Does HIV Cause AIDS?
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Plastic had a little discussion about people who still doubt that HIV causes AIDS. In fact, HIV meets all three of the main criteria set out by Robert Koch more than a century again: a) HIV is almost universally present in all AIDS cases; b) HIV can survive outside the body long enough to be transmitted; and, c) completely healthy people exposed to HIV almost universally develop AIDS, while those not exposed do not.
In fact there are a couple of tragic cases that really shut the door on the non-HIV hypothesis — in a number of cases, twins have been born where only one twin was HIV+. In those cases, only the HIV+ twin develops AIDS.
But here’s the thing I find most odd. When this idea that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS was first circulating in the 1980s, the HIV deniers had what they claimed was a massive body of evidence that HIV does not cause AIDS. The evidence? Believe it or not, Africa!
If AIDS is caused by a sexually transmitted virus such as HIV rather than being a reaction to drug abuse, homosexual sex, etc., then why wasn’t there an AIDS epidemic in Africa? The fact that there wasn’t an AIDS epidemic in Africa proved that AIDS couldn’t be caused by HIV.
Of course, I haven’t seen many of the HIV deniers float that argument in awhile (in fact the second it was clear Africa was experiencing a massive AIDS epidemic, the anti-HIV folks quickly “discovered” that Africa was just as decadent as the United State and Europe, neatly fitting it into their hypothesis).
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