To: Ilaine who wrote (3928 ) 12/8/2002 3:26:06 PM From: Hawkmoon Read Replies (2) | Respond to The epidemiology of Chinese AIDS is pretty clear, too. People sold blood plasma which was pooled before it was reinjected into their bodies. These are the people who got AIDS. People who did not receive pooled plasma did not get AIDS, for the most part. "The typical response to this violating of a basic principle that has served well for a century is either to ignore it or say that HIV is so complex that it renders Koch's Postulates obsolete. But Koch's Postulates are simply a formalization of common-sense logic, not a statement about microbes. The laws of logic don't become obsolete, any more than mathematics. And if the established criteria for infectiousness are thrown away, then by what alternative standard is HIV supposed to be judged infectious? Just clusterings of like symptoms? Simple correlations with no proof of any cause-effect relationship? That's called superstition, not science. It puts medicine back two hundred years." This is to ensure that the disease was caused by the suspect germ and not by something unidentified in a mixture of substances. The tissues and body fluids of a patient with a genuine viral disease will have so many viruses pouring out of infected cells that it is a straightforward matter — a standard undergraduate exercise — to separate a pure sample and compare the result with known cataloged types. "Viruses make you sick by killing cells. When viruses are actively replicating at a rate sufficient to cause disease, either because immunity hasn't developed yet or because the immune system is too defective to contain them, there's no difficulty in isolating them from the affected tissues. With influenza, a third of the lung cells are infected; with hepatitis, just about all of the liver cells. In the case of AIDS, typically 1 in 1000 T-cells shows any sign of HIV, even for terminally ill cases — and even then, no distinction is made of inactive or defective viruses, or totally non-functional viral fragments. But even if every one were a lethally infected cell, the body's replacement rate is 30 times higher. This simply doesn't add up to damage on a scale capable of causing disease. Far from being a common cause of the various conditions called "AIDS," HIV itself was an opportunistic infection that made itself known in the final stages of immune-system deterioration brought about in other ways. In a sense, AIDS caused HIV. Hence, it acted as a "marker" of high-risk groups, but was not in itself responsible for the health problems that those groups were experiencing. The high correlation between HIV and AIDS that was constantly being alluded to was an artifact of the way in which AIDS was defined:
