subject: HIV/AIDS/Denialism, Is It A concern Or Not. Exactly What is Denialism And Where Did It Come From [print this page] HIV/AIDS/Denialism, Is It A concern Or NotHIV/AIDS/Denialism, Is It A concern Or Not. Exactly What is Denialism And Where Did It Come From
It has taken hold despite the lack of scientific evidence. AIDS denialism has had a significant political impact especially in South Africa under the presidency of Thabo Mbeki. Scientists and physicians have raised alarm at the cost of AIDS denialism, which discourages HIV-positive people from using proven treatments.
The scientific community considers the evidence that HIV causes AIDS to be conclusive and rejects AIDS-denialist claims as pseudoscience based on conspiracy theories, faulty reasoning, cherry picking, and misrepresentation of mainly outdated scientific information. With the rejection of these arguments by the scientific community, AIDS-denialist material is now spread mainly through the Internet.
HISTORICALLY
This is going to go into the history and the people and places that caused this and the spread of this erroneous information. (For Lack of A Better Way to Put It)
In 1983, a group of scientists and doctors at the Pasteur Institute in France, led by Luc Montagnier, discovered a new virus in a patient with signs and symptoms that often preceded AIDS. They named the virus lymphadenopathy-associated virus, or LAV, and sent samples to Robert Gallo's team in the United States. Their findings were peer reviewed and slated for publication in Science.
At an April 23, 1984 press conference in Washington D.C., Margaret Heckler, Secretary of Health and Human Services, announced that Gallo and his co-workers had discovered a virus that is the "probable" cause of AIDS. This virus was initially named HTLV-III. That same year, Casper Schmidt responded to Gallo's papers with "The Group-Fantasy Origins of AIDS," which was published by the Journal of Psychohistory. Schmidt posited that AIDS was not an actual disease, but rather an example of epidemic hysteria in which groups of people are subconsciously acting out social conflicts. Schmidt compared AIDS to documented cases epidemic hysteria in the past which were mistakenly thought to be infectious. (Schmidt himself would later die of AIDS in 1994.
In 1986, the viruses discovered by Montagnier and Gallo, found to be genetically indistinguishable, were renamed HIV. In 1987 Peter Duesberg questioned the link between HIV and AIDS in his paper Retroviruses as Carcinogens and Pathogens: Expectations and Reality, in the journal Cancer Research. This publication coincided with the start of major public health campaigns and the promotion of "zidovudine (AZT) as a treatment
