There is an aspect of this I always stumble over, as I person who lived through the AIDS crisis. I can understand that having HIV, by itself, cannot be enough to cause AIDS, because there are so many people who have HIV in their bodies but are healthy. But, just to cite one example, my father died of AIDS in 1989, but he did not use popp…
There is an aspect of this I always stumble over, as I person who lived through the AIDS crisis. I can understand that having HIV, by itself, cannot be enough to cause AIDS, because there are so many people who have HIV in their bodies but are healthy. But, just to cite one example, my father died of AIDS in 1989, but he did not use poppers, or lead a wild, dissolute life in any way, but rather he led the ordinary life of an educated professional. He had the same diet and lifestyle as everyone else in my family, but no one else in the family got sick and died. The one thing that made my dad different is that he was HIV positive and we were not. It's true that he took AZT, but he had all the classic AIDS symptoms before he began taking it. I know many, many people for whom this is true: they led the same lifestyles as all the people who remained healthy, and only one thing made them different: being HIV positive. They all had AIDS and died. Some took AZT and some did not. It does make it seem like getting HIV is somehow very strongly correlated with having AIDS, even if it doesn't directly cause it all by itself. And some mechanisms of how the HIV virus attacks the immune system are known in detail.
There is an aspect of this I always stumble over, as I person who lived through the AIDS crisis. I can understand that having HIV, by itself, cannot be enough to cause AIDS, because there are so many people who have HIV in their bodies but are healthy. But, just to cite one example, my father died of AIDS in 1989, but he did not use poppers, or lead a wild, dissolute life in any way, but rather he led the ordinary life of an educated professional. He had the same diet and lifestyle as everyone else in my family, but no one else in the family got sick and died. The one thing that made my dad different is that he was HIV positive and we were not. It's true that he took AZT, but he had all the classic AIDS symptoms before he began taking it. I know many, many people for whom this is true: they led the same lifestyles as all the people who remained healthy, and only one thing made them different: being HIV positive. They all had AIDS and died. Some took AZT and some did not. It does make it seem like getting HIV is somehow very strongly correlated with having AIDS, even if it doesn't directly cause it all by itself. And some mechanisms of how the HIV virus attacks the immune system are known in detail.
Any ideas that can clear this up for me?