Aids

Since the beginning of the 1980s, the Auto Immune Deficiency Syndrome, known by its acronym AIDS, has become the world's most widely spread and most feared disease. An astronomical amount of money and energy has since been invested by governments and by private agencies in the attempt to know more about this deadly disease and to find a cure as well as a vaccine against it. Yet, unfortunately, whatever progress has been registered seems to dwarf the tragic advance of this modern equivalent of the medieval Black Death.

According to the World Health Organization, by the end of 1994 governments had notified it of 1,025,073 cases of AIDS since record-keeping began in 1980, although the true figure was probably more than four times higher (AP, 1995, p. A2). The agency said that chronic undereporting and underdiagnosis in developing countries meant the actual number of AIDS cases was probably more than 4.5 million. W.H.O., an agency which is part of the United Nations, said that more than 70 percent of the estimated cases were in Africa, while about 9 percent were in the United States alone, 9 percent in the rest of the American hemisphere, 6 percent in Asia and 4 percent in Europe. These statistics included only people with active cases of AIDS or those who had died of the disease (AP, 1995, p. A2).

Soon after the W.H.O. statistics were made public, another set of data which caused no little concern came out. By the end of January, 1995, the U.S. Federal Centers for Dis

uld be farther along. But the problem has simply turned out to be worse than we could have imagined (Horowitz, 1995, p. 33). The critical players involved in determining the course of the disease, both as an affliction and as a public-health issue, have been forced to admit that much of the work to date may have been misdirected, while the country's most prominent researchers no longer talk of "hitting a home run" or finding a "magic bullet." Rather, the fashionable phrase today in AIDs research circles is "return to basic science" (Horowitz, 1995, p. 33). To complicate the issue even further some iconoclasts are ready to challenge what has been the fundamental tenet of AIDS researchers across the United States and the world, i.e. that the human immunodeficiency virus is the cause of AIDS. On October 28, 1994, at an alternative medicine gathering in Greensboro, North Carolina, Robert Willner, a Florida physician, publicly injected himself with a blood sample drawn from a HIV- infected young man. In an interview soon after the inoculation, Willner described HIV as an "innocent virus" and said that AIDS is not caused by HIV, nor is it contagious, but it is caused by malnutrition, recreational drug abuse and modern medicines i