Blutoski, I didn't mean to ignore your input here. I was engrossed in research, and overlooked your point. HIV was called
HTLV-III in the early days. Note this study -
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=2443528&dopt=Abstract
Or,
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/224/4648/497
There are hundreds more studies like that. Thousands actually. When you say HTLV, what do you mean? HTLV-1 doesn't cause immune problems, it causes cancer. (sometimes). HTLV-II isn't known to cause anything yet. HTLV-III is now called HIV, and HTLV-IV is a complete unknown, except to some current researchers. So what HTLV did they have?
Note: HIV is my field of research.
HTLV-1. Yes, this is cancer. It's cancer of the CD4 cells. Cancer of the immune system cells. This is exactly the type of cell that's infected with HIV. Consequently, the symptoms are similar: people with HTLV have a collapsed immune system, and die of ancillary infections, such as pneumonia, and get Kaposi's Sarcomas. HIV was never really 'called' HTLV - this was merely the leading proposal during a period of much rapid change in the field.
Those are good questions. Ones that get to the heart of the matter. Remember when AIDS was considered a death verdict? And we were warned about how it would infect one out of five heterosexuals by 1990?
I remember being told there was a one-in-a-million chance that anybody would ever get it. There's a difference between what was announced by somebody somewhere sometime, versus actual projections from professionals. Media tends to be alarmist.
Also: things change, and projections are based on assumptions that may turn out to be mitigated. For example, we figured out how to screen it from the blood supply. Secondly, people started using condoms. Recall that at the time, STD was common in the 20-30 year old age bracket, and most were treatable, so people did not protect themselves.
Why do some diseases not cause disease? And why do some people not believe in them?
You'll have to be more specific.
Why do some Doctors (and skeptics) not believe in Fibromyalgia Syndrome, (FMS) Multiple chemical sensitivities (MCS), Gulf War syndrome (GWS), Post-polio syndrome or Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS)?
You have a mixed bag here: FMS and CFS are more or less medically accepted. If a doctor rejects the diagnosis, he's more likely engaged in malpractise rather than 'of a different opinion'. The two controversies are regarding their root cause(s) and treatment, and secondly, there's a controversy about patients who self-diagnose and their doctor disagrees, because they don't meet the actual criteria. Just because a doctor doesn't believe that Mabel has FMS doesn't mean he doesn't think there is such a thing. (as an example, my wife is a psychiatrist who is certain that dissociative disorder exists, but every patient of hers who has claimed they have it is just plain lying - she looks forward to the day she gets a real one)
In contrast, MCS GWS and PPD are dubious diagnoses, and have not been added to diagnostic tools. See
my review of MCS.
Regardless, these conditions are also very different than the HIV controversy in that there is no physical presentment that cannot be explained by other factors. AIDS cannot be explained by any model with the reliability and robustness that it receives from the HIV model.
That is for sure. Bacterial infections suffer the same questions. Why do some people get sick and others don't? Why do some people have an agent always in them, but never get sick? Why does exposure to HTLV not cause illness?
These questions can sometimes be answered on an individual basis.
Sometimes, a patient is HIV+, but it turns out, the test was a false positive. These anomalies are impossible to resolve when they are historical. You can do a good test today, but if the prior test was ten years ago, there's no building a time machine to see if they *really* had the result back then that the test produced. There are different types of HIV tests, based on different principles, and they can produce contradictory results.
In the case of disease resistance in general: the specific immune system is unique to every individual, and based on a mix of genetic starting material, and exposure history (magnitude and frequency). Individuals vary in their resistance as a result of this mix. Even identical twins have variability.
And why do people with AIDS not have HIV?
Often, a patient is misdiagnosed, for example. Like the HTLV patients mentioned above. I have not been able to locate an actual example of a testable AIDS patient who is HIV-. These anecdotes appear to be apocryphal.
