From Satya magazine, current issue, NYC:

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What Do we Really Know About AIDS?

By Christine Maggiore

I am profoundly disappointed with progressive, critical thinkers who stop thinking critically when it comes to AIDS. The same people who are wary of mainstream media stories and government reports accept without question all stories and reports on AIDS. The very activists who protest the agendas of multinational chemical corporations assume their typical practices and toxic products are right-on when it comes to AIDS. On public radio, in alternative journals, and among the terribly concerned and compassionate, there's only one side to AIDS and little tolerance for anyone who thinks otherwise. It seems that AIDS is immune to healthy skepticism and has the unique ability to turn fervent liberals ferociously conventional and make compliant followers out of our most innovative leaders.

As a healthy HIV positive mother, I find that my decision to decline toxic pharmaceuticals for myself and my son inspires mostly criticism from people who otherwise support independent thinking, natural living, and everyone else's right to choose. As the director of an alternative AIDS organization, I wish that intelligent, caring people would step outside of the mainstream paradigm and consider another side of AIDS. To that end, I offer Satya readers the tip of an enormous iceberg of information.

AIDS is not a new disease. AIDS is a new name for an ever-expanding list of previously known and unrelated conditions that include yeast infections, diarrhea, tuberculosis, salmonella, certain pneumonias and cancers. These conditions are only called AIDS when a person tests HIV positive, but all of these also happen to people who test HIV negative, and all have well-known causes and treatments that are completely unrelated to HIV.

AIDS varies from country to country and year to year. In January of 1993, government AIDS officials in America declared that people who test HIV positive and have a low T cell count