Several years ago I had heard (not seen myself) that someone claiming AIDS was not caused by HIV appeared on Oprah. While there, he injected himself with blood taken from an AIDS patient (to prove his point)
I haven’t found anything on the internet and Snopes doesn’t show anything either.
Did I make this up? Did I hear a rumor that wasn’t true and Snopes never picked it up?
Does anyone have any information about this incident?
Dunno about Oprah, but there was a fairly prominent doctor who claimed that AIDS was not caused by HIV and infected himself deliberately in an attempt to prove it (NB: this strikes me as a highly irrational thing for any doctor to do, regardless of the strength of his convictions). IIRC, he died from some other cause (cancer or accident, I think) a short while after infecting himself, so that was the end of it.
FWIW I know a young lady who was attacked by a panhandler, who injected her with HIV-infected blood from a syringe (proven by tests on the syringe). She never developed HIV or AIDS. It’s been maybe 8 or 10 years now.
I know someone else whose sister, a nurse, was attacked by an HIV-infected prisoner who injected into her the blood sample she had just collected from him. This lady did die of AIDS a few years later.
Weird - both people that I know were exposed to AIDS were exposed by needle attacks - and it sounds like urban legends, but these are real people that I know!