I'm open for a good clean debate, so here goes.
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HIV might not cause Aids, I'm not an expert but this is what i understand.

The the theory of HIV leading to AIDS has long been questioned.
Nobel Prize winning scientists like Prof. Mullis and a Prof Duesberg have challenged their peers to provide scientic proof that HIV causes AIDS and to this day those who "discovered" the HI Virus have failed to prove scientifically that HIV does in fact cause AIDS.

HIV is a virus, like the flu or cold.HIV mostly infects T-cells, also known as CD4+ cells, or T-helper cells. These cells are white blood cells that turn the immune system on to fight disease. Once inside the cell, HIV starts producing millions of little viruses, which eventually kill the cell and then go out to infect other cells.

Aids, A person is said to be have Aids if they have one of 29 specific diseases and test positive for antibodies associated with HIV.

In other words, pneumonia in a person who tests HIV positive is AIDS, while the same pneumonia in a person without HIV is pneumonia. The clinical manifestations and symptoms of the pneumonia may be identical, but one is called AIDS while the other is just called pneumonia.

If you died of TB and you are HIV positive , then you are said to have died of Aids, even if the TB still would have killed had you not had the HIV.

@ Nightz, some of what you said is true. To start off, I'd like to say that I've been a nurse for more than 10 years (15 this month to be exact) and have seen AIDS treatment evolve greatly. I'd like to commend you on the subject matter. Actually, people with HIV have a suppressed immune system and are subject to rare opportunistic infections. The pneumonia that you speak of is not the same type in non HIV individuals. The pneumonia that HIV patients are subject to is a different strain, a rare type, called pneumocystic carinii. Now , what determines if a person goes from HIV to AIDS is their T-cell count. If it falls below 200 then they are said to have full blown AIDS regardless whetheror not if they have any other infection. Once the T-cell count drops the chances of them acquiring rare infections increases 100 fold. Once they begin to get attacked by the onslaught of the infections then the diagnosis changes.Again as a public health nurse in an urban area, most of the population that I see is black and I enjoy educating whenever the opportunity arises. If you'd like more info on the suject you can go to http://www.cdc.com and click on the AIDS link. Another addition I'd like to add is that people never"officially" dies of AIDS, the death certificate will always list first the cause of death, say TB as you mentioned, followed by the phrase " a complication of AIDS" and everything else is listed in order of compounding effect. In general people never die of TB nowadays unless they are homeless or without insurance. This is a travesty especially in the US which touts themselves as such a rich nation.

Is HIV the Cause of AIDS?

There is no proof that HIV causes AIDS. In fact, all the epidemiological and microbiological evidence taken together conclusively demonstrates that HIV cannot cause AIDS or any other illness. The concept that AIDS is caused by a virus is not a fact, but a belief that was introduced at a 1984 press conference by Dr. Robert Gallo, a researcher employed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). (14)

HIV is a retrovirus, a type of virus studied meticulously during two decades of federal health programs that centered around the search for a cancer virus. The idea of contagious cancer was a popular notion in the 1960s and 70s. Since retroviruses have no cell-killing mechanisms, and cancer is a condition marked by rapid cell growth, this type of virus was considered a viable candidate for the cause of cancer. However, healthy people live in harmony with an uncountable number of harmless retroviruses; some are infectious while others are endogenous, produced by our own DNA. (15) Few, if any, retroviruses have been shown to cause disease in humans.

In the 1980s when the CDC began to direct its attention to AIDS, Gallo and other cancer researchers switched their focus from cancer to the newly identified dilemma called AIDS, and the same government scientists who led the quest for a cancer virus began to search for a virus that could cause AIDS.

On April 23, 1984, Gallo called an international press conference in conjunction with the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). He used this forum to announce his discovery of a new retrovirus described as "the probable cause of AIDS." Although Gallo presented no evidence to support his tentative assumption, the HHS immediately characterized it as "another miracle of American medicine...the triumph of science over a dreaded disease." (16)

Later that same day, Gallo filed a patent for the antibody test now known as the "AIDS test." By the following day, The New York Times had turned Gallo's proposal into a certainty with front page news of "the virus that causes AIDS," and all funding for research into other possible causes of AIDS came to an abrupt halt. (17)

By announcing his hypothesis to the media without providing substantiating data, Gallo violated a fundamental rule of the scientific process. Researchers must first publish evidence for a hypothesis in a medical or scientific journal, and document the research or experiments that were used to construct it. Experts then examine and debate the hypothesis, and attempt to duplicate the original experiments to confirm or refute the original findings. Any new hypothesis must stand up to the scrutiny of peer review and must be verified by successful experiments before it can be considered a reasonable theory.

In the case of HIV, Gallo announced an unconfirmed hypothesis to the media who reported his idea as if it were an established fact, inciting government officials to launch new public health policies based on the unsubstantiated notion of an AIDS virus. Some attribute these violations of the scientific process to the atmosphere of terror and desperation that surrounded the notion of an infectious epidemic.

The data Gallo used to construct his HIV/AIDS hypothesis were published several days after his announcement. Rather than supporting his hypothesis, this paper revealed that Gallo was unable to find HIV (actual virus) in more than half of the AIDS patients in his study. (18) While he was able to detect antibodies in most, antibodies alone are not an indication of current infection and are actually an indication of immunity from infection.

His paper also failed to provide a credible explanation as to how a retrovirus could cause AIDS. Gallo suggested that HIV worked by destroying immune cells, but 70 years of medical research had shown that retroviruses are unable to kill cells, and he offered no proof that HIV differed from other harmless retroviruses. In fact, all evidence to date conclusively demonstrates that HIV -- like all retroviruses -- is not cytotoxic.

http://www.aliveandwell.org/