I stopped looking at this thread for a few days because I found it too depressing, perhaps, as gingernut suggests, I was suffering a sense-of-humour failure. I was also a bit ashamed of losing my temper with him, for which I'm sorry. Having seen so much AIDS and living in a country where our president's incredulity has caused and is causing so many avoidable deaths tends to make one a bit passionate.
"The disease exists. The question is: What's causing it? That's the crux of the matter."
This is what so exercised the minds of the public health workers in the early '80's when so many people suddenly began suffering from (and expiring from) opportunistic infections secondary to failure of their cellular immune systems. As I tried to explain, because of the devastating implications, many other causes apart from a transmissible agent were explored before this was accepted.
The epidemiology of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome points remorselessly towards a transmissible agent. The victims come from all countries and all different walks of life, they eat different foods, they live in different climates, the degree of environmental pollution around them varies wildly, they are well-fed or malnourished. The one common factor they all have is that they have come into intimate contact, sexually or otherwise, with body fluids from someone who already has, or subsequently goes on to develop this syndrome. These are facts that it is impossible to deny.
So logical deduction would suggest that whatever is causing this illness is a transmissible agent. And if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and walks like a duck then the chances are good that it IS a duck.
No other hypothesis, be it environmental toxins, food, soil, genetics, Coca-Cola or antibiotics even begins to fit the epidemiology as well as a transmissible agent. Thus most reasonable people would accept that the most likely cause IS a transmissible agent.
Very roughly, transmissible agents can be divided into bacteria, fungi, viruses and protozoa. Bacteria, fungi and protozoa are easy to find if you know where to look for them and the obvious place to look here would seem to be in body fluids. Despite intensive searches, no such bacterium, fungus or protozoan has been found.
That leaves viruses. So do we know of any viruses that selectively infect white blood cells, as the hepatitis virus infects liver cells? Yes we do, and quite a few. Among others, Mononucleosis (kissing disease, glandular fever)is caused by the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV)[discovered in 1964], which infects B cells (B-lymphocytes), producing a reactive lymphocytosis and the atypical T cells (T-lymphocytes).
To cut a long story short, eventually, by dint of much searching, a virus WAS identified that was only found in individuals suffering from this mysterious immunodeficiency. Cell-free filtrates from these people were able to infect and kill T-cell cultures in the lab. Cell-free filtrates from these people inadvertently given to previously healthy haemophiliacs by Factor VIII injections resulted in them developing the same immunodeficiency syndrome.
Thus it would seem reasonable to suppose that by killing their T-cells this virus was responsible for the immunodeficiency. By extension, infection with this virus is responsible for human immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) and it would therefore seem reasonable to call this variant retrovirus the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).
We now have a good explanation as to why people develop these severe immunodeficiency symptoms. OK, some folk don't believe that the virus exists or that if it does, that it is merely a harmless coincidental. Indeed, the thousands of electron-microscope photos from labs all over the world COULD have been faked, but it does sound just a little improbable. Again, presnce of the virus COULD be just a coincidence, but it's a very large coincidence indeed, so one has to ask oneself just how likely it is.
The thing is, that if you say, "OK, it isn't a virus, so what is it then?", it isn't good enough to say, "Uh, I dunno, but I'm sure it isn't a virus!". The evidence that HIV exists, is real and causes AIDS is so overwhelming that in order to discard it you need pretty conclusive evidence that it IS actually caused by whatever else you say it is. As is said, "Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proofs" and such proofs (or even half-way believable alternative explanations) are sadly lacking.
An earlier poster very reasonably asked, "Why then, do there seem to be such a number of seemingly reputable scientists who disagree?". Part of the answer is that the numbers are actually quite small and generally their reputability does not survive close scrutiny. Ms. Culshaw is certainly extremely attractive, but her modest CV -
http://math.uttyl.edu/rculshaw/vitae.htm - hardly inspires confidence in her ability to speak authoritatively on the matter. Her principal published paper -
http://www.jpands.org/vol11no4/culshaw.pdf - makes some bold excursions into immunology/virology (which as a mathematician, is not her field), but overall, merely re-makes the acknowledged point that HIV has a complex and varying relation to it's host that is difficult to model satisfactorily. And stating that she has been involved in HIV research for ten years is a little invidious when she only received her mathematics B.Sc. in 1996.
As to others, it's hard to know why they maintain their positions as the evidence against them mounts year by year. Certainly people like Rasnick (our president's AIDS guru) and Duesberg now make more money from speaking than they ever did in their relatively undistinguished scientific careers. Several, like Root-Bernstein, have now recanted - he now says, "The denialists make claims that are clearly inconsistent with existing studies. When I check the existing studies, I don’t agree with the interpretation of the data, or, worse, I can’t find the studies [at all]."
But there will always be people who believe bizarre things, maintaining their beliefs in the face of all evidence and against all odds.
And finally, as regards the virgin cure myth, as good a short summary as any is here -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV_and...will_cure_AIDS - "Virgin cleansing is a myth that has occurred since at least the sixteenth century, when Europeans believed that they could rid themselves of a sexually transmitted disease by transferring it to a virgin through sexual intercourse. Although the exact prevalence of this is unclear, it is believed to occur worldwide (Meel, 2003; Groce et al., 2004). Doing so does not cure the infected person, but it will expose the victim to HIV infection, potentially spreading the disease further. This myth has gained considerable notoriety as the perceived reason for certain recent sexual abuse and child molestation occurrences (Meel, 2003)".
Our (RSA) current epidemic of child/baby/toddler violations is a pretty nasty consequence of this. I've seen these injuries and they're quite horrific.
Well there you have it, and as Ripley says, "Believe it or not".
Mac