Most of us know the basics of the accepted knowledge about HIV and AIDS: it is a virus that is transmitted through sex, breaks down the immune system and more often than not, results in death. In very broad strokes, that's the accepted wisdom. But there's a group of scientists around the world who dispute major elements of that theory and recently the government has created an outcry by saying they want to hear their views.
British journalist Joan Shenton has worked in this field for a decade. Let her put us in the picture.
Sophie Brassard: 'This is horrible, my parents are condemned to poison my kids.'
Canadian mother Sophie Brassard has tested positive on an HIV test. She did not want to give her children the AIDS drug AZT because she believes it is toxic. Her children have been taken away by the authorities and Sophie's parents are now legally bound to administer the drug.
Sophie: 'I miss them so much and I'm so scared permanent damage will be done to them.'
Here in South Africa many are clamouring to be given AZT, but in other countries some HIV positive pregnant mothers are so worried about AZT's toxicity that they refused to give it to their children, resulting in legal action against them.
HIV-positive mother: 'I can hardly begin to describe how horrific I find the idea of AZT being given to pregnant women and new born babies. I've seen the effects on adult women and adult men. It's very strong and very toxic.'
This HIV-test positive mother's rejection of AZT and refusal to test her baby for HIV went to the High Court in the United Kingdom. The judgement went against her and the judge ordered her to test the child. She fled the country with her partner and baby and they are now fugitives.
This mother, like Sophie, is challenging the fundamental beliefs about AIDS. New doubts are rising up about the causes and treatment of AIDS.
South Africa is in the middle of an important re-evaluation about what has been described as the greatest plague the world has known - AIDS.
There are many scientists and communities around the world who profoundly challenge the idea that a virus HIV causes AIDS. Their voices have seldom been heard.
In Pretoria, South Africa, an international expert panel on AIDS is being convened by President Thabo Mbeki to allow a wider range of opinions to be heard.
President Thabo Mbeki: 'Because all of us have been brought up on an orthodox view that HIV equals AIDS equals death. And one of the things that has become clear and is rather disturbing, is the fact there was a view being expressed by people whose scientific credentials you can't question. I'm not saying they're not necessarily correct, but it seems there's been a determined effort to silence it.'
I've been reporting on the unfolding of the AIDS debate since 1986 in a series of documentaries allowing some of the experts that have been marginalised a voice.
One of the earliest dissenting voices was that of molecular biologist Professor Peter Duesberg, member of the United States National academy of Sciences. Through a series of published papers he has stated that it is not an HIV - or human immune virus - that causes AIDS... and AZT is toxic.
AIDS was not infectious, he said, and in Africa people were dying not of HIV, but of poverty, malnutrition, dirty water and the old diseases like malaria and TB that go untreated.
This led our team to travel across Africa in 1993 - east to west - to Tanzania, Cote d'Ivoire, Cameroon and Uganda. Our purpose was to find out if people were really dying in high numbers - and of what?
In Rakai village the total breakdown of the medical services is all too apparent. We visited a local hospital in the so-called epicentre of AIDS, and what a sorry scene! Not a single AIDS patient, only an empty ward. No nurses, no doctors, only one tiny baby suffering from malaria convulsions, surrounded by her silent family.
We then found the only member of staff who got up from her sick bed to speak to us.
Clinic staff member: 'I work as a midwife and I help with the treatment of other patients. I have malaria.'
Lack of staff and medicines at these local hospitals and dispensaries has meant that sick people stay in their own homes. But the nurse did show us the medicine cabinet stocked with drugs supplied by the World Health Organisation's essential drugs programme. However, under a new cost scheme, villagers are required to pay a fixed price for them which, for most, means going without.
Africa has been blamed for the spread of AIDS around the world, but statistics for AIDS in Africa have been grossly inflated because most AIDS is diagnosed through symptoms alone, without an HIV test. And many people are wrongly identified. Some TB cases, for example, are wrongly called AIDS.
Dr Martin Oko-Nwang is a TB specialist in Kampala, Uganda.
Dr Martin Oko-Nwang: 'A patient who has TB and is HIV positive would appear exactly the same as a person who has TB and is HIV negative. Clinically, both patients would present with prolonged fever, wind, prolonged cough, and in both cases the cough could be productive. Now, therefore clinically, I can't differentiate the two.'
In Kagera, Tanzania, Lucy is a frightening example of wrong diagnosis. She was diagnosed HIV positive in an unconfirmed screening test. She was ostracized by her community and became very ill. NGO worker Phillipe Krynen and his wife took her into their care and she returned to health.
Phillipe Krynen: 'It's very seldom those who've been stigmatised with AIDS are not dying. Lucy was one of the first persons- because we didn't support the AIDS tag - who recovered and was proof to the community that you can recover from such episodes.'
Lucy: 'I am strong now and I'm back to my old weight. I can do any work I am faced with. I hope to now have children.'
A few months later Lucy tested negative three times running and she is now happily back in her community.
As more and more publicity was given to the possible heterosexual spread of AIDS - and the flames of plague terror were fanned - the issue of the drug AZT, marketed as a therapy for AIDS, came to the fore.
AZT was licensed in 1987 through a multicentre trial in the USA. Those trials have been described as deeply flawed by AIDS researcher John Lauritsen, who studied the US Food and Drug Administration papers which were acquired through the Freedom of Information procedure.
John Lauritsen: 'This study was incredibly uncontrolled and sloppy. Protocols have been violated and if you violate the rules of a game, you are cheating.'
Michael: 'In utter desperation, I took AZT. It made me ill. I went through that process five times. I was never on it for more than a month, but my partner, Kevin, persisted and he died.'
Six years later, Michael is in good health and still actively opposing the marketing of AZT.
By 1993, in London the debate about false AIDS statistics and damage from AZT had spilled out on to the streets. There were strong protests about the PENTA trials across Europe, involving giving AZT to pregnant African women and their babies. This child's mother felt she hadn't been given enough information.
HIV-positive mother: 'They tested him and would tell me the results in one month's time. But I was worried about AZT and wanted more information about it.'
Merryland Bazarra is a community worker with African families in London.
Merryland Bazarra: 'People suffer. These side effects are so strong from AZT. They also are losing their muscles, they have diarrhoea ... most of them were not told about the side effects, so they need more information.'
The debate went to the Parliament in that same year. And George Galloway MP tabled a series of searching questions.
British MP George Galloway: 'If people knew this highly toxic drug was being administered to potentially hundreds of children - most of them black, most of them without a voice, most parents without a voice in British society - then I think they would be stopped.'
There was little change in the next five years until the matter was raised again in the House of Lords in 1999. Information that HIV testing is not reliable was becoming more public and the central problem of what was being tested for was under scrutiny. Had HIV ever been properly isolated?
Organisations like Continuum magazine, edited by Huw Christie, sprang up in support of people questioning their test results. In an interview, HIV co-discoverer Professor Luc Montagnier stated that HIV has never been purified - an essential scientific step in designing reliable tests for any virus.
Huw Christie: 'It was startling that Dr Montagnier acknowledged, in his interview with Continuum as far back as 1983, that he and his team were not able to purify anything known as HIV. So who should be surprised that when the same was attempted at laboratories in Germany and the US, when the results were published all they found were proteins and cellular debris.'
Dr Valender Turner of the Royal Perth Hospital, Western Australia, explains that, without proteins from purified HIV, testing could produce countless wrong results.
Dr Valender Turner: 'If there is such a thing as AIDS causing retroviruses then its unique body path, its proteins, should only be found in HIV-positive individuals and individuals who have AIDS; but this is not the case.'
Also in Perth, senior AIDS researcher, Eleni Eleopulos, has published numerous scientific papers on the disturbing fact that no scientist has ever collected a pure sample of what people call HIV.
Eleni Eleopulos: 'There is no way to test for HIV. This is because all the tests are based on indirect markers, none of which have been validated by proving that the markers are positive only when the virus is present.'
Professor Etienne de Harven pioneered the electronmicroscopy of retroviruses at the Sloan Kettering Institute, New York. Today he is highly critical of the research into so-called HIV.
Professer Etienne de Harven: 'There is a most urgent need to redirect research funding. Funds must go to laboratories working on other ideas totally independent from HIV, and no longer working on the hypotheses which have never been proven.'