HIV and AIDSIn college, when we were in sex education class, we were told about AIDS and HIV. We learned that being HIV positive (human immunodeficiency virus) eventually led to AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome), which ultimately led to death. We were taught it and we never really doubted it. The AIDS pandemic is global and an estimated 40 million people are infected. None of them were cured. The amount of funding for AIDS research is not small. An abundant supply of medications is available for patients diagnosed with AIDS or HIV. Some AIDS patients take “cocktails” of pills, which often cause serious physical side effects. Some “cocktails” may involve ingesting 25 tablets per day. There has been much talk about the discovery of an AIDS vaccine, but there have been no definitive results yet. She became a media sensation when she appeared on ABC News 20/20(1). Her Person She has been called an unfit mother, a heretic, and has been compared to those who believe the Holocaust never happened. The reason for the turmoil is that she is HIV positive, takes no medication, wonders if HIV causes AIDS, has published a book called What If Everything You Thought You Knew About HIV AIDS was fake?, that she had unprotected sex with her. husband, has an untested 3-year-old son whom she breastfed at birth (the virus can be transmitted in utero, during childbirth or through breastfeeding) and is pregnant with her second child. Her name is Christine Maggiore and she. along with other dissidents have drawn both anger and support from the AIDS and HIV communities. The difference between being HIV positive and having AIDS is that having AIDS means a person must be HIV positive and have a T cell count below 200 or have one. of the 28 opportunistic infections from the CDC (Center for Disease Control). Christine Maggiore began to question the connection between HIV and AIDS and the HIV and AIDS testing process when some things she was told about AIDS and HIV did not fit her situation. She describes how she "started to really think about what doctors and AIDS educators told me, rather than just accepting that it was all true and correct." Doctors told her that based on her T-cell count, she had a recent new infection..