Review-Journal suggests HIV may not cause AIDS?

The back page of the Sunday Las Vegas Review-Journal's Viewpoints section always includes a collection of quotations that the newspaper finds somewhat interesting or, usually, dubious. It's not something that's available online.

Today's explainer of one of those quotes was nothing short of dangerous and shocking. Here's the whole thing, bold-faced where your attention needs to go:

"Well, sir, there were scientists who said the world was flat an there were scientists who said HIV doesn't cause AIDS." -- U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., responding to Russell Moore, a dean at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who scoffed at "apocalyptic" scenarios for global warming painted by the "secularist environmental movement" during Senate global warming hearings on June 7. In fact, it's Sen. Boxer's constituent, renowned University of California, Berkeley biochemist Peter Duesberg, who most prominently holds in his book "Inventing the AIDS Virus" that the "HIV-causes-AIDS" hypothesis fails to meet any of Koch's four postulates for disease causality. Medical scientists usually require such a hypothesis to meet all four.

Whoa. The R-J's editorial board does not believe global warming is caused by people, so the implication here is that the question of whether HIV causes AIDS is an equally suspicious notion. Never mind that Duesberg's claims in a 10-year-old book have been taken apart bit by bit by a long list of credible scientific organizations and journals, particularly his chronologically incorrect notion that AIDS could be caused by HIV medication like AZT, which is a pretty stupid idea seeing how many thousands of AIDS patients died in the years before AZT was developed to slow the progress of the disease.

The National Institutes of Health, in fact, has a full explanation of the HIV-AIDS link on its website. Plus, here's a lengthy list of links to studies and reports confirming the connection. And, of course, there's the disastrous example of South Africa, where President Thabo Mbeki's denial of the HIV-AIDS connection dissuaded many of his citizens from heeding warnings about how to avoid contracting HIV and from submitting to HIV medication treatments. (Mbeki has since backed off, by the way, seeing how South Africa has the highest rate of HIV infection in the world.)

It is baffling and shocking that a major, legitimate daily American newspaper would toss out such a notion, even more baffling than the idea that Sen. Boxer ought to be held responsible for the nutty claims of one of her 36.5 million constituents.

The newspaper needs to clarify this bizarre remark as soon as possible.