Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome and human immunodeficiency virus

¶ … changing face of AIDS, the ever-Mutating nature of the HIV virus

The AIDS that science thought it was facing in the 1980's is not the same AIDS they are fighting today. Mutation has changed the retrovirus thought to be the likely cause of AIDS -- and even this 'fact' has fallen into some scientific disrepute. Originally, thee retrovirus HIV was thought to be the simply cause of AIDS. As "most Americans" believed they knew what caused AIDS," they grew complacent. "For a decade, scientists, government officials, physicians, journalists, public-service ads, TV shows, and movies" told the American public that AIDS was definitely caused "by a retrovirus called HIV." This virus supposedly infected and killed the T-cells, or protective cells of the immune system. This led to a fatal immune deficiency after an asymptomatic period that averaged ten years or so." (Thomas, Mullins, Johnson, 1994)

Even as early as the 1980s, anomolies in AIDS patients were detected -- some patients fell ill quite quickly, others never did. Then, 1992, five patients were identified who had such AIDS-like symptoms as low T-cell counts, pneumocystis pneumonia, and tuberculosis but who failed to test HIV-positive. They were found to have "an unseen virus" with "a trace of an enzyme produced by retroviruses, the group of viruses that includes the HIVs. Without this enzyme, called reverse transcriptase, retroviruses cannot insert their genes into our cells' DNA and cause infection, and the subsequent destruction of the T-cells (Radetsky, 1993)

This new virus showed scientists that the HIV virus could replicate quite quickly, although "HIV-1 and HIV-2" were still assumed to be the primary causes of AIDS, clearly other causes of AIDS like complaints were extant. This new discovery of a new virus in the patients, however, warned scientists of the dangers of viral replication, as new viruses seemed to be constantly emerging."(Radetsky, 1993)

AIDS in the United States, thanks to increasingly complex cocktails of drugs, has become a managable, chronic illness for sufferers who can afford such treatments. But there is a paradox, for as the disease has grown more managable for individuals, as a public health hazard in the developing world, it has grown into unforseen, unmanagable and epidemic proportions -- and as the retrovirus attaches itself to more and more varities of DNA, it binds with a greater variety of enzymes and thus creates an even greater potential for more mutations.

A little known secret is that "after spending billions of dollars, HIV researchers are still unable to explain how HIV, a conventional retrovirus with a very simple genetic organization, damages the immune system..the absence of any agreement about how HIV causes AIDS, the only evidence that HIV does cause AIDS is correlation. Just as there are cases of AIDS [4,621 cases recorded in the literature, 1,691 of them in the U.S.A.] without HIV, there are cases of HIV-positive persons who remain healthy for more than a decade and who may never suffer from AIDS. It is even possible that some rare strains of HIV exist that are benign...Some homosexual men in the U.S. who have been infected with HIV for at least eleven years show as yet no signs of damage to their immune systems." (Thomas, Mullins, Johnson, 1994)