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From: jfh@netcom.com (Jack Hamilton)
Newsgroups: sci.med.aids
Subject: Re: AIDS and HIV
Message-ID: <1991Jun25.031131.26604@cs.ucla.edu>
Date: 25 Jun 91 02:57:50 GMT
References: <1991Jun24.151525.1480@cs.ucla.edu>
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In article <1991Jun24.151525.1480@cs.ucla.edu> gerri@watson.ibm.com (Gerri 
Oppedisano) writes, in response to my earlier article:

>Has there been any person who has AIDS who didn't have HIV+
>status first? 

Two answers: 

1) I corrected my first posting; I should have said that there are
AIDS-like illnesses not caused by HIV. 

2) There have been people with AIDS who have tested negative for the HIV
antibody.  It may be that their immune systems had given up and stopped
producing them by the time someone did the test.  Most people don't have
frozen blood stored away for later testing, so there's no way to go back
and see if they were HIV antibody positive in the past.  I don't know
whether these people were tested for the presence of the actual virus after
direct viral tests were developed.

>How long has the longest period of HIV+ status
>without symptoms been? 

Some of the people in the San Francisco City Clinic Study were HIV+ in the
late seventies and have yet to develop AIDS or ARC.  Again, it's difficult
to say; until recently, a lot of people thought there was no point in
taking the test, because there was nothing they could do anyway.  There may
be someone out there who has been carrying the HIV virus since the
beginning, whenever that was.  There's just no way to tell.  It is clear,
though, that some people can live a long time.

>I've heard that everyone who is HIV+
>eventually develops AIDS; is this rumor?

Yes.
-- 
Jack Hamilton         jfh@netcom.com         apple!netcom!jfh