Slide 1: Confidential HIV Test - AIDS Myths Busted
If you've ever been in the situation where you've needed to take a confidential HIV test you're likely to be concerned with how you may have caught the virus and where your strain originated from. Scientists have been trying to work out where the virus originated from since it was discovered in the 1980s, but even now that the exact origin of AIDS and HIV is clear, there are still some ridiculous rumours and conspiracy theories about where AIDS came from. Here we bust the worst of them: Have a look at HIV Test Someone Had Sex with a Monkey So you need a confidential HIV test because someone somewhere in the 1930s once bedded a chimp? Sounds ludicrous, right? And that's exactly what it is. Although scientists do know that HIV evolved from the chimp virus, SIV, this wasn't confirmed until 2006. One of the rumours was that HIV had jumped from human to chimp via intercourse, but we now know that not to be the case. Instead it is more likely that a chimp carrying the SIV was hunted and killed by a human and that the chimps infected blood somehow got into the human's bloodstream. This could be through a cut on the hand or even through eating undercooked chimp meat. Take a look at HIV Testing AIDS is the Result of a Secret Governmental Biological Warfare Program What if your confidential HIV test was the result of a secret governmental biological warfare program from the Cold War gone terribly wrong? This theory sounds even more far-fetched than the first one and that involved sex with primates! First of all the Cold War ended in the 1950s and to be honest there simply wasn't the technology around at this time to create highly sophisticated retroviruses. This was a time before even computers and fax machines had been invented. See to HIV Tests A Secret Plot to Exterminate Gays This conspiracy theory isn't just ridiculous it's also downright homophobic. For a start if AIDS and HIV were the result of a plot to exterminate all gays, or even God's revenge on gays as some conspiracy websites claim, then how do you explain the fact that lesbians are the lowest risk group for the virus? There's also the important fact that the virus began in rural Africa which isn't exactly a hotbed of gay pleasure. If God or the secret scientists were really planning a plot to exterminate all gays wouldn't they have unleashed the virus somewhere a little gayer?
