HIV/AIDS Things certainly change in the world of AIDS; a few years ago Dr. Robert Gallo who discovered HIV told us that HIV alone explained the appeara= nce of AIDS: Clearly HTLV-111 (as it was then called) causes AIDS. Anybody who doesnt say that doesnt know t he facts. Theres just no questio= n about it... Theyre avoiding responsibility, or theyre just ignorant o= f the data, or they dont understand it. (New York Native 1984) The worl= d looked set for a catastrophe as the epidemic grew. More recently though Gallo has admitted that his assertion was not based purely on scientific grounds but on the need to bring the field to another extreme to avoi= d confusing people with 'multifactorial' and 'crackpot' theories. It has also now become clear that it was Frenchman Dr. Luc Montagnier who in fact first discovered HIV and promptly sent a sample to Gallos laboratory. Gallo was convicted of 'scientific fraud' in December 1992 and remains under investigation by the U.S . Congress. Montagnier has moved even further away from the original direct HIV-AIDS link; speaking to the audience during last Julys 8th International AIDS Conference in Amsterda= m he said: I think we should put the same weight now on the co-factors [as we have on HIV]. Two years previously when he first made his views clea= r about co-factors and the possibility that HIV can be benign and peaceful= only 200 of 12,000 delegates bothered to come to listen to his talk; almost half had walked out by the end. Critics of the H IV-AIDS orthodoxy have made much of findings of Aids without HIV. As far back as 1986 there have been reports of Aids cases remaining uninfected with HIV for extended periods. In 1989 the U.S. Centre for Disease Control reported that 5% of all U.S. Aids p atients who had so far been tested for HIV were HIV-negative. Associate Professor Robert Root-Bernstein, one of the critics who has spoken out, believes that The existence of HIV-free Aids proves that HIV is not a necessary cause of acquired immunodefici ency. = A number of those who have had second thoughts about HIV-AIDS conventional wisdom tried to get the following short letter published in prominent scientific journals: It is widely believed by the general public that a retrovirus called HIV causes the grou p of diseases called AIDS. Many biomedical scientists now question this hypothesis. We propose that a thorough reappraisal of the existing evidence for and against this hypothesis be conducted by a suitable independent group. We further propose that criti cal epidemiological studies be devised and undertaken.= Every journal refused to publish it and as a result The Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis" was formed with its own newsletter Rethinking AIDS.=20 Dr. Peter Duesberg: AIDS heretic The most prominent and controversial of these scientists is Dr. Peter Duesberg, Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. He has even told Gallo that he would not be afraid to be injected with HIV if it could be gu aranteed clean of contaminants. Duesberg argues that HIV is nothing more than a harmless little hitchhiker along for the ride; he believes HIV= is a marker for AIDS risks found in people who are reservoirs of rare viruses and microbes acquired by cont acts with many others, either by transfusions, sex or by sharing needles. AIDS itself is a syndrome of 25 old diseases including pneumonia, Kaposis sarcoma, dementia, diarrhoea, candidiasis, tuberculosis etc. Though unrelated they are thought to be 'opportunistic' taking advantage of immunodeficiency. Duesberg challenges this:=20 Kaposis sarcoma, lymphomas, wasting disease, and dementia are not favoured by immunodeficiency because they are neither caused by microbes or viruses or associated with them. Why do they appear in AIDS patients? The reason for the near 100% correlatio n claimed between AIDS and HIV is, he writes, that If the (HIV) antibody is not present, the same diseases in the same risk groups are called by their old names. AZT is AIDS by prescription Duesberg believes psychoactive drugs are the true cause of AIDS: Natural and synthetic psychoactive drugs are the onl= y new pathogens around since the 1970s and the only new disease syndrome is AIDS and both are found in exactly the same populations. The hugely profitable and highly toxic drug AZT which is said to offer an extra year of life is thought by Duesberg to be the final straw in provoking immune deficiency. Developed for cancer chemotherapy, AZT cannot distinguish infected from uninfected ce lls and causes further immunodeficiency and degenerative diseases. Since 1989 AZT has even been prescribed to healthy people who have tested positive for HIV antibodies: the basis for the daily poisoning of 125,000 people, he believes. Studies published in April 1993 actually show that AZT has no therapeutic effect on HIV+ve patients at all. Duesbergs drug-AIDS hypothesis can, he hopes, sol= ve many of the riddles of the conventional virus-AIDS hypothesis: - T= he sexually active general population that is not addicted to drugs does not get AIDS because drugs, not a sexually-transmitted virus, are causing it. Conventional venereal diseases and unwanted pregnancies are on the rise, indicating there is suffici ent unsafe sex for HIV to spread through sexual contacts. - Over 80% of AIDS patients are males, because in th= e U.S. males consume over 80% of all hard psycho-active drugs. - AIDS develops only after years of risk behaviour because drugs take years to cause AIDS diseases, exactly like cigarettes and alcohol take years to cause their diseases." - Risk group-specific AIDS diseases are the resul= t of group-specific drugs. For example the 20-fold higher incidence of Kaposis sarcoma in homosexuals corresponds to their preference for poppers. - African AIDS are old diseases - like Slim disease, fever, diarrhoea, and tuberculosis - under a new name. They are caused by protein malnutrition, parasitic infections, and poor sanitation - the reasons why they are distributed randomly between the sex es. - Natural antibodie= s to HIV and synthetic HIV vaccines do not protect against AIDS because it is caused by drugs and clinical deficiencies. We should warn against drugs, not against sex, if we want to prevent AIDS, urges Duesberg; Above all, we should terminate the use of the D.N.A. chain terminator AZT. We could be at the bottom of AIDS very fast if we had some open minds, he believes. If there were but one open scientific conference,= if Newsweek, Science or the New York Times would once say 'we h ave to consider alternatives, were not getting anywhere', then we could have answers very fast. But its so polarised now, and theres so much money= in the HIV business. Its very difficult to go against three billion dollars. In Defence of HIV Quite understandably groups which accept the validity of the HIV-AIDS link, even with new provisos about co-factors, have not been at all happy about Duesbergs ideas. His message undermines the hard-work done by groups like the Terrence Higgins Trust i n spreading their message of safe sex and safe drug use - Duesberg provides= a perfect excuse for not changing behaviour. In spite of this he has not weakened in the face of criticisms of his irresponsibility" in pushing a colossal fallacy: Im not suicidal. If I could see just one solid argument that I'm on the wrong track I would back off, but its not there. As a top researcher Duesbe= rg has lost his $350,000 National Institute of Health grant to study cancer genes - hardly surprising as he is i n effect saying that the Institute is wasting $3 billion on HIV research. Ive paid dearly for my hypothesis= - with my professional standing, with my funding, with a good part of my career, he says. Duesberg, an expert on retroviruses like AIDS, has had his more theoretical claims countered in such journals as Science, Nature, and the British Medical Journal as well as in the New Scientist. He points out, for instance, the biochemical inactivity of H IV: it infiltrates or infects as few as one in 100,000 susceptible cells. When Duesberg raised this problem a press statement was read from Dr. Gallos assistant, Dr. Blattner: The mechanisms through which human immuno-deficiency virus brings about exten sive destruction of immunological functions is unknown. Duesberg goes as far as saying that Being seropositive again= st a virus [a +ve HIV test] is traditionally to your advantage; thats beneficial. When you have an antibody to a virus you are vaccinated. His critics on the other hand state that HIV is the single common factor tha= t is shared between AIDS cases in gay men in San Francisco, well nourished young women in Uganda, haemophiliacs in Japan and children in Rumanian orphanages. They report that s tudies of gay men who did and did not = use recreational [non-injecting] drugs have shown no correlation between recreational drug use and AIDS. They claim a further refutation with = the much lower incidence of AIDS in those cities where drug use occurs wi th minimal sharing of injection equipment. The Terrence Higgins Trust is, however, the target of a fierce new protest by 'Gays against Genocide' (GAG) who want the Trust to sever its financial and political links with the pharmaceutical multinational Wellcome - makers of AZT. GAG point out that th e Terrence Higgins Trust don't mention that Wellcome was reported to the Dept. of Health in 1992 for "false and misleading" claims surrounding AZT and was also condemned by the Committee on Safety of Medicines over four leaflets it co-produced with the Te rrence Higgins Trust. They say the Trust has ignored critics of AZT and data which casts doubt on its efficacy. GAG believe people with HIV/AIDS have been betrayed by the organisation which gives an impression of producing impartial and uncensored informa tion and advice.=20 The Cures? Whilst the costly and, supporters admit, severely toxic dr= ug AZT, developed at the National Cancer Institute headed by Dr. Gallo, has been rushed through tests (which gay group ACT-UP believe were riddled with irregularities) and into production, other less toxic potential cures have been largely forgotten. One example is AL 721 made from the active lipids of egg yolks in a ratio 7:2:1. Tests in 1985 were positive and seconded by Gallo who confirmed that AL 721 was an effective non-toxic inhibitor of H IV with no side effects. Now owned by a company called Ethigen, AL 721 was not released for use as the company claimed not to have the $50 million needed for F.D.A. testing. AIDS activists pointed out that it could have been quickly marketed as a food su bstance rather than a more lucrative drug. A number of people claim to have had success in treating AIDS sufferers as syphilis patients. New York Doctor Stephen Caizza had noticed the paucity of syphilis cases when all other venereal diseases were flourishing. Dr. Caizza travelled to Germany to study the results of two doctors there who had come to a similar conclusion. He says that between 1982-86 I lost somewhere in excess of 200 patients which I believe averages out to approximately one a week. When he began working from the AIDS-as-syphili s hypothesis in one year he lost only one patient out of 216 who were fully treated with the correct penicillin. When Dr. Caizza phoned his penicillin suppliers to fix a better-priced deal so that treatment could be more accessible he was told: Listen, Im going to b= e perfectly honest with you. Youre dealing with a generic medicine here. Were in the process of de veloping some real legitimate AIDS medicines. Why should we give you $150,000 in order to prove that the medicines that were working on, which are going to be incredibly profitable, arent necessary? Joan McKenna, who was one of the first to make the AIDS-syphilis, link phoned the Center for Disease Control to report her findings only to be told: Well, this isnt new. The Center had been getting calls for two years from doctors treating AIDS patient s who appear to have secondary syphilis which was responding negatively to tests. When she asked what they were doing about it she was told Nothing. And what they were going to do? Again, Nothing. Dr. Ca= izza concluded that Theres no money in what Im doing. Theres no mone= y for the doctor, theres no money for the pharmaceutical house, theres no money for the researcher, theres no money for the scientist. The only person who profits is the pati ent. Of only three patents awarded for AIDS treatments one is for a typhoid vaccine developed by medical technician Salvatore Catapano which he found worked well alongside penicillin against AIDS. Doctors across America pay him royalties to use his regimen. Ca tapano considers the drug AZT, originally developed for cancer but found to be a dud, to be a death sentence if given to alre= ady severely immune-suppressed patients. If the dust were to settle over the many accusations and counter-accusations we would see that the current situation is of a spectrum of opinion with Duesberg at one end seeing HIV as unnecessary and a few virologists at the other still convinced that it is the sole cause of AIDS; most experts are in the grey area in the middle arguing about what balance of HIV and co-factors might be necessary, or sufficient, to cause AIDS. Given such disarray it seems profoundly wrong that as yet only one toxic and expensive drug is officially-sanctioned for use, as the U.S. Presidential candidates themselves pointed out last year in the first of their pre-election televised debates. Any su ccesses with other methods unfortunately remains anecdotal for as long as the medical establishment refuses them comprehensive testing and support. This seems rather like a replay of the situation with cancer. Though the U. S. Congress recently published a report into Unconventional Cancer Treatments in response to the upsur= ge of public interest, this was only done after decades during which the th ree profitable orthodox treatments had failed to make much headway at all against cancer. Celia Farber wrote of her fears in the US magazine Spin: "Fuelled by billions and accountable to no one, the cancer industry did exactly what the AIDS industry is do ing. It stomped out any dissent from the orthodox view, refused to fund research into alternative treatments." Once again it looks as if thousands of people may be denied potentially beneficial and harmless treatments by a medical establishment similarly eager to close ranks; this time around AZT. The prominent AIDS researcher Dr. Joseph Sonnabend has spoken of his despair at the situation regarding AZT: "It is beyond belief. I don't know what to do. I'm ashamed of my colleagues. I'm embarassed. This is such shoddy science, it's hard to believe nobody's protesting. Damned cowards! The name of the game is to prot ect your grants. Don't open your mouth. It's all about money. It's grounds for just following the party line and not being critical when there are obvious financial and political forces that are driving this."=20 Gays against Genocide - Tel. 081 672 2183. They have copies of "An Urgent Appeal for Action regarding AIDS, HIV and Human Rights" which was presented to the U.N. in February 1993. It urges an AZT ban and an end to the promotion of the "unfounded hypothesi s that HIV is the direct cause of AIDS." This article is based on "Black Magic/Black Science" to be published by Zoe Lenska who has also authored "Cancer is now Curable - B17 Vitatherapy". Available from: Hippocrates Advocates, Ste. 12, Enterprise Centre, Cranbourne Road, Potters Bar, Herts., EN6 3DQ. Selected sources: How do we know that HIV is the cause? Edward King/National AIDS Manual, Newsletter Editor, Unit 52, The Eurolink Centre, 49 Effra Road, London SW2 1BZ (Tel. 071 737 2004) Unconventional viewpoints: Alternative AIDS Cures by GJ Krupey. Steamshovel Press No. 5 Summer 1992; "AIDS: Can We Be Positive?" 26th April 1992, The Sunday Times; Rethinking AIDS: 2040 Polk Street, Suite 321, San Francisco, CA 94109