AFA’s Bryan Fischer: HIV Doesn’t Cause AIDS
Posted inAnti-LGBTby Leah Nelsonon January 6, 2012
It’s tempting to describe American Family Association spokesman Bryan Fischer as a close-minded, reactionary bigot. But when it comes to embracing fresh ideas that support his beliefs – heck, he pretty much outdoes us all.
Remember when he said that gays were responsible for the Holocaust? Or the time he claimed that states can require public officials to pass religious tests, directly contradicting both a 50-year-old Supreme Court decision and the express wishes of the Founding Fathers themselves? These are not exactly mainstream theories, but, ever open-minded, Fischer adopted them anyway.
And just when you think he’s reached the outermost limits of revisionism, Fischer one-ups himself by promoting a theory so breathtakingly outrageous that it makes his previous claims seem tame.
Well, he’s done it again, declaring during an anti-gay tirade on his radio show Tuesday that there is no connection between the HIV virus and AIDS.
He even had someone to back him up: Peter Duesberg, a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California at Berkeley whose hypothesis about AIDS has made him a pariah among his peers.
Once revered as a genius for his pioneering cancer research, Duesberg since 1987 has been a leading proponent of the so-called “denialist” hypothesis that HIV does not cause AIDS. He offers a range of possible alternative causes, claiming at different times that AIDS is a “fabricated epidemic,” that it is triggered by the use of recreational drugs, and that it is caused by the antiretroviral drugs that have improved and prolonged the lives of countless HIV-infected persons.
That’s not what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says.
“The scientific evidence is overwhelming that HIV is the cause of AIDS,” Dr. Jonathan Mermin, director of the CDC’s Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention, told Hatewatch via E-mail. “Infection with HIV has been the sole common factor shared by people with AIDS throughout the world. In addition, antiretroviral medicines developed specifically against HIV have been associated with dramatic reductions in the incidence of AIDS and mortality. Statements that AIDS is not caused by HIV are misleading and potentially dangerous.”
That seems an understatement. In 2000, Duesberg served on a commission charged by then-South African President Thabo Mbeki with determining whether HIV caused AIDS. Already inclined to disbelieve the connection, Mbeki accepted the conclusion that the two were not linked, leading to a disastrous public policy that caused an estimated 330,000 South Africans to die from AIDS, according to a 2010 report in AIDS and Behavior, a public health journal.
On Fischer’s show, Duesberg said that intravenous drugs are responsible for 50% of all cases of AIDS in America. “Most of the rest of the other half is male homosexuals – but not your all-American male homosexual from next door,” he said. “It’s the ones who have what they call ‘cruising,’ that have hundreds of –thousands of – sexual contacts in a short time. They can only accomplish that like our Olympians break records now, by taking lots of drugs.”
Fischer interviewed Duesberg in the context of discussing a proposed Los Angeles ordinance that would require performers in pornographic films to use condoms on the set.
Duesberg’s statistics – which suggest that half of AIDS patients are IV drug users and half are promiscuous gay men who use drugs to enhance their libido – do not quite square with reality. The CDC’s most recent statistics (here and here) do show that gay and bisexual men account for the majority of new HIV infections – 61% in 2009 – and that overall, 49% of Americans living with AIDS are gay or bisexual men. Neither numbers nor science say that all these men were drug-addicted sex fiends – and more to the point, 27% of those infected in 2009 were heterosexuals. Only 9% were IV drug users.
Asked to respond to the CDC’s statement about his hypothesis, Duesberg challenged the authority of the CDC, demanding evidence to back up this reporter’s characterization of the organization as an internationally recognized authority on epidemiology.
He also acknowledged that he had not heard of Bryan Fischer prior to speaking on his show. In response, Hatewatch provided him with several examples of Fischer’s most offensive and inaccurate anti-gay comments, reading verbatim his 2010 declaration that “Homosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and six million dead Jews.”
Duesberg – who, according to a lengthy 2008 profile in Discovermagazine, was born in Münster, Germany, in 1936 and grew up to the tune of air raid sirens, and whose father volunteered to serve in the German army – said he had never heard that theory before, and said he would need to see the context of Fischer’s comment before passing judgment. When Hatewatch forwarded him a linkto Fischer’s original blog post, he responded via E-mail, “I am not ready to comment on Bryan Fischer at this time, beyond our radio discussion of AIDS until I had a chance to talk to him directly. I have seen too many examples, including my own, where a scientifically correct point of view is twisted into a politically incorrect one, to diminish an opponents [sic] character.”
He also wrote, “I do not ‘marginalize’ male or female homosexuals. On the contrary, I have sacrifized [sic] status and career investments to find a scientific answer to AIDS, which is primarily a gay syndrome in the US.”
Duesberg may not seek to marginalize LGBT people (though, according to the Discover article, he repeatedly referred to them as “homos”) – but Bryan Fischer certainly does. Summing up his takeaway from Duesberg in a blog post yesterday, he wrote, “Bottom line? HIV does not cause AIDS. So let’s immediately stop spending billions of dollars trying to kill a harmless microbe. And secondly, let’s tell homosexuals to stop sleeping with other men, stop using poppers, and stop shooting up. If they listen to that message, public health will improve, everybody will live longer, and taxpayers will be able to keep more of their money. What’s not to like?”
“That,” responded Brian Chase of the Los Angeles-based AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which is pushing the condom ordinance, “might be one of the dumbest things Bryan Fischer’s ever said – and that is saying quite a bit.”
- Sa_artman
- 02-22-2012, 06:41 PM
- Sa_artman
- 02-22-2012, 06:43 PM
Surprise (NOT): AIDS Deniers Contribute to Vax Hysteria
Posted: October 02, 2011
By Bob Unruh
© 2011 WND
Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann, two presidential candidates who sparred over the issue of Texas vaccinations, may be floundering in the polls, but the topic of Merck's controversial Gardasilis heating up – with an Austrian physician who studied the drug saying it is not only dangerous, but useless in reducing cervical cancer, the stated reason it would have been administered to young girls under an executive order from Gov. Perry.
Dr. Christian Fiala, who successfully fought the use of the drug in Austria, told WND this week "there is no proof of a causal relationship of HPV and cervical cancer (correlation is not necessarily causation) and there is no evidence that HPV vaccine reduces the overall number of cervical cancer (cases)."
'SCARY MEDICINE: Exposing the dark side of vaccines'
In an email, Fiala called the HPV vaccination plan "a money-making machine without any benefit for patients. But some inherent risks."
Officials report that there have been 17,500 or more "adverse" incident reports that have been made over the last few years because of the use of the vaccination.
Fiala, who fought the idea of vaccination with Gardasil as part of a national health standard in Austria, says he was targeted by the vaccine developers for his findings.
"The doctors involved in vaccine development submitted an official complaint ... accusing me of doing harm to the image of doctors," Fiala said. "The investigation did not go far, because I could show that I fully respect evidence based on medicine. Therefore, the investigation was closed. But it could have cost me the right to [practice] medicine. It was meant as a threat."
He said that while he was arguing over the application of the medicine, an 18-year-girl was found dead in her bed.
"She had been absolutely healthy before her death, except some central nervous symptoms in the few days prior to her death. … This happened three weeks post-HPV vaccination," he said.
Then, another girl, 16, was hospitalized with similar symptoms and was in intensive care for a week before she started recovering.
"For obvious reasons this slowed down the enthusiasm for the vaccine in Austria," he said.
As a result, the product is not greatly promoted in his country, "and it is used infrequently."
Dr. Jane Orient of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons also told WND that she battled Perry's plan in 2007 and 2008 to inoculated school girls.
"Our position was that this was a violation of parental rights and patients' rights, to mandate a vaccine without a really good public health reason," she said.
She pointed out that the HPV virus is spread only by sexual contact and not in routine school situations. And she said there were a lot of questions about the brand new drug, among them the direct link between the HPV vaccine and any side effects.
"It tends to worry me quite a lot if I give a shot and [a patient] drops dead," she said.
"It should be that the patient is the one to make the determination [to get vaccinated]; the state should not be demanding that little girls be subjected to this."
She told WND that it was good for the issue to be raised at the level of a presidential race, because the public needs to debate and decide such issues.
When Bachmann raised the issue,the traditional media attacked her for asserting that the vaccine could be dangerous and should not be imposed by government.
The Bachmann attack "may be hurting her considerably more than him," stated theInternational Business Times, citing her narrative about a mother who complained the treatment had injured her daughter. "Bachmann did not offer any scientific evidence to suggest there is actually a viable link between Gardasil and mental retardation."
The report said: "Of the 35 million doses of Gardasil distributed in the U.S., only about 0.05 percent of individuals who have been vaccinated have reported some kind of side effect, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Mental retardation was not one of them."
The Washington Post joined the criticism, saying, "Her offense quickly turned to defense when her comments were criticized by an extremely long list of groups and people, including Rush Limbaugh, the Washington Post editorial board, Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Centers for Disease Control.
"In the wake of Bachmann's comments," the report continued, "there doesn't seem to be a rush of stories questioning the safety of Gardasil. There appears to be only one such story: a WISH-TV Indianapolis report about Zeda Pingel, whose mother claims she's suffered health problems after being vaccinated."
The Student Life publication at Washington University accused Bachmann of making verbal gaffes.
"The virus itself is the most common sexually transmitted infection. According to the Centers for Disease Control, some 50 percent of sexually active American adults will contract HPV during their lifetimes. HPV is a very real problem, and this vaccine can help prevent its spread.
"With women comprising half our population, that this claim, which can do nothing but hurt women's health, was made is concerning," the publication said.
Some 17,500 individuals have suffered side effects such as Guillain-Barre Syndrome, Bell's Palsy and even death.
In the debate, Bachmann said Perry's act was "a violation of liberty interests."
"We cannot forget in the midst of this executive order, there was a big drug company that made millions of dollars because of this mandate," she continued. "Is it about life or about millions of dollars for a drug company?"
Perry said the donation from the vaccine maker, Merck, was only $5,000, and he was insulted if Bachmann was suggesting he could be "bought for $5,000."
"I'm offended for all the little girls who didn't have a choice. That's what I'm offended for," she responded.
Neither the Bachmann nor the Perry campaigns returned WND requests for comment.
But critics of Perry point out that the vaccine is supposed to address a disease only transmitted by sexual activity, and the issue isn't the mundane, clinical argument that Gardasil supporters portray.
At the What Doctors Don't Tell You blog, a campaign called Truth About Gardasil was highlighted.
"What they are not telling you is that thousands of girls are having adverse reactions to the HPV vaccines, some have even died – at last count, at least 103 lives have been lost. We have got to do something about this. These girls need our help! These girls are having reactions such as; seizures, strokes, dizziness, fatigue, weakness, headaches, stomach pains, vomiting, muscle pain and weakness, joint pain, auto-immune problems, chest pains, hair loss, appetite loss, personality changes, insomnia, hand/leg tremors, arm/leg weakness, shortness of breath, heart problems, paralysis, itching, rashes, swelling, aching muscles, pelvic pain, nerve pain, menstrual cycle changes, fainting, swollen lymph nodes, night sweats, nausea, temporary vision/hearing loss just to name some of them!"
Actually, the government itself has documented deaths from reactions to the vaccine, although the total doesn't match the blog's claim of fatalities.
Anecdotally, the government's documents confirm:
The case of a 19-year-old woman who was given Gardasil and reported, "Headache, nausea, dizziness, chilling, tiredness, shortness of breath, complained of chest pain, severe cramps." She died of "acute cardiac arrhythmia."
A 13-year-old girl was vaccinated and, 10 days later, developed fever. According to federal reports she "did not recover and was admitted to the hospital. … She developed dyspnoea and went into a coma … she expired [that day]."
And a 10-year-old developed "progressive loss of strength in lower and upper extremities almost totally ... nerve conduction studies [showed Guillain-Barre syndrome]." The case was considered "immediately life-threatening."
Those reports have been monitored over the years byJudicial Watch,a Washington watchdog corruption fighter, since the drug's approval by the Food and Drug Administration
"To say Gardasil has a suspect safety record is a big understatement. These reports are troubling and show that the FDA and other public-health authorities may be asleep at the switch," Tom Fitton, president of the organization, told WND when the death and injury reports were arriving.
Judicial Watch launched a comprehensive investigation of Gardasil's safety record in 2008 after the drug's manufacturer,Merck & Co., began a major effort to lobby in state legislatures to impose requirements that girls be given their product.
It was in 2008 when Judicial Watch obtained documents from the FDA documenting "anaphylactic shock," "foaming at mouth," "grand mal convulsion," "coma" and "now paralyzed" descriptions of the complications from Gardasil. The company wanted it to be mandatory for all schoolgirls.
The federal reports document some three dozen deaths in the United States, although an activist organization claims there have been almost 70 deaths, nearly 800 "serious" reactions and thousands of minor reactions.
Merck spokeswoman Jennifer Allen Woodruff told WND that the drug addresses a medical need, that of reducing the rates of HPV.
She said it has been approved widely around the world, with 120 countries having examined and approved its use.
"Nothing is more important to Merck than the safety of our vaccines and those who use them," she said. "The facts about Gardasil are clear and its efficacy and safety … were established."
She declined to say that Merck had not lobbied state lawmakers for laws that would force the vaccine on children and families, instead offering that the company focused on lobbying efforts regarding the "potential school requirements" in some states.
She said the company's goal was simply to provide information to those who made such decisions.
However, the vaccine has had a few bumps. Agence France-Presse reported in 2009 that Spanish authorities withdrew tens of thousands of doses of the vaccine when two teen girls were hospitalized.
In the United Kingdom, an investigation was launched after two young girls died following their injections of the drug.
And the Daily News and Analysis from India said the Indian Council of Medical Research suspended a cervical cancer control vaccination program for girls after four deaths and complications for 120 more.
The Truth about Gardasilhas launched a videocalled One More Girl that publicizes "questions" about Gardasil's safety.
Posted: October 02, 2011
By Bob Unruh
© 2011 WND
Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann, two presidential candidates who sparred over the issue of Texas vaccinations, may be floundering in the polls, but the topic of Merck's controversial Gardasilis heating up – with an Austrian physician who studied the drug saying it is not only dangerous, but useless in reducing cervical cancer, the stated reason it would have been administered to young girls under an executive order from Gov. Perry.
Dr. Christian Fiala, who successfully fought the use of the drug in Austria, told WND this week "there is no proof of a causal relationship of HPV and cervical cancer (correlation is not necessarily causation) and there is no evidence that HPV vaccine reduces the overall number of cervical cancer (cases)."
'SCARY MEDICINE: Exposing the dark side of vaccines'
In an email, Fiala called the HPV vaccination plan "a money-making machine without any benefit for patients. But some inherent risks."
Officials report that there have been 17,500 or more "adverse" incident reports that have been made over the last few years because of the use of the vaccination.
Fiala, who fought the idea of vaccination with Gardasil as part of a national health standard in Austria, says he was targeted by the vaccine developers for his findings.
"The doctors involved in vaccine development submitted an official complaint ... accusing me of doing harm to the image of doctors," Fiala said. "The investigation did not go far, because I could show that I fully respect evidence based on medicine. Therefore, the investigation was closed. But it could have cost me the right to [practice] medicine. It was meant as a threat."
He said that while he was arguing over the application of the medicine, an 18-year-girl was found dead in her bed.
"She had been absolutely healthy before her death, except some central nervous symptoms in the few days prior to her death. … This happened three weeks post-HPV vaccination," he said.
Then, another girl, 16, was hospitalized with similar symptoms and was in intensive care for a week before she started recovering.
"For obvious reasons this slowed down the enthusiasm for the vaccine in Austria," he said.
As a result, the product is not greatly promoted in his country, "and it is used infrequently."
Dr. Jane Orient of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons also told WND that she battled Perry's plan in 2007 and 2008 to inoculated school girls.
"Our position was that this was a violation of parental rights and patients' rights, to mandate a vaccine without a really good public health reason," she said.
She pointed out that the HPV virus is spread only by sexual contact and not in routine school situations. And she said there were a lot of questions about the brand new drug, among them the direct link between the HPV vaccine and any side effects.
"It tends to worry me quite a lot if I give a shot and [a patient] drops dead," she said.
"It should be that the patient is the one to make the determination [to get vaccinated]; the state should not be demanding that little girls be subjected to this."
She told WND that it was good for the issue to be raised at the level of a presidential race, because the public needs to debate and decide such issues.
When Bachmann raised the issue,the traditional media attacked her for asserting that the vaccine could be dangerous and should not be imposed by government.
The Bachmann attack "may be hurting her considerably more than him," stated theInternational Business Times, citing her narrative about a mother who complained the treatment had injured her daughter. "Bachmann did not offer any scientific evidence to suggest there is actually a viable link between Gardasil and mental retardation."
The report said: "Of the 35 million doses of Gardasil distributed in the U.S., only about 0.05 percent of individuals who have been vaccinated have reported some kind of side effect, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Mental retardation was not one of them."
The Washington Post joined the criticism, saying, "Her offense quickly turned to defense when her comments were criticized by an extremely long list of groups and people, including Rush Limbaugh, the Washington Post editorial board, Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Centers for Disease Control.
"In the wake of Bachmann's comments," the report continued, "there doesn't seem to be a rush of stories questioning the safety of Gardasil. There appears to be only one such story: a WISH-TV Indianapolis report about Zeda Pingel, whose mother claims she's suffered health problems after being vaccinated."
The Student Life publication at Washington University accused Bachmann of making verbal gaffes.
"The virus itself is the most common sexually transmitted infection. According to the Centers for Disease Control, some 50 percent of sexually active American adults will contract HPV during their lifetimes. HPV is a very real problem, and this vaccine can help prevent its spread.
"With women comprising half our population, that this claim, which can do nothing but hurt women's health, was made is concerning," the publication said.
Some 17,500 individuals have suffered side effects such as Guillain-Barre Syndrome, Bell's Palsy and even death.
In the debate, Bachmann said Perry's act was "a violation of liberty interests."
"We cannot forget in the midst of this executive order, there was a big drug company that made millions of dollars because of this mandate," she continued. "Is it about life or about millions of dollars for a drug company?"
Perry said the donation from the vaccine maker, Merck, was only $5,000, and he was insulted if Bachmann was suggesting he could be "bought for $5,000."
"I'm offended for all the little girls who didn't have a choice. That's what I'm offended for," she responded.
Neither the Bachmann nor the Perry campaigns returned WND requests for comment.
But critics of Perry point out that the vaccine is supposed to address a disease only transmitted by sexual activity, and the issue isn't the mundane, clinical argument that Gardasil supporters portray.
At the What Doctors Don't Tell You blog, a campaign called Truth About Gardasil was highlighted.
"What they are not telling you is that thousands of girls are having adverse reactions to the HPV vaccines, some have even died – at last count, at least 103 lives have been lost. We have got to do something about this. These girls need our help! These girls are having reactions such as; seizures, strokes, dizziness, fatigue, weakness, headaches, stomach pains, vomiting, muscle pain and weakness, joint pain, auto-immune problems, chest pains, hair loss, appetite loss, personality changes, insomnia, hand/leg tremors, arm/leg weakness, shortness of breath, heart problems, paralysis, itching, rashes, swelling, aching muscles, pelvic pain, nerve pain, menstrual cycle changes, fainting, swollen lymph nodes, night sweats, nausea, temporary vision/hearing loss just to name some of them!"
Actually, the government itself has documented deaths from reactions to the vaccine, although the total doesn't match the blog's claim of fatalities.
Anecdotally, the government's documents confirm:
The case of a 19-year-old woman who was given Gardasil and reported, "Headache, nausea, dizziness, chilling, tiredness, shortness of breath, complained of chest pain, severe cramps." She died of "acute cardiac arrhythmia."
A 13-year-old girl was vaccinated and, 10 days later, developed fever. According to federal reports she "did not recover and was admitted to the hospital. … She developed dyspnoea and went into a coma … she expired [that day]."
And a 10-year-old developed "progressive loss of strength in lower and upper extremities almost totally ... nerve conduction studies [showed Guillain-Barre syndrome]." The case was considered "immediately life-threatening."
Those reports have been monitored over the years byJudicial Watch,a Washington watchdog corruption fighter, since the drug's approval by the Food and Drug Administration
"To say Gardasil has a suspect safety record is a big understatement. These reports are troubling and show that the FDA and other public-health authorities may be asleep at the switch," Tom Fitton, president of the organization, told WND when the death and injury reports were arriving.
Judicial Watch launched a comprehensive investigation of Gardasil's safety record in 2008 after the drug's manufacturer,Merck & Co., began a major effort to lobby in state legislatures to impose requirements that girls be given their product.
It was in 2008 when Judicial Watch obtained documents from the FDA documenting "anaphylactic shock," "foaming at mouth," "grand mal convulsion," "coma" and "now paralyzed" descriptions of the complications from Gardasil. The company wanted it to be mandatory for all schoolgirls.
The federal reports document some three dozen deaths in the United States, although an activist organization claims there have been almost 70 deaths, nearly 800 "serious" reactions and thousands of minor reactions.
Merck spokeswoman Jennifer Allen Woodruff told WND that the drug addresses a medical need, that of reducing the rates of HPV.
She said it has been approved widely around the world, with 120 countries having examined and approved its use.
"Nothing is more important to Merck than the safety of our vaccines and those who use them," she said. "The facts about Gardasil are clear and its efficacy and safety … were established."
She declined to say that Merck had not lobbied state lawmakers for laws that would force the vaccine on children and families, instead offering that the company focused on lobbying efforts regarding the "potential school requirements" in some states.
She said the company's goal was simply to provide information to those who made such decisions.
However, the vaccine has had a few bumps. Agence France-Presse reported in 2009 that Spanish authorities withdrew tens of thousands of doses of the vaccine when two teen girls were hospitalized.
In the United Kingdom, an investigation was launched after two young girls died following their injections of the drug.
And the Daily News and Analysis from India said the Indian Council of Medical Research suspended a cervical cancer control vaccination program for girls after four deaths and complications for 120 more.
The Truth about Gardasilhas launched a videocalled One More Girl that publicizes "questions" about Gardasil's safety.
- Sa_artman
- 02-22-2012, 06:45 PM
Isn't it true that drug companies are withholding the cure to make money?
This is a popular point of view among conspiracy theorists and those with contempt for drug companies, but a little rational thought should put this myth to rest.
This popular conspiracy theory gives far too much credit to the science of bygone generations. HIV first infected humans in the first half of the twentieth century (see Question 3). We have proof of human infection dating back to the '50s. The idea that such a complex virus could be created by scientists today is farfetched enough, but to think that it could have been invented over 65 years ago is preposterous.
Few of those who believe in this theory think it was just an innocent scientific experiment gone wrong. Instead, they believe it was part of a well-orchestrated plot to rid the country ... or the world ... of its "undesirable" elements: gay men, injection drug users, or minorities ... take your pick. But in the first half of the last century, we were too busy worrying about poverty (the '30s), the war ('40s), and communists (the '50s) to waste time trying to figure out how to wipe out gay men and drug users, who were barely on the radar screens of anyone except other gay men and drug users.
The fact that the HIV epidemic didn't originate in the developed world (where, as we know, all the evil scientists live) doesn't fit well with this theory either. Since the epidemic began in Africa, you'd have to propose that someone was trying to wipe out all Africans, a strategy that would not have been appreciated by the colonial powers who relied on them for labor and income.
Finally, it's inconceivable that the inventor of such a virus could also have planned an epidemic that would target specific groups of people. Its spread among gay men, drug users, and minorities was accidental, and in the end, it didn't stay confined to those groups anyway. Throughout history, there have been infamous examples of abuse of the human race by science and medicine, but the deliberate creation of the HIV epidemic is not one of them.
*Koch's postulates: The four criteria needed to prove that a microbe or organism is the cause of a disease. The postulates are: 1. the organism must be found in all animals suffering from the disease but should not be found in healthy animals; 2. The organism must be isolated from a diseased animal and grown in pure culture; 3. The cultured organism should cause disease when introduced into a healthy animal; and 4. The organism must be reisolated from the experimentally infected animal.
This is a popular point of view among conspiracy theorists and those with contempt for drug companies, but a little rational thought should put this myth to rest.
- It's no surprise that we haven't yet eradicated HIV infection. The difficulty of finding a cure is discussed in Question 42.
- People who develop therapies at drug companies are scientists. They're motivated by the things that motivate scientists everywhere else: publication in prestigious journals, the respect of their colleagues, Nobel Prizes, interviews on "Oprah," getting funding to do more research, and the knowledge that their work has made a difference to humankind. No scientist who discovers the cure for AIDS is going to keep quiet about it, even if ordered to do so by an evil, profit-hungry CEO!
- Drug companies are competitive. If they're onto something big, they know their competitors can't be far behind. Being the second company to come up with The Cure won't be good enough. If a company had a cure, you'd have heard about it!
- A cure for AIDS would be highly profitable. Sure, there's big profit in lifetime therapy, too, but it's shared among multiple competing drug companies and doesn't last forever. Drugs go off patent and get replaced by generics; they fall out of favor as they're replaced by newer and better agents. A cure is likely to be expensive and would result in an instant monopoly for the company that discovered it.
- Most conspiracy theories are wrong.
This popular conspiracy theory gives far too much credit to the science of bygone generations. HIV first infected humans in the first half of the twentieth century (see Question 3). We have proof of human infection dating back to the '50s. The idea that such a complex virus could be created by scientists today is farfetched enough, but to think that it could have been invented over 65 years ago is preposterous.
Few of those who believe in this theory think it was just an innocent scientific experiment gone wrong. Instead, they believe it was part of a well-orchestrated plot to rid the country ... or the world ... of its "undesirable" elements: gay men, injection drug users, or minorities ... take your pick. But in the first half of the last century, we were too busy worrying about poverty (the '30s), the war ('40s), and communists (the '50s) to waste time trying to figure out how to wipe out gay men and drug users, who were barely on the radar screens of anyone except other gay men and drug users.
The fact that the HIV epidemic didn't originate in the developed world (where, as we know, all the evil scientists live) doesn't fit well with this theory either. Since the epidemic began in Africa, you'd have to propose that someone was trying to wipe out all Africans, a strategy that would not have been appreciated by the colonial powers who relied on them for labor and income.
Finally, it's inconceivable that the inventor of such a virus could also have planned an epidemic that would target specific groups of people. Its spread among gay men, drug users, and minorities was accidental, and in the end, it didn't stay confined to those groups anyway. Throughout history, there have been infamous examples of abuse of the human race by science and medicine, but the deliberate creation of the HIV epidemic is not one of them.
*Koch's postulates: The four criteria needed to prove that a microbe or organism is the cause of a disease. The postulates are: 1. the organism must be found in all animals suffering from the disease but should not be found in healthy animals; 2. The organism must be isolated from a diseased animal and grown in pure culture; 3. The cultured organism should cause disease when introduced into a healthy animal; and 4. The organism must be reisolated from the experimentally infected animal.
- Sa_artman
- 02-22-2012, 06:46 PM
Hey you fucking prick - why don't you start your own god damned thread?!!!...and just for giggles.
. Originally Posted by Mr. Bill
- Mr. Bill
- 02-22-2012, 06:47 PM
DOCTORS AND AIDS
HOW COULD THEY ALL BE WRONG?
by Anthony Brink
A response sometimes heard to the expression of doubt about the integrity of the HIV-AIDS paradigm as a medical model for understanding disease incidence is, "How could all the doctors in the world be wrong?" There are many possible answers to this question. One might point out that unanimity has never guaranteed the soundness of medical constructs, and examples of this abound. The history of medicine both ancient and modern is a wrecking-yard full of broken and abandoned ideas.
In this century alone innumerable medical theses have collapsed to which nearly all doctors once subscribed, such as bacterial theories of scurvy, beriberi, and pellagra, and more recently, the immuno-surveillance and retroviral theories of cancer aetiology - for which billions of dollars funded thousands of convincing research papers during the "War on Cancer" declared by Nixon in 1971.
Then there was swine flu: 1976 saw President Gerald Ford on television, at the behest of the American medical establishment, solemnly urging all Americans to get vaccinated against an imminent deadly influenza epidemic. About 50 million Americans were panicked into being immunised with useless or harmful vaccines rushed onto the market. Adverse reactions resulted in damages claims of $2.7 billion. Not a single case of swine flu appeared subsequent to the death of a sick recruit undergoing basic training in a boot camp in New Jersey (hardly an unusual event) that had ignited all the hysteria.
Before HIV-AIDS, and alongside the mad cow craze in Britain and the avian flu folly in Hong Kong, the great swine flu fiasco was perhaps the most telling instance in recent times of how Medicine can lose its head.
Another answer to the question goes to the fact that most doctors have scarcely more than a layman’s grasp of the concepts that populate biology at its molecular horizon. For instance, most would gape dully if asked to define the peculiar characteristics of a retrovirus (like HIV, we’re told) as distinct from other viruses, or distinguish endogenous and exogenous retroviruses, or articulate the rival contentions advanced by molecular biologists about whether the whole of retrovirology might be a mistake, a wrong turn at a scientific road-fork, a bad inference drawn from the evidence of certain metabolic biochemical phenomena which look odd when seen against old-fashioned rules of molecular genetics, and the possibility that retroviruses might not exist as infectious agents at all - that it is rather the classical dogma that needs an overhaul.
Taxed about the HIV theory of AIDS, most doctors can do little more than quote the claims of their authorities, like priests citing papal bulls and encyclicals, making obeisance to their cardinals.
A third answer would make the impudent point that it is fallacious to imagine that doctors generally have a superior capacity for reasoning than their patients.
The notes given medical students speak to the scant education that doctors receive in this art. To read them is to see how flimsy medical and biological theories are dished up as fact for rote learning, making the kind of call-and-answer instruction one sees in farm schools in this country look like an adventure in lateral-thinking training.
Doctors do so well at school because they’re the kind of guys who are the most easily schooled. In myths and legends to outdo the Hare Krishna people. Especially virologists, who occupy the haughtiest medical echelons, but who seem to have the dimmest bulbs in the upper storey. As revealed by what they swallow without a hiccup. And regurgitate to their students. Like the timeless French fancy ("Le Rage") that a bite from a dog acting wild and crazy can make you go mad and die. (But not the dog; man is the ‘end-host’.) You can go the same way from eating steak. Although nobody can plausibly say why.
Or some cancers are caused by viruses and are infectious. Or the most hilarious notion of them all: semen and vaginal secretions can be deadly. Mothers’ milk too. But not spit. All of a sudden. After millions of years. Thanks to a mutated virus from monkeys. Or maybe the moon. And all of this without any evidence. Not a shred. And there’s a funny part to it. You might be feeling fine. But you’re sure to go in six months time from any one of a couple of dozen diseases or malignancies. No, make that two years, well actually five; shall we say eight, or ten, or twelve, maybe fifteen; OK perhaps your life is just shortened a bit. Definitely? Yes, most certainly; no, not necessarily. Look, we don’t know. How, why? We don’t have the faintest idea.
Theories zigzag like a drunk at the wheel. ("We are still confused, only we are now confused at a higher level of understanding.") Excuse me. Is this the circus?
Nor do doctors necessarily proceed from a more rational mindset than Joe Public does. The opposite may be the case. That HIV-AIDS as a medical construct could have taken root so richly among doctors, despite its absurd fundamental tenets (which fly in the face of everything known to virology), illustrates the point.
As Harvey Bialy, scholar in residence at the Biotechnology Institute at the University of Mexico and editor at large of the prestigious science journal Nature Biotechnology puts it, the HIV theory of AIDS "turns immunology upside down and inside out."
To begin with, never before was the presence of antibodies taken to be prognostic of future disease. They used to be thought of as good things – evidence, where the patient appears healthy, of a successful immune response to a pathogen defeated.
Former molecular biology professor at Johns Hopkins and Harvard Universities, Charles Thomas predicts that after the balloon pops, historians will be studying the flight of common sense in the lunacy of the AIDS age, "for a 100 years, ...how America gave AIDS to the world." But since HIV-AIDS as a diagnostic construct is still hegemonically regnant in our time, the point about the way doctors as a group tend to think needs illustrating with a different example. What better than the turn Medicine took during the Third Reich.
The Nazis’ virulently irrational and barbarous doctrines of racial hygiene found huge appeal for German and Austrian doctors in that era. No other profession was as well represented on Nazi party membership lists.
From an ostensibly sober, rational profession functioning as an elite caste in a culture that seemed itself to be the fruit of the Enlightenment, just under half of them were card-carrying Nazis. Of course not all engaged in the sadistic butchery of untermenschen for which the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trials were conducted, but it would be a mistake to imagine that such criminals were aberrant quacks from the fringes, flourishing like vermin on the opportunities created within the Nazi eugenics paradigm.
In fact many medical practitioners and academics tried or named in testimony at the trials had enjoyed international eminence in their professional fields. Dr Edwin Katzenellenbogen, for instance, (who got life imprisonment) had served on the faculty of the Harvard Medical School.
Scholars of religious thinking have long known that the more horrible and improbable the founding superstitions of a new faith, the greater its capacity to mobilize the popular imagination and the stronger the force of its revolutionary engine.
In Medicine, Religion’s first cousin, the same sometimes applies. Like an infant upstart religion with imperial designs, the HIV-AIDS paradigm calls for a vigorous rebellion against long-established models of understanding. Woe betide any conservative scientists reluctant to become conversos to the rude new creed, who point out that the new theory is absurd on its face, that the link between AIDS and sex is no stronger than its link with sleeping; they become marginalised like Jews defying the demands of medieval Christendom, not racked and burned, but ostracised - scientifically defrocked, blacklisted and delegitimated, stripped of research funding, banned from lecturing podia, kicked out of their laboratories, rendered unemployable in academia or industry, menaced with confinement in psychiatric wards, isolated from graduate students in whom they might instill similar heretic doubts, and barred from publishing in the journals that once craved their papers.
But naturally; radical political dissident Noam Chomsky, Professor of Linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology has pointed out that "if you serve power, power rewards you with respectability. If you work to undermine power…you are reviled, imprisoned, driven into the desert."
The AIDS phenomenon at root is a vast pumping aggregation of interests with enormous political and economic power. Doctors and scientists who challenge its sacred tenets risk attracting the wrath of the revolution’s red guards. They won’t be thrown from windows. But their careers will be over. For their reactionary intransigence these critics will be marked always with pejorative epithets, as persistent as tattoos, like ‘discredited’, ‘loony’, ‘maverick’, ‘dangerous’ and ‘irresponsible and pernicious’. Just to make sure we correctly tell the wits from the dunces. And to discourage us from asking, "Well, what are these guys actually saying?"
A fourth explanation lies in the fact that for all their social status and prestige, in truth doctors generally function close to the bottom of the food-chain in the medical-industrial complex, and serve as little more than a thoughtless delivery system for the pharmaceutical corporations – whose wares they peddle makes the medical drug industry one of the most profitable legal enterprises on the planet.
Just how little room doctors are allowed for independent judgment founded on their own observations is revealed in the fact that in some places a doctor who declines to follow an approved treatment regimen such as chemotherapy for cancerous tumours, in view of his empirical assessment of its utter uselessness and lethal toxicity, risks sanctions from his controlling guild.
Imagine the trouble a doctor would be in were he brazenly to announce his conclusion that having investigated the business, reactive HIV antibody test results are virtually meaningless - pointers to no more than heightened non-specific immunologic activity. And were he to refuse to diagnose negative or positive, selecting for life or death, like a Nazi doctor calling links or rechts. Or marking ‘+’ on the medical files of slow or crippled German children, to mark them for murder during the euthanasia programme.
In sum, one doesn’t have to cast about too far for answers to the question, "How could all the doctors in the world be wrong about AIDS?" Medicine’s penchant for screwing up magnificently, its characteristic intellectual sluggishness, and the appeal of "magical thinking" for its practitioners is plain to anyone who turns back a few pages.
.
HOW COULD THEY ALL BE WRONG?
by Anthony Brink
A response sometimes heard to the expression of doubt about the integrity of the HIV-AIDS paradigm as a medical model for understanding disease incidence is, "How could all the doctors in the world be wrong?" There are many possible answers to this question. One might point out that unanimity has never guaranteed the soundness of medical constructs, and examples of this abound. The history of medicine both ancient and modern is a wrecking-yard full of broken and abandoned ideas.
In this century alone innumerable medical theses have collapsed to which nearly all doctors once subscribed, such as bacterial theories of scurvy, beriberi, and pellagra, and more recently, the immuno-surveillance and retroviral theories of cancer aetiology - for which billions of dollars funded thousands of convincing research papers during the "War on Cancer" declared by Nixon in 1971.
Then there was swine flu: 1976 saw President Gerald Ford on television, at the behest of the American medical establishment, solemnly urging all Americans to get vaccinated against an imminent deadly influenza epidemic. About 50 million Americans were panicked into being immunised with useless or harmful vaccines rushed onto the market. Adverse reactions resulted in damages claims of $2.7 billion. Not a single case of swine flu appeared subsequent to the death of a sick recruit undergoing basic training in a boot camp in New Jersey (hardly an unusual event) that had ignited all the hysteria.
Before HIV-AIDS, and alongside the mad cow craze in Britain and the avian flu folly in Hong Kong, the great swine flu fiasco was perhaps the most telling instance in recent times of how Medicine can lose its head.
Another answer to the question goes to the fact that most doctors have scarcely more than a layman’s grasp of the concepts that populate biology at its molecular horizon. For instance, most would gape dully if asked to define the peculiar characteristics of a retrovirus (like HIV, we’re told) as distinct from other viruses, or distinguish endogenous and exogenous retroviruses, or articulate the rival contentions advanced by molecular biologists about whether the whole of retrovirology might be a mistake, a wrong turn at a scientific road-fork, a bad inference drawn from the evidence of certain metabolic biochemical phenomena which look odd when seen against old-fashioned rules of molecular genetics, and the possibility that retroviruses might not exist as infectious agents at all - that it is rather the classical dogma that needs an overhaul.
Taxed about the HIV theory of AIDS, most doctors can do little more than quote the claims of their authorities, like priests citing papal bulls and encyclicals, making obeisance to their cardinals.
A third answer would make the impudent point that it is fallacious to imagine that doctors generally have a superior capacity for reasoning than their patients.
The notes given medical students speak to the scant education that doctors receive in this art. To read them is to see how flimsy medical and biological theories are dished up as fact for rote learning, making the kind of call-and-answer instruction one sees in farm schools in this country look like an adventure in lateral-thinking training.
Doctors do so well at school because they’re the kind of guys who are the most easily schooled. In myths and legends to outdo the Hare Krishna people. Especially virologists, who occupy the haughtiest medical echelons, but who seem to have the dimmest bulbs in the upper storey. As revealed by what they swallow without a hiccup. And regurgitate to their students. Like the timeless French fancy ("Le Rage") that a bite from a dog acting wild and crazy can make you go mad and die. (But not the dog; man is the ‘end-host’.) You can go the same way from eating steak. Although nobody can plausibly say why.
Or some cancers are caused by viruses and are infectious. Or the most hilarious notion of them all: semen and vaginal secretions can be deadly. Mothers’ milk too. But not spit. All of a sudden. After millions of years. Thanks to a mutated virus from monkeys. Or maybe the moon. And all of this without any evidence. Not a shred. And there’s a funny part to it. You might be feeling fine. But you’re sure to go in six months time from any one of a couple of dozen diseases or malignancies. No, make that two years, well actually five; shall we say eight, or ten, or twelve, maybe fifteen; OK perhaps your life is just shortened a bit. Definitely? Yes, most certainly; no, not necessarily. Look, we don’t know. How, why? We don’t have the faintest idea.
Theories zigzag like a drunk at the wheel. ("We are still confused, only we are now confused at a higher level of understanding.") Excuse me. Is this the circus?
Nor do doctors necessarily proceed from a more rational mindset than Joe Public does. The opposite may be the case. That HIV-AIDS as a medical construct could have taken root so richly among doctors, despite its absurd fundamental tenets (which fly in the face of everything known to virology), illustrates the point.
As Harvey Bialy, scholar in residence at the Biotechnology Institute at the University of Mexico and editor at large of the prestigious science journal Nature Biotechnology puts it, the HIV theory of AIDS "turns immunology upside down and inside out."
To begin with, never before was the presence of antibodies taken to be prognostic of future disease. They used to be thought of as good things – evidence, where the patient appears healthy, of a successful immune response to a pathogen defeated.
Former molecular biology professor at Johns Hopkins and Harvard Universities, Charles Thomas predicts that after the balloon pops, historians will be studying the flight of common sense in the lunacy of the AIDS age, "for a 100 years, ...how America gave AIDS to the world." But since HIV-AIDS as a diagnostic construct is still hegemonically regnant in our time, the point about the way doctors as a group tend to think needs illustrating with a different example. What better than the turn Medicine took during the Third Reich.
The Nazis’ virulently irrational and barbarous doctrines of racial hygiene found huge appeal for German and Austrian doctors in that era. No other profession was as well represented on Nazi party membership lists.
From an ostensibly sober, rational profession functioning as an elite caste in a culture that seemed itself to be the fruit of the Enlightenment, just under half of them were card-carrying Nazis. Of course not all engaged in the sadistic butchery of untermenschen for which the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trials were conducted, but it would be a mistake to imagine that such criminals were aberrant quacks from the fringes, flourishing like vermin on the opportunities created within the Nazi eugenics paradigm.
In fact many medical practitioners and academics tried or named in testimony at the trials had enjoyed international eminence in their professional fields. Dr Edwin Katzenellenbogen, for instance, (who got life imprisonment) had served on the faculty of the Harvard Medical School.
Scholars of religious thinking have long known that the more horrible and improbable the founding superstitions of a new faith, the greater its capacity to mobilize the popular imagination and the stronger the force of its revolutionary engine.
In Medicine, Religion’s first cousin, the same sometimes applies. Like an infant upstart religion with imperial designs, the HIV-AIDS paradigm calls for a vigorous rebellion against long-established models of understanding. Woe betide any conservative scientists reluctant to become conversos to the rude new creed, who point out that the new theory is absurd on its face, that the link between AIDS and sex is no stronger than its link with sleeping; they become marginalised like Jews defying the demands of medieval Christendom, not racked and burned, but ostracised - scientifically defrocked, blacklisted and delegitimated, stripped of research funding, banned from lecturing podia, kicked out of their laboratories, rendered unemployable in academia or industry, menaced with confinement in psychiatric wards, isolated from graduate students in whom they might instill similar heretic doubts, and barred from publishing in the journals that once craved their papers.
But naturally; radical political dissident Noam Chomsky, Professor of Linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology has pointed out that "if you serve power, power rewards you with respectability. If you work to undermine power…you are reviled, imprisoned, driven into the desert."
The AIDS phenomenon at root is a vast pumping aggregation of interests with enormous political and economic power. Doctors and scientists who challenge its sacred tenets risk attracting the wrath of the revolution’s red guards. They won’t be thrown from windows. But their careers will be over. For their reactionary intransigence these critics will be marked always with pejorative epithets, as persistent as tattoos, like ‘discredited’, ‘loony’, ‘maverick’, ‘dangerous’ and ‘irresponsible and pernicious’. Just to make sure we correctly tell the wits from the dunces. And to discourage us from asking, "Well, what are these guys actually saying?"
A fourth explanation lies in the fact that for all their social status and prestige, in truth doctors generally function close to the bottom of the food-chain in the medical-industrial complex, and serve as little more than a thoughtless delivery system for the pharmaceutical corporations – whose wares they peddle makes the medical drug industry one of the most profitable legal enterprises on the planet.
Just how little room doctors are allowed for independent judgment founded on their own observations is revealed in the fact that in some places a doctor who declines to follow an approved treatment regimen such as chemotherapy for cancerous tumours, in view of his empirical assessment of its utter uselessness and lethal toxicity, risks sanctions from his controlling guild.
Imagine the trouble a doctor would be in were he brazenly to announce his conclusion that having investigated the business, reactive HIV antibody test results are virtually meaningless - pointers to no more than heightened non-specific immunologic activity. And were he to refuse to diagnose negative or positive, selecting for life or death, like a Nazi doctor calling links or rechts. Or marking ‘+’ on the medical files of slow or crippled German children, to mark them for murder during the euthanasia programme.
In sum, one doesn’t have to cast about too far for answers to the question, "How could all the doctors in the world be wrong about AIDS?" Medicine’s penchant for screwing up magnificently, its characteristic intellectual sluggishness, and the appeal of "magical thinking" for its practitioners is plain to anyone who turns back a few pages.
.
- Sweet N Little
- 02-22-2012, 06:48 PM
must ...copy....... and ...paste.........
- Mr. Bill
- 02-22-2012, 06:52 PM
...and just for giggles. Originally Posted by Sa_artmanYou are a sociopathic coward - the type of social reject who defaces property in the dead of night - and who harasses others for pure deviant enjoyment.
.
- Sa_artman
- 02-22-2012, 06:53 PM
must ...copy....... and ...paste.........
I should make this a quote Mr. Bill thread.Originally Posted by Mr. Bill
Hey you fucking prick - why don't you start your own god damned thread?!!!
.
and who could forget this gem...
You are a sociopathic coward - the type of social reject who defaces property in the dead of night - and who harasses others for pure deviant enjoyment.
.
- Sweet N Little
- 02-22-2012, 06:57 PM
+1 LMAO!!
- Sa_artman
- 02-22-2012, 06:57 PM
Isolation of a T-lymphotropic retrovirus from a patient at risk for acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS).
Barré-Sinoussi F, Chermann JC, Rey F, Nugeyre MT, Chamaret S, Gruest J, Dauguet C, Axler-Blin C, Vézinet-Brun F, Rouzioux C, Rozenbaum W, Montagnier L.
Abstract
A retrovirus belonging to the family of recently discovered human T-cell leukemia viruses (HTLV), but clearly distinct from each previous isolate, has been isolated from a Caucasian patient with signs and symptoms that often precede the acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). This virus is a typical type-C RNA tumor virus, buds from the cell membrane, prefers magnesium for reverse transcriptase activity, and has an internal antigen (p25) similar to HTLV p24. Antibodies from serum of this patient react with proteins from viruses of the HTLV-I subgroup, but type-specific antisera to HTLV-I do not precipitate proteins of the new isolate. The virus from this patient has been transmitted into cord blood lymphocytes, and the virus produced by these cells is similar to the original isolate. From these studies it is concluded that this virus as well as the previous HTLV isolates belong to a general family of T-lymphotropic retroviruses that are horizontally transmitted in humans and may be involved in several pathological syndromes, including AIDS.
...continue here....http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6...?dopt=Abstract
Barré-Sinoussi F, Chermann JC, Rey F, Nugeyre MT, Chamaret S, Gruest J, Dauguet C, Axler-Blin C, Vézinet-Brun F, Rouzioux C, Rozenbaum W, Montagnier L.
Abstract
A retrovirus belonging to the family of recently discovered human T-cell leukemia viruses (HTLV), but clearly distinct from each previous isolate, has been isolated from a Caucasian patient with signs and symptoms that often precede the acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). This virus is a typical type-C RNA tumor virus, buds from the cell membrane, prefers magnesium for reverse transcriptase activity, and has an internal antigen (p25) similar to HTLV p24. Antibodies from serum of this patient react with proteins from viruses of the HTLV-I subgroup, but type-specific antisera to HTLV-I do not precipitate proteins of the new isolate. The virus from this patient has been transmitted into cord blood lymphocytes, and the virus produced by these cells is similar to the original isolate. From these studies it is concluded that this virus as well as the previous HTLV isolates belong to a general family of T-lymphotropic retroviruses that are horizontally transmitted in humans and may be involved in several pathological syndromes, including AIDS.
...continue here....http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6...?dopt=Abstract
- Sa_artman
- 02-22-2012, 07:00 PM
Petite women are the salt of the earth ;-)
- Sweet N Little
- 02-22-2012, 07:01 PM
As seen in clinical studies lasting 96 weeks, patients being treated with HIV medicationfor the first time who took ISENTRESS plus Truvada:
- May reach a reduced viral load to undetectable (less than 400 copies/mL or less than
50 copies/mL) and an increase in CD4 (T) cell counts (depending on the test used). ISENTRESS may not have these effects in all patients - Had a low rate of side effects
- The most common side effect of moderate to severe intensity (that interfered
with or kept patients from performing daily activities) was trouble sleeping - This side effect occurred more often in patients taking ISENTRESS plus
Truvada (4%) versus Sustiva plus Truvada (3%)
- The most common side effect of moderate to severe intensity (that interfered
- Experienced less effect on LDL cholesterol ("bad" cholesterol)
- Cholesterol increased an average of 7 mg/dL with ISENTRESS plus Truvada
versus 21 mg/dL with Sustiva plus Truvada- When they began the study, the average LDL cholesterol of patients on ISENTRESS plus Truvada was 96 mg/dL versus 93 mg/dL for those on Sustiva plus Truvada
- Cholesterol increased an average of 7 mg/dL with ISENTRESS plus Truvada
- Sa_artman
- 02-22-2012, 07:12 PM
Duesberg Strikes a blow for HIV/AIDS denialism
Category: HIV/AIDS denialism
Posted on: January 6, 2012 6:00 AM, by MarkH
When Duesberg was recently given space in Scientific American I think the blogosphere was rightly chagrinned that they would give space to a crank whose crackpot ideas are thought to be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands. But it seemed at the time he had been keeping his denialism on the down low, maybe appearing to have given up on his crank view that HIV does not cause AIDS. Not so anymore. He's back, and has secured publication of a paper denying HIV/AIDS in an Italian Journal.
The title, AIDS since 1984: No evidence for a new, viral epidemic - not even in Africa, seems such a denial of reality that you wonder if part of it is he can't reverse now because then he's responsible for a great many AIDS deaths, especially in South Africa. Specifically the paper is a refutation of the above linked paper discussing excess AIDS deaths likely due to rejection of anti-retroviral medications.
Their argument, which is bizarre, is that AIDS has not been a big enough problem to truly be infectious.
I suggest now that you take five minutes to go outside and scream, or maybe gently hit your head against a hard surface.
Then they use WHO statistics showing that population is still growing in South Africa, Uganda and sub-Saharan Africa to suggest AIDS deaths in this location have been exaggerated, and worse, use South African statistics which claim only 10,000 AIDS deaths per year between 2000 and 2005.
Even if we believed these data were accurate, in an environment when HIV diagnosis conferns social disgrace and under a government that similarly denied the link between HIV and AIDS, this is proof of nothing.
Finally, he has an extensive section criticizing HIV/AIDS drugs as toxic, and singles out AZT for criticism. It has side-effects that are bad, it's true, but medicine is about risk versus benefit, not whether or not there are no risks to a therapy. He also cites many papers that are pre-HAART, and are irrelevant.
But even so he misrepresents the literature, including this paper to suggest that AZT is ineffective.
But all of this is besides the point. HIV monotherapy is not even standard of care for these reasons. We know HIV rapidly becomes resistant to a single therapy, hence the need for combination therapy. You need proof combination therapy prevents progression of disease and death? JAMA on protease inhibitors, or how highly-active anti-retroviral therapy (HAART) decreases mortality to a third of that on a single drug? Or how AIDS mortality decreased with introduction of HAART? Or how when people are non-compliant with the medication they are much more likely to progress to AIDS and die.
If you look at the effect of inferior therapy on HIV/AIDS survival, yes, the results aren't great, but Duesberg is ignoring reams of data and current standard of care with HAART therapy. As for HAART therapy he castigates it for the side effects of the drugs, not for efficacy in preventing mortality. The drugs have known long-term toxicities, but this is besides the point. If the drugs extend your life beyond what you would have had without it, and you eventually die of a toxicity years later, they have still served their purpose and extended life. No one is saying these drugs are perfect. They are hard to take, they cause gastrointestinal upset, they can cause mitochondrial injury with long term use, injury to other organ systems with prolonged therapy. This is true, but that's an argument for continued research and refinement of these drugs to ideally find a less-toxic next generation anti-retroviral, not an argument against their use.
Finally, he suggests the harm from HAART to unborn children or the use of single-dose AZT to prevent transmission during pregnancy may have untoward side-effects on the growth and development of exposed children. A valid point. But given the choice between life + side effects of drug, versus possible transmission of HIV to children there is no choice. Only for a denialist who doesn't believe HIV is the causitive agent of AIDS (ignoring all the basic science demonstrating the molecular mechanisms of HIV destruction of t-cells) is there any question that you should take the small risk of a drug side-effect over the dramatically shortened life span of a child with HIV.
I can't help being personally offended by this drivel. I'm in Baltimore, with a population known to be living with HIV of 2.5%. Although the actual prevalence of HIV in the city is much higher as there are thousands living with HIV but without the diagnosis. I treat patients with HIV all the time, and operate on them, and have personally seen what happens when HAART is started on patients with AIDS-defining diseases, and how hopeless it is when non-compliance has sabotaged a potentially life-saving therapy (the virus can become resistant to any drug and this is increased with non-compliance). These cranks don't treat these patients, they ignore the data that would help these patients and undermine public health. The publication of this denialist trope is a tragedy.
Category: HIV/AIDS denialism
Posted on: January 6, 2012 6:00 AM, by MarkH
When Duesberg was recently given space in Scientific American I think the blogosphere was rightly chagrinned that they would give space to a crank whose crackpot ideas are thought to be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands. But it seemed at the time he had been keeping his denialism on the down low, maybe appearing to have given up on his crank view that HIV does not cause AIDS. Not so anymore. He's back, and has secured publication of a paper denying HIV/AIDS in an Italian Journal.
The title, AIDS since 1984: No evidence for a new, viral epidemic - not even in Africa, seems such a denial of reality that you wonder if part of it is he can't reverse now because then he's responsible for a great many AIDS deaths, especially in South Africa. Specifically the paper is a refutation of the above linked paper discussing excess AIDS deaths likely due to rejection of anti-retroviral medications.
Their argument, which is bizarre, is that AIDS has not been a big enough problem to truly be infectious.
The germ theory of disease predicts that a new (relative to a population) patho-genic virus or microbe causes an exponentially spreading epidemic of new microbe-specific illnesses and deaths within weeks to months after the arrival of the new pathogen (Encyclopædia Britannica, 2010).According to the authors this should result in a bell-shaped curve with rapid rate of infection then passage of the pathogen from the population. This is, of course, absurd because HIV is not yersinia pestis or plague. HIV does not get transmitted through casual contact and it does not have a rapid onset of action, often taking years before the syndrome becomes clinically apparent. Effectively, they're comparing apples and oranges and saying HIV can't be an infectious epidemic because it's not acting like the spread of the black plague through London. I am serious, that is their comparison.
I suggest now that you take five minutes to go outside and scream, or maybe gently hit your head against a hard surface.
Then they use WHO statistics showing that population is still growing in South Africa, Uganda and sub-Saharan Africa to suggest AIDS deaths in this location have been exaggerated, and worse, use South African statistics which claim only 10,000 AIDS deaths per year between 2000 and 2005.
Even if we believed these data were accurate, in an environment when HIV diagnosis conferns social disgrace and under a government that similarly denied the link between HIV and AIDS, this is proof of nothing.
Finally, he has an extensive section criticizing HIV/AIDS drugs as toxic, and singles out AZT for criticism. It has side-effects that are bad, it's true, but medicine is about risk versus benefit, not whether or not there are no risks to a therapy. He also cites many papers that are pre-HAART, and are irrelevant.
But even so he misrepresents the literature, including this paper to suggest that AZT is ineffective.
In 1994 the ability of AZT to prevent AIDS was tested by the British-French Concorde study, the largest, placebo-controlled study of its kind (Aboulker and Swart, 1993; Seligmann et al., 1994). This study investigated the onset of AIDS and death of 1749 HIV-positive, mostly male homosexual subjects, which had been divided into an untreated and an AZT-treated subgroup. It was found that AZT is unable to prevent AIDS and increases the mortality by 25%. In view of this it was concluded, "The results of Concorde do not encourage the early use of zidovudine (AZT) in symptom-free HIV-infected adults." (Seligmann et al., 1994). This is a misrepresentation of the findings. The study was not between treated and untreated groups. Subjects were divided between treatment before and after onset of AIDS. All subjects received AZT when they became ill. This study did not suggest patients should not receive AZT with onset of AIDS, only that there was no benefit to treatment with a single drug before onset of symptoms. This is still an issue of some contention, especially with issues of patient compliance, whether there is benefit to long term treatment with anti-retrovirals before onset of any AIDS defining illness. Here is what was said by Aboulker and Swart:
By contrast with the differences in CD4 count, there was no significant difference in clinical outcome between the two therapeutic strategies. The 3-year survival rates were 92% (90-94%) in the Imm [treatment at randomization] group and 93% (92-95%) in the Def [treatment after AIDS-defining illness] group (p=0.15, two-tailed), with no significant differences overall or in subgroup analyses by CD4 count at baseline (table I). This conclusion was unchanged when analyses were restricted to deaths classified as probably HIV related. Similarly, there was no significant difference in rates of progression of HIV disease: 3-year progression rates to AIDS or death were 18% in both groups, and to "minor" ARC, AIDS, or death these rates were 29% (Imm) and 32% (Def).AZT did not worsen outcomes, but as a monotherapy it did not help prevent progression to AIDS or death. For the life of me I can't figure out how he got AZT increased death rates by 25%.
But all of this is besides the point. HIV monotherapy is not even standard of care for these reasons. We know HIV rapidly becomes resistant to a single therapy, hence the need for combination therapy. You need proof combination therapy prevents progression of disease and death? JAMA on protease inhibitors, or how highly-active anti-retroviral therapy (HAART) decreases mortality to a third of that on a single drug? Or how AIDS mortality decreased with introduction of HAART? Or how when people are non-compliant with the medication they are much more likely to progress to AIDS and die.
If you look at the effect of inferior therapy on HIV/AIDS survival, yes, the results aren't great, but Duesberg is ignoring reams of data and current standard of care with HAART therapy. As for HAART therapy he castigates it for the side effects of the drugs, not for efficacy in preventing mortality. The drugs have known long-term toxicities, but this is besides the point. If the drugs extend your life beyond what you would have had without it, and you eventually die of a toxicity years later, they have still served their purpose and extended life. No one is saying these drugs are perfect. They are hard to take, they cause gastrointestinal upset, they can cause mitochondrial injury with long term use, injury to other organ systems with prolonged therapy. This is true, but that's an argument for continued research and refinement of these drugs to ideally find a less-toxic next generation anti-retroviral, not an argument against their use.
Finally, he suggests the harm from HAART to unborn children or the use of single-dose AZT to prevent transmission during pregnancy may have untoward side-effects on the growth and development of exposed children. A valid point. But given the choice between life + side effects of drug, versus possible transmission of HIV to children there is no choice. Only for a denialist who doesn't believe HIV is the causitive agent of AIDS (ignoring all the basic science demonstrating the molecular mechanisms of HIV destruction of t-cells) is there any question that you should take the small risk of a drug side-effect over the dramatically shortened life span of a child with HIV.
I can't help being personally offended by this drivel. I'm in Baltimore, with a population known to be living with HIV of 2.5%. Although the actual prevalence of HIV in the city is much higher as there are thousands living with HIV but without the diagnosis. I treat patients with HIV all the time, and operate on them, and have personally seen what happens when HAART is started on patients with AIDS-defining diseases, and how hopeless it is when non-compliance has sabotaged a potentially life-saving therapy (the virus can become resistant to any drug and this is increased with non-compliance). These cranks don't treat these patients, they ignore the data that would help these patients and undermine public health. The publication of this denialist trope is a tragedy.
- Sweet N Little
- 02-22-2012, 07:17 PM
Welcome to ATRIPLA.com. This is the place to learn about the first HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) regimen in one pill daily.
ATRIPLA is a combination of three HIV medicines: SUSTIVA® (efavirenz), EMTRIVA® (emtricitabine) and VIREAD® (tenofovir disoproxil fumarate).
ATRIPLA is a prescription medicine used alone as a complete regimen or with other medicines to treat HIV-1 infection in adults.
ATRIPLA is the #1 prescribed HIV regimen.*
- ATRIPLA is the only 1 pill daily HIV regimen with 3 DHHS-preferred† meds for patients new to therapy.
- ATRIPLA is proven to lower viral load to undetectable‡ and helps raise T-cell (CD4+) count to help control HIV through 3 years of a clinical study in patients new to therapy.
- Through 3 years, 71% of patients taking the meds in ATRIPLA had undetectable‡ viral loads versus 58% for COMBIVIR (lamivudine/zidovudine) + SUSTIVA
- At Year 3, the average increase of CD4+ cell count was 312 cells/mm3 for patients taking the meds in ATRIPLA versus 271 cells/mm3 for COMBIVIR + SUSTIVA
*Synovate Healthcare Data; US HIV Monitor, Q1, 2010.
†The Department of Health and Human Services.
‡Defined as a viral load of less than 400 copies/mL.
INDICATION
ATRIPLA is a prescription medication used alone as a complete regimen or with other anti-HIV-1 medicines to treat HIV-1 infection in adults.
ATRIPLA does not cure HIV-1 infection or AIDS and has not been shown to lower your chance of passing HIV-1 to others through sexual contact, sharing needles, or being exposed to your blood. The long-term effects of ATRIPLA are not known at this time. People taking ATRIPLA may still get infections that develop because the immune system is weak or other conditions that happen with HIV-1 infection.
Do not change or stop your medicine without first talking with your healthcare provider. See your healthcare provider regularly while taking ATRIPLA.
- WTF
- 02-22-2012, 07:20 PM
Evidently HIV cause some crazy muther fuc'er to post shit on the internet denying its existance!
