AIDS - Acquired Immuno Deficiency Syndrome. Thought by many to be the scourge of the millennium, in the last decade AIDS has become a household word and, for many, a terrifying end to a troubled life.

During the second Reagan presidential campaign in 1983, then Secretary of Health and Human Services, Margaret Heckler, and Robert Gallo from National Institutes of Health, made a startling announcement: AIDS, that strange and terrifying disease that was sweeping through the ranks of San Francisco homosexuals and was popping up in pockets around most of the civilized world, was caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). President Reagan then announced a large-scale government effort to find a cure for AIDS, and went on to another four years in office with an overwhelming mandate to carry out his programs, which included an unprecedented government funded effort to conquer AIDS.

Since that announcement a decade ago, the U.S. government has spent a staggering $22 billion, and private research has spent billions more chasing the illusive HIV-AIDS connection. And yet all this money, all this research, all this effort has produced no vaccine, no effective prevention, and no cure.

What could possibly be wrong? When we attacked polio, we found a prevention. When we attacked measles we prevailed. We have even made significant progress in the fight to control cancer and heart disease. Why is AIDS so different?

When we examine the HIV-AIDS hypothesis more closely, we will discover that the relationship is purely circumstantial rather than cause-and-effect. Even the nature of this circumstantial evidence is a bit of a stretch, since the correlation actually is between AIDS and the antibody against HIV. Reduced to its simplest form, AIDS is now defined as one or more of about thirty previously known diseases if they occur in the presence of the HIV antibody. In other words, AIDS is not a disease in and of itself; but when - for example - tuberculosis occurs in the presence of the HIV antibody, the disease is defined as AIDS, whereas when tuberculosis occurs by itself, it is simply tuberculosis.

Typically, when an hypothesis is put to scientific test, its primary hurdle (after offering a plausible explanation of the facts) is its ability to predict accurately future related events. With this in mind, let us compare nine specific predictions that have been made since the initial announcement of the HIV-AIDS connection with what actually happened.

Prediction

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