The Great AIDS Hoax

[ydoaPs]

Everything you've ever heard about AIDS is a lie!

[bascule]

Heh, remember when Steven Segal went on Arsenio and claimed that the government created AIDS to attack the gay/black population? (I guess it's his brother's pet theory)

[ecoli]

that site's a bunch of crap, but there are more convincing sites out there that lend data showing that HIV isn't the cause of AIDS. (especially in the early days when the research on HIV wasn't very good).

[mooeypoo]

I'm trying to think what the HECK kind of reason would a person (or persons) have to discredit the most wreched horrible desease in the world, the desease science has been trying to find a cure to for half a century, and a desease that it's PREVENTION relies mostly on AWARENESS.

 

Unbelievable what kind of things people decide to invest their time in.

 

~moo

[ecoli]

I'm trying to think what the HECK kind of reason would a person (or persons) have to discredit the most wreched horrible desease in the world, the desease science has been trying to find a cure to for half a century, and a desease that it's PREVENTION relies mostly on AWARENESS.

 

Not discrediting the disease... obviously that exists. But, they are claiming that AIDS is not caused by HIV.

 

Here's an older paper of the subject: http://www.duesberg.com/papers/ch2.html

[Mokele]

Yeah, Duesberg, the guy who thinks AIDS is caused by drug use. The pushers must be working overtime if they've got all those fetuses shooting up already.

 

His opinion is as worthy of discussion as that of Behe. He's a crank.

 

Mokele

[mooeypoo]

The prevention of AIDS is relying mostly on awareness.. if people state that it is not coming from HIV, then the attempts to properly prevent it is discredited...

 

I just can't seem to find a reason for someone to do that.

 

~moo

[GutZ]

Heh, remember when Steven Segal went on Arsenio and claimed that the government created AIDS to attack the gay/black population? (I guess it's his brother's pet theory)

 

[steven Segal voice] "The government has once again decieved us. It's time to take some action." $ cutscene $*cocking of m16 with one hand and lighting a cigar with the other*

[ecoli]

I just can't seem to find a reason for someone to do that.

 

Because they legitamately think that HIV doesn't cause AIDs.

 

You must admit, the history of the research behind HIV and AIDS is rather sketchy. And Bob Gallo's half-asked discovery coming at a time when it made him nice and famous.

 

IIRC, a sample of HIV wasn't even isolated from human semen until recently, yet they claimed that HIV was transmitted through the semen back in the '80s/

[Mokele]

You can find conspiracies in anything, if you look hard enough.

 

What they think is irrelevant. What does the evidence say? So far as I'm aware, there's no credible evidence to support their position, not to mention the fact that their only proposed alternative is so laughable I can scarcely believe they voiced it at all.

 

I've read the objections he voices. They're weak at best; I've heard better from creationists, and similarly, all have been amply refuted by non-crackpot scientists.

 

Smart people can believe really stupid things, and this is a case in point.

 

Mokele

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

Smart people can believe really stupid things, and this is a case in point.

A great book... even has a chapter entitled "Why Smart People Believe Weird Things."

[raptor]

I was more interested in this theory:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPV_AIDS_hypothesis

[Dak]

whilst i'm not saying this about individual people who consider that HIV isn't/may not be the cause of AIDS, most of the people/sources that have been most prolific in spreading 'awareness' of the HIV 'myth' have been religous fundies. I guess they like having some 'evidence' that god is punishing sinners (read: fags, the sexually promiscuous, and drug users. possibly its a sin to be african aswell?)

 

I would think that the fact that HIV is used as a gene vector to infect white blood cells would lend significant weight to the claim that HIV infects white blood cells, as would the fact that its use as a CD4+ cell infector is avoided if possible, as the CD4+ cells tend to die, en mass, after gene vectoring that uses HIV.

 

I will say one thing tho: AIDS is aquired immunodeficiency syndrome, and a syndrome is just a collection of symptoms; as such, it need not be exclusively caused by one factor. look at Downs syndrome -- a collection of symptoms with, broadly speaking, one cause (something bizzare happening in a region of chromosome 23), and several things that create that condition (trisomy at chromosome 23, mutation of the genes on chromosome 23 etc).

 

its the same with AIDS -- the collection of symptoms are, basically, the aquisition of a non-functional adaptive immune system -- the broad cause is a crappification of the adaptive immune system -- things that make that condition true include: irradiation, immunosuppressants, Human-T-Lymphotrophic-Virus (look at early papers on HIV and you'll see it reffered to as HTLV-III), and anything else that massively suppresses or annhiolates white blood cells, espescially the ones involved in initiating/regulating the adaptive immune system (macrophages, helper-t-cells, or B-cells), which includes the CD4⁺-trophic(read: helper-t-cell and macrophage distroying) HIV.

 

so, yes, there are other causes of AIDS. the survivors of chernobyl had short-term AIDS. people with HTLV-I or HTLV-II have AIDS. people undergoing treatment for leukemia are intentionally given AIDS by being given immunosuppressants. but, mostly, people with AIDS have HIV.

 

unless the definition of AIDS includes HIV as etiologic agent, in which case i guess the above isn't true, but you know what i mean