And if you think HIV doesn't cause AIDS, I'll probably laugh in your face.

Apparently the HIV virus is most effective in people of African descent due to genetics.

Add to that the fact that a parasitic worm common in contaminated water sources, like in third-world countries, can increase the effects of AIDS and I am beginning to see why so many people in Africa, and African-Americans, think that HIV was engineered to kill black people.

Think about it-- it targets one race, a race that has a long history of being subjugated simply because they were unlucky enough to live in a region of the world that can't support agriculture and domestication of animals well enough to give them a competitive edge. The people who are most affected by it are Africans/African-Americans, poor people, people who have multiple partners, drug users and homosexuals. It's incurable, only treatable with expensive and complicated drug regimins, and can even pass to children from mothers. Basically, if there was a designer illness made up by right-wing mad scientists (right wing because it targets promiscuity and homosexuals), HIV sounds like a pretty good bet.

Of course, I don't actually beleive it is, for two reasons-- first of all, we already figured out that the original HIV was in monkeys and passed to humans through hunters in Africa handling monkey blood. Second of all, there are major flaws in the design from a mad-scientist perspective. First of all, it's got such a long dormant period. While a certain dormant period is required for a disease to be successful, 10 years just to have the first symptoms is pretty excessive, and in that time people can successfully reproduce, and there's a chance that their kids won't get it-- not a super chance, but a chance. Also, it can ONLY pass through blood or semen, so it's limited to people who are exposed to those things coming from multiple people. Doctors and nurses who handle open wounds and needles are a high-risk group, which doesn't make much sense from a mad eugenicist's perspective because we need doctors and nurses. And because of rapes, many people who the eugenicist probably wouldn't want to wipe out have been dying.

Basically, it's too slow to transmit, too slow to kill, and too easy to affect people you actually want to keep around. Besides, if any government or organization was actually racist enough to commit such a heinous crime they'd probably have it attack Native Americans, Asians, Indians, Arabs, etc as well. Or some up with a different disease to do that.

Still, it's really no wonder why so many conspiracy theorists and even normal people believe HIV is man-made. Oregon State University did a study in 2002-2003 that said 48% of African-Americans believed HIV was a man-made virus, 27% thought it was made by the US government and 15% thought it was designed as a form of genocide. I'm sure this new research will probably only fuel those opinions, and I can understand why they persist, no matter how detrimental they are to public-health campaigns.

I'll go put on my tinfoil hat now...