posted on Jul, 10 2009 @ 10:01 AM
Good discussion here and a tricky topic.
I won't say Alex is right or wrong, but I can acknowledge that the research around the HIV virus and its connection to AIDS is flaky and not of very
high quality. Not everyone who gets AIDS symptoms is discovered to have HIV and not everyone who has HIV gets AIDS symptoms. In addition, the people
who die of "AIDS related" diseases tend to die of the same diseases they would normally die of given their various risks groups. Noone has shown an
unexplainable white blood cell drop in anything I have ever read. In every case the infected is doing *some* sort of activity that causes their
immune system to be comprimised already.
In addition, the guy who linked AIDS to HIV was already trying to link HIV to cancer, so he could be accused of trying to save his career in a sense.
HIV is not a new virus according to standard virology models. In fact, HIV is following the infection pattern of a rather old virus (meaning it is
not spreading dramatically in an exponential pattern reaching a point where a sizable chunk of the population have immunity). It infects about the
same amount of people every year (approx 1 Million, I think, although I can't remember the reference paper I saw that on... prolly WHO or NIH)
Course, what I find humorous is that people think that if HIV is found NOT to cause AIDS and is actually just a common virus that exists pretty much
everywhere, then we will all go back to reckless behavior and all get sick. You gotta remember that there is a LARGE amount of STDs out there, the
most common one being "pregnancy"
People will still use condoms and be careful.
Incidentally, the plague, as I recall, was a old virus that existed in livestock in China and mutated to infect humans. It slowly made it across
central asia on the back of caravans until it reached the densly populated areas of Western Europe. At that point, poor sanitation, rats, fleas,
etc., led to the dramatic surge in infections which eventually flattened as the balance point was reached in immunity levels. To this day, it still
exists, but it is not as common because we can artifically control the immunity in humans with vaccines.