Does HIV cause AIDS?

[Tubbers]

I've never heard of a person developing AIDS without having HIV. Nor has google.

[Septimus]

So a professor of mine has decided to turn a Logic class into a class, more or less, about AIDS. We're using a lot of studies on AIDS and HIV to dissect and analyze.

One of the articles we've been delegated to Analyze is Peter Gallo 1984, which is supposed to be the original article proving that the HIV (then called HTLV-III) virus causes AIDS. The article itself doesn't seem to provide strong evidence at all....and it's rather baffling how it because so widely accepted in such a short about of time. One of the main problems that isn't apparent is that that article he wrote based on his data was not submitted for peer review, which seems to be a scientific no-no. Also the article itself showed only about a 50% correlation with having HTLV-III and having AIDS, which doesn't suggest a strong correlation at all, even less a cause.

Aside from our class exercise, we're watching a video about a man who we also read about, Peter Duesberg, who has consistently disputed the evidence the fact that HIV causes AIDS since Gallo's article was published. He points out many things, like the fact that HIV doesn't kill enough T-Cells to account for the drop in T-Cell count which results in AIDS, and also the way the HIV virus acts, which isn't consistent with the way that retrovirus' are known to act. He also points out the infection rate of this so called "Epidemic" is not like any epidemic we've ever seen, and the numbers do not correspond. The infection rate has been more or less growing at a consistent, slow rate, whereas "epidemics" are erratic, and cause high amount of infection in a short period of time, then die off. Also Duesberg believes that the medication cocktails such as AZT actually cause AIDS.

ANYWAYS. Aside from everything we've learned, I'm curious to know if anyone here studies this type of thing, or knows a lot about AIDS. The evidence against the idea that HIV causes AIDS seems pretty strong.... and I'm wondering if this is just something that has been disputed in the past, or if it's still something that's going on. We have plenty of dormant virus', and HIV seems to be no different. I'm curious!!

Oh shit on a shingle. Not this non-sense. I spent 5 years in HIV education, and this stupidity keeps popping up.

http://www.aidstruth.org/new/denialism/myths

If AZT and other drugs cause AIDS, then why did so fucking many people die before the drug cocktails exist? Are are so many people in Africa who are not getting any treatment dying?

For a logic teacher, he certainly enjoys insane, illogical conspiracy theories.

[Denchi]

Well I believe many of the treatments work, but they only treat part of the problem, there's no cure, and that seems to correspond with the idea that we haven't found the actual cause yet. We can simply manage HIV.

It just seems odd that HIV is supposed to be a retrovirus, yet it doesn't act like one at all. We all have plenty of dormat retrovirus' in our bodies, but they don't become active very often, and if they do, our body attacks them and we become immune (Chicken Pocks, Measles, etc). The main argument I'm reading is that HIV doesn't kill off nearly enough T-Cells to cause AIDS. Many times an AIDS patient shows that only 1 in 100,000 T cells even has the HIV virus, when you would need half infected to even be prone to the amount of T-cell loss attributed to AIDS.

Edit: Yeah my teacher is a fuckup, but I just couldn't help pursuing this avenue. Thanks for input Sept, gonna read that thoroughly.

[Delekii]

I've never heard of a person developing AIDS without having HIV. Nor has google.

I've never heard of a person who breaths air that doesn't need water to live. That doesn't mean that the breathing of air causes the necessity of water.

Don't take this as me saying that there isn't a causal relationship between HIV and AIDS because anyone with a semblance of a brain knows by now that there is, even if the guy that wrote the article didn't have enough proof at the time, just that a lack of evidence to the contrary doesn't prove anything.

[Jedimasta]

Well I believe many of the treatments work, but they only treat part of the problem, there's no cure, and that seems to correspond with the idea that we haven't found the actual cause yet. We can simply manage HIV.

It just seems odd that HIV is supposed to be a retrovirus, yet it doesn't act like one at all. We all have plenty of dormat retrovirus' in our bodies, but they don't become active very often, and if they do, our body attacks them and we become immune (Chicken Pocks, Measles, etc). The main argument I'm reading is that HIV doesn't kill off nearly enough T-Cells to cause AIDS. Many times an AIDS patient shows that only 1 in 100,000 T cells even has the HIV virus, when you would need half infected to even be prone to the amount of T-cell loss attributed to AIDS.

Edit: Yeah my teacher is a fuckup, but I just couldn't help pursuing this avenue. Thanks for input Sept, gonna read that thoroughly.

What your teacher fails to realize (or you) is that HIV has an incredibly high rate of mutation making it near impossible for even a healthy immune system to combat the virus. Essentially, the moment you become infected, your immune system goes into overdrive and tries to make antibodies for every single strain in your body which is incredibly hard. Of course during this replication process, your T-cells are slowly dying off. If you don't know what T-cells do, they are the cells that after being marked by the antibodies T-cells are responsible for killing off the marked pathogens. Only until very recently have scientists found a protein in the HIV particle that remains static even after all these mutations. Hopefully, this can be used for a cure but at the very least some kind of vaccine. Other than that, the only kind of cure we can look forward to is gene therapy that alters the surface proteins on the helper T cells.
Also, try and watch "And the Band Played On". It shows that Gallo is a dick and took credit from the french.

[Septimus]

Well I believe many of the treatments work, but they only treat part of the problem, there's no cure, and that seems to correspond with the idea that we haven't found the actual cause yet. We can simply manage HIV.

It just seems odd that HIV is supposed to be a retrovirus, yet it doesn't act like one at all. We all have plenty of dormat retrovirus' in our bodies, but they don't become active very often, and if they do, our body attacks them and we become immune (Chicken Pocks, Measles, etc). The main argument I'm reading is that HIV doesn't kill off nearly enough T-Cells to cause AIDS. Many times an AIDS patient shows that only 1 in 100,000 T cells even has the HIV virus, when you would need half infected to even be prone to the amount of T-cell loss attributed to AIDS.

Edit: Yeah my teacher is a fuckup, but I just couldn't help pursuing this avenue. Thanks for input Sept, gonna read that thoroughly.

What virus has been cured? Chicken Pox? The flu? The common cold? Polio? We know the viruses that cause those diseases, still not cure them.

[Valkrish]

that's a good read, too bad most of ZA WARULDO still won't read it!

[Khamsin]

Epstein-Barr virus/Adenovirus : Tonsilitis :: HIV : AIDS

[Kohan]

Clearly the real cause of AIDS is:

http://i171.photobucket.com/albums/u.../diabeetus.jpg

In all seriousness, if you doubt HIV leads to AIDS, then you should stop listening to spin doctors and try reading some more.

[archibaldcrane]

This was almost clarified, but AIDS is a syndrome. A syndrome is simply a collection of specific symptoms. HIV is basically asymptomatic AIDS.

Pretend most Herpes infections take 10 years to show a single symptom, and when Herpes sores appear, we call that condition "Ey n...ouch! fuck look at my elephanttrunk syndrome". Herpes causes ENFLAMES, but it's only called ENFLAMES when it's actually showing.

This is the exact same motherfucking thing as AIDS. If it's showing symptoms, it's AIDS. If it's not, but you still have the virus, it's HIV. It's really extremely fucking simple.

[Jer]

^=== This

Edit: Gdm page claims. I meant Archibald's post.

That said, you will find some professors are just...ignorant. I had a chemistry professor in college who kept trying to teach his classes that the sun was made of iron. And this was at an otherwise highly accredited engineering university. You just do what you need to in order to get by, which many times is easier than getting on a prof's bad side.

[Erza]

HIV is a virus that attacks the immune system namely the CD4+ lymphocyte T helper cells causing them to deplete.

AIDS is a deficiency syndrome of the immune system and yer considered to have AIDS when your CD4+ count drops below 200 per µL of blood. YOu can also develop AIDS by other causes, albeit rare, than the HIV virus.

I think it's stupid to refute HIV as the primary cause of AIDS considering how much the anti-retroviral drugs like NRTIs, NNRTIS, fusion inhibitors, protease inhibitors to name a few have significantly increased the lifespan of HIV infected people, whereas those not treated die from oppertunistic diseases pretty quickly.

Tis also worth mentioning that a website run by a few people infected that were outspoken HIV deniers had to shut down because all the editors dies.

[Apelila]

Tis also worth mentioning that a website run by a few people infected that were outspoken HIV deniers had to shut down because all the editors dies.

That really shouldn't be funny but golly did it make me laugh. Probably one of the better examples of natural selection.

[Rokku]

Law and Order: SVU had an episode last week about exactly this topic. I was actually wondering when someone would bring it up for debate on BG, lol.

I'm no doctor or cell biologist, but I think given the information that's out there, it's pretty easy to say that retrovirals don't cause AIDs, and your teacher is an idiot for putting this kind of sludge into people's heads.

[0ni0n]

Law and Order: SVU had an episode last week about exactly this topic. I was actually wondering when someone would bring it up for debate on BG, lol.

I'm no doctor or cell biologist, but I think given the information that's out there, it's pretty easy to say that retrovirals don't cause AIDs, and your teacher is an idiot for putting this kind of sludge into people's heads.

AIDS is symptomatic of HIV, as running nose is symptomatic of flu. but in this case, the HIV erodes your immune system to the extent that you're susceptible to all other virus or bacteria. When the immune system is weakened past a certain threshold, you have got AIDS. Simply put, eventually you could die of something as common as the flu virus due to complications, such as internal bleeding, because you are completely defenseless.

To answer your question, yes, HIV causes AIDS.

[Mizango]

This thread needs more Guartz tbh.

[Tonko]

AIDS is actually just a subjective label placed on someone with HIV who meets certain criteria:

Candidiasis of bronchi, trachea, or lungs
Candidiasis, esophageal
Cervical cancer, invasive
Coccidioidomycosis, disseminated or extrapulmonary
Cryptococcosis, extrapulmonary
Cryptosporidiosis, chronic intestinal (>1 month's duration)
Cytomegalovirus disease (other than liver, spleen, or lymph nodes
Cytomegalovirus retinitis (with loss of vision)
Encephalopathy, HIV-related
Herpes simplex: chronic ulcer(s) (>1 month's duration); or bronchitis, pneumonitis, or esophagitis
Histoplasmosis, disseminated or extrapulmonary
Isosporiasis, chronic intestinal (>1 month's duration)
Kaposi's sarcoma
Lymphoma, Burkitt's (or equivalent term)
Lymphoma, immunoblastic (or equivalent term)
Lymphoma, primary, of brain
Mycobacterium avium complex or M. kansasii, disseminated or extrapulmonary
Mycobacterium tuberculosis, any site (pulmonary or extrapulmonary
Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia
Pneumonia, recurrent
Progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy
Salmonella septicemia, recurrent
Toxoplasmosis of brain
Wasting syndrome due to HIV

As well as CD4 <200 cells/microliter, or <14% CD4 cells

Once you have any of these things concurrent with an HIV infection, you are arbitrarily labeled as having AIDS. It's really misleading, especially in the eye of the general public. In reality, you can recover from these conditions, and never have any other problems, but you still have AIDS. There's no comming back from that.

But yes, HIV causes AIDS. Your instructors "logic" is piss poor and smells like shit. People who never go on AZT develop AIDS. But they all have HIV.

There's actually websites who claim HIV doesn't exist at all:
http://www.actupsf.com/aids/myth/index.htm
http://www.hiddenmysteries.org/healt.../aids-mag.html

These "scientists" actually reccomend abandoning the anti-HIV meds and to stop using condoms, saying HIV isn't contagious.

Mind numbing.

[Kuya]

It's a problem, if as you say Tonko, that it's used arbitrarily, as AIDS carries quite the negative stigma.

[Seraph]

That said, you will find some professors are just...ignorant. I had a chemistry professor in college who kept trying to teach his classes that the sun was made of iron. And this was at an otherwise highly accredited engineering university.

To be fair, he isn't entirely incorrect. If I recall correctly, iron is the element where fusion stops being an overall exothermic reaction, since it takes more energy to fuse iron atoms than the process gives off. So, someday, when the sun dies off from lack of fuel, in what is most probably billions of years from now, it might have a reasonable composition of iron in it.

Definately not yet though, so you are correct in your mocking. It's mostly made up of hydrogen and helium at this point. How else do you think it stays floating up in the sky?

[Tristam]

So a professor of mine has decided to turn a Logic class into a class, more or less, about AIDS. We're using a lot of studies on AIDS and HIV to dissect and analyze.

One of the articles we've been delegated to Analyze is Peter Gallo 1984, which is supposed to be the original article proving that the HIV (then called HTLV-III) virus causes AIDS. The article itself doesn't seem to provide strong evidence at all....and it's rather baffling how it because so widely accepted in such a short about of time. One of the main problems that isn't apparent is that that article he wrote based on his data was not submitted for peer review, which seems to be a scientific no-no. Also the article itself showed only about a 50% correlation with having HTLV-III and having AIDS, which doesn't suggest a strong correlation at all, even less a cause.

Aside from our class exercise, we're watching a video about a man who we also read about, Peter Duesberg, who has consistently disputed the evidence the fact that HIV causes AIDS since Gallo's article was published. He points out many things, like the fact that HIV doesn't kill enough T-Cells to account for the drop in T-Cell count which results in AIDS, and also the way the HIV virus acts, which isn't consistent with the way that retrovirus' are known to act. He also points out the infection rate of this so called "Epidemic" is not like any epidemic we've ever seen, and the numbers do not correspond. The infection rate has been more or less growing at a consistent, slow rate, whereas "epidemics" are erratic, and cause high amount of infection in a short period of time, then die off. Also Duesberg believes that the medication cocktails such as AZT actually cause AIDS.

ANYWAYS. Aside from everything we've learned, I'm curious to know if anyone here studies this type of thing, or knows a lot about AIDS. The evidence against the idea that HIV causes AIDS seems pretty strong.... and I'm wondering if this is just something that has been disputed in the past, or if it's still something that's going on. We have plenty of dormant virus', and HIV seems to be no different. I'm curious!!

Your prof is literally stupid as shit and while I don't know what college you're attending, I would speak to a dean. Robert Gallo's work wasn't the only work to describe HIV as the cause of AIDS, but it was the first and people tend to reward primacy in science so he gets most of the credit. It's worth mentioning that two other people got the Nobel this year for isolating HIV and showing it was the cause of ADIS, Gallo was a notable exception and many feel that he got snubbed.

Duesberg may have once been an authority on retroviruses, but he's apparrently lost the ability to follow data and make the proper conclusion. If you look at a T-cell after it's been infected, it looks proper fucked. In that respect HIV IS different from most retroviruses.
A blog I've followed in the past (by an HIV researcher) makes the following point:

http://scienceblogs.com/erv/2008/05/...onal_media.php

***

That is where this article fails miserably. Duesberg made some goddamn stupid comments in this article like:

"He knew that HIV is a retrovirus-- the subject of his own heralded research-- and that retroviruses dont kill the host cells they infect. If anything, they make them proliferate."

No. One problem I have with my experiments is that I sometimes put too much virus on my cells, and I kill them all. By 'kill them all', I mean 48 hours after I put viruses on, say, 100,000 cells, they are all dead. Nothing is left but scraps of cell membrane. HIV-1 kills the cells it infects.

***

The drug cocktails for HIV/AIDS has been one of the most remarkable advances in evidence-based medicine in the history of humankind. The life-expectancy for a person infected with HIV undergoing treatment is now close to 63 years. This is a huge advance and if we didn't know the cause of AIDS, it would have been impossible.