Why I Quit HIV: The Aftermath

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Fri, 19 May 2006 23:08:24 +0200

" Sepp Hasslberger " <sepp

Why I Quit HIV: The Aftermath

 

 

 

Rebecca Culshaw did a follow-up on her recent article about her

quitting HIV research.

 

I found this on Joan Shenton's new site, http://www.immunity.org.uk/

which is just being put together, but what's there is worth visiting.

 

Joan is open to comments and suggestions.

 

Kind regards

Sepp

 

 

 

Here is the follow-up article by Rebecca Culshaw

 

Why I Quit HIV: The Aftermath

by Rebecca V. Culshaw

 

 

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig7/culshaw2.html

 

Why I Quit HIV: The Aftermath

 

by Rebecca V. Culshaw

by Rebecca V. Culshaw

 

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I want to start with an apology. I regret that I have not been able to

individually answer every email I've received in the wake of my essay,

" Why I Quit HIV, " which recently appeared on Lew Rockwell. I am

grateful for this forum, and I hope that I will be able to clear up

some confusion people appear to have experienced. I'd also like to

express my gratitude for the many, many positive and indeed

inspirational letters I've received.

 

Now I'd like to address some common questions I received.

 

Many people inquired what impact the article would have on my job or

career. I have not quit my job, nor have I been fired (so far). I've

simply abandoned one area of research – I doubt I'll ever be able to

publish in mathematical biology again, but that was the risk I knew I

was taking. Thank you all for your concern.

 

A few individuals kindly suggested that I inject myself with the blood

of a late-stage AIDS patient. While such an act might sensationalize

my viewpoint, there are a number of problems with such an

" experiment. " First, I can only imagine the non-HIV contaminants that

might be found in such blood. Second, the data and results contained

in the literature are sufficient to cast doubt on HIV. But most

importantly, such an " experiment " would hardly settle anything, given

the " latency period " of 10-15 years for progression to " AIDS. "

 

Many people insisted that I don't know what I'm talking about because

I offer no alternative explanations for AIDS. There are many

alternative explanations for " AIDS, " or severe immune deficiency. The

immunosuppressive effects of malnutrition, chronic drug abuse

(pharmaceutical as well as recreational), parasitic infections,

psychological stress, and other risks were well-established long

before " AIDS " became recognized in the early 1980s. The fact is that

most (but not all) AIDS patients do belong to risk groups whose

members are subject to one or more of the above assaults. This fact

can be checked by reading the annual CDC surveillance reports,

although drug use is hidden because the CDC gives priority to " sexual

transmission. " And I should point out that the correlation between

positive antibody tests and immune deficiency doesn't necessarily

imply that HIV is the cause. To shamelessly steal an analogy from

Peter Duesberg, just because long-term smokers often tend to develop

yellow fingers along with lung cancer, does not mean that yellow

fingers cause lung cancer. This is what we refer to in statistics as a

" lurking variable " – correlated but not the cause, and hence

confounding the issue. In any case, pointing out the flaws in an

existing theory in no way obliges me to produce an alternative.

 

I did receive several emails from people like myself who work or have

worked with AIDS every day, people who have growing doubts or who have

abandoned the theory altogether. These include doctors, pharmacists,

biologists and social workers.

 

" I volunteer in a Community Health Center, which was started twenty

years ago, mainly for HIV positive people, though our clientele has

expanded to all sections of our community. Also, as a former physician

and then a psychiatrist, I was never able to understand this

mysterious 'disease', and your writing has clarified a lot of that

mystery. "

 

And there was also the following quote, from a social worker who works

with HIV-positive prisoners:

 

" Having worked with women with HIV in a prison environment, they

always seemed more scared than sick. "

 

The letters that particularly affected me were those from people

diagnosed with HIV, or who have lost loved ones to AIDS. I have lost

count of the number of people who have told me that they are convinced

their friends and lovers died from AZT poisoning rather than HIV. I

have nothing to offer but my utmost sympathy. I've received mail from

people who are HIV-positive and healthy for years without any AIDS

medications. I have also gotten more letters than I was expecting from

people whose lives have been seriously affected by false positive

diagnoses, including a man who lost his position in the military after

a positive HIV test, despite being at very little risk, and despite

having had malaria and numerous vaccinations. He's out of work now.

 

" I am a low-low-low-low risk group guy who has been diagnosed with HIV

as a part of yearly tests (military). As a hetero[sexual], monogamous

(10 years with one NEG[ATIVE] partner), non-IV drug using male...I was

skeptical. However the " system " is not skeptical and it has

subsequently tubed my previously successful career...The fact that I

have had malaria and about a billion weird immunization shots

(incl[uding] Anthrax) has not been brought up as possible source of

false positive. "

 

For everyone who has been affected by AIDS in one way or another, and

for those of you who have an abiding concern about doing science

correctly, please know that I read all of your letters and you are in

my thoughts. What I wrote was very personal, but it was also intended

to serve another purpose: the average person should be aware of all

the information that exists, not just what's been fed to us through

the government propaganda machine. The individual citizen should be

able to make informed choices about their health and their life. Let's

not allow overzealous, misinformed public health agencies to take away

that right from us.

 

The article also attracted some comments from the blogosphere. The

following comments appeared at a blog called Aetiology, which is owned

and maintained by Seed magazine:

 

" That's rich. First, as I mentioned, she's a mathematician. I

don't know what her background is in infectious disease epi[demiology]

(I contacted her but she did not respond), and she obviously shows

little understanding of molecular biology in her comments about PCR

(by her logic, any microbe shouldn't cause us harm because they are so

tiny). " March 9, 2006 10:43 AM

 

Yes, I am just a mathematician. I've never treated an AIDS patient,

nor have I worked with HIV in the lab. But in the course of my work, I

have studied both the microbiological and epidemiological aspects of

AIDS, and the current HIV theory fails to explain either of these.

Ever more convoluted explanations for HIV pathogenesis and

epidemiology are not the signs of a mysterious virus, but rather the

signs of a theory that is being shaped to fit the facts.

 

The following quote, as well as the quote above, indicate some

confusion over what I had to say about PCR. This comes from an

aspiring microbiology student:

 

" To understand my shock at the content of this article, you have

to understand how incredibly steeped in the doctrine of the AIDS

generation current education in Microbiology is. In the several years

I have been working on my B.Sc, I have taken probably five courses

that featured HIV or AIDS as prime examples of their precepts, have

taken a course from one AIDS researcher, and have read about AIDS from

several more. The idea of the AIDS virus has been one of the best

known and studied examples of classical virology that we've ever

had...I haven't read the whole article yet, but from the part I've

read, it seems that it's written by a disgruntled HIV mathematician

who got out of the race when she discovered that her paradigm and that

of the establishment in this medical research field were radically

different. From what I read, her science seems fine, except for some

pretty disdainful and poorly-educated opinions on some of the

best-used and most well-understood DNA techniques, such as PCR, or

Polymerase Chain Reaction (the technique used by crime-scene units to

amplify very small amounts of DNA so it can be identified, matched or

analyzed):

 

If something has to be mass-produced to even be seen, and the

result of that mass-production is used to estimate how much of a

pathogen there is, it might lead a person to wonder how relevant the

pathogen was in the first place.

 

First of all – to say this, a person needs to have absolutely no

concept of how small DNA is, the degree of virulence of the pathogen

being studied, and essentially no concept of how microbiology works.

In short – a mathematician. " The AIDS " Theory. "

 

To be very clear, I did not mean that HIV cannot be pathogenic because

it is so small, I meant it cannot be pathogenic because it is so

sparse; there is so little of it to be found. I was comparing PCR to a

Xerox machine, rather than a magnifying glass. We need the Xerox

machine because traditional virus culture techniques fail to detect

HIV. Worse yet, PCR is used to measure " viral load, " but this

quantitative use of PCR has never been validated. As mathematician

Mark Craddock has said, " If PCR is the only way that the virus can be

detected, then how do you establish the precise viral load

independently of PCR, so that you can be certain that the figures PCR

gives are correct? " An alarmingly simple question, when you think

about it; perhaps too simple for an AIDS establishment already fully

committed to " surrogate markers, " protease inhibitors and " combination

therapies. "

 

And finally, a random blogger at LibertyPost.org appears to be lauding

the toxicities of protease inhibitors:

 

" And worse, she claims that protease inhibitors are killing HIV

patients, 'And the leading cause of death in HIV-positives in the last

few years has been liver failure, not an AIDS-defining disease in any

way, but rather an acknowledged side effect of protease inhibitors,

which asymptomatic individuals take in massive daily doses, for

years,' when that's exactly what you would hope for (mortality

drastically decreasing to the point that more deaths were the result

of side effects) if protease inhibitors were in fact EFFECTIVE

treatment for AIDS. " posted on 2006-03-03

 

Finally, I received a series of odd emails from a prominent government

HIV researcher, which includes the following quote:

 

" The AIDS denialists are making some noise about you being the `latest

PhD researcher' to refute HIV as the cause of AIDS. The document they

are citing...does not contain any new research, but only repeats a lot

of the standard denialist disinformation. "

 

The opening of this email begins with the use of the pejorative and

entirely unnecessary term " denialist, " and this was followed by an

" elucidation " of various aspects of virology that I imagine were

intended to persuade me to change my mind, despite the fact that the

arguments given were precisely those arguments that led me to doubt

HIV in the first place.

 

The arguments I presented were not intended to be " new research, " but

rather a short summary of the rather substantive questions that

scientists such as Peter Duesberg and others have raised, which have

still not been adequately answered. If the AIDS establishment is so

convinced of the validity of what they say, they should have no fear

of a public, adjudicated debate between the major orthodox and

dissenting scientists to settle the matter once and for all. Yet all

the major AIDS researchers have averted such a public debate, either

by claiming that the " overwhelming scientific consensus " makes such a

debate superfluous, or by saying that they are " too busy saving

lives. " In place of public debate, clearly politically motivated

documents such as the Durban Declaration remain the establishment's

standard response to dissenting voices. Even a cursory reading of this

pathetic document reveals it to be a statement of faith, designed to

divert attention from dissenters at the very moment when they were

threatening to expose the orthodoxy in South Africa in 2000.

 

To clarify an issue that has caused some confusion, it was not the

mathematical models themselves that caused me to doubt HIV, but rather

the scientific literature on which the models are based. Billions of

dollars have been spent on HIV, and this has not led to a greater

understanding of the virus, but rather to a series of unproven or

incorrect speculations which have been widely trumpeted in both the

scientific and lay press. Such a track record is indicative of

institutional problems in modern biomedicine.

 

The famous Ho/Shaw 1995 Nature papers are a typical example of this

phenomenon. These were the papers largely responsible for popularizing

HAART (the so-called " Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy " ) and the

" Hit hard, hit early " regime as a treatment for " HIV disease " and

" viral load " as a measure of treatment success. The mathematical

models used in these papers were claimed to show that HIV replicated

furiously from day one – in contrast to earlier evidence suggesting it

to be quite inactive. Even now, few people are aware that these

conclusions were based on very poorly constructed mathematical models.

Anyone who has taken a first course in differential equations can see

that, if analyzed properly, the models predict the onset of AIDS

within weeks or months after infection by HIV, before antiviral

immunity. (For anyone interested in a mathematical refutation of the

Ho paper, I refer you to Mark Craddock's analysis. Similar criticisms

have been directed at the Shaw paper.)

 

This example illustrates a central flaw in the HIV theory. The vast

majority of the literature I've seen uses what is known as circular

logic – you assume that something will happen, and then you mold the

definitions, models, experiments, and results to support that

conclusion. Craddock describes a typical example of circular logic in

the Shaw paper:

 

" They are trying to estimate viral production rates by measuring

viral loads at different times and trying to fit the numbers to their

formula for free virus. But if their formula is wrong, then their

estimates for viral production will be wrong too. "

 

Such tactics, by definition, are excellent at maintaining the façade

of a near-perfect correlation between HIV and AIDS, and of providing

seemingly convincing explanations of HIV pathogenesis. But the

resultant science does little to expand our actual understanding.

 

To fully appreciate how such tactics became common, one needs to

revisit the beginning of AIDS science. In 1984, HIV was announced as

the cause of AIDS at a press conference before any supporting

literature was published and had a chance to be critiqued by the

scientific community. By the time the supporting papers were

published, the lay press had all but declared HIV to be " the AIDS

virus, " and debate in the scientific arena was squelched. The current

commonly used orthodox tactic of arguing by intimidation and forcing

the conclusions to fit the facts became entrenched. Consider the time

period in the scientific literature, when HIV went from being " the

probable cause of AIDS " (1984) to simply " the cause of AIDS " (1985).

What changed? What happened to make scientists come to such certainty?

If you look at the actual papers, you'll see quite clearly that the

answer is: Nothing.

 

Returning to the Ho/Shaw papers, these have essentially been debunked

by both establishment and dissenting researchers, on biological as

well as mathematical grounds; they are now acknowledged to be wrong by

the scientific community, and it remains a mystery how they were ever

able to pass peer review in the first place. It is often asked, " Why

should we care at this point? Those papers are 11 years old; our

understanding has progressed since then. " The short answer is that

" viral load " and combination therapies are used to this day, despite

the fact that they were originally based on these incorrect papers.

Although current therapeutic regimens have been scaled back from the

" Hit hard, hit early " dogma that was popular ten years ago, the fact

remains that a large population of people have been, and continue to

be, treated on the basis of a theory that is fundamentally unsupportable.

 

Yet there is another answer to this question which is even more

fundamental. It is a curious fact that few HIV researchers seem to be

bothered by the events surrounding the Ho/Shaw papers. You might

imagine that people might " care at this point " because of concern over

the integrity of science. You might imagine that people might feel an

urge to discuss how the papers got published, and if other such

mistakes have happened since that time. You might imagine that the

failure of the peer review process to detect such patently inept

research would send off alarm bells within the HIV research community.

 

You would be wrong.

 

HIV researchers know the Ho/Shaw papers are wrong, yet they continue

along the clinical path charted by the papers. They know that the

quantitative use of PCR has never been validated, yet they continue to

use " viral load " to make clinical decisions. They know that the

history of HIV/AIDS is littered with documented cases of fraud,

incompetence, and poor quality research, yet they find it almost

impossible to imagine that this could be happening at the present

moment. They know their predictions have never panned out, yet they

keep inventing mysterious mechanisms for HIV pathogenesis. They know

many therapies of the past are now acknowledged to be mistakes (AZT

monotherapy, Hit hard, hit early), yet they never imagine that their

current therapies (the ever-growing list of combination therapies)

might one day be acknowledged as mistakes themselves.

 

As a final thought, I am often asked, " How could medicine have made

such a big mistake? How could so many people be wrong?. " I believe the

answer lies in the disintegration of scientific standards that have

resulted, in large part, from the changing expectations of academic

scientists. I'm an assistant professor, and my father is also a

professor in the physical sciences, so I have had plenty of

opportunity to see exactly how research expectations affect the

quality of work we produce. It is clear to me that the pressure to

obtain big government grants and to publish as many papers as possible

is not necessarily helping the advancement of science. Rather,

academics (and in particular, young ones) are pressured to choose

projects that can be completed quickly and easily, so as to increase

their publication list as fast as possible. As a result, quality suffers.

 

This lowering of scientific standards and critical thinking has been

apparent in many aspects of research for some time, and after several

generations of students, it is now beginning to infiltrate the

classroom – the textbooks and the undergraduate curriculum. It is

germane at this point to indicate that many of the common arguments

presented in response to the queries of HIV/AIDS skeptics are

essentially some form of appeal to the use of low standards. (For

example, " You don't need a reference that HIV causes AIDS, " " The fact

that HIV and AIDS are so well correlated indicates that it must be the

cause, " " HIV is a new virus, and new viruses will meet new standards, "

" Koch's postulates are outdated and don't apply in this day and age, "

" We don't need to worry about actual infectious virus, viral `markers'

should suffice, " or " Real scientists do experiments; they don't write

review articles on the literature. " ) All of these observations are

eloquently summed up, again by Craddock:

 

" Science is about making observations and trying to fit them into

a theoretical framework. Having the theoretical framework allows us to

make predictions about phenomena that we can then test. HIV " science "

long ago set off on a different path...People who ask simple,

straightforward questions are labeled as loonies who are dangerous to

public health. "

 

It is this decline in scientific standards that I point to, when I am

asked how so many people could be so wrong. Given the current research

atmosphere, it was almost inevitable that a really, really big

scientific mistake was going to be made. But we can still have hope

for the future – hope that institutional and political pressures will

no longer continue to cost lives, and hope that we will soon see

honest dialogue and debate, free of name-calling and intimidation.

 

March 21, 2006

 

Rebecca V. Culshaw, Ph.D. [send her mail], is a mathematical biologist

who has been working on mathematical models of HIV infection for the

past ten years. She received her Ph.D. (mathematics with a

specialization in mathematical biology) from Dalhousie University in

Canada in 2002 and is currently employed as an Assistant Professor of

Mathematics at a university in Texas.

 

2006 LewRockwell.com

 

 

--

 

 

 

The individual is supreme and finds its way through intuition.

 

Sepp Hasslberger

 

 

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