Slashdot Mirror

It doesn't matter. They are all going to die of AIDS anyway.

All arguments and bigotry aside, if your pastor was correct then AIDs wouldn't be the problem it is today.

Looking at this map of AIDs infection per African country in 2001, you can see that some countries are closing in on having 40% of their population infected.

ahref=http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/afri ca/03/aids_debate/img/africa_epidemic/africa_2001_ 2.gifrel=url2html-20970http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/s hared/spl/hi/africa/03/aids_debate/img/africa_epid emic/africa_2001_2.gif>

Now, these figures are hard to estimate, but this site provides some figures on the number of people whom have experimented with same-sex partners http://www.avert.org/hsexu1.htm. Lets take 10% as a figure, for example - that's still a quarter of the number required to make your Pastor's comments anything but pure BS.

Just look at the stats: this disease is killing a huge number of people, the people who are among the poorest and least educated in the world. There are literally millions of kids who are born HIV infected. These kids right now have little chance of even reproducing. What life they do have is plagued by sickness.

As a Christian you should be the first to empathize and want to do something to help these people. You should be he first people cheering news articles such as this one. Unless of course the Trollish race got the philosophies of Hitler and JC muddled up..

When it comes down to it - HIV and AIDS are very easily preventable diseases. Anyone who takes proper minimal precautions will not get HIV or AIDS

Indeed, it appears to be the modern day McCarthyism! The whole concept to stopping whatever your country decides are children from experimenting with each other is ludicrous! Obviously, there's a problem with predatory adults (and sad to say usually males!), but to apply those same rules to 16 year olds is crazy!

Age of Consent by country (some examples from the page) :-
UK - 16
USA - up to 18 (differs by state!)
Spain - 13
Madagascar - 21

Spain seems low to me, but I guess I am just used to the UK's 16. 18 seems high, and who'd want to grow up in Madagascar!

Maybe the issue is just when there's a large age range between the (otherwise) consenting parties? There was a case recently in the UK of a substitute teacher who the school governers discovered had a previous sex offence with a 15 year old when he was 30-something. A big to-do in the papers (Daily Mail!) about it. He lost his job - probably never worked again as a teacher, which is all well and good you might say - serves him right! Turns out, they married a year or so later and are still married now! Perhaps he really did love her?

Rules are (usually) good, but the blanket application of rules will pretty much ALWAYS come across cases where the rules should be flexible or there will be injustices.

If these childporn hackers are looking for PCs why don't the authorities setup some honey-trap PCs without firewalls etc, and catch the people who use them - spammers, pornographers, whatever! Surely that would be the sensible thing. The pornographers are seeding (potentially!) innocent people's PCs with illegal pictures to try and grey the concept of guilt, why not fight back with honey-trap PCs so the hackers have a grey area to ponder on about whether this really is a safe PC for them to take over!

They do have abstinence ONLY education...and wow, it's still spreading. Maybe you should speak to the US government about getting off thier religious high horse and adopting a more realistic approach to halting the spread of AIDS, ie condoms.

http://www.om.org/headlines/view.jsp?id=6333

Nevertheless, moral attitudes are being allowed to dictate the practicalities of AIDS education, especially in the USA. Human Rights Watch argues that this form of education actively opposes basic human rights. http://www.avert.org/aidseducation.htm

http://www.guardian.co.uk/christmasappeal2005/stor y/0,16796,1654865,00.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ne ws/2005/04/01/waids01.xml

I'm sure we can demand they "stop fucking" when all the rest of us decide to. Just because you MIGHT get hit by a car backing out of the driveway doesn't stop you from going to the movies...

Good point. I've been reading about some relief groups that are handing out condoms to women whose husbands work in diamond mines for months at a time just so they won't spread AIDS to them when they get back. There is almost no education in South Africa and the government hasn't done much about it either. Combine that with extreme poverty and the West exploiting everyone they can to save a few bucks and you've got the epidemic. Here's a few articles. These are also a year or two old and things have gotten worse. Also, an article with the quote from the parent poster.

And since most people worldwide with HIV are druggies, (not that there's anything wrong with druggies... I have to remember where I'm posting) I bet a lot die from drug overdoses.

Reference?

O-kay Look under bullets 1 - 4(which support the conclusion the pure HIV culture has caused AIDS in laboratory workers(i.e. humans) which is actually a stronger case than animals.

Duesberg, in fact, doesn't argue that at all. You're just so horribly confused here I don't even know what to say. Actually, Duesberg has probably offered the strongest arguments *against* the position you impute to him here of anyone involved.

Actually, he does argue that Koch's criteria have not been fulfilled, which is what I said he had argued against.

OK, you've got a number of people with severely degraded immune systems. They're a homosexuals, part of a 'scene' that involves unprotected sex with many partners (and you can put that 'many' in capital letters and use the blink tab, it was several people a night, every night) as well as heavy hard drug use. You can't think of a single hypothesis to explain this besides an infectious agent? Please.

I can think of lots of hypotheses but the fact remains that a simple hypothesis(the infective agent is HIV) is the most simple, most accurate, most backed-up hypothesis there is.

If your only answer is "drug use" you have a very weak argument. There are very very many cases of people who are not drug-users and who do not engage in promiscuous sex developing AIDS from exposure to HIV through unprotected sex or transfusions. Read the book "Borrowed Time" for instance. There are also very very many cases of heavy drug-users who do not end up with AIDS and are also, incidentally, HIV negative. Asserting that all gay people who develop AIDS are also hard drug users verges on statistically unfounded prejudice , the kind that the Reagan administration used to deny any obligation to help them.

Nor is there any logical reason to deny that there may be different causes for different cases.

Then the cases not caused by HIV but by other immune deficiency syndrome are not AIDS. I suggest you read this. Look under the justification for the fulfillment of Koch Rule 1. Scientists discovered that a small number of people having a clinical diagnosis of AIDS-like disease actually had a different disorder. Also look at the surveillance statistics.

The immune system is a complex system, and it's hardly inconceivable that it might break down for a number of reasons.

It does break down for a nubmer of reasons. Those are separate illnesses. The most coherent, simple, and productive explanation is that the constellation and development of AIDS-related illnesses and this kind of immune deficiency are caused by HIV, not any other cause. The simplest answer is usually the right one, as a guiding principle. IN this case, we have a simple answer and the data supports this answer. The fact it is complex points to the idea that one source capable of affecting it in its entirety is responsible - otherwise we have to assume that many different forces are responsible, an idea that on its face and statistically is untenable and violates Occam's razor.

As to Duesbergs lack of results, results require experiments, experiments require money, and the day he opened his mouth and questioned Gallos claims his money has been cut off. And THAT is what we should all be outraged about. Duesberg has submitted countless grant proposals with good research designs that would have settled the issues he raises, one way or the other, with good solid data. Up until he opened his mouth on this issue, he was a top rank grant writer, and he's done a lot of first class science. But now all he can do is write, because experiments take money, and no one is willing to fund experiments that might prove the paradigm

AIDS is destroying Africa and devastating other countries as well. Even in the richest nations such as the United States AIDS is a huge public health problem.

Money spent on AIDS research is money well spent. AIDS drugs (from AIDS research) have done much to help people living with HIV continue to live normal or less-painful lives for many years. Drugs also have dramatically cut the transmission rate at birth (mother-child).

Africa in particular has been damaged in terms of economics, stability, and security by the AIDS epidemic. Here is a site with AIDS rates in the adult population in Africa. Notice that for 15-49 year olds the sub-Sahara infection rate is estimated at 8.4%! Some countries have infection rates of over 20% such as Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Life expectancy at birth in some countries has dropped below 40 years!

A major reason other countries do not now have such high infection rates is large, expensive national programs have been established to prevent the spread of AIDS. Here is some information about the Caribbean where some nations have managed to dramatically reduce HIV transmission rates by the use of new drugs. Cuba, which has a large public health apparatus, is notable in its success against HIV/AIDS.

Someone was kind enough to make up a website that has this sort of information available...

Age of Consent

Hey, don't look at me like that! I needed the info for a report in psych class! I may be a pervert, but not THAT kind of pervert!

No, their motive is to try to reduce the larger social problem of out of wedlock births. Children who grow up in single parent homes are at a great disadvantage in any society. You are the one spreading fear by suggesting a special interest group conspiracy is keeping an effective vaccine from being approved.

Do you think they would want to deprive a vaccine from the millions infected with HIV in Africa? Pretty wacky.

Stephen Lewis, the UN secretary general's special envoy for HIV/Aids in Africa, said US cuts in funding for condoms and an emphasis on promoting abstinence had contributed to a shortage of condoms in Uganda, one of the few African countries which has succeeded in reducing its infection rate...
Meanwhile, religious groups that oppose condom use are receiving an increased share of funding, the pressure group says. "Religious fundamentalists, some financially supported by the US government and the office of the first lady, Janet Museveni, have become prominent in attacking condoms and those who distribute them," Change's report said.

I know exactly what you mean. Bascially the law was made because most girls less than the age of consent in a jurisdiction are susceptable to pressuring by older men. It is assumed that they don't have the maturity to actually consent to an act. Now, of course, some 15 year-olds do have such maturity, some don't. The law just places a hard-coded age limit, even if that means that some 17 year-olds* might have the capacity to consent, many don't. If there wasn't a hard cutoff, then the courts would have to determine each case seperately.

Many things are this way. Some teenagers can use alcohol responsibily. Some middle-aged adults can't. All the same, the cutoff in all 50 of the USA is 21.

*In the US, the age of consent is set by the state. List of countries' age of consent

Okay. I'm a skeptic most of the time but I don't buy the perth group's basic arguments. I haven't read through their entire document, but I smell a rat.

It's not "entire document" but rather "all of their documents". Plural. And yes, it is difficult reading.

AIDS obviously does exist, and if HIV doesn't cause it what does?

AIDS is defined as "HIV plus one of many other illnesses, all of which can exist in the absense of HIV". All of the "AIDS-associated" illnesses existed before AIDS and before the HIV/AIDS theory. If HIV doesn't cause it, then perhaps it is one of the many, many causes which typically cause the AIDS-associated illnesses. This is an answer that humans don't like to hear: the solution to this problem might NOT be a single pathogen. It might be many unrelated causes.

This is not the first time this has happened. Scientists used to believe headstrong that a pathogen caused pellagra. Lots of people died unnecessarily because of that belief.

And If hiv doesn't exist, what is this: http://www.avert.org/virus.htm ??

If HIV does not exist, then the data on that page is creative fiction. Everyone can repeat the AIDS dogma, but it doesn't answer tough questions that HIV/AIDS proponents don't like to answer. If you scroll down on that page, you'll see a link that reads, "evidence that HIV causes AIDS". (Interesting that they would need to include this.) Click on it and go to the next page. Halfway down the next page they mention Koch's postulates and then make this extraordinary statement: "Even Koch recognized that in some cases not all of his conditions could be met, so other evidence should also be considered. This is particularly true when the germ is a virus rather than a bacterium. Modern scientists are willing to consider a wide range of evidence."

The reason why that statement is extraordinary is because the HIV/AIDS heretics have long claimed that the HIV/AIDS theory did not fulfill Koch's postulates, and the orthodoxy has countered, "Yes, it does!" The writers of this web page acutally admit that HIV does NOT fulfill Koch's postulates. Instead, they claim that Koch's postulates are irrelevant.

Reading that page is difficult because the page relies on the reader's ignorance of terms such as "isolation" to make its points. The page claims, "Researchers have been able to isolate and culture HIV from most AIDS patients whom they have examined". To "isolate" means to remove everything that is not-X from a melange of X and other stuff, and the way that it is done with retroviruses is through a cetrifuge with bands of increasingly dense sucrose. It's well-known that retroviruses band at 1.16 g/mL density.

No one has done this with HIV. It's likely that when the writers say "isolate" they're acutally referring to something quite different that does not actually isolate anything. HIV/AIDS researchers have played this trick many times. After all, it's what they're paid to do. No one outside of the HIV/AIDS orthodoxy gets funded.

I could go on for hours about problems with their arguement, but I suspect they have some motive for believing what they say other than the facts presented.

I, too, can go on for hours about this subject. It is deep, complex, and not for the faint-of-heart. And I believe that I can convince you that there are unfixable flaws in the HIV/AIDS theory if you are willing to accept that you might be wrong and are patient enough to hear the evidence. I also believe that you might another motivation for defending the HIV/AIDS theory. What is it that you feel you must defend here? Scientific integrity? The honor of the medical field? The pride of the journalists? Lots of "lay people" get really, REALLY angry when HIV/AIDS is questioned, and I am really curious about that anger. I certainly understand the anger of someone who's on the AIDS dole. Yours is more puzzling to me.

Okay. I'm a skeptic most of the time but I don't buy the perth group's basic arguments. I haven't read through their entire document, but I smell a rat. AIDS obviously does exist, and if HIV doesn't cause it what does? Cellular Redox? That's an obsurd statement. If it was cellular redox, why is there no diagnosed cases of HIV/AIDS in people that have never had any type of blood mixing, or sex with another person?

And If hiv doesn't exist, what is this: http://www.avert.org/virus.htm ??

I could go on for hours about problems with their arguement, but I suspect they have some motive for believing what they say other than the facts presented.

Funny, but a nit-pick, if I may...

* At least 18 - 5 = 13 years of training required by U.S. law.

take a look a this: http://www.avert.org/aofconsent.htm

the age of consent in the US differs from state to state, 18 in (quick count) only 13 states (most 16, 17)

and the US State with the lowest AoC goes to... (drumroll)

South Carolina @ 14!

They should adopt "Lowest age of consent law in the union!" as their new state motto and put it on license plates.

How many peer reviewed journals are cited above? ZERO!
Here's an easy to read summary of the real evidence: http://www.avert.org/evidence.htm
And a more detailed summary: http://www.niaid.nih.gov/factsheets/evidhiv.htm

Here are some of the proven, reviewed, science backed theories, quoted from the NIH site above:

"AIDS and HIV infection are invariably linked in time, place and population group."

"Many studies agree that only a single factor, HIV, predicts whether a person will develop AIDS."

"HIV can be detected in virtually everyone with AIDS."

"Newborn infants have no behavioral risk factors for AIDS, yet many children born to HIV-infected mothers have developed AIDS and died."

"The HIV-infected twin develops AIDS while the uninfected twin does not."

These are peer reviewed scientific theories. Anyone can cast doubt on them, but to do so with such little evidence is irresponsible, especially considering the gravity of the disease. No serious journal proposes that AIDS is not caused by HIV.

Well, the spanish flu pandemic did kill more people than world war 2 and AIDS beats just about any other war besides the big one.

I've got to disagree with those numbers.
Asian Flu deaths (This one got my grandmother in '57.)
Spanish Flu deaths
AIDS/HIV deaths
Deaths in Major Wars
Deaths in Medium Wars

As you can see from those reasonably well-documented pages, deaths from major wars and man-made famines/genocides account for more deaths than major disease outbreaks by a substantial amount. If you factor in typhoid, dysentary, pneumonia, polio, and cholera, then compare those to the rest of the conflicts listed above, my guess is that man still comes out ahead. Yay us.

"...killing hundreds of thousands of people every year..."

Try over three million per year or >250,000 per month. And 95% of the burden is on developing countries.

See World AIDS & HIV Statistics for stats.

Genocide is taking affirmative actions to cause another race's end. Unless you're arguing a conspiracy theory the West created HIV to kill all the Africans, this isn't genocide.

Also, the estimated number of people in Africa with HIV is 25 million. While a staggeringly huge number, it's not "hundreds of millions".

I don't want to see millions of people die slow, horrible deaths, but it's not like I'm killing them. A virus is.

Perhaps he's one of those people that assumes that everyone on the internet but him is an evil monster. Scary internet people.

FYI: I remember reading on BBC News (a few years ago) that there are around 50000 reported cases of women being raped in South Africa each year. I might not have the exact figure but it was definitely that order of magnitude.

South Africa has quite a problem with HIV (the South African Department of Health Study estimates that 29.5% of pregnant women were living with HIV in 2004 according to this site).

It could be fairly likely that rape cases provided a non-negligible contribution to the spread of HIV, at least in SA.

That the proportion of incidence of HIV/AIDS to total population is a low one(about 39.4 million infected(1) in a population of about 6.4 billion(2) for about .6 infected people per 100) means that any random person has a rather low risk of contracting HIV in the next, say, ten years. Statistically, _nobody_ catches AIDS for any reason, except for a few anomalies. Certainly it's easy to ignore AIDS cases caused by a subset of possible causes in a relatively unaffected subset of all people, because _every_ case of AIDS in the USA is a statistical anomaly.

Unfortunately, in the real life you speak of nobody is 6/1000ths HIV+. It's easy to hide information using statistics; with the 6/1000ths number one might not expect for whole countries to have an adult HIV/AIDS prevalence rate of 21.3%(3) One might not even expect 640,000 children 15 and under to have been newly infected with HIV in 2004(4).

Of course AIDS isn't going to kill us all, at least not until it somehow manages to become transmissible by mosquito bite. But to say that "normal" people who "take a modicum of precaution" don't catch AIDS except for a few anomalies is willingness to misleadingly ignore those life has shat on, and because of that ignorance claim those covered shit don't exist.

Consider:

Correctional institutions in the USA have an HIV/AIDS rate five to ten times higher than that of the general population(5).

In 1998, 11.5 million inmates were released from jails and prisons(6), re-entering the "normal" population and bringing with them any diseases contracted while imprisoned.

It is estimated that more than 425,000 inmates in the USA are raped every year, although accurate numbers are notoriously difficult or impossible to come by(7)

True monogamy is really very uncommon, with most sexually active people in the USA going through a period of serial monogamy, wherein they may have a great number of sexual partners, allowing diseases such as AIDS to be spread unwittingly even by those held in trust.

(1)http://www.avert.org/worldstats.htm
(2)http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/ra nkorder/2119rank.html
(3)http://www.unaids.org/en/geographical+area/by+c ountry/namibia.asp
(4)http://www.avert.org/worldstats.htm
(5)http://www.spr.org/en/factsheetdisease.html
(6)Ibid.
(7)http://www.menweb.org/throop/abuse/usa-prison.h tml

That the proportion of incidence of HIV/AIDS to total population is a low one(about 39.4 million infected(1) in a population of about 6.4 billion(2) for about .6 infected people per 100) means that any random person has a rather low risk of contracting HIV in the next, say, ten years. Statistically, _nobody_ catches AIDS for any reason, except for a few anomalies. Certainly it's easy to ignore AIDS cases caused by a subset of possible causes in a relatively unaffected subset of all people, because _every_ case of AIDS in the USA is a statistical anomaly.

Unfortunately, in the real life you speak of nobody is 6/1000ths HIV+. It's easy to hide information using statistics; with the 6/1000ths number one might not expect for whole countries to have an adult HIV/AIDS prevalence rate of 21.3%(3) One might not even expect 640,000 children 15 and under to have been newly infected with HIV in 2004(4).

Of course AIDS isn't going to kill us all, at least not until it somehow manages to become transmissible by mosquito bite. But to say that "normal" people who "take a modicum of precaution" don't catch AIDS except for a few anomalies is willingness to misleadingly ignore those life has shat on, and because of that ignorance claim those covered shit don't exist.

Consider:

Correctional institutions in the USA have an HIV/AIDS rate five to ten times higher than that of the general population(5).

In 1998, 11.5 million inmates were released from jails and prisons(6), re-entering the "normal" population and bringing with them any diseases contracted while imprisoned.

It is estimated that more than 425,000 inmates in the USA are raped every year, although accurate numbers are notoriously difficult or impossible to come by(7)

True monogamy is really very uncommon, with most sexually active people in the USA going through a period of serial monogamy, wherein they may have a great number of sexual partners, allowing diseases such as AIDS to be spread unwittingly even by those held in trust.

(1)http://www.avert.org/worldstats.htm
(2)http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/ra nkorder/2119rank.html
(3)http://www.unaids.org/en/geographical+area/by+c ountry/namibia.asp
(4)http://www.avert.org/worldstats.htm
(5)http://www.spr.org/en/factsheetdisease.html
(6)Ibid.
(7)http://www.menweb.org/throop/abuse/usa-prison.h tml

If they're so smart, they better figure out how to use a damned condom

Three of the earliest known instances of HIV infection are as follows:

1. A plasma sample taken in 1959 from an adult male living in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo
2. HIV found in tissue samples from an American teenager who died in St. Louis in 1969.
3. HIV found in tissue samples from a Norwegian sailor who died around 1976.

Analysis in 1998 of the plasma sample from 1959 was interpreted5 as suggesting that HIV-1 was introduced into humans around the 1940s or the early 1950s, which was earlier than had previously been suggested. Other scientists have suggested that it could have been even longer, perhaps around 100 years or more ago.

Secondly, HIV can (theoretically) be passed on through kissing, but since saliva is perhaps the bodily fluid with the lowest incidence of HIV, one would have to drink vast quantities of it to ensure a successful transfer. It would only seem to be within the realm of feasibility if both you and your partner had cuts or sores in your mouth, but again this is one of the more unlikely ways to catch HIV. I believe there has only been one confirmed case of infection through mouth to mouth contact.

Where should i read up more? You failed to mention some recommended sources of information. In their absence, i was forced to do my own research. These sites are quite useful.

Bein attracted to children ISN'T a problem. The girl next door to me is 14 and VERY hot (I'm in the UK she's legal in two years).

Attraction to children might be a problem, but we need to be clear about our terms: a fourteen-year-old may be a child in the eyes of the law but as far as our primate brain is concerned she is a woman, ready to reproduce, and it is very, very normal for a heterosexual male of any age to be attracted to her. Acting on that attraction may be illegal or inapproprite in other ways, but the attraction itself is normal and should not be worrisome.

A persistent sexual attraction specifically to pre-pubescent children is the clinical definition of pedophilia and persons with such feelings should seek counseling ASAP.

How about several million dead africans due to drug company patents? http://www.avert.org/drugtreatment.htm

The federal government is alredy spending $3 billion per year on AIDS research. That does not include all of the private investment into AIDS research. The company who comes up with the cure stands to profit many billions of dollars. The research group who succeeds may not get a billion dollars but they will certainly get a lot.

People are constantly picking on NASA by talking about how much good the money could be spent elsewhere, (insert worthy cause here) but they don't realize how much of NASA's money goes to worthy research. The list of inventions that have been spawned from NASA projects is quite amazing.

I realize that your sheltered existence makes it easy for you to dismiss the majority of the millions who suffer from HIV as irresponsible, but I'm here to tell you, it's not always so, nor do I find that most cases (at least that I know of through the support groups) are caused by irresponsibility.

If you assume that all heterosexual contact infections were 'responsible', and then add in blood transfusions, coagulation disorders and other 'responsible' actions, then you still end up accounting for under 20% of infections in the US.

HIV/AIDS is terrible, and I certianly don't want to discount the lives that are affected by it.

However, claiming that the majority of infections, at least in the US, are not preventable is far more dangerous than saying that "Chalking a majority of infections to irresponsibility is facile and dangerous."

The caveat 'at least in the US' applies because in other countries, especially the African nations, the culture of male dominance actually speeds the infection. A large percentage of those infected perhaps did not have the opportunity to act responsibly.

I understand how to protect my computer from virus and other attacks, and therefore I have not had an infection on any of my computers for over a decade.

I understand how to protect myself from sexually and body fluid transmitted diseases, and therefore I am not HIV/AIDS positive.

I don't claim that I am immune - far from it - but my chances are greatly reduced. Perhaps equal to your chances prior to your infection.

I claim that if everyone chose to avoid placing themselves in risky situations, whether it be visiting a warez site and catching a virus, or getting drunk at a party and sleeping with a stranger, then the incidence would be drastically reduced. If this was the case, then efforts could go into protecting 'innocent' sufferers of the disease who got it not by risky behavior, but through other's risky behavior.

What the parent is pointing out is that you are not only a minority being part of the 2% of Americans suffering with this disease, you are also a minority within the disease, being one of the few who got it without engaging in risky behavior.

I hope for a simple, cheap treatment and eventual cure for this virus and the disease that generally follows. Until then, I hope that people act responsibly - that is our current best, and only, effective defense.

I cannot possibly understand what you are going through, but I wish you the best of luck.

-Adam

But I think you'll find that in terms of percentage by class that are infected with HIV, the rich and poor share a similar proportion.

Whooooooooa, where, exactly, are you getting this total bullshit. I mean, it stinks just like your ass where you pulled it from. The largest majority of people with HIV is most certainly people below what the US determines as the Federal Poverty Level.

"If you can afford it" is not tacked onto "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

Think before you type, hmmm?

Uh huh... I live in Japan. Here we don't have "love hotels" all over the place. Neither do we have countless brothels disguised as "massage outlets". Furthermore, we don't have porn mags on the shelves of convenience and book stoors right out there with all the other mags without restrictions on who can see or buy them... Nope, it's all squeaky clean here. It's not like there's any increasing danger from the spread of HIV or anything either.

(read the "Changing epidemic" part specifically from the last link.)

claiming that the HIV virus, the virus that causes AIDS, is a virus that was manufactured in American laboratories between 1962 and 1978.

The US government's claim to invention may be invalidated by prior art. HIV was around before 1959 (though there is some dispute ).

If you look up the patent that supposedly proves that Gallo invented HIV, you will see that it is NOT a patent on HIV, it is a patent on a method of reproducing HIV extracted from humans and it was filed after public research on HIV. Reproducing a pathogen is an important part of conducting research, both as an amplifier for presence tests, to make large numbers of identical samples to experiment on, to allow the American Type Culture Collection to archive the virus and make copies of it, and to allow others to reproduce research. It is much better to copy one virus particle than try to extract lots of HIV, and only HIV, from blood. Now, whether patenting such a process rather than placing it in the public domain is assinine is another discussion.

All the Copyright notices by Zygote Media on many of the web sites that report this do not inspire confidence, either. "Media" in the name sure sounds more like a for-profit venture than an activist to me.

For a total of something like $1000, Boyd Graves will sell you copies of public domain government documents that supposedly support his claim. But given that he misrepresents a patent for reproducing HIV as a patent on HIV itself, your money will not be well spent. And if he sent the spams, you would be supporting a spammer.

There are many urban legends about man made HIV.

Which biological differences would make some people less susceptible to the alleged virus?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
For example, mutated ccR5 protiens on the surface of cells protects against AIDS because it prevents the virus from recognizing and infecting the cell. Other reasons will surely be found after research. Since the phenomena of some people being more resistant to disease is so common (indeed, a very close relative of HIV, SIV, can only infect primates even though their DNA is extremely similar to that of humans), the existence of long term non-progressors is very weak evidence. If you could prove why AIDS should be different from other viruses, in that it was not susceptible to genetic differences (more like a gun-shot to the head than the flu), then you'd have a more compelling argument.

I was talking about US AIDS cases. How do you know that all of the "AIDS victims" in the USA did not die of AZT poisioning?
>>>>>>>>>>>
Because people were dying of AIDS in the early 1980's, a decade before the introduction of AZT and other anti-AIDS drugs?

The "millions of people" dying of AIDS in Africa were *estimated* to have AIDS, not tested. How do you know that they are not dying of malnutrition?
>>>>>>>>>>>
Because studies do actually test people. I'll cite two studies from South Africa, which you can find here.In the first study, of 16,743 sexually active women at 396 locations, 24.5% were find to be infected. In the second study, of 8428 people in the general population, 11.4% were found to be infected. Moreover, my dad works in public health, and has done many projects in Africa. From what he's told me, AIDS is definately a real problem there, and many people are dying from it, without ever getting expensive drug treatments.

Actually, in sub Saharan Africa, at least, is more common among women then it is among men. (15 million women, 11 million men as of 2001). I'm not sure why this is, though male to female transmission may be more efficient than female to male transmission.

Persons aged between 15 and 45 are the most productive laborers. AIDS is most prevalent among persons in that age bracket (unlike other diseases, such as cholera and malaria, which are associated with higher mortality rates among the very young, and the aged.) In sub Saharan Africa, the incidence of AIDS is quite high, so AIDS-related debilitation and death does have a measurable negative effect on agricultural production.

HIV drugs can be used to stave off the disease, but the cost of drugs deplete funds that would ordinarily be spent on fuel and fertilizer.

The loss of strong laborers may tempt families to engage in unsustainable agriculture, as crop cycling and the like is less financially rewarding in the short term.

There may be other negative effects upon agricultural production as well.

I know, I shouldn't feed the trolls. But some people seriously have that sort of knee-jerk reaction: That is, they see someone say "it's a gay disease", and they throw up their arms and declare the person a bigot. Unfortunately, it's the way things are.

If you had looked at the statistics on the page I linked, you'd notice that, through June 2001, in the U.S., of the total 807074 people reported with AIDS or HIV, 368971 of those likely were exposed under the category "men who have sex with men". That's 45%. A quarter of that were exposed through heterosexual contact.

Now, as to the credibility of those statistics, on the same page:

These HIV figures include only those states with confidential HIV reporting
Source: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES

If you don't inject drugs and aren't a gay male, AIDS likely shouldn't be as big a worry as, say, hepatitis might be.

AIDS isn't as big of a deal as many other diseases in America. The biggest killer in the U.S. is still heart disease. In this country, it is largely a gay male's disease (woo hoo, that'll get me flamed), and even in that demographic it hasn't caused the kind of decimation it has in demographics like, oh, the whole of South Africa.

Like it or not, the U.S. remains extremely egocentric. This is Slashdot, not the BBC.

AIDS isn't as big of a deal as many other diseases in America. The biggest killer in the U.S. is still heart disease. In this country, it is largely a gay male's disease (woo hoo, that'll get me flamed), and even in that demographic it hasn't caused the kind of decimation it has in demographics like, oh, the whole of South Africa.

Like it or not, the U.S. remains extremely egocentric. This is Slashdot, not the BBC.

Do you work for a big pharm company?

No, and I have never had any sort of connection with any of them. I'm a programmer affiliated with the med school of a very large private university, doing computational biology (I was a molecular bio major). I do not work on anything remotely AIDS-related, nor does the group I'm in receive any AIDS-related funding, but quite a few other scientists here do.

(Actually, my university does make some money off AIDS therapies developed here too, but this pisses off a lot us anyway. It doesn't indicate ulterior motives, because like most universities they try to commercialize anything they can, and AIDS research is only a small part of that.)

even though you don't provide any evidence that Duesberg believes such a thing, so you could be making it up

It says so on that page you quoted, fairly close to the top- Duesberg tried to claim the award. This is one of the things that bugs me; the HIV-is-bogus lobby can't even agree on this. And you didn't read the page before posting it, either. Shame.

As for the genome, protein structures, etc., you could always do a Google search, but that would require an open mind. HIV-RT is (indirectly) of interest in my line of work, so I do actually know a little bit about it (and the people down the hall know quite a bit more). A few of the many, many structures are this, this,
or this, and you can find many more by simply going here and doing a search for "HIV" or "reverse transcriptase". The genomes of HIV1 and HIV2 can be found, like almost every other genome, at the NCBI here and here.

Yes, the nasty side-effects are obvious, but trying to cloud them with language such as "brute force attack on reverse transcription" only makes your argument more suspicious, particularly in light of the questions that you've failed to answer. What, exactly, are the side effects of AZT?

I don't see how that's clouding the language; you're making a big deal about the side effects but you don't appear to know much about pharmaceuticals or molecular biology. AZT is a nucleoside analogue chain terminator, meaning it replaces thymidine in nascent DNA chains but prevents further addition to the chain. I believe the problem is that it fucks with normal transcription too, and it was originally intended as an anticancer drug. I don't know anything about the actual external side effects, only the molecular ones, but I seem to recall it involves some sort of anemia. (Okay, other pages say it basically just makes you feel horribly ill.)

I'll agree AZT is a nasty drug. But you didn't answer my question: what about other therapies that do appear to be successful? Some of these can't be taken in combination with AZT, so you have to leave that out of your argument.

How do you explain it under your belief system, you know, the one that dictates that HIV==AIDS?

"Belief system"? Um, well, the evidence doesn't necessarily dictate anything- medical science isn't advanced enough. I would argue that "AIDS is (usually) cause by HIV", which is a good bit different, and I don't have an answer for what happened to those children. There are plenty of weird examples like that involving AIDS, but they don't mean existing hypotheses about the role of HIV are wrong, only that disease resistance and molecular biology are very complicated. And we knew that already. You can't use anecdotal evidence as proof of a broad generalization; it's just not statistically valid.

As a counter-example, how do you explain the 2.2 million Africans who died from AIDS last year, where they can't afford AZT and certainly aren't doing many poppers? And, for that matter, I'm not clear on how you can cite the children as an example when you believe they were misdiagnosed in the first place. Did they have HIV and not get AIDS- either because of weird biology (my argument) or HIV's harmlessness (Duesberg's argument)- or did they not have HIV in the first place? If the latter, does this mean everyone who's tested positive for HIV does not have any such virus in them?

So, the first problem here is that all you're able to do is nitpick. The second problem is that your hypotheses, to be correct, require that there be a vast conspiracy on the part of the news media, the medical establishment, and the pharmaceutical companies to fabricate AIDS so that GlaxoSmithKline can boost its revenues. It's one thing to claim that Gallo acted inappropriately, but to extend this to accuse a vast number of AIDS researchers of falsifying data is sort of absurd. You clearly haven't even bothered to do the most cursory sort of investigation, and you seem to have virtually no knowledge of biology beyond what you've read on the Virus Myth web page. And I'm a bit peeved that you keep accusing everyone of working for pharmaceutical companies- heck, the assholes didn't even read my resume when I sent it to them last spring.

Here's a challenge: read this from beginning to end and see if you understand it.

Hows this for a catastrophe? And some companies are unwilling to avert it to protect their precious IP. Oh wait- that's all happening in Africa, so it can't matter.

Somehow, I don't think it's the lack of a catastrophe that's the problem- I think its the general public's ignorance of the impact of IP laws that is.

Maybe next time you should check google before asking.

My misunderstanding of where you saw the irony.

Your point is well taken. The news media everywhere sucks in general. SciAm is one of the few somewhat newsy publications that doesn't suck like the general media does.

Fortunately, outbreaks of most of the really awful diseases are scarce currently. The biggest one now is HIV (AIDS), which has killed about 19 million people, and is well on its way to much larger numbers. There is no cure or immunization yet, and with the large number of different strains being discovered there probably won't be any soon.