AIDS is not caused by drugs. There were drugs before 1980 in the
U.S., but no AIDS. AIDS is a syndrome– an immune problem in which
almost all of the afflicted person’s lymphocytes disappear. The idea
that this happened to chronic drug users in the US before 1980, but
that somehow nobody noticed, is so ludicrous that it deserves to go

Again, essentially all of the patient’s lymphocytes disappear in AIDS.
They are gone! Gone from the blood, gone from the lymph nodes. They
AIDS is real. AIDS is new. It is not caused by drugs. It
continues to kill a million people a year in Africa, and it is not
just a new name for the same old illnesses. AIDS has different
features from the traditional illnesses in Africa, which are obvious
enough that any bright teenage student should be able to grasp them
after a few minutes of not very involved discussion. The mystery is
why a very few adults, even now, don’t seem to get it.

I believe in Africa that AIDS was spread thru hetrosexual action.

Big question: Why is AIDS a “new” disease beginning about 1980?
Have not people had immune system problems throughout history?

Think of the new Ebola and Hanta virus outbreaks. Think of the
new strains of flu virus that sweep the Earth periodically. Where do
new viral diseases in humans come from? Animals.

HIV-2, which causes AIDS in West Africa, is basically the same
virus called SIV in monkeys. It’s just SIV that has been transferred
to humans, and now causes disease in them. It doesn’t hurt monkeys,
but it causes AIDS in baboons and macaques.

HIV-1, the main AIDS virus, and the one which causes almost all
the disease in Africa and America, is closest in structure to a virus
found in chimpanzees. It probably came from chimpanzies, sometime
before 1959, spreading slowly in humans at first because of slow human
movement in equatorial Africa before industrial development. Not
surprizingly, HIV-1 causes a very mild disease in chimps. They lose
the same cells in their immune systems that humans do, but only a few
chimps given HIV-1 have lost enough to become ill enough to be classed
as having AIDS. From what we can see, however, the process of
infection of HIV-1 in chimps, and HIV-2/SIV in baboons and macaques, is
identical. The same part of the immune system is destroyed.

The worldwide outbreak of AIDS is apparently related to the
Kinshasha highway, which connected the main AIDS regions in equatorial
Africa (endemic areas for chimps) with the coast. From there it spread
to France in the early to mid 1970’s. Starting in 1976, a French
Canadian homosexual airline steward who had been in France spread the
disease to many gay men on both coasts of the United States. HIV was
recovered from serum specimens stored from vaccine tests in gay men in
the US, starting in 1978. It wasn’t seen before then. The first AIDS
case in the US showed up in 1980, and a number of cases caused the
problem to be recognized in 1981. The maximal rate of silent HIV viral
infections in gay men, in transfusions, and in hemophilia products was
in 1982, all before the clinical disease itself (which takes at least
several years to incubate in most people) had shown up more than a few
hospital cases. There wasn’t a test for HIV until 1985, and by then
it was too late for hundreds of thousands of people in the US, who had
already been infected.