I find the whole topic fascinating. Nearly every scientist who reads Duesberg's stuff and follows his arguments is convinced that he's not using clear and logical science to get to his conclusions, though he is a convincing speaker and he sounds good. He does a good job of exposing stuff that we don't know about HIV and AIDS, , but he's too quick to jump to the conclusion that the gap in knowledge proves a conspiracy of some sort, or that it proves his assertions. Scientists know that the pursuit of knowledge often proceeds at a snail's pace, and learn to deal with unanswered questions as just that - unanswered questions. Conspiracy theorists, like religious fanatics, are a little too quick to assume that the answer for every unanswered question, every little itty bitty doubt, is that their original theory is right and everyone else is thus wrong because there's a question - conspiracy theories leave no stone unturned with their easy universal declarations.

Duesberg is having career problems because what he's doing is not good science, and most people who are helping AIDS patients consider him to be the antichrist. Some scientists who disagree with him still think that he has an interesting idea or two that are worthy of a scientific study, but most scientists want nothing to do with him or his movement because he has a track record of distorting science, cherry-picking the data, and making unsubstantiated claims and presenting them as fact.

As far as the AIDS deniers' claims, there is no study that backs up their assertions that drug use or poverty cause AIDS; there are in fact many, many pieces of reasearch to the contrary. Drug use and poverty certainly exacerbate AIDS, and can bring on the decline of the immune system faster, but they do not cause the underlying problem; HIV does. They also can't answer why the new anti-retroviral drugs are helping so many people with AIDS, nor can they counter the practically universal presence of HIV in AIDS patients (at least so far as the aforementioned AIDS patients have been tested for HIV).

Gos and I are duking it out at that link I posted, so that's a good place to start looking for specifics on all of this. You'll get a pretty good fleshing out of both sides there.

Criminy. Ted, thanks for the succinct explanation here, and for having the stomach to duke it out with Gos on the other thread. I'm involved in HIV research and have been an activist for going on 20 years. I'm so tired of Johnny-come-latelies like that. It's like people who say evolution is a myth because there is no direct evidence.