Mary wrote:
>
> If the virus does not make AIDS, what does?

We don't know.  That's the whole problem.  Lots of people have ideas,
though.  Duesberg says it's drugs (but seems to think that prescription
drugs are OK for some reason).  The Perth Group says it's oxidative
stress.  Other ideas include that it's just a renaming of end-stage
syphilis, that it's just an autoimmune disease triggered by semen
getting into the bloodstream via the rectum, that it's caused by a
combination of HIV and mycobacteria, or mycobacteria alone, etc.

Some of these ideas were around in 1984, when Gallo announced that
he'd found the cause of AIDS in HIV (which it seems he had stolen
from the French, by the way) but all funding for investigation into
non-HIV theories in this country was cut off the moment that the
government decided that HIV was the cause.  It's mighty hard to test
fringe theories these days, especially ones that don't involve drug
therapy, because good research takes big bucks, and those big bucks
come mostly from the big pharmaceutical companies or the government
(a good friend of the pharmaceutical companies).

Carol