Dont know if any of you are aware, but there are a minority in the scientific community who believes that the hiv hypothesis may be wrong. They believe that aids is caused by nonviral factors and that HIV simply does not exist. They base these findings on the fact that no proper HIV electron micrograph has ever been published of the virus that would constitute as proof of its existance and the lack of solid scientific experiments conducted to prove that it is indeep a retrovirus. They explain that aids is caused by nonvirl factors, such as chemicals, drug use and even the antiviral drugs itself used to treat aids/hiv.
The danger with studies like this is that it may bring to a collapse or hinder the process of trying to eliminate the current pandemic - assuming that these opposing theories are wrong.
If these studies are right, however - though seems unlikely - it is important to certainly redraw our conclusions but the seemingly overwhelming evidence certainly supports the popular beliefs.
The problem with science in general is, that it is vitally important to make sure ever step of investigation, experimentation, theorizing and the establishment of a theory to be rigorous and accurate - because those theories will become a fundamental block towards which other theories in the future are built upon. No scientist can simply go through every step of scientific experimentation to then go to do frontier research because it is time consuming and ideally should be unneccessary. Basically the majority of researchers and scientists consider established theories to be correct and move on from there and draw new conclusions on the basis of the fundamentals. Messing up the funamental can casue a lot of problems and that is the major point of the opposing views towards the hiv hypothesis; basically saying the first scientists, hense the preceeding, screwed up.
I personally think though that the popular belief is correct because evidence does support the correlation between hiv and aids.