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Overview
AIDS (Acquired Immuno-Deficiency Syndrome) is an autoimmune disease that can be accompanied by a wide range of other symptoms and opportunistic infections. When any of these opportunistic infections include a positive diagnosis of the HIV virus, a patient is said to have AIDS. AIDS is controversial, in this respect, because of how widely AIDS symptoms can vary, both in terms of how it manifests around the globe, and also how it affects different risk groups.

In the United States and Europe, the most common characteristics of AIDS are Kaposi`s sarcoma (a type of cancer), pneumocystis pneumonia, candidiasis, and mycobacterial infections such as tuberculosis, toxoplasmosis (a disease caused by protozoa that damages the central nervous system, eyes, and internal organs), cytomegalovirus, and the herpes virus. Other symptoms often associated with AIDS include diarrhea, weight loss, night sweats, fevers, rashes, and swollen lymph glands.

The Problem with Defining AIDS
In January 1993, the original defining criteria for AIDS was changed by researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Prior to that time, to be diagnosed with AIDS, patients had to exhibit one or more of 25 symptoms listed by the CDC, and also be HIV-positive. In 1993, the CDC added three new conditions to this listÑcancer of the cervix, bacterial pneumonia, and tuberculosisÑwhich, when accompanied by HIV, is now considered to be AIDS. The effect of this decision dramatically and, some claim, artificially inflated the statistics of people who have AIDS. In the U.S. alone, the figures immediately rose from 250,000 to 400,000, causing noted epidemiologist, Gordon Stewart, M.D. of England to ask, "Will any woman with cervicitis, any man with urethritis, prostatitis, genitourinary cancer or any cancer, or perhaps severe infection, or any other unspecified, wasting or multiple disease, who happens to be HIV-positive, be diagnosed and registered as having AIDS and treated for HIV disease just because those in the business can expand their domain across any diagnostic code and scruple?"

Adding to the problem of defining AIDS are the stark differences between the groups said to be most at risks for contracting AIDS. For example, Kaposi`s sarcoma is 20 times more common in gay men with AIDS than in all other American AIDS patients. By contrast, tuberculosis (TB) is the primary AIDS symptoms among intravenous drug users. In Africa, AIDS is not categorized according to risk groups because it seems to evenly occur among the population and between the sexes. AIDS symptoms among Africans are chiefly diarrhea, wasting, fever, and persistent cough. All of these symptoms have been quite common in Africa for many decades, well before AIDS began to be defined, and are also the primary symptoms of most other tropical diseases.

Because of such discrepancies, much confusion and dissent remain about what AIDS really is and even whether it can accurately be classified as a distinct disease. The common factor in all the symptoms and disease conditions associated with AIDS is HIV. If patients with these symptoms and conditions test positive for HIV, they are said to have AIDS. If they test HIV-negative, they are said to be AIDS-free even if they have the same symptoms and other disease conditions as HIV+ patients. This has led to a kind of diagnostic discrepancy that is not found for any other type of disease. Further compounding the problem is the fact that some scientists, researchers, physicians, and other health care practitioners dispute whether or not HIV even causes AIDS, a question that is considered heretical by the AIDS establishment, which focuses all of its efforts in developing drugs and vaccines that target and destroy the HIV virus. Critics of this approach point out that such drugs and vaccines are in themselves highly toxic and may in fact be causing many of the symptoms associated with AIDS. Rather than focusing on HIV, these dissenting health experts argue, the focus should be instead on educating people about risk factors that are common among AIDS patients, such as recreational and pharmaceutical drugs, unprotected sex, exposure to bacterial infections, and, especially in Africa and other Third World countries, malnutrition, dysentery and contaminated drinking water...

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Natural Cures for AIDS