clearer if the CDC said? ?AIDS refers to those illnesses that result from severe immunosuppression. There may be many different factors causing?severe immunosuppression. Among these are x, y, and z??Immune systems may be weakened through their normal work of helping us to recover from disease [or by] various forms of stress or pathogens. The key thing we need to know?is what sort of insults to the immune system can bring it to the point of collapse...? Continuum Summer 1999 ?The key issue of concern here is that there is no clear and systematic information about how effective these [HIV] tests are for predicting the future health of the infant. The discussions on the issue tend to imply that a positive result on any of these tests is a sure sign of impending death, but there is no solid published evidence to support that assumption.? ?HIV testing of mothers and infants is frequently done not through detection of the virus itself but through the detection of antibodies that are presumed to be associated with HIV. While some take the view that the presence of these antibodies is a cause for alarm, it should perhaps be viewed as just the opposite, a highly desirable finding.? Virusmyth.net, Sept, 2000 ?ACTG 076 [Thai AZT study] has been praised repeatedly in the literature for reducing mother-to-child transmission of the virus by two-thirds. In fact, the Thai study claimed a reduction in transmission from a rate of 25.5% to 8.3%. This is a reduction of 17.2%,