I cannot answer the question as phrased, because, as phrased, the question assumes that AIDS is a single disease with a single cause. AIDS is not a single disease, it is many, and likewise it does not have one cause, but many. I don't even pretend to know how many causes it might have, I do know however, of quite a few that will cause AIDS-indicator diseases and conditions in the absence of HIV, particularly if multiple factors are combined in a single individual.

In addition, AIDS is a disease of definition, in that we call it "AIDS" only in certain groups of individuals that we arbitrarily deem to be "at risk", and when the same clinical manifestations occur in those that we deem to be "not at risk", we call them something else. As such, AIDS is as much a social construct as it is a medical condition, and thus one cannot delve into the subject of the causation of AIDS as a medical condition, without also discussing the causation of AIDS as a social phenomenon.

In order to understand the origins and causations of AIDS as a social phenomenon, we must go back quite a bit before the GRID epidemic of the early 1980s, to about 9 years earlier, when the American Psychiatric Association (finally) removed homosexuality from its official list of mental disorders. Prior to that date, persecution of homosexuals took as much a scientific pretext as a religious one. Homosexuals had been subjected to electroshock "therapy", toxic drugs, incarceration, and a long list of horrors, not solely at the hands of religious Inquisitors, but at the hands of scientific and medical professionals as well.

The movement in the early '70s towards normalization of scientists' views towards homosexuality resulted in a sexual revolution much like the heterosexual revolution of the preceding decade, complete with an analagous set of drug habits. However, there were several toxic substances to which the gay community of the Disco Era were exposed, which were not in evidence with the "flower generation".

One of these was nitrite inhalants; amyl nitrite, butyl nitrite, cyclohexyl nitrite -- today, it's a whole family of chemicals, but in those days it was primarily amyl and later butyl nitrite. This class of drugs is legally marketed in the US (though its intended use must be disguised in most states,) under brand names such as "Bolt", "Ram", "Pig Sweat", "Hard", and my all-time favorite, "Jungle Juice", primarily to gay males. In the context of gay male sex, nitrites have a dual use: Their initial effect is penile engorgement, coupled with a warm, throbbing sensation throughout the body, particularly in the head and genitals. This is coupled with a relaxation of the body's sphincters, including the anal and throat sphincters. However, the penile engorgement gives way to flaccidity with overuse, so when gay men use these drugs in the context of sex, "bottoms" tend to use them heavily, while "tops" tend to use them sparingly, if at all.

Another possible suspect is benzene in anal lubricants, particularly the oil-based lubricants that were popular at the time. Ever try a liquor enema? It's a quicker way to get drunk than by imbibing, in part because the rectal lining is more absorbent than that of the stomach. According to the Hazardous Chemical Desk Reference (1993), symptoms of benzene poisoning include "Confirmed human carcinogen producing myeloid leukemia, Hodgkin's disease, and lymphomas by inhalation. A human poison by inhalation . . .skin contact, intraperitoneal, intravenous, and possibly other routes. A severe eye and moderate skin irritant. . . blood changes, increased body temperature. . .Mutation data reported. . . .The bone marrow may be [damaged], . . .the changes reflected in the peripheral blood. Anemia, leucopenia, macrocytosis, . . .thrombocytopenia may be present. . . Benzene has a definite cumulative action . . . . In chronic poisoning the onset is slow, with the symptoms vague: fatigue, headache, dizziness, nausea and loss of appetite, loss of weight, and weakness are common complaints. There is great individual variation in the signs and symptoms of chronic benzene poisoning."

Another possible culprit is the fact that many of the most promiscuous gays of the period were on running prescriptions for antibiotics, which they obtained from pliant doctors, and took daily for months or years on end, as a prophylactic against STDs. Indeed, there were also what were called "cocktail parties" (the name has a dual meaning,) in which were featured two large bowls -- one filled with psychoactive drugs, and the other filled with antibiotics, and "fast-track" homosexuals who attended these parties would sample from both bowls before joining the orgy in the back room. Does your knowledge of human biology extend to knowing why you're not supposed to take antibiotics on a chronic basis like that? Hmmm...fungal infections, immunosuppression, and a laundry list of other "AIDS-indicator" diseases. Go figger.

So this subset of gay men had no fewer than three simultaneous assaults on their immune systems, as a direct result of the lifestyle (in particular the chemical lifestyle) that they were living. In essence, nitrites caused them to have KS, the antibiotics were responsible for the candidiasis, PCP, and other fungal infections, and the benzene did the rest (not to mention that each of these factors is immunotoxic in its own way, so that all three ingredients were not necessarily needed in any given case to cause autoimmune disease). In particular, note that nearly all of the early cases of GRID/AIDS in the early '80s were among bottoms -- the ones most heavily exposed to two out of three of these toxic assaults.

In 1981, when Dr. Michael Gottleib published the very first paper on GRID/AIDS, concerning five homosexual men in California with PCP and current or prior CMV infection, he said, (and I quote,) "The patients did not know each other and had no known common contacts or knowledge of partners who had had similar illnesses. The 5 did not have comparable histories of sexually transmitted disease." He went on to say, "Two of the 5 reported having frequent homosexual contact with various partners. All 5 reported using inhalant drugs, and 1 reported parenteral drug abuse."

Now, at this point, ask yourself one question: Given the above facts in the seminal paper on AIDS (no pun intended,) what is there to suggest that this was an STD in the first place? Here's an even more revealing question: If all 5 had been heterosexual males instead, all else being equal -- two of them being promiscuous, none of them having comparable STD histories or knowledge of sex partners with similar illnesses, all 5 abusing a class of drugs common and virtually exclusive to heterosexual males, the whole nine yards -- what are the odds that it would have more or less immediately been assumed to be an STD?

From the very beginning, GRID/AIDS was a disease of definition, and those who created it disguised this quickly by changing the name from "GRID" (Gay-Related-Immunodeficiency) to "AIDS" (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome.) But no matter what they called it, it was still a disease of definition: If the patient developed certain illnesses and fell into a "risk group", then it was "AIDS". If not, then it was something else.

Eleven days after the publication of Dr. Gottleib's report, Donald Francis of the Epidemic Intelligence Service placed a call to his former Harvard research supervisor, Myron "Max" Essex, to voice his opinion that the new disease would be caused by a sexually transmitted retrovirus with a long latency period. Francis would later lobby heavily and successfully at the NIH for his view, which he cooked up in less than two weeks after the first article about the new "gay plague" was published in the MMWR.

Now, since the Nixon administration (and to a lesser extent, even before then,) there had been a group of retrovirologists in high places at the NIH and the CDC, who'd been the "go-to" guys for Nixon's War on Cancer, and at the time were considered to be among the creme-de-la-creme of the world's retrovirologists. Two of them were Dr. Peter Duesberg and Dr. Robert Gallo.

Now, by 1981, there was a very real economic reason that certain government retrovirologists needed a disease, any disease, that they could pin on a retrovirus: It just so happens that "CDC" doesn't stand for "Centers for the study of interesting but harmless particles", it stands for "Centers for Disease Control", and Ronald Reagan had just been swept into office on a campaign promise of eliminating government waste. By this time, Duesberg had already defected from the cancer gravy train, he'd recanted his "discovery" of the RSV oncogene, and he was starting to make a rather compelling case that retroviruses are generally non-pathogenic. If the CDC's retrovirologists (Gallo among them) didn't come up with something pretty scary that they could blame on a retrovirus, their heads were on the chopping block and they well knew it.

Meanwhile, speculation surfaced repeatedly in those early years that AIDS was a lifestyle disorder, caused in the gay population by drug abuse, particularly nitrites, but such voices were systematically shouted down by a new wave of gay-activists-turned-AIDS-activists, who insisted that AIDS simply had to be infectious. There was a reason for this: How many people do you know who donate to the National Emphysema Foundation? Ever write your congressman to demand more funding for research into alcoholic cirrhosis? The American people generally have no pity on those who bring disease upon themselves, and if they fear that abuse of a drug will kill them, they'll refrain from using that drug and worry about it no more, they certainly aren't gonna pressure their legislators to hurry up and pass the Janis Joplin Act so that we can get more funding for drug-induced diseases before they spread to the general public.

So Ol' Ronnie had these activists marching on the White House lawn, chanting "Silence equals DEATH!" and an election coming up that very November (1984), and so for political reasons he had to toss these activists a bone, and so he "gave them Barrabus" in the form of Robert Gallo, to give them the infectious cause for AIDS that they demanded. He might as well have ordered a basin brought to him, so that he could wash his hands.

From there, it was a case of "science by press conference", as Gallo's announcement of his "discovery" of the "probable cause of AIDS" at a press conference on April 23, 1984, preceded his very first publication of his findings for peer review by about two weeks. In the meantime, the world accepted uncritically the premise that HTLV-III (later renamed "HIV") was the cause of AIDS, in the virtually total absence of scientific peer review.

And as with most pseudoscientific social constructs (for comparisons, Google terms like "Spermatorrhea" and "Female Hysteria") large groups of the masses, both professionals and laymen alike, accepted without question what they'd been told, no matter how ridiculous a claim might seem in any other context, because each had his own reasons for wanting to believe that it was true. Christians wanted to believe that it was one of the plagues of the Apocalypse, and that God was targeting gays first with His "plague of greivous sores". Closet homophobes, driven underground by a decade of "normalization" of views of homosexuality, leapt at the chance to vindicate their views that homosexuality is a sickness. Industrialists (particularly in the pharmaceutical and condom industries,) saw a chance to market a whole line of products to a populace mobilized by fear of a highly-stigmatized disease. Doctors wanted to believe that they were well on their way to curing their patients, because the cause had been found. Ordinary joes who beat their wives when they suspected them of screwing around, had a whole new justification for their behavior. Just about everyone had some reason to want to believe in the construct of AIDS-as-STD, and so no virtually no one asked any questions -- the consensus was in, the mob had spoken, and AIDS was an STD caused by HIV, even before the first paper on HIV had even been published, much less reviewed by the larger scientific community.

That's a question I can only answer with a question: "Which AIDS? Are we talking about African/third-world AIDS or American/Western AIDS? If it's American AIDS, is it African-American AIDS or gay AIDS or other? Are we talking 1981-1984 AIDS, 1984-1985 AIDS, 1985-1987 AIDS, 1987-1993 AIDS, or 1993 to present AIDS?"

All of the above are different AIDS', and all have different causes, and this is evidenced by two facts: 1) AIDS-indicator diseases tend to break down demographically. For example, in the US, about 98% of KS in AIDS patients is among gay males, even to this day. African AIDS patients, on the other hand, suffer from KS (in heterosexuals of both sexes), malaria, dysentery, etc., while heterosexual African-American AIDS patients have almost no KS, and tend to be more likely to be diagnosed on the basis of low CD4 counts and/or common opportunistic infections like candidiasis. 2.) There are people who are considered to have AIDS under one definition, which would not be considered to have AIDS under another definition, and vice-versa. For example, many Africans diagnosed under the Bangui definition for AIDS have been found to be HIV-negative, resulting in the repeated downward revision of WHO AIDS statistics (the most recent one within the past month.) Thus, for many Africans diagnosed with AIDS, AIDS is caused by not living in America where you can't be diagnosed with AIDS unless you've tested positive on two different antibody tests, since these people would not be considered to have AIDS here, since they test negative for HIV.

For the purpose of this discussion (and in the interest of not digressing back into my rambling diatribe on the history of AIDS, so that I can explain the "cause" or more likely "causes" of AIDS in any different demographic in any given time period,) I shall stick more or less to the current CDC version, which has been in place since 1993.

Now, if I told you that there's no such thing as a retrovirus that causes heart disease, would you turn around and ask, "Then what causes heart disease, smart guy?" Chances are that you wouldn't, because we both know that heart disease is a generic term for a wide variety of different specific medical conditions, each of which has its own cause or causes. And yet, when we're discussing a wide variety of different specific autoimmune conditions lumped together under one big "AIDS" umbrella, we're having that very conversation. This in and of itself is a bit remarkable, from my point of view.

AIDS is much the same, and as such, there is no simple explanation for what causes each and every case of AIDS, any more than there is a simple explanation for what causes each and every heart attack. What I shall do, instead, is to attempt to explain those that fall under the current CDC definition.

Under that definition, AIDS is defined as: 1) Testing positive on ELISA and Western Blot for HIV infection; AND 2) Having a one-time CD4 count measurement lower than 200 OR having one of nearly 30 different AIDS-indicator diseases. (NOTE: The CDC definition includes the possibility of having AIDS without a low CD4 count, and so does my own, so that word "OR" in the above sentence is very important. Neither I nor the CDC limit AIDS to those with low CD4 counts. Indeed, in my opinion, early-stage AIDS or what is often called "pre-AIDS" is more likely characterized by significantly elevated CD4 counts rather than low counts, which are more characteristic of late-stage AIDS. This is, as I said earlier, also in line with one of the more popular recent models of AIDS causation, known as the "immune activation" model.)

Now, the list of AIDS-causative co-factors includes, but is not limited to: Stress, malnutrition, genetic predisposition, drug abuse, sleep deprivation, chronic panic resulting in chronically-elevated adrenalines (often caused by testing positive in and of itself,) use/misuse of pharmaceuticals, social ostracization resulting in chronically-elevated cortisols (also often caused by testing positive), psychological factors, toxic factors, AIDS-cocktail drugs, etc. This list is in no particular order, and is hardly complete.

Now, at this point, I have to explain a concept to you that I call the "car crash" model of AIDS. No, it doesn't mean that AIDS is caused by car crashes, it means that causation is similar to that of auto accidents, in that neither AIDS nor auto accidents are generally caused by a single factor in most cases, but tend to be multifactoral. In the case of a car crash, it wasn't just that the other guy ran the red light, and it wasn't just that you were speeding, being late for work, having overslept because of antihistamines you'd taken only hours earlier to try to get some relief from your allergies so that you could get two hours' sleep before getting up for work, and it wasn't just that you were on your cel phone with your boss, trying to explain why you'd be late this morning. Usually, when a car crash occurs, it's because you were speeding, talking on the cel phone, groggy from drugs and insufficient rest, AND your mind was elsewhere when suddenly this guy runs a red light and BAM. If any one of those factors were different, either a different accident altogether would have occurred, or perhaps even no accident at all, and the more of these co-factors we remove from the equation, the less and less likely an accident becomes.

In the case of AIDS, one or more AIDS co-factors (the more the merrier,) cause a condition of immune activation, resulting two generic autoimmune conditions: hypergammaglobulinemia, and hyper-activation of T4 lymphocytes. Hypergammaglobulinemia, being the overproduction of any number of a variety of antibodies, makes the person more likely to test false-positive on an HIV test, and the overall effect the combination of these conditions is much like the rare disease known as "Job's Syndrome" or Hyper-IgE Recurrent Infection Syndrome -- the patient undergoes a period of simultaneous immune hyperactivation and immunosuppression, becoming more susceptible to fungal infections, opportunistic infections, and the like, all the while with elevated CD4 counts and antibody levels.

Now, at this point, if the patient doesn't ever test false-positive, he can not be considered to have AIDS under the current CDC definition, so at this point we have to bid farewell to those who have this disease but persist in testing negative for HIV (as the CDC did in 1993 when they adopted this definition in the first place.) They may have been AIDS patients under the 1981-1992 definitions, but under the 1993-to-present definition, they don't have AIDS anymore, because they don't have HIV. HIV is therefore the virus which causes other diseases to be called "AIDS".

Thus, the currently-accepted definition of AIDS insists that only those who test positive for HIV have it, and in others the exact same disease is called "Idiopathic CD4 Lymphocytopenia", or "ICL" for short. Never mind the fact that this is a totally circular definition -- I didn't make these rules up, I'm just following them in my definition of the term "AIDS" for the purpose of this discussion, and at this point, we can no longer call people with ICL "AIDS patients", because the CDC insists that it's not AIDS unless you test positive for HIV.

Thus, those who develop this specific set of autoimmune phenomena and test false positive as a result of it are defined as "AIDS patients". Now, having tested false-positive on an HIV test as a result of autoimmune abnormalities, what do you think is in store for the patient in the future? I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that someone with a history of autoimmune disease is likely to have a future much the same, unless he finds a way to eliminate some or all of the AIDS co-factors in his life.

Now, consider that the human immune system can only produce a finite number of CD4 cells in one's lifetime. In the elderly, it is known that CD4 counts drop naturally, and that KS, PCP, and other AIDS-indicator diseases are common in that age group, regardless of HIV status. What do you think would happen if your immune system spent a decade or two constantly producing CD4 cells at 3 or 4 times the normal rate? For every decade, you'd get 3 or 4 decades closer to complete autoimmune exhaustion. By the time you were 30, you could easily have the immune system of someone twice your age or perhaps even older. At that point, you'd lose your ability to produce CD4 cells at the normal rate, and your immune system would finally collapse.

You ask if I think I'll ever develop AIDS. I'm telling you that under both the CDC and my own definition, I already have AIDS. Under the CDC definition, I've had AIDS since 1998. Under my own definition, I was born with early-stage AIDS, and in my adult life, I complicated my pre-existing autoimmune problems with prolonged and chronic use of recreational and medicinal drugs, extremes of stress brought on primarily by a long-term addict-enabler relationship with a crackhead, and other such factors. In 1998, I attempted to leave the crackhead, moving (as I said earlier,) into a friend's spare bedroom, with his 24 cats pissing all over the place in a mold-infested environment that was also extraordinarily infested with dust mite waste, due to the presence of 27 indoor mammals. As a result, I almost immediately took sick with something indistinguishable from "seroconversion illness", and subsequently tested positive for HIV (in my opinion, false positive.)

Subsequently, I moved back in with the crackhead, exposing myself to further stress, and sharing two consecutive apartments with her which were heavily infested with mold and dust mite waste, and one of which was also heavily infested with cat dander. The longer I lived under these conditions, the sicker I became, and within two years of the onset of illness, I developed an atypic pneumonia characteristic of AIDS.

In early 2001, we moved into a house which I'd thoroughly inspected for mold or water damage beforehand, and my health almost immediately began to improve. Shortly thereafter, I took a driver's license photo. Two and a half years later, I took another driver's license photo in the same DMV office, under the same lighting, and possibly with the same camera. Those photos are here -- I challenge you to pick which is the picture of the younger me.

So, in short, I've had AIDS for quite some time now, by the most commonly-accepted definitions of the disease -- at the moment, I happen to be in a period of the best health of my life, and at that my health is far from perfect. I have scars all over my left forearm from a rash of staph boils I had a little more than a year ago. I have a perforated septum from a fungal infection in my teens. I had autoimmune issues before I tested positive (or false-positive) for HIV, and I actually have fewer of them now than I did only a few years ago, mostly because I've made a lot of changes in my life.

Will I die of AIDS? At this point, considering that I am an HIV-positive AIDS dissident, (and becoming somewhat influential in the movement despite myself) I have no doubt that if I step in front of a bus tomorrow, or develop lung cancer from years of smoking and nitrite abuse, or whatever finally takes me out, my death will be called "AIDS". And why not, considering the fact that when Ryan White bled to death from hemophilia complicated by AZT poisoning, it was called "AIDS"?

I don't plan on dying anytime soon, though. I'm not a health nut, but I've made some improvements in the way I eat, the way I live, the way I take care of my body, and I've eliminated or drastically reduced most or all of the AIDS co-factors that I have any control over (I can't do much about my genetic predispositions, but I can at least stop making them worse by piling on the nitrite inhalants, corticosteroids, toxins, stress, environmental allergens, and other immune stressors that were previously the causes of my "progression to AIDS".)