg supporter here):
Well, I think you should separate out (1) those that say HIV does not cause AIDS from (2) those that say herbs or shark cartilege or whatever will cure AIDS. Both groups are making very very different claims that should be evaluated differently, and those in the first group are not necessarily in the second; also, it seems like those in the second group have an incentive to not be in the first.
[I’m really having trouble posting this, I apologize if it appears multiple times.]
To me, the most interesting thing Duesberg says is that there is not one single study that definitively shows that being infected with HIV and nothing else will cause someone to have AIDS.
Rather, Duesberg believes that people just started saying “HIV causes AIDS,” and they cite to other people saying “HIV causes AIDS,” so there’s no “first source” that absolutely proves this.
Also, the efforts to fully and finally determine whether HIV causes AIDS in humans* are hampered by the fact that it’s really impossible to do a study on this with a control group (people with HIV that don’t take the AIDS cocktail) and a test group (people with HIV that do take the AIDS cocktail).
First, know that Duesberg thinks that we call AIDS is really simply the combination of two unrelated events: (1) a disease that a person gets after having his immune system hurt by long-term drug use and (2) HIV infection in the blood. In other words, if someone gets one of the “AIDS diseases” and doesn’t have HIV in their blood, then they don’t have AIDS; if they do, then they do. By the way, Duesberg believes that the AIDS cocktail people with HIV take is one of the types of drugs that hurt the immune system with long-term use.
Now, the problems: (1) You can’t get people to answer truthfully about the drugs they are taking (in the non-AIDS cocktail taking group) or not taking (i.e., the AIDS cocktail taking group may not be sticking to their meds, which I understand is hard to do because of the quantity of them and the frequency with which they must be taken); (2) many scientists would think it was unethical to essentially let people choose to die by not taking the AIDS cocktail, even if they agree to do so fully knowing what the “establishment” (for lack of a better word) believes to be the truth.
So, anyone wanna take a stab at finding the first source for the statement “HIV causes AIDS”? You’ve gotta find a source that quotes a study (or performs a study), not a source that quotes another statement that “HIV causes AIDS.”
By the way, I find Duesberg’s argument interesting and I don’t think that it’s completely absurd, but I’m also not a full supporter of his or anything like that. Rather, I realize that I’m not equipped to decide the issue myself, and I thank god that I’m not in a position to have to decide the issue for myself.
*Duesberg says that no study of monkeys infected with HIV has ever shown that a monkey later developed AIDS. Others have countered this point by saying that monkeys are immune to HIV.
On another note (while I’m playing Duesberg supporter here):
Well, I think you should separate out (1) those that say HIV does not cause AIDS from (2) those that say herbs or shark cartilege or whatever will cure AIDS. Both groups are making very very different claims that should be evaluated differently, and those in the first group are not necessarily in the second; also, it seems like those in the second group have an incentive to not be in the first.
[I’m really having trouble posting this, I apologize if it appears multiple times.]
The idea that AIDS is caused by drug use is ludicrous. How many of the multitudes of African children dying daily are hardcore heroin or cocaine addicts?
UnuMondo
I’m not going to get into a point-by-point rebuttal of Duesberg’s views or claims. Not because I thinnk they are beneath notice or anything, but simply because this:
is wrong.
Monkeys and other primates do not get HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) infections, they are infected by the closely-related SIV (Simian Immunodeficiency Virus). Inoculating a rhesus monkey with either isolated SIV or with the blood of a previously-infected monkey will cause the simian equivalent of AIDS.
In addition, persons who have been accidentally inoculated with the blood of AIDS patients have themselves developed AIDS. Take, for example, the Yale-New Haven Hospital resident who won a lawsuit against Yale:
[emphasis added]
Actually, Yale’s defense team specifically attempted to assert that the doctor had other, unspecified “risk factors”, but eventually dropped the claim. She is reported to be on anti-retroviral therapy, and has shown some ARC symptoms, but has not developed AIDS.
Furthermore, if Duesberg were correct, then the mother-child transmission of HIV would not cause AIDS in infants (it does), and giving those mothers AZT during pregnacy wouldn’t provide any protection to thos infants (it does).
I should further state that, if you look at it, Duesberg’s basic argument is a semantic game: AIDS without HIV isn’t diagnosed as AIDS, so AIDS doesn’t really exist. Essentially, he argues that by changing the definition, a group of unrelated diseases were suddenly lumped together under the moniker of AIDS.
Where this fails is that these “unrelated diseases” were considered rare to extremely rare until AIDS hit and made them common in HIV-positive populations. Kaposi’s sarcoma was a “zebra” in 1970, now it is a “horse”. The list of indicator diseases includes (among others)
Duesberg’s drug use explanation does not accomodate all these conditions. He is forced into ad-hockery to save his theory. Always a bad sign for the liklihood of an explanation.
I’m sorry, I owed TaxGuy a response to this:
Remembering that this is GQ and not GD or IMHO:
True enough. I did not mean to imply that Duesberg is a charlatan on the order of the super-coral calcium guy. I was attempting to draw out reasons why the alternative explanations, of whatever type, are attractive to President Mbeki and other government officials in response to glilly’s questions.
Dude, I think that on several occasions you’re saying that someone “has AIDS” when you really mean “is infected with HIV,” and Duesberg wouldn’t argue with you that the person in question is infected with HIV, he’d just argue with you about the implications of that.
Specifically:
This doesn’t disprove Duesberg’s claim that HIV does not cause AIDS. The lady got HIV and has yet to develop AIDS.
The fact that infants get infected with HIV from their mothers does not disprove Duesberg’s assertion that HIV does not cause AIDS. Also, I understand that AZT somehow lessens the number of HIV baddies in the blood (correct me if I’m wrong), so it’s perfectly reasonable that AZT would lessen the rate of mother-child HIV transmission, but this doesn’t say anything about whether HIV causes AIDS.
**
True, but Duesberg says mainstream science is playing the semantic game. Duesberg himself isn’t.
Yeah, I think Doozy has some explanation for this in his book, but I don’t remember it now. I think it has to do with how the long-term use of amyl and butyl nitrates and heroin and stuff is different than using other stuff.
Duesberg says that African AIDS and US AIDS are two totally different things and that his belief that HIV does not cause AIDS is limited to US AIDS. I don’t remember why.