From "Nature: International Journal of Science." This article addresses the Durban Declaration, which clearly refutes AIDS deniers from the perspective of the international scientific community.

The declaration on these two pages was stimulated by the current controversy in South Africa about whether HIV is the cause of AIDS (see, for example, Nature 404, 911; 2000 and Nature 405, 105; 2000). This has caused massive consternation among all scientists, doctors and many others in the international community who treat AIDS patients or who work on AIDS in other ways. There is widespread anxiety that denying or doubting the cause of AIDS will cost countless lives if blood screening, use of condoms, and methods to prevent mother-to-child transmission of the virus are not implemented or, worse, even abandoned.

The declaration has been signed by over 5,000 people, including Nobel prizewinners, directors of leading research institutions, scientific academies and medical societies, notably the US National Academy of Sciences, the US Institute of Medicine, Max Planck institutes, the European Molecular Biology Organization, the Pasteur Institute in Paris, the Royal Society of London, the AIDS Society of India and the National Institute of Virology in South Africa. In addition, thousands of individual scientists and doctors have signed, including many from the countries bearing the greatest burden of the epidemic. Signatories are of MD, PhD level or equivalent, although scientists working for commercial companies were asked not to sign.

The Durban Declaration has an organizing committee of over 250 members from over 50 countries. The list of signatories up to 29 June can be found on Nature's website as Supplementary Information (http://www.nature.com).

HIV causes AIDS. Curbing the spread of this virus must remain the first step towards eliminating this devastating disease.

I want to first off state that I have lost dear family members to HIV.

AIDS is not a virus or disease in and of itself. The acronym stands for acquired immunodeficiency syndrome and represents the point where the HIV has depleted a body's CD4 cells to below a 200 count. These are the cells that help with immunity. People with HIV who are considered to have AIDS do not die of HIV, but from any or several of the myriad of other germs and bacteria that we interact with on a daily basis. The subject certainly gets more complex than that on all kinds of levels.

Please be diligent and continue to seek rational information as medical scams and medicinal science deniers are rampant. I mean sure, lets be skeptical of the general establishment, but our local clinics are not trying to spread autism through child vaccines. As Carl Sagan states in his exceptional book, "The Demon Haunted World," "Keeping an open mind is a virtue—but, as the space engineer James Oberg once said, not so open that your brains fall out."

Well, if you agree that HIV attacks a person's immune system (which is literally directly observable), then AIDS is an inevitable conclusion, if allowed to reach that point.

[hivinsite.ucsf.edu]

[rethinkingaids.com]

@ravenwolfcasey, where did you get that there is zero scientific data that proves HIV is the cause of AIDS? That's a pretty controversial statement.

I had my suspicions at first, but then I learned that in the 1950's a female doctor who was doing work in Africa came home to be treated for what we now call AIDS, but which they had no idea what it was at the time. The link was the symptoms and opportunistic infections. So, it actually had been out there for a while before it became a pandemic.

The best theory put forth was that is existed for a while isolated to a particular region of Africa, but local war lords, like Idi Amin, came destroying villages and people fled and dispersed, carrying the HIV virus into major cities, where it spread quickly, likely because the displaced peopel had to prostitute themselves in order to make money to survive.

Most virulent diseases evolve in the tropics, and the ones that affect man moslty come from Africa, because that is where the other "great apes" are located (humans as classified as a "great ape" too) making it easier for a disease to jump species from animal to man that are the most genetically or biologically similar.

One interesting note, is that HIV uses the same chemical port on T-cells as the black plague. Persons who are ancestors of black plague survivors are more likely to survive, but only if they inherited the genetic mutation that prevents infection. If they get it from only one parent, then they will live, but carry the infection like a "Typhoid Mary", but if they get the mutation from both parents (this is very rare, and you need to have a genetic test to be sure) then they are actually immune to both HIV and the black plague.

Before anyone gets excited about a possible conspiracy about the two diseases using the same chemical keys, you shoudl realize the black plague is a bacteria, while HIV is a virus. It wan't until the 1980's, and mostly due to HIV research that the technology was developed to view viruses. The technology did nto exist to genetically modify viruses before the HIV epidemic broke out and was already spread everywhere in the world.

As I said at the beginning, I was suspicious at first, or rather wary, but once I learned the facts, and gained knowledge, the conspiracy theories all chetty picked information to bolster their ideas, much how religious people cherry pick some scriptures and ignore others which are embarrassing or just don't make any sense or are contradictory.