Acquiring AIDS Information Online

by Ed Robinson, M.D., Ph.D.

Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome—AIDS. You hear about it all the time; it's in every paper and news source from Time to Newsweek to Rolling Stone. But what is it? Do you really know everything there is to know about AIDS and, more importantly, do you know what you need to know about AIDS? If you have questions, and your favorite source of information is out of town or on the phone, where can you look for information? The Internet.

I found one site with loads of links on AIDS was the AIDS Resource list. This source has over 100 links to AIDS and HIV information sites. Several of the links are directly to search engine sites, thus making the 100 links on the order of several hundred sites. Furthermore, the sites include information useful to physicians and scientists as well as high school students. Overall, a great site with nice graphics.

So, how does one get infected by HIV? There are nearly as many questions asked about that topic as there are people with AIDS. I managed to find a pretty good site, from Australia, with answers to many commonly asked questions. (Example: Can you get AIDS from a mosquito? The answer is "no.")

Now that you know how one can get infected by HIV, the next question is: How to prevent AIDS? How do you protect yourself and your loved ones? There are a couple of sites, including an online guide to safer sex, devoted to such topics. This includes instructions on how to use a condom properly, information on how women can protect themselves, and information on other sexual health-related topics.

One of the linked pages includes information on women and HIV. This comprehensive site includes photographs, a bedside safer sex guide for lesbians, and other information. The site includes links to several sites that have nudity, but they are educational in nature.

One frequently asked question concerns the relative risks of becoming infected with HIV via different types of sex. Several different sites address these questions, but one of the best is related to the risks of oral sex. This is discussed in great detail, includes several scientific studies, and is heavily researched. All in all, a balanced, truthful, and accurate presentation of the data.

There are plenty of sites containing information for HIV counselors; the same information could be useful to parents, adults, adolescents, teachers, etc. One of these sites is maintained by the University of California at San Francisco, probably the leading center for AIDS care and counseling. This site is organized by questions that might be asked. For example, one heading is: Does AIDS prevention work? (also in Spanish) The link leads to a summary of data, referenced and annotated, that addresses that specific question. Other topics include women and AIDS, adolescents and HIV, condoms and HIV prevention, and several others. A highly factual and well- researched site.

Once you start reading about HIV, AIDS, and the immune system, you might have some questions concerning terminology. The online glossary of AIDS terms is one of the most comprehensive that I have seen. A really wonderful, huge, text-only file, it contains explanations of many acronyms as well as fairly easy-to-understand descriptions of AIDS terminology. It is by no means simplistic, however.

A site that calls itself the "world's largest source of information and research on HIV" is the Red Ribbon Net. The site includes some interesting and informative links to sites such as the Biotechnical and Pharmaceutical Companies. Overall this site was a bit user unfriendly as Web sites go, but with some negotiating one could obtain useful information. I would have to say that this site (the Biotech site) was not designed for nonscientists. Another site accessed through the Red Ribbon Net was a list of AIDS Services Organizations. This could be searched by organization name or by organization state/region. (Unfortunately, the latter was under construction so only the former was available.) My only complaint about that site is that it is pretty provincial, listing organizations in only the greater Los Angeles area.

The federal government certainly seems to want to have its hands on the AIDS Web sites; two of the best Web sites are sponsored by the federal government. The first, the CDC Clearinghouse on AIDS, is great in that it has useful links such as the National AIDS Hotline, the HIV/AIDS treatment service, and even has summaries of recent articles on HIV/AIDS that appear in the news all across the United States. The latter, the AIDS Case Summary, can be quite informative. Finally, you can order educational materials directly from the CDC.

The other two government AIDS sites I would like to mention have been described in previous "Medicine on the Web" articles. The first is the NIH home page, which includes links to the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the institute that funds most AIDS research in the United States.

The second is the US Patent and Trademark Office AIDS Patent Database. This site is fascinating and allows the user to search the database for all of the patented inventions relating to AIDS.

This article presents only a few of the many HIV and AIDS sites available on the Web. Other related sites could be found by searching for "Sexually Transmitted Diseases," "AIDS" or "HIV" with any common search engine (e.g., Webcrawler or Yahoo). Such searches yield many useful and not-so-useful topics. For example, a search for "HIV" on Webcrawler yielded 1,258 documents, while a search for AIDS yielded 10,324, although the latter search yielded a huge number of unrelated documents. On Yahoo, "AIDS" is a specific subheading under the general heading of Health: Medicine: Diseases and Conditions: AIDS/HIV, which lists 119 sites.

I would just like to close by addressing my favorite, and most irritating, topic: Does HIV cause AIDS? For those of you who follow such topics, there has been a debate (involving a few scientists, among them the previously respected scientist, Peter Duesberg) regarding whether or not HIV causes AIDS. The counterpoint, that HIV does indeed cause AIDS, is manned by some 20,000-50,000 scientists worldwide (including me). Despite overwhelming evidence to support this belief, the minority opinion (that HIV doesn't cause AIDS) has been covered extensively in the popular press with potentially devastating results. If people (especially teenagers) don't believe that HIV causes AIDS, they may not take the proper precautions to prevent infection, and people infected with HIV may not take antiviral drugs that have been proven to prolong survival. Thus, the popular press has, in my opinion, been negligent in its coverage of the minority position.

The National Institutes recently posted, on the Internet, a position paper that addresses this topic from the prevailing view; it makes for some interesting reading, and is full of data to support the fact that HIV causes AIDS. The paper is 203 Kbytes and is a bit cumbersome; however, the pertinent subtopics can be accessed via links to the table of contents. The extensive references can be accessed via links from the article. If you want to be "in the know" about HIV and AIDS, check out the site.

Next month we'll take a stroll along another Medicine on the Web fiber.

Ed Robinson earned his M.D. and Ph.D. at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and Vanderbilt University Graduate School in Nashville, Tennessee. Dr. Robinson has spent over ten years studying HIV and the immune response to HIV in infected individuals. He is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Pathology at the University of California at Irvine, where he continues his research and teaches undergraduate, graduate, and medical students about HIV and the immune system. Questions about this column, or suggestions for future columns, can be addressed to him at edr@wwwiz.com.