REVIEW ARTICLE Demographic Characteristics of HIV: II. What Determines the Frequency of Positive HIV Tests?

Abstract—HIV tests are supposed to detect the human immunodeficiency virus, but the accumulated results of 2 decades of HIV tests in the United States are not consonant with that supposition. Newborn babies test HIV-positive about 4 times more often than do children from about 1 year of age to the pre-teen years. Male children always test positive more frequently than do female children. The frequency of positive HIV-tests, F(HIV), varies in regular fashion with age among widely different sectors of the population: blood donors, military personnel, drug users, and others. F(HIV) increases from the teenage years into the middle adult years and then declines again toward old age. These regularities and trends mark HIV tests as indicators of a physiologic process and not indicators of a sexually transmitted infection. F(HIV) also varies from group to group, in a manner that reflects the general state of health of that group: repeat blood donors test positive most rarely, first-time donors somewhat more frequently, military personnel even more frequently, members of the Job Corps considerably more frequently, and medical patients being treated for reasons unconnected to HIV or AIDS nevertheless test HIV-positive more often than do healthy people—even when the medical condition is psychiatric. These variations again mark a positive HIV-test as indicating, not anything specific to HIV but something non-specific about health in general, for example, the degree of physiologic or oxida-tive stress. These and other aspects of the data confirm the conclusion reached in Part I of this series, that HIV tests do not track a sexually transmitted agent. The most significant corollary is that newborns who happen to test HIV-positive should no longer be treated with the highly toxic anti-retroviral drugs