p For more than a decade, scientists throughout the world agreed that HIV had a latency period, a time during which it remained inactive before becoming active and causing immune destruction. The notion of a latency period was used to explain why HIV did not behave like all other infectious, diseasecausing microbes that cause illness soon after infection, and why significant quantities of active HIV could not be found in people who test HIV positive.

p At first, HIV’s latency period was thought to be a few months long.^^82^^ It was then revised to one year, then two, then three and five years.^^83^^ As greater numbers of people who tested HIV positive did not develop AIDS as predicted, the latency period was extended to ten or fifteen years, and more recently, even to entire lifetimes.^^84^^

p Just when HIV’s growing latency period became the focus of mounting scrutiny, it was replaced with the concept of constantly active HIV that replicates and destroys cells at spectacular rates, a hypothesis known as “viral load.” The media, government health agencies, AIDS organizations, and most AIDS doctors have uncritically accepted the viral load concept as fact. Proponents of viral load assen that HIV is rampant and destructive from the very moment of infection, and that the immune system of a person who tests positive is engaged in a perpetual struggle to keep the virus under control. They claim that HIV, after five, ten or fifteen years, eventually wins the battle by wearing out the immune system.

p Viral load relies entirely on conclusions drawn from polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests, and is based on the erroneous notion that the fragments of genetic material PCR finds correspond to counts of actual virus. In fact, PCR is unable to detect actual virus; it only amplifies genetic material associated with HIV (RNA or DNA) and the “load” produced by the test is a mathematical calculation, not a count of infectious virus. When standard methods of virus counting are applied, a viral load of 100,000 has been shown to correspond to less than ten infectious units of HIV, an amount that is far too small to induce illness.^^85^^

p Contrary to popular belief, PCR cannot determine what portion, if any, of the genetic material it detects represents infectious virus. In fact more than 99% of what PCR measures is noninfectious.^^86^^ Dr. Kary Mullis, who won the 1993 Nobel Prize for inventing PCR is a member of The Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis and refutes those who claim that HIV is the causative agent of AIDS.^^87^^

Viral loads have been measured in people who are HIV negative and in AIDS patients who test HIV antibody positive but have no HIV^^88^^ Low levels of viral load have not been correlated with good health, with absence of illness or high T cell counts while high viral loads do not correspond with low T cells or sickness.^^89^^ For more information, please see What’s Up with Viral Load? on page 36.