Worrying about Nothing. Today is "World AIDS Day", a festival of ignorance and misguided sympathy. The Associated Press story on commemorations of this 'momentous day' states that:

"Some 39.4 million people worldwide are infected with the HIV virus that causes AIDS, according to the U.N. AIDS agency."

When 40 million people are "infected" with something but aren't sick, that proves not that their infection will make them sick but that the microbe at issue is harmless.
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Indeed, there is essentially no more powerful proof that a microbe is harmless than that a great many people have it in their system   but AREN'T SICK!
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The presence of antibodies to any microbe shows not that an infection is current and growing but that it is either waning or completely over, past, done, thru. That is because once the body identifies a microbe and successfully manufactures antibodies, those antibodies coat those microbial cells and set them up for destruction by the body's immune processes. Vaccination works because it induces the body to produce antibodies, and those antibodies prevent the body from being invaded successfully by that microbe into the future. In the case of AIDS, the theory is that if only we could create a vaccine against HIV, we would be safe. Indeed, the U.S. Government announced in 1985 that it expected a vaccine to be ready in about five years. It is now almost 20 years later, but there is no vaccine.

And even if there were a vaccine, all it would do is produce the very same antibodies that are present in people said to be "infected with HIV" but who are almost all truly "formerly infected with HIV". (The presence of antibodies indicates not a present infection but a past infection, a DEFEATED infection, and thus not that a person with those antibodies is going to die from that infection but that s/he has survived it and is thereafter safe.) Yet we are told that the presence of the very antibodies that would protect against HIV proves that the person with those antibodies will die from AIDS! — unless, of course, s/he takes extremely expensive medications for life!
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But in order to know that antibodies prove safety, not danger, you'd have to understand the most rudimentary realities of biology, and, alas, most people don't. Biology is magic, as far as they're concerned. They don't understand any of it.
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In order to relax about HIV, which I was able to do by June 1987, you'd have to understand that the patterns of AIDS are not the patterns of a microbial infection spread by sex and blood but the patterns of substance abuse (in the West) and endemic poverty and disease (in the Third World), having nothing whatsoever to do with a particular virus.
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In the First World, people have good nutrition, indispensable to good health; clean water; safe sewage treatment; preventive and critical medical care. People in the Third World have none of these things.
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The First World also has a horrible problem with dangerous chemicals known as "drugs". The Third World, as John Stewart of the Daily Show might say, "not so much". Drug users interact with other drug users. Non-drug users avoid them like the plague — an apt expression, as it turns out. This close social and sometimes sexual interaction within the drug community but apart from the general community leads to a false impression that a microbe passed from person to person in that community is responsible for the sickness and death suffered by members of that community, when in reality it is the chemicals they are all using that produce injury to their immune system and undermine their health, even to the point of death. People who use the same drug combinations but never meet develop the same health problems, thousands of miles apart: New Yorkers and Singaporeans who have no sexual intermediary separately develop AIDS from toxic chemicals, but government insists that somehow a virus that started in New York MUST somehow have reached Singapore, even tho there is no carrier to connect the two communities 11,000 miles apart. And naive, trusting people believe that.
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If government were to say that because New Yorkers have been dying from traffic accidents in large numbers long before Singaporeans started to die from traffic accidents in significant numbers, therefore traffic accidents are a disease spread from New York to Singapore by some unknown means, should we believe them? That is precisely the kind of nonsense government is promoting with regard to AIDS, yet people by the BILLION believe.
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No, traffic accidents aren't transmissible, and even tho they may have identical characteristics, they are not caused by a common microbe. Nor are DRUG ACCIDENTS, which is what AIDS in the First World is: a host of similar drug accidents and reactions induced by similar drug chemicals in stupid people who think that it doesn't matter what kinds of chemicals you take into your body — no chemical can do them harm, especially chemicals that make them feel good.
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In the Third World, and especially in sub-Saharan Africa, the world's basket-case, poverty and backwardness are causing people to die from the same things poor people in these regions have always died from, but now their sad, poverty-induced deaths are magically transformed by government pronouncements into an "epidemic" — no, "pandemic" — produced by a single virus (which, alas, is merely ASSUMED to be present; you don't need proof). Is HIV really the cause of their deaths? Or is it simply a harmless ambient virus widely prevalent which tens of millions of people there have been exposed to and easily defeated and to which they then bear completely effective antibodies for the rest of their (brief) lives?
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In the West, most people suffer the common cold (which is apparently a class of many different viruses that produce similar symptoms). What if we decided to see the common cold as a lentivirus (slow-acting virus) that eventually and invariably produces death, because the overwhelming preponderance of all Americans who die from any illness had, beforehand, at least once in their life had a cold? That cold came first, and death later, so the cold must be the cause of the death, right? Nope. That's just plain wrong. This false reasoning (fallacy) is so common that it has its own Latin name and is explained thus by L. Kip Wheeler, an assistant professor of English at Tennessee's Carson-Newman College:

Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc (Literally: "After this, therefore because of this"): This type of false cause occurs when the writer mistakenly assumes that, because the first event preceded the second event, it must mean the first event caused the later one. Sometimes it does, but sometimes it doesn't. It is the honest writer's job to establish clearly that connection, rather than merely assert it exists. Example: "A black cat crossed my path at noon. An hour later, my mother had a heart-attack. Because the first event occurred earlier, it must have caused the bad luck later." This is how superstitions begin.

Belief in AIDS as virus is little more than a superstition promoted by government to control sexual behavior. It works because the bulk of people are credulous and easily scared by things they don't understand: superstitious.
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Some people are indulgent of governmental abusiveness, so might think, "So what if HIV doesn't cause AIDS? Isn't it still a good idea to discourage people from having sex out of wedlock? Where's the harm?" HERE'S the harm: a (black) man was recently sentenced to 137 YEARS IN PRISON for spreading HIV! Other people have been induced to COMMIT SUICIDE on finding out that they are HIV-positive, even tho dispassionate people know that that is, at worst, nothing like a death sentence, and smart people know that HIV has nothing to do with AIDS, so someone infected with HIV might VERY well live a long and healthy life without so much as one milligram of ANY anti-HIV drug.
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The way the AIDS Conspiracy (of government, duped media, and drug users who don't want their drug use blamed) works is that the conspirators talk about oranges and imply that they are talking about apples. For instance, if we were actually talking apples and oranges, and the government said that frost threatens to kill off 90% of the trees in an apple orchard, we would know from our own experience with these deciduous trees (which survive severe winters to blossom anew each spring) that that's ridiculous. BUT if government made you think it was talking about ORANGE trees when they said that subfreezing temperatures will kill off entire orchards, you could believe that, because our experience is that orange trees do not survive winter in the North. The AIDS Conspiracy talks about apples (HIV) and makes you think they are talking about oranges (AIDS). But the one is NOT the other.
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HIV is a virus called "Human Immunodeficiency Virus" just as another virus is called the "cold" virus, even tho HIV has nothing to do with immunodeficiency and the "cold" virus has nothing to do with cold! When government speaks of 40 million people being 'infected with AIDS', they are lying, pure and simple. When anyone claims that 20%, or 23%, or 25% of the people of country X in Africa are "infected with the virus that causes AIDS", that is a flat-out invention. To get such a figure, you would have to test everyone (or at least a truly representative sample) for, at the least, ANTIBODIES to the virus, or for actual viral presence. That has NEVER HAPPENED ANYWHERE. Nothing like 100% of Americans, in a hugely rich country with one doctor for every 400 people, have been tested for HIV! In Africa, there is in many places no more than one doctor for every 15,000 or 30,000 people. You would have to be an idiot to believe that in such countries, 100% of the population has been tested for HIV, or even that the healthcare system is so sophisticated that it is able to test a truly representative sample of the population. So when you hear a figure like that, you have an absolute intellectual obligation to DISBELIEVE.
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In the United States, there was one attempt to do random sampling of blood in hospitals across the country, to find the actual incidence of HIV in anonymous, unlabeled blood specimens. That sample found that if it was representative, only 550,000 Americans were infected with HIV (not with AIDS). The government was very unhappy with that result, because it had been telling the world for years that there were 1-2 million Americans infected with HIV. They asserted, without justification, that susceptible minorities (in blood samples taken from ghetto hospitals, among other places) must have been underrepresented. Still, the only real evidence they had from an actual survey of blood samples indicated that only 550,000 Americans were infected with HIV. Rather than give that number, government fudged a bit and lowered its estimate of infections from 1-2 million to 600,000 to 1 million. They had no basis for the 1 million figure, but they had used it so long and it was so well known that they kept asserting it, even after evidence came in that it was too high.
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Thru 2003, the CDC reported today, the number of Americans diagnosed with AIDS is 902,223. Interesting, isn't it, that there are more than half again as many people diagnosed with AIDS than were found to have been infected with HIV in an actual blood survey? Soon there will be more people with AIDS than the higher number of people asserted to have been infected with HIV. How will they explain that? They won't. They don't have to. Every time a case is found of a person with clinical AIDS who shows no trace of HIV, the government brushes it off as inconsequential and irrelevant. That individual just had something that looks (exactly) like AIDS. In AIDS, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's not a duck unless it has HIV.
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As for Africa, who HAS been tested? Almost nobody, and generally only people who are already sick. Patient A, who has a fatal illness with wasting and tests positive for HIV, is said to be dying from AIDS. Patient B, in the very next bed, who has the identical illness with wasting but tests negative for HIV, is said to be dying from something else! That makes about as much sense as testing everybody dying from cancer for the cold virus and pronouncing that everyone who tests positive for the cold virus is dying from a cold but everyone who tests negative for the cold virus is simply dying from cancer!
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Meanwhile, AIDS, the condition of life-threatening immune deficiency, has practically disappeared as a public health concern, because nobody from the general population but only people from drug-soaked minorities get it. It's been 24 years, but AIDS has still not invaded the general population, an utter impossibility for a viral disease spread by sex and blood. But the general population is still supposed to worry! What's happening here can't be used to scare people, so government constantly talks about AIDS in Africa or a supposed "global pandemic" instead. No, AIDS hasn't invaded the general population HERE, but Africa proves that it COULD. Of course, 20 years ago half of all AIDS cases were in the United States, so if anything like a general epidemic were to occur, it should have occurred here. But it hasn't. AIDS never invades the general population here, but retains a very tight relationship with drug use. You are not supposed to think about that. 'If it can happen in Africa, it can happen here. It's a ticking time bomb and is bound to go off, sooner or later.' Famines that kill millions happen in Africa. Does that mean they're bound to happen here too?
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Apples (non-drug-using Americans) are supposed to worry because oranges (drug users) are dying from immune deficiency. Apples (rich Americans with safe water and readily available doctors and medicines) are supposed to fear for their lives because oranges (Africans living in appalling conditions, at the edge of starvation and assailed by water-borne, insect-borne, tropical diseases) are dying young. It's all so stupid!
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If you really want to know what's happening with AIDS, go to www.virusmyth.com and read, especially, the articles by Peter Duesberg and John Lauritsen. Then, if you use hard drugs, and especially combinations of drugs, STOP, or risk dying young. If you do not use hard drugs, you can stop worrying about AIDS!

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:09 PM