HIV AIDS Hoax ??!!

[Cobalt]

Is this a serious topic, like, seriously serious? Or is someone REALLY late with their April Fools Day joke?

[Cridders88]

I don't think Thinkreal was thinking real.

[thinkreal93]

Okay guyss...
I just happened to stumble upon these articles and they all made a lot of sense from what I was reading. That's why it created doubts in me.

I guess I was too absorbed by all the logic, that's all.
������ ������

I guess I stand corrected now.

[meridannight]

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[Insertnamehere]

[MENTION=23272]thinkreal93[/MENTION]

Ok, this may seem humorous at first, as the level of ignorance in the information you've been looking at is beyond anything I've seen lately.

But it is a serious topic. Extremely serious, because the more ignorance is spread about a dangerous pathogen such as HIV, the more people get infected with it and spread it.

HIV is a virus that specifically infects CD4+ T-lymphocytes circulating in the bloodstream. As such, it is attacking the very cells that are the primary and most pivotal component in the defense of the organism. Learn this at once, carve it in your head. HIV infects immune system cells.



What do you think happens to these cells after a while?



^ That happens.

When enough of these cells are compromised, the ability of the organism to defend itself is all but erased. This is what is called Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome i.e. AIDS.

If by now you can't see the connection between HIV and AIDS, please go bang your head against a wall until it sinks in.

Not everyone who aqcuires a viral infection will present symptoms. Symptoms are the signal of a disease but absence of symptoms says nothing. A person can be infected with HSV-1 and not develop oral herpes once in their life, a person can be exposed almost daily to rhinoviruses, but the average adult only gets 2-3 colds per year. That does not mean the pathogen is not the cause of the disease, because everytime there is a disease the pathogen can be isolated and identified as the cause.

Symptoms are also general. Influenza, cold, and several other infections share similar symptoms. It is possible that AIDS can have its causes in other things too, but it won't mean that HIV is less of a cause because of it.

When it comes to HIV, some people have pin pointed mutations in the CD4 protein that prevents them to becomign targets. They are the few, I'm a afraid. The danger with these folks is that when the virus can stay in the organism (HSV-1, HIV) the person is now a carrier of the pathogen.

That introduction aside, I have to now adress the sources of your information: a youtube channel and some "professionals".

A youtube channel....seriously? You do know that I can go on youtube right now and make a video saying that the earth is a cube. Would that make it a fact?

I doubt any of the information you've looked at comes from any kind of respectable scientific source. If you could cite your sources that would be nice.

But the worst part is not that, the worst part is that you find it logical.

"freeyourmindandthink"? My dear, you are not thinking at all.

My point here is to tell you that the quality of the information depends a great deal on where you get it. Anyone can say anything on the internet. It's your job to discern what is true and what is not.

You speak of "evidence in your face", so let's talk about that.

Evidence that HIV can be found in seminal fluid:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2872239/

"HIV-1 RNA was detected in semen and blood at all stages of the disease"

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC191898/

"The median viral load in a cross section of 34 men was 11,000 HIV-1 RNA copies/ml (range, <400 to 1.3 x 10(7) copies/ml) in whole semen and 5,238 HIV-1 RNA copies/ml (range, <400 to 2.8 x 10(5) copies/ml) in seminal plasma"


http://jem.rupress.org/content/206/12/2578.2

The title and image speak for themselves in this one.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9854115

"Despite the long-term suppression of HIV-1 RNA in the plasma of the seven men, proviral DNA was detected in seminal cells in four. Replication-competent viruses were recovered from peripheral-blood cells in three men and from the seminal cells in two of these three men. The viruses recovered from the seminal cells had no genotypic mutations suggestive of resistance to antiretroviral drugs and were macrophage-tropic, a feature that is characteristic of HIV-1 strains that are capable of being sexually transmitted."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2924360/

The seminal compartment is the source of the transmitted virus in a majority of the transmission events for HIV-1.

Should I go on?

All links have full text articles asociated for you to read them thoroughly. All of this work has been published in respectable scientific media, "Journal of Virology" and the likes and compiled in a reputable database like NCBI and PubMed. For work to be published in any such media, it must be a work of quality. As someone who has published, I will tell you that the work you submit goes under thorough revision and not a few times it can get rejected. That is what make a media respectable as a source of information.

You talked about the tests and detection techniques. You clearly don't know how they work, so let me try and explain them.

One of the techniques used is ELISA, which is based on antibody detection. Basically, if the blood of a patient has an antibody against a HIV antigen, it will mark positive.



However, it is prone to a small margin of error, because antibodies are delicate and while fairly specific in their recognition, they're not perfect in their selectiveness. There can be a false positive.

That is why another much more accurate technique exists. PCR works by amplifying an existing DNA strand by the use of specific primers and a heat-stable polymerase, so as to obtain a large number of copies of the target DNA and detect it.



So you say "Even with PCR techniques, the hiv virus has never been isolated".

My dear, PCR is a detection and not an isolation technique, first of all.

Nevertheless, you might be missing the important and LOGICAL fact: if there is no existing target DNA to be amplified, PCR won't ever be positive

This is to mean that if I design primers that are specific for HIV viral DNA/RNA, said DNA (and by consequence, the virus itself) MUST BE PRESENT IN THE SAMPLE FOR THEM TO BE DETECTED.

If you have a positive PCR, it means that your target DNA was there.


So, ELISA samples the patient's blood against an existing viral antigen that you have to provide to see if there are antibodies against the virus and PCR is based on using specific primers that you design in order to amplify HIV DNA/RNA if it's there to be amplified.

Both these descriptions should make you conclude one important thing:

I couldn't possibly provide the virus to be sampled in ELISA or design primers that are specific for HIV DNA if at some point someone hadn't isolated the virus in question and sequenced it's genome in the first place!

If I can perform these techniques it's precisely because the virus has been isolated and characterized beforehand.

And just so you have some proof, a sample article showing it can in fact be done.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3669022/

So, after all of this, I do hope you are convinced and can go ahead and not spread false and dangerous ideas.

[thinkreal93]

[MENTION=23097]Insertnamehere[/MENTION]
Yeah I got it. Thanks.

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