By the way, it’s time to dump the HIV/AIDS distinction. They aren’t different disease, they are different stages of the same infection. We don’t make such distinctions for different stages of syphillis, for instance. The distinction is an artifact of an earlier time, when HIV was less well understood than it is today.

I think it’s important to recognize the difference between the underlying pathology and the clinical manifestation. They commonly have different names, particularly when the underlying pathology has multiple manifestations. It’s important because recognizing the clinical syndrome has diagnostic, therapeutic, and prognostic implications. Thus, for instance, HIV infection, per se, and AIDS, have very different implications in terms of therapy and prognosis.

You mention syphilis. In fact, there are still multiple names for the different manifestations of the disease — tabes dorsalis in neurosyphilis, chanchre in primary syphilis, and gumma in tertiary syphilis. And, in fact, distinctions are made between primary, secondary, tertiary, latent, and neurosyphilis. Similarly, there are different names for different manifestations of tuberculosis (scrofula, Pott’s disease, etc), malaria (blackwater fever), cancer (Sweet’s syndrome, Cushing syndrome), etc., etc. etc.

The treatment of the manifestations of AIDS is different from the treatment of latent HIV infection, particularly regarding the features that make up AIDS itself — such as opportunistic infections, autoimmune manifestations, neoplasia, dementia, malabsorption. Since clinical recognition, therapy, prognosis, and etiologic agents are different (at least with regards to the signs and symptoms), it’s appropriate to make the distinction. One might argue that a different name be used to mark that distinction, but the distinction itself is still important, whatever name is used.