In the developing world, the virus has existed for at least 65 years because HIV is rarely spread heterosexually. Research that studied the wives of infected hemophiliacs showed that an HIV-positive person requires over 1,000 unprotected sexual contacts with an HIV-negative person from the opposite sex to pass along the virus just once.In another surprise study, published in the Lancet, 1997, 349:851-2, French doctors at the Cochin-Port Royal hospital in Paris looked at the risk of married couples wanting to conceive a baby where the man was HIV-positive. Their findings are in line with infection rates of 1 per 1000 acts of unprotected sex among stable heterosexual couples.
According to this published research, it would take an HIV-infected heterosexual who has sexual intercourse 2-3 times a week about seven years to infect another person with HIV! This practically means that it would take the HIV-infected males of one million couples 2,739 years of daily unprotected sex to infect all female partners.In the developing world, unprotected sex among heterosexuals cannot, therefore, be held responsible for the high number of people who test HIV positive (even if HIV tests were 100% reliable, which they are not).
How is AIDS contracted?
However, the situation is different with regard to infected pregnant women. A baby is directly and constantly exposed to the mother’s blood for a period of 9 months. During this period the virus has a 50% chance of being passed on to the baby. Retroviruses survive when they reach a new host prenatally (passed from mother to child). This way of passing on a virus is at least 500 times more efficient than through sexual transmission. (Blood transfusion is another obvious way of contracting the virus)
In contrast to the situation in wealthy nations, HIV in Third World countries is equally distributed between both sexes, which means, it must have been passed on from mother to child for many centuries. Had HIV been a deadly killer virus, the babies of infected mothers would have obviously been born deformed, miscarried, or dead, because newly born babies have not yet developed adequate immunity to defend themselves against a killer virus. Even if they somehow managed to survive, they could only last for a maximum of two years – the latency period given to infected babies before developing AIDS. The spreading of the virus would have stopped automatically through the destruction of all new babies that were infected by their mothers.
Due to the low rates of homosexuality in developing countries, the prenatal route of transmission has been their only efficient way (50 percent chance) to pass on HIV to the new generations. Grown female children who become mothers would again have a 50 percent chance of passing the virus to their children. Therefore, in Africa alone, HIV must have been around for many generations before it was able to infect as many as 6-8 million people. The latest argument that the increased condom use in some African nations helped to slow the rate of infection is hardly convincing since the main route of HIV infection in Africa is from mother to child.
Who Gets AIDS?
The situation is much different in the industrialized world where HIV is mostly transmitted through different routes. The most susceptible groups are very active homosexuals, needle-sharing heroin addicts, and hemophiliacs who receive transfusions. They represent the main and easiest routes through which disease-causing microbes can be passed on to others who share one common risk factor: immune deficiency. In other words, the groups in society where HIV is commonly present amongst their members are also the groups with the biggest health risks and, therefore, more likely to produce AIDS symptoms. Still, HIV’s most concentrated occurrence among health risk groups cannot be blamed for causing AIDS diseases, just as elevated cholesterol levels cannot be held responsible for causing heart disease. These are mere correlations. Another problem is that gay men, drug users, and hemophiliacs who are exposed to semen, drugs, blood transfusions, hepatitis, the Epstein Barr virus, and many other diseases or factors known to cause biological false positives in HIV tests, represent the most unreliable groups in society to demonstrate real presence of HIV.
As prophesied 13 years ago, AIDS has invaded the heterosexual community, or so it appears. Since cervical cancer and other female diseases have more recently been renamed AIDS diseases, AIDS seems to have affected the female population. However, most AIDS patients are still male.
Anything and everything that strongly abuses the body and depletes the immune system must be held responsible for causing illness, regardless of whether it is a stroke, cancer, or an AIDS disease. Emotional stress, insufficient nutrition, dehydration, sleep deprivation, alcohol, cigarettes, antibiotics, hard drugs, excessive sexual activity, etc., can all damage the immune system. A dormant piece of viral material such as HIV, on the other hand, can do no harm in a healthy body.
Whoever continuously exposes himself to immune risk factors is also more susceptible to developing the Acquired Human Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Someone may argue: “What about an innocent baby who becomes infected with HIV by its parents and dies from pneumonia? Is that not AIDS?” The fact is that at least as many children die from pneumonia with or without HIV, and it doesn’t significantly influence the outcome of the disease whether they had a previous encounter with HIV or not. What can make a big difference, however, is how the pneumonia is treated.
