From: dac@sci.ccny.cuny.edu (David A Cooke)
Subject: Re: AIDS risk/Duesberg
Organization: City College of New York - Science Computing Facility
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1993 03:06:59 GMT

In article <C01H9y.3GH@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> gletty@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (Bruce Gletty) writes:
>pmsc13sg@UMASSD.EDU (Stephen Grossman) writes:
>
>>    "Other people do have that virus but AIDS patients have it more often...,"
>>says D. (_Full Context_, Feb. 1992)
>
>Ah, but has anyone wiht AIDS ben HIV negative?? That would shoot all the
>theories full of holes.

	Yes, there have been a few individuals with AIDS who have been
HIV-.  Several cases of this were brought up at the last international
conference on AIDS.  This doesn't really support the arguments of those
who argue that HIV doesn not cause AIDS, however.  Most tests for AIDS
are indirect, and given the AIDS virus' obscenely high mutation rate,
it wouldn't be at all improbable that it will periodically mutate
sufficiently that it won't show up on the standard tests.  There are
already two recognized variants of HIV, HIV-1 and HIV-2, and they
require different tests to be detected as far as I know.  These HIV-
AIDS patients are probably examples of this sort of phenomenon, given
that new strains develop within a single individual.
	Another possibility is that there are one or more other viruses
that cause AIDS-type problems that are not HIV that have been around
for a long time but were never recognized.  It is not inconceivable
that there could be other viruses with similar end results.  This is
true for many diseases--pneumonia, for example, can be causes by at
least 20 different infectious agents, but they produce fairly similar
symptoms, accounting for the general term "pneumonia."  Other viruses
that cause HIV-like immune depletion would probably never have been
recognized prior to the AIDS pandemic if they are rare and not easily
spread because cases would be sufficiently rare and isolated that no one
would make the connection.  AIDS was only recognized because of its
tight clustering and rapid increase in number of cases.  A less contagious
virus wouldn't give such tell-tale signs, and wouldn't infect very many
people.  Indeed, I have heard that the epidemiology and symptomology of
some of these HIV- AIDS patients is somewhat different, and that they don't
seem to be particularly contagious, which could point to other minor
viruses giving AIDS-like effects.
	If the second possibility is true, it would only disprove the
HIV-AIDS link in the strictest sense.  The existence of other viruses
that produce syndromes clinically nearly indistinguishable from AIDS
does not imply that HIV doesn't cause AIDS.  It simply means that
AIDS, like pneumonia, can have more than one causative agent.  The
evidence that HIV is far and away the major culprit, if not the only
possible one, is overwhelming.  As far as I know, there are less than
a hundred known HIV- AIDS cases.  There are hundreds of thousands of
HIV+ AIDS cases.  This is a very tight association, and the exceptions,
if they are truly exceptions at all, are not sufficient to challenge
the rule.

		-David Cooke




-- 
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David A. Cooke |First-Year Medical Student| (1) dac@sci.ccny.cuny.edu 
               |  University of Michigan  | (2) David.A.Cooke@um.cc.umich.edu
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