Reappraising HIV and AIDS

[Guest guest]

http://www.redflagsweekly.com/crowe/2005_jan14.html

Reappraising HIV and AIDS

 

David Crowe

for Knights of the Round Table

Calgary

December 21, 2004

 

The Knights of the Round Table is a discussion group that has met monthly

in Calgary since the 1920’s, featuring speakers on a wide variety of topics.

 

Everyone knows that:

 

‘HIV is a retrovirus that

leads to the fatal disease

call AIDS.

The virus is transmitted

by sex and

contaminated blood products.” (The catechism of AIDS)

 

But, what if everyone is wrong?

 

Valerie Emerson of Maine thought that the AIDS drug AZT was unsafe and the

State took her to court to force her to give it to her son. The judge ruled

“She has placed her faith in this medical approach in the past and has

lost a child. She has discontinued her own treatment with no apparent

present ill-effects.” She was allowed to keep her son drug free.

(<http://www.redflagsweekly.com/crowe/2005_jan14.html#Clapp1998>Clapp, 1998)

 

Kathleen and David Tyson of Oregon were not so lucky. A judge ruled that

Kathleen could not breastfeed her new baby, and that the parents must give

him the drug AZT.

(<http://www.redflagsweekly.com/crowe/2005_jan14.html#Wolf2001>Wolf, 2001)

 

“Mary” (not her real name) and her husband have an HIV-positive infant

whose heart almost gave out from AIDS drugs forced on them in a major

Canadian hospital. They now live in fear that doctors will find out that

they aren’t giving the drugs any more.

 

“Joe” (not his real name) may go to jail because he’s HIV-positive and had

sex with people who weren’t. His test may be false positive due to an

earlier bout with Hodgkins Lymphoma, but that might not matter.

 

Audrey was treated as an AIDS patient for years, but never had a verified

HIV test.

 

Kim had a verified test and because only she and her husband knew, she

stayed in an abusive relationship for a decade. She couldn’t figure out why

she never got sick though, and eventually discovered information that made

her question the meaning of HIV tests. She is now launching a lawsuit in

Kansas against the test manufacturers.

 

Christine Maggiore of Los Angeles gave herself up for dead more than a

decade ago when she was tested positive. She resisted starting drugs, and

eventually discovered the work of Dr. Peter Duesberg. This changed her view

of her condition and she now runs a society for people who are HIV-positive

and also questioning whether AIDS drugs are for them. Christine wrote the

book “What if everything you thought you knew about AIDS was wrong”

(<http://www.redflagsweekly.com/crowe/2005_jan14.html#Maggiore2000>Maggiore,

2000) and Duesberg wrote “Inventing the AIDS Virus” .

(<http://www.redflagsweekly.com/crowe/2005_jan14.html#Duesberg1996>Duesberg,

1996).

 

 

What is AIDS?

 

I really should define my terms, starting with AIDS. In Canada it means

about 30 different infectious diseases or cancers, when accompanied with a

positive HIV test. Most diseases are rare but some, like TB, are common, at

least among certain groups, such as drug addicts. TB in a drug addict with

a positive HIV test is AIDS, but TB with a negative test is TB.

(<http://www.redflagsweekly.com/crowe/2005_jan14.html#HC1995>HC, 1995)

 

In the United States, since 1993, you haven’t even need to be ill to be

diagnosed with AIDS. A low CD4 immune cell count and a positive HIV test is

all it takes.

(<http://www.redflagsweekly.com/crowe/2005_jan14.html#MMWR1992>MMWR, 1992 )

And, by the way, if you are diagnosed with AIDS and get well again, you

aren’t supposed to be recategorized as non-AIDS! By 1997 65% of new

diagnoses were in this not ill category in the United States.

(<http://www.redflagsweekly.com/crowe/2005_jan14.html#CDC1998>CDC, 1998)

What happened after that year? We don’t know because the Centers for

Disease Control stopped publishing this statistic in their annual report.

My attempts to obtain the raw data (sans personal identifying information

of course) along with Ukrainian statistician Vladimir Koliadin were

rebuffed. The CDC was “too busy”.

 

In Africa, a third AIDS definition is used. The ‘Bangui’ definition, and

its slight variants, have long been used. In places where HIV testing is

not available (most third world countries) an AIDS diagnosis is based on

two of three ‘major’ signs (weight loss >10%; diarrhoea > 1 month; fever >

1 month (intermittent or chronic) ) and one ‘minor’ sign (including

persistent cough > 1 month; itching; swollen lymph nodes).

 

So, in America, we have AIDS without disease, and in Africa we have AIDS

without HIV (or at least, without any evidence for HIV).

 

 

What is HIV?

 

HIV cannot be seen directly (I’ll return to this important point in a

minute) but only via a variety of tests. The most common HIV test is an

antibody test (ELISA, usually followed by Western Blot). These tests detect

a reaction between body fluids and proteins that are claimed to come from

HIV. With HIV you are never believed to be able to cure yourself. In other

diseases the presence of antibodies would be considered a sign of health.

 

There are other tests that are testing for things that are closer to actual

HIV, such as antigen tests and culturing. But, surprisingly, antibody tests

usually take precedence. Could this be because these tests are negative

much more often than antibody tests?

(<http://www.redflagsweekly.com/crowe/2005_jan14.html#ARAS2004t>ARAS, 2004t)

 

An increasingly common test is known as ‘viral load’. This looks for tiny

fractions of the DNA or RNA that is believed to come from HIV.

 

But, where did researchers get the HIV proteins or the DNA or RNA in order

to validate the tests?

 

They should have gotten them from purified HIV. But, shockingly, HIV has

never once been purified, not once even after spending billions of dollars

on research! The closest people have ever come was in 1997, when two groups

of researchers published their examination of the material that had often

been called ‘purified HIV’ in the past.

(<http://www.redflagsweekly.com/crowe/2005_jan14.html#Bess1997>Bess, 1997;

<http://www.redflagsweekly.com/crowe/2005_jan14.html#Gluschankof1997>Gluschankof\

,

1997) “Electron microscopy of gradient-enriched preparations from

supernatants of virus-infected cells revealed an excess of vesicles with a

size range of about 50-500 nm, as opposed to a minor population of virus

particles of about 100 nm”. That is, about 90% of the material they obtain

was cellular, not viral.

 

It’s worse than this actually. Without purification, nobody can say with

certainty what proteins are truly from HIV, nor can they say what HIV RNA

definitely is. They can’t inject pure HIV into an animal, and, most

importantly of all, they can’t validate HIV tests. We just have to accept

that since most of the time (not all of the time by any means) two

different HIV tests give the same results, that the tests are valid.

 

That’s right, without purification of HIV, there is nothing that we can

know for certain is an HIV protein or HIV genome. And, therefore, no HIV

tests are conclusive proof of the presence of HIV.

 

In fact, we don’t even know for sure that HIV exists.

 

 

Other Potential Causes?

 

Peter Duesberg, in his 1996 book, gave a good summary of other possible

causes for AIDS diseases. The highly promiscuous gay men who were at most

risk of getting AIDS were also heavy users of drugs called ‘poppers’. There

was extensive research showing that these drugs are immunosuppressive and

carcinogenic, but this stopped in the mid-1980s when all funding was

diverted to the HIV hypothesis. Note that it is mostly gay men who get the

so-called ‘gay cancer’ (Kaposi’s Sarcoma) and not other risk groups.

 

IV drug abusers have always been vulnerable to illness. They usually don’t

eat right, they don’t have good accommodation and they inject not only

drugs into their body but whatever the drugs are ‘cut’ with. This includes

toxic chemicals are a variety of foreign proteins. Is it a surprise that

they commonly get TB and other infectious diseases?

 

Hemophiliacs inject foreign blood products into their body, sometimes

daily. Higher purity clotting factor, available in the 1980s dramatically

slowed the immune system decline.

(<http://www.redflagsweekly.com/crowe/2005_jan14.html#deBiasi1991>de Biasi,

1991) Unfortunately, the death rate started to climb dramatically around

1987, when the first AIDS drug, AZT, was approved.

(<http://www.redflagsweekly.com/crowe/2005_jan14.html#Darby1995>Darby,

1995;

<http://www.redflagsweekly.com/crowe/2005_jan14.html#Duesberg2003>Duesberg,

2003)

 

Blood transfusion recipients not only have massive quantities of foreign

blood injected into them, but they usually have some other extremely

serious health condition such as a major accident or cancer chemotherapy

induced anemia. In one study 41% of people who definitely received a

transfusion of HIV+ blood were dead one year later. But so were 48% who

received blood suspected of being HIV+. And 50% of people who only received

HIV-negative blood.

(<http://www.redflagsweekly.com/crowe/2005_jan14.html#Ward1989>Ward, 1989)

 

Africans, the biggest group of AIDS victims, are diagnosed with symptoms

that seem suspiciously like the symptoms of Tuberculosis, Malaria or just

plain malnutrition. But, instead of helping these people gain clean water

and adequate nutrition, the HIV theory of African AIDS (remember, this is

not American AIDS!) says that they should get AIDS drugs for their

condition. Note that one of the most common side effect of AIDS drugs is

extremely serious anemia, and many Africans are anemic already because of

malaria, hookworm infestations and so forth.

 

 

Life Saving Drugs?

 

Most ordinary people probably think that AIDS drugs are life saving

because, well, because they’ve been told that this is so many thousands of

times, in newspapers, magazines and on TV.

 

Side effects of these drugs include not only anemia (requiring regular

blood transfusions), but also liver failure, regular vomiting and diarrhea,

high cholesterol and blood sugar levels, muscle wasting, migration of fat

around the body, pancreas failure…and many more

(<http://www.redflagsweekly.com/crowe/2005_jan14.html#ARAS2004a>ARAS,

2004a; <http://www.redflagsweekly.com/crowe/2005_jan14.html#ARAS2004h>ARAS,

2004h)

 

This is not surprising when you consider how these drugs work. The first

AIDS drug, AZT, still one of the most commonly prescribed (although rarely

by itself any more) is a nucleoside analog. It is a ‘broken’ version of the

molecule Thymidine, one of the four bases of DNA. It is known as a DNA

chain terminator because when a molecule of AZT gets into a DNA chain it

stops replication of that chain. Chillingly, the only time that AZT is

given alone is to pregnant women, in order to prevent mother-to-child

transmission of HIV. Somehow, interfering with DNA synthesis in the mother

and growing fetus is not considered a major problem, even though it is

known that AZT crosses the placenta

(<http://www.redflagsweekly.com/crowe/2005_jan14.html#Gillet1990>Gillet,

1990) and that it is implicated in genetic damage and tumour formation.

(<http://www.redflagsweekly.com/crowe/2005_jan14.html#Olivero1997>Olivero,

1997 (and others by the same group)) Only the assumption that everyone with

HIV will die a quick and painful death could possibly justify the

prescription of this drug. Notably, many other AIDS drugs are in the same

nucleoside analog, and the other major drug classes (non-nucleoside reverse

transcriptase inhibitors and protease inhibitors) also have gruesome and

fatal side effects.

 

One recent study reported that non-AIDS conditions such as liver failure

and heart disease, probably cause by AIDS drugs, were causing as many

deaths as AIDS amongst their AIDS patients.

(<http://www.redflagsweekly.com/crowe/2005_jan14.html#Reisler2003>Reisler,

2003)

 

Drugs go through clinical trials, so they must be safe and effective,

right? Well, it simply ain’t so. Think of Vioxx, Celebrex and Prozac, three

drugs that have been approved, but are now on the way out.

 

Associated Press recently revealed that an African trial on the AIDS drug

Nevirapine was a shocking mess, a mess that was covered up for a while by

the US National Institutes of Health. Not reporting adverse events was one

of the major flaws.

(<http://www.redflagsweekly.com/crowe/2005_jan14.html#Solomon2004a>Solomon,

2004a) They also reported that a formerly healthy HIV-positive woman,

persuaded to take this drug during pregnancy, died of liver failure shortly

after birth. The researchers also tried to cover this up.

(<http://www.redflagsweekly.com/crowe/2005_jan14.html#Solomon2004b>Solomon,

2004b)

 

There are many people, on the other hand, who are classified as LTNPs (Long

Term Non-Progressors) who have never taken AIDS drugs. One study

described a group of people who had been HIV+ for 11 to 15 years, without

taking AIDS drugs, without getting AIDS-defining illness.

(<http://www.redflagsweekly.com/crowe/2005_jan14.html#Harrer1996>Harrer, 1996)

 

 

Transmission

 

The evidence that HIV is sexually transmitted is highly questionable. In

the study that first came up with the estimate that the risk of HIV

transmission is 1/1000 per incidence of sex…not a single case of

transmission between sexual partners was detected over a 10 year period!

“We observed no seroconversions after entry into the study...No

transmission occurred among the 25% of couples who did not use their

condoms consistently, nor among the 47 couples who intermittently practiced

unsafe sex during the entire duration of follow-up.”

(<http://www.redflagsweekly.com/crowe/2005_jan14.html#Padian1997>Padian,

1997 )

 

Sexual transmission in Africa has been recently questioned by a group of

scientists lead by David Gisselquist. They believe that the re-use of

needles is the cause, as people with AIDS are also people who have sought

more medical treatment. “Many studies report HIV infections in African

adults with no sexual exposure to HIV and in children with HIV-negative

mothers. “

(<http://www.redflagsweekly.com/crowe/2005_jan14.html#Gisselquist2002>Gisselquis\

t,

2002 (and others)

 

One of the most surprising results was in a large, well designed study of

Montreal IV drug users. It showed that IV drug users who ALWAYS used clean

needle exchanges were 10 to 23 times MORE likely to become HIV-positive

than those who NEVER used them. Those who ‘sometimes’ or ‘usually’ used

clean needle exchanges had intermediate levels of risk. How can

transmission of HIV via dirty needles explain this?

(<http://www.redflagsweekly.com/crowe/2005_jan14.html#Bruneau1997>Bruneau,

1997)

 

 

What You Should Do

 

If you have ever given money to an AIDS charity you should think before

doing it again. Are you giving money to buy life-saving drugs? Or will your

money be used to pronounce a death sentence and then proceed to execute it

with AIDS drugs?

 

Will you be using money to drag terrified parents in front of a court so

that their children can be removed from them? Their crime? Refusing to give

the drugs that cause their children to lose weight, vomit after each dose,

have diarrhea all the time, and wake up screaming in the middle of the

night because of the pain in their muscles.

 

Will your money be used to cut open the stomachs of minor children who

complain about taking the drugs and insert a PEG (Percutaneous Endoscopic

Gastrostomy) so that they can be dosed against their will, as in the recent

Incarnation Children’s Center scandal in New York City?

 

<http://aras.ab.ca>Our society’s website is open 24/7. It can connect you

with a variety of other websites with complementary information.

 

Mainstream information is available on hundreds of websites. Probably there

are more of these websites than new AIDS cases in Canada: 218 in 2003, a

number that has fallen every year since 1993.

(<http://www.redflagsweekly.com/crowe/2005_jan14.html#HC2004>HC, 2004)

 

I am not alone. In fact, one of the latest postings on our website is a

list of well over one thousand people who have questioned some or all of

the dogmas surrounding HIV and AIDS. Most of these people have academic

qualifications, including many doctors and scientists.

(<http://www.redflagsweekly.com/crowe/2005_jan14.html#ARAS2004l>ARAS, 2004l)

 

 

References

 

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ARAS, 2004h <http://aras.ab.ca/haart.html>http://aras.ab.ca/haart.html

ARAS, 2004l <http://aras.ab.ca/thelist.htm>http://aras.ab.ca/thelist.htm

ARAS, 2004t <http://aras.ab.ca/test.html>http://aras.ab.ca/test.html

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