AIDS is not an STD. Neither is HIV.

Yet another “third rail.”

Readers familiar with the literature regarding the purported sexual transmissibility of HIV-positivity are no doubt well-acquainted with the 1997 Padian study, “Heterosexual transmission of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in Northern California: results from a ten-year study.” This is the study that, famously, announced that the probability of seroconverting from a single unprotected encounter was approximately 1 in 1000 (0.0009) for male-to-female transmission, and approximately 1 in 8000 for female-to-male transmission. There is good evidence that these numbers might even be inflated, given that in the prospective study, no seroconversions were observed over the course of ten years.

Nevertheless, the absence of seroincident infection over the course of the study cannot be entirely attributed to significant behavior change. No transmission occurred among the 25 percent of couples who did not use condoms consistently at their last follow-up nor among the 47 couples who intermittently practiced
unsafe sex during the entire duration of follow-up

Indeed, The Perth Group have produced several excellent literature reviews regarding various means of “transmitting” HIV-positivity. From the abstract of “AIDS: Sexually transmitted or sexually acquired?”:

It is claimed that tens of millions of people have acquired AIDS as a result of
sexual transmission of HIV. Sexually transmitted diseases or infections are
invariably spread from active to passive partners and vice versa. We have
critically analysed the published data on AIDS acquisition. These data
indicate that AIDS is certainly sexually acquired but not sexually
transmitted. Conceptually the difference is subtle indeed but nonetheless
pivotal in the understanding of AIDS pathogenesis.

Note the distinction here; The Perth Group is referring to the acquisition of immune deficiency, not to the acquisition of HIV-positivity, whose probability is never more than negligible per the mainstream literature. This leads to the inevitable question: How did a new, almost totally untransmissible agent, manage to be everywhere present in the United States as soon as it was “discovered,” and remained almost completely constant at about 0.3% of the population for the nearly four decades since? Either the phenomenon of HIV-positivity has been around a lot longer than forty years, or HIV-positivity cannot be contagious, or both. Consider the Perth Group’s monograph on mother-to-child transmission, which establishes, among other things, that although HIV-antibody-positivity can be acquired perinatally, these antibodies, known as “ghost” antibodies, are transient and vanish within months in most cases. In fact, there have been cases of HIV-negative mothers giving birth to HIV-positive babies, a curious phenomenon that the researchers attempt to explain away by claiming the childrens’ infections to be nosocomial (hospital acquired), though there is little evidence to substantiate this claim.

Furthermore, HIV-positivity varies in a “regular fashion and independently with age, sex, race, and geography, unlike the stochastic patterns seen in infectious diseases,” suggesting an agent that is likely not infectious at all, but related perhaps to genetics. Furthermore, the consistent racial distribution in every risk group or non-risk group tends to support the notion that whatever HIV-positivity represents, it cannot be contagious and certainly does not behave like an STI. Indeed, it behaves much more like a genetic condition such as sickle cell anemia. Furthermore, the possibility of endogenous retroviral activation must be considered very seriously, as it explains both the phenomenon of testing HIV-positive and its potential non-contagious link to immune deficiency. We will examine the phenomenon of human endogenous retrovirus (HERV) activation in detail in an upcoming post.

To sum up: Neither AIDS nor HIV-positivity is bidirectionally sexually transmitted. AIDS itself may have a contagious element to it, especially when the definition of “AIDS” is expanded to include HIV-negative AIDS. HIV is not an STI. An excellent start to unraveling the mysteries of AIDS would be to divide research funding equally among HIV/AIDS and non-HIV AIDS. Once HIV-negative AIDS (which can be argued eclipses HIV/AIDS in numbers) gets the attention it deserves, we will be well on the way to solving the mystery of acquired immune deficiency once and for all.

Pre-order my upcoming book, The Real AIDS Epidemic, here.