Why deny only one part of science? IDists branch out into AIDS denial

Over at Uncommon Descent, the blog of William Dembski and friends, a contributor has a post up discussing Peter Duesberg’s aneuploidy hypothesis for cancer (which Orac discussed here for more background). The post itself is a bit confusing–it’s titled “When Darwinism Hurts,” and according to the author’s clarification, it’s about “Darwinism” leading us down the wrong path as far as cancer research goes. (Though whether cancer would be due to mutations in specific genes or in chromosomes, it’s still an evolutionary process, but I digress…) To me, anyway, the more interesting portion was in the comments section, where both DaveScot and Sal Cordova imply also that HIV might not cause AIDS; more after the jump.

Now, it’s been frequently mentioned on here that prominent IDers Phillip Johnson and Jon Wells have previously stated their “skepticism” of HIV as the cause of AIDS. To their credit, most IDers I know disagree with Johnson and Wells on this point. However, Scot and Cordova buy right into it. Scot:

That said it’s not wholly unlikely that HIV is a symptom rather than a cause of AIDS. From my POV 23 years of considering it the cause of AIDS has not moved us any closer to a vaccine. There are two possibilities in that. The first is that the virus is just too insidious but second is that it isn’t insidious it’s just not the cause so no amount of effort against the virus will prevent the disease. However it does seem incredibly unlikely that AIDS isn’t a transmissable disease caused by infectious element of some sort so if not HIV then what is it? The evidence is circumstantial and compelling but the lack of progress in curing AIDS is also compelling evidence that we’re on the wrong track.

Incredibly likely? Because we have no vaccine? That means that more than 99% of all infectious diseases, then, aren’t infectious.

Cordova, meanwhile:

Even if the dissent is wrong, it would be hard to argue those involved are crackpots. [Cites Kary Mullis, Bernard Forscher and David Rasnick]. Given how I’ve seen Darwinian evolution promoted and how it has created harmful medical and social practices, it’s hard not to be skeptical of all sorts of accepted scientific “truths”.

How many logical fallacies can we count here? Arguments from authority? Social Darwinism, therefore HIV doesn’t cause AIDS?

Is it any wonder scientists have such a problem taking ID advocates seriously?

Comments

#1 blf
July 2, 2007

There was some whinging from DaveScott recently at UD which was AGW-denialism. If I recall correctly, it was buying into the “there isn’t a problem, it’s colder now than the Middle Ages, and in any case, it’s all the Sun’s fault” pseudoscience.

Anyways, so besides incompetent bashing of evolution and HIV-causes-AIDS, you can add incompetent bashing of AGW. Plus, of course, the belief that “incompetent bashing” is the same as “science” and that said bashing “proves” something else (the something else notably lacking any plausible hypothesis, evidence, testing, or refutablity).
#2 ERV
July 2, 2007

Meanwhile, Davie thinks that you genetically modify plants with retroviruses, and that retroviruses are part of Gods Plan for speciation, endogenous retroviruses are Gods Plan for vaccines, etc etc etc.

Retroviruses=Magic
#3 Adele
July 2, 2007

Someone who thinks Kary Mullis and David Rasnick aren’t crackpots! Ha ha.
#4 Katie
July 2, 2007

I’ve seen this vaccine argument more than once and it’s so transparently illogical it amazes me anyone can actually take the time to type it out without realizing that it makes no sense. We do not have a vaccine to prevent HIV infection, therefore HIV does not cause AIDS? If there were a vaccine that effectively prevented vaccinees from becoming infected with HIV but did *not* prevent them from developing AIDS, that would be news. However, so long as we haven’t made the first step, this has nothing to do with AIDS causation. Are any of the serious denialists actually making this argument, or just blog trolls and DaveScot?
#5 Doug S
July 2, 2007

What I find interesting is that IDists hardly ever offer up any alternative to what they deny, except for “goddidit”. So are they suggesting here that God infected all these people with AIDS? That’s quite a statement about their beliefs.

Doug
#6 Sark Astik
July 2, 2007

From my POV 3,000 years of considering mycobacteria the cause of tuberculosis has not moved us any closer to a vaccine. There are two possibilities in that. The first is that the bacteria is too insidious. The second is that my head is up my ass so much that my neck has a permanent brown stain.

Now, considering that I am able to talk out my ass, which do you think it is?
#7 harold
July 2, 2007

The ostensible “aneuploidly versus mutation” argument is an oversimplified straw man, and can only appeal to those quite ignorant of cancer biology.

I’m going to simplify a bit, too, to make my point, but in a way that is non-deceptive.

Biochemical and cell biological events that disrupt chromosome structure, typically in offsring cells during cell division, are obviously a type of mutation. It is primarily the resulting disruption of gene expression that leads to an abnormal phenotype, of course. Genes are disrupted, or removed from their regulatory environment in one chromosomal millieu and placed into an abnormal location.

Constitutive expression of a gene which should be regulated, lack of expression of a regulatory gene, etc, can result.

Arguing that disruption of chromosome structure is somehow distinct from disruption (“mutation”) of genes and their regulatory elements is, in essence, a confession that one does not know what genes or chromosomes are.

In lymphoma and leukemia, cancers of cells which are already circulating when normal, the resulting translocations frequently lead to the transposition of an oncogene.

This link leads to promotional material for a commercial lab, but it discusses several example translocations quite nicely.

http://www.invitrobiotec.de/pdf/chromotrans_en.pdf

With solid tissue cancers, the situation is more complex. By the time a clone of solid tissue cells has become metastatic, it has undergone an enormous number of abnormal genetic events.

Cancer is clearly analagous to evolution. A population of genetically variant cells emerges, which is free from the controls of multicellularity. The individual cells enjoy a selective advantage, relative to cells that “obey the rules” (not necessarily by dividing faster). They are able to consume a disproportionate amount of the available resources, and to some degree “take over”. Eventually, the cancer cells “foolishly” destroy their own environment (in this case, the individual multicellular organism), and go extinct.

It is conceivable that chromosome structure alone might have some gene-independent effect, but there is no reason to think that this would be major.

ID jacka$$es are remarkably deficient in any idea of what they are talking about. They repeatedly show that even basic biochemistry and genetics are utterly unknown to them. They don’t bother to understand what they argue against.
#8 pough
July 2, 2007

So are they suggesting here that God infected all these people with AIDS? That’s quite a statement about their beliefs.

I think you’ll find that quite a few of them believe that it is, in fact, God’s judgment on people who have been naughty (with collateral damage, oh my). I’ve heard “why would there be STDs if it wasn’t God’s judgment?” before. It’s an idea that may seem blindingly stupid, but it’s definitely out there and I would love to see an expert like Tara shred it properly.

I don’t get why you think this is so shocking. The Bible definitely includes stories where God kills people for sticking their pee-pees in the wrong places. (Other times, though, He encourages it or thinks it’s okay.)
#9 Larry Fafarman
July 2, 2007

I am both a holocaust revisionist and a Darwin doubter. A Darwinist said that the “irrationality” of my holocaust revisionism hurts the credibility of my arguments against Darwinism. So I answered that person as follows:

So you are saying that if — hypothetically — you agreed with my views about the holocaust, you would then conclude that I am a “rational” person and would therefore automatically agree with — or at least be more inclined to agree with — my views against Darwinism? Or vice-versa? Why shouldn’t your argument cut both ways?
. . . . people’s views on different subjects should be viewed independently of each other unless there is some direct connection, and you Darwinists have denied that there is any connection between Darwin and Hitler.

Tara Smith said,

DaveScot said,

. . . . it does seem incredibly unlikely that AIDS isn’t a transmissable disease caused by infectious element of some sort so if not HIV then what is it? The evidence is circumstantial and compelling but the lack of progress in curing AIDS is also compelling evidence that we’re on the wrong track.

Incredibly likely? Because we have no vaccine? That means that more than 99% of all infectious diseases, then, aren’t infectious.

I don’t see how your above statement follows from what DaveScot said.
#10 PaulBurnett
July 2, 2007

In my on-line debates with creationists, I occasionally ask how many leprosy bacilli and syphilis spirochetes and HIV retrovirii were on board Noah’s Ark, and precisely which members of Noah’s family were carrying them. I haven’t gotten a good answer yet…
#11 FastEddie
July 2, 2007

I issue a challenge to Scot. Let’s prick Scot with a needle chock full of HIV. If HIV is just a symptom of AIDS, then he should be in little danger. Right?

On a side note, I saw a PBS show a few years ago on how the bubonic plague affected a small town in England during an outbreak. The researchers found that living descendants have at least on copy of a delta-32 gene. Having two copies of the gene makes one virtually immune to plague. Surprisingly, they also found the same gene in people who seem immune to HIV. Has there been any further research on this?
#12 noreen Martin
July 2, 2007

Most seem to be closed minded in their theories and will not entertain other possibilities of the caustion of disease. For instance, every disease is treated by the germ theory of medicine and thus treated accordingly. When the person is sick or dying, at that point that may be the appropriate approach in life. However, unless the root cause or the true cause of the problem is ever addressed, then the cycle continues on, which is what is happening in medicine in this country. The doctors patch one up until the next sickness arrives by medicating and vaccinating the population, which has one of the worse longevity records on the planet. Maybe we should stop and evaluate a whole host of issues or our very concept of medicine itself and what and how to achieve perfect health.
#13 Gary
July 2, 2007

I would think that the people who advocate that HIV doesn’t produce AIDS in people, would be able to produce documented cases of people who have had AIDS and not been infected with HIV.

Unless I’m wrong, I haven’t heard of a single case of AIDS that didn’t start out with HIV.
#14 DT
July 2, 2007

Indeed. Chemokine receptor 5 (CCR5) is a coreceptor for HIV binding. The delta-32 allele impairs CCR5 function and has been shown to reduce likelihood for HIV infection to occur and for HIV progression.

CCR blockers are now a viable therapeutic target for HIV inhibition. Drugs like Maraviroc have been showm to drop HIV levels significantly, and are in clinical studies.

Their development gives further support to the viral-HIV-AIDS orthodox position (as if it needed any). There are now several ways to interfere with viral replication, all solid, evidence based studies showing success. These include inhibition of viral binding (CCR receptor blockers, CD4 blockers), viral fusion (T20 and similar fusion inhibitors), nucleotide and nucleoside analogues which inhibit RT, “non-nucleoside” inhibitors of RT, inhibitors of viral integration (integrase inhibitors), and inhibitors of viral assembly such as protease inhibitors.

That’s quite a list. HIV denialists have in the past come up with lame excuses as to why patients’ health improves on drugs (someone came up with one study showing PIs could inhibit candida growth in vitro by way of explanation – pitiful, isn’t it?), but they have no theories, even bad ones, as to why all these classes of drug are effective.

http://www.broad.mit.edu/mpg/popgen/pubs/1998_AJHG_CCR5.pdf
#15 MarkH
July 2, 2007

I covered this idiocy too.

I attribute it to crank magnetism. Cranks are attracted to arguments of other cranks. This occurs for a few reasons. First and foremost, they are completely incompetent at determining good scientific arguments for obvious reasons. People who are incompetent are not capable of recognizing competence in others.

Second, they enjoy any instance in which the “orthodoxy” gets egg on its face or any perception that orthodoxy is being challenged on something big – it makes it appear as though their challenge to the “orthodoxy” is more legitimate. If people can challenge the idea that HIV causes AIDS, why not that evolution holds all of biology together?

You end up seeing, for instance in he-who-shall-not-be-named above a lot of overlap between various forms of denialism as a result. It’s all due to scientific incompetence. They aren’t interested in creating a single consistent worldview, and are more than happy to accept crank arguments from others that are even inconsistent with their own. They’re only interested in their overvalued ideas and bigotries gaining acceptance despite the complete inability to make their views jibe with any other accepted truths.
#16 Hermagoras
July 2, 2007

I was the first comment on that Uncommon Descent thread (and was shortly thereafter booted from the forum). As I see it, the ID people ally with other kinds of denial and crank science because they value the (extreme) minority point of view as such. That’s why they attract (and welcome) even holocaust deniers.
#17 T. Bruce McNeely
July 2, 2007

“noreen Martin”, what in Hell are you talking about?

“Every disease” is NOT treated by the germ Theory.
Which population has “one of the worst longevity records”?
The populations with the longest life expectancies without exception use modern scientific medical care.
Medical research is all about finding root causes.
The “root cause” of AIDS is a virus, and the best way to avoid it is as follows:
Avoid promiscuous sex.
Practice safe sex.
Avoid exposure to human blood or blood products that have not been tested for HIV.
Practice universal precautions in the medical setting.

Simple, no?
#18 DT
July 2, 2007

Gary:

I would think that the people who advocate that HIV doesn’t produce AIDS in people, would be able to produce documented cases of people who have had AIDS and not been infected with HIV.

Unless I’m wrong, I haven’t heard of a single case of AIDS that didn’t start out with HIV.

I’ll answer this before the denialists pour in with their deliberate misinformation.

Gary, you are wrong in one sense, in that we talk of patients having AIDS if they have one of several severe opportunistic infections or tumours, AND have HIV infection. It is however possible to have a severe opportunistic infection and not have HIV – for instance someone severely malnourished or immunosuppressed with steroids or chemotherapy might get Pneumocystis (PCP) for example.

However, a clinician would not say this person had AIDS just because they had PCP; – in order to meet the (rather unhelpful) case definition for AIDS they would have to have PCP, have HIV and no other obvious cause for being immunodeficient – in other words it has to be clear that HIV is the cause of that person’e immunedeficiency.

The rather unwieldy way in which AIDS is defined gives denialists scope for sowing the seeds of confusion. What they cannot do however is give examples of severe opportunistic infections occurring in HIV negative patients in anything but very small numbers. So when they claim drug use causes AIDS, not HIV, they cannot explain why it is that 99.9% of cases of PCP in drug users come from the small pool (10%?) of drug users who also happen to have HIV. Oh, they may come up with the odd case report in the published literature, gleefully shouting “See! A case of PCP in an HIV-negative drug user!” with the irony that the case has been published specifically because of its rarity value escaping them completely. By rights, there should be hundreds of thousands of cases of PCP in drug users without HIV if the denialists hypothesis is correct. Guess what? There have been about a dozen.
#19 Doug S
July 2, 2007

Pough said:

> I think you’ll find that quite a few of them believe
> that it is, in fact, God’s judgment on people who have
> been naughty (with collateral damage, oh my).

Believing that God is the direct cause of sickness is so 14th century! Although I can believe a fringe minority might think that, I find it hard to believe that many people (including the religious) would believe it. I can see people believing that God created HIV to punish the evil (with collateral damage), but not to personally give each AIDS sufferer the disease as a personal punishment. Which leaves me to wonder about their motivations, since clearly they don’t have any alternative ideas as to why AIDS occurs.

I think their comments have more to do with their broad campaign to discredit science and scientists. Once those pesky scientists are out of the way with their human reasoning and logic, they will be free to direct the will of the people (and the country) to their liking and benefit. Sounds too much like a conspiracy theory? Perhaps, but that is the only logic I can draw from their statements on so many wide ranging issues. Any other ideas?

Doug
#20 justPassinThru
July 2, 2007

[DaveScot] However it does seem incredibly unlikely that AIDS isn’t a transmissable disease caused by infectious element of some sort so if not HIV then what is it? The evidence is circumstantial and compelling but the lack of progress in curing AIDS is also compelling evidence that we’re on the wrong track.

[Prof Smith]Incredibly likely? Because we have no vaccine? That means that more than 99% of all infectious diseases, then, aren’t infectious.

daveScot seemed to me from this quote to be arguing that HIV is likely the cause of AIDS, but that the cure search is hampered by false assumptions. Prof. Smith, I think your response shows you might have missed his point.
#21 cooler
July 2, 2007

Its not that suprising that many scientists question HIV considering 99.9% of animals injected dont get hiv and that its only in a small fraction of tcells, according to Gallo in 1990 it’s only in 1 of 10,000 Tcells.

Not only that but most viruses cause most of their damage before antibody production, and not after.

But then again all viruses dont work by the same rules………so how do you prove your pet barely detectable virus with no reliable animal model causes disease?

YOu follow 2 groups of hiv positive and negative people that are matched for everything else, AZT, Drug use, coinfections and catastrophic stress and you see if HIV is really the culprit. The studies on AIDS truth dont match and control for confounding factors, because they were never designed to test the hiv hypothesis, the studies assumed it to be true.

A study like this would not be dangerous, for if the HIV positive people truly did have their tcells drop to around 200 then they could start ARV’s if they wanted to. It’s much more dangerous to tell people that there is a 100% chance of death, Like montagnier said that alone could kill them.

Anyways, some of you people need help. There are other microbes out there that are more likely to cause disease, Like Shyh ching LO’s/ montagnier’s mycoplasma incognitus WHY?

BEcause this microbe sickens and kills every animal injected with it, as LO showed. It’s being found by PCR in many illnesses like CFS, you cant look for antibodies, the monkeys injected with it showed weak antibody reponse only when near death.

This is undergraduate microbiology, if a microbe sickens and kills every animal and there is also a correlation in humans and is detected with electron microscopy VS. a microbe that doesnt kill most every animal, is barely detactable more likely microbe A is more dangerous to humans than microbe B. And if you want to prove microbe B is really a killer, you’d better have some matched studies designed to prove it. Use your brain.

You people condescendingly dismiss any theory that’s not supported by a drug company or the CDC, so I’m not going to get into an argument with the same robots. Ive posted references for everything I’ve said before, I suggest some of some of you more open minded people here read http://www.projectdaylily.com and learn more about how the mycoplasma was part of the biowarfare program.
#22 cooler
July 2, 2007

“99.9% of animals dont get AIDS” I mean
#23 Adele
July 2, 2007

You’re both right. In the United States alot of fundies believe AIDS was sent by God to punish gays and drug users. These people think collateral damage is fair because WE like EVERYONE deserves it because we don’t kill all gays and drug users which would be the Christian thing to do. OK not nearly all Christians think this but some do. The same kinds who think the world is 6000 years old and Jews are greedy Christ-killers who planned 9/11 and they think its wrong to do science because that’s like the Tower of Babel. People trying to be like God which is a no no.

They believe HIV is a gift from god AND scientists are evil. They also think the government has to come down. The Aetiology troll BillyBipBip from the other HIV threads who also calls himself cooler and frummy and Thomas Paine calls people “unamerican” if they don’t agree with him is one of this kind I think.
#24 Adele
July 2, 2007

By “you’re both right” I meant Pough and Doug of course. Not the troll I just commented at the same time as. Interesting mindset though. Yeah, let’s just do a placebo study on human beings when we have drugs to keep them alive and let’s let their immune systems fall apart because we can always bring em back from the brink when they start to die. That would be ethical, wouldn’t it?

That’s the fundie mindset. Anti-government all the way until they get in power and then people would really find out what death is.
#25 cooler
July 2, 2007

If its isnt lying adele again!

Adele youve repeatdly stated that youre a scientist, a PCR tech, to be exact, yet I found a link at Utah state University of an “adele” and “Dale” (2 frequent posters here) and this Adele is no scientist at all, just the wife of one. If it’s not you do you have any proof youre a scientist?

http://www.usu.edu/fchd/cdlab_youngs.cfm
#26 Tara C. Smith
July 2, 2007

cooler, you keep posting the same comments–that’s spamming, not discussion even by the loosest sense of the term. Keep it up and they’re going to start getting junked.
#27 Albatrossity
July 2, 2007

Interestingly, DaveScot seems to have changed his tune re HIV/AIDS since 2005. In this amusing (for lots of reasons) thread at UD, DS opines: “Everyone dies. Get used to it. The Holocaust was a man-made purposeful attempt to slaughter a group of many millions of people based upon a perceived inferiority. AIDs is a terminal disease brought on by a naturally occuring virus. Moreover it’s an an almost wholly avoidable disease if one makes a reasonable effort to curb hedonistic desires.”

Note that this quote will also be amusing when DS slides inexorably into Holocaust denial, a prediction that others have made before me. I think that the crank magnetism hypothesis, as noted by MarkH above, explains this prediction pretty well
#28 John Marley
July 2, 2007

re: noreen Martin

WTF?
#29 cooler
July 2, 2007

Youre not supposed to start ARV’s till around 200 tcells anyways, Miss PCR tech, youre a scientist right, you should know! LOL
#30 John Marley
July 2, 2007

I’d just like to include cooler in my above statement.
#31 cooler
July 2, 2007

Considering the same attacks are made over and over, the same rebutalls are made, anyways I’m done “spamming.” Im home with a broken rib and should be out of the house in a few days/weeks.
#32 Adele
July 2, 2007

HAART kills virus replicating and it helps bring back T-cells. That’s clear. When to start HAART has been controversial since it came out. It’s a debate with ten different sides not two. And evidence for everyone. Lots of it. You can read all of it and still not know what’s best. Doctors and patients have to make these decisions together. There’s no one answer for everyone and every drug combo.

Here’s a paper that says early HAART is best.
Gras L et al, J Acquir Immune Defic Syndr. 2007 Jun 1;45(2):183-92 CD4 cell counts of 800 cells/mm3 or greater after 7 years of highly active antiretroviral therapy are feasible in most patients starting with 350 cells/mm3 or greater.

You can find other papers that say only below 350. Or nearer 200.

But you NEVER play around with people’s health just to have a inert placebo when you’ve already shown something works better. That only happens in Billy’s fantasy land where he’s taken freshman biology and he writes like Thomas Paine.
#33 noreen Martin
July 2, 2007

I believe that the verdict is still out on whether HIV truly causes AIDS. Some of you may not be aware that benzene will cause AIDS, which has nothing to do with HIV or sex. I was referring to our low longevity rates compared to other civilized populations on the planet. While we’re at it, check out our infant mortality rates too.
#34 raven
July 2, 2007

Here’s a paper that says early HAART is best.
Gras L et al, J Acquir Immune Defic Syndr. 2007 Jun 1;45(2):183-92 CD4 cell counts of 800 cells/mm3 or greater after 7 years of highly active antiretroviral therapy are feasible in most patients starting with 350 cells/mm3 or greater.

The current recommendations can be found on the NIH site as a pdf. I just glanced at them a while ago. IIRC, the current SOC is HAART at 350 CD4s, 200 for sure, or if the patient is showing symptoms consistent with immunodeficiency. CD4 cell counts of 800 after 7 years is pretty good and consistent with a normal state of health.

For the HIV- denialists, this is a mere hobby to fill up some empty hours. For HIV+ denialists, it is a choice between a long life or a shorter one. My reading is that about 20% refuse HAART. Most of them die within a few years. Not all refusers are denialists. Some just can’t be bothered or don’t care.
#35 noreen Martin
July 2, 2007

Experiments could be done on rats to help prove and disprove theories without harm to humans. Let’s expose different control groups to benzene, HIV, mycoplasmas, HHV6A, parasites, denatured foods, and other harmful entities. Let’s see how each group fairs and then let’s give some of the sick rodents antiretrovirals, some antiretrovirals and natural foods and supplements and some only treated with natrual foods and supplements. Let us see who fares the best and lives the longest and on what protocol.
#36 noreen Martin
July 2, 2007

Raven, there is the last category, which is we cannot get the mainstream’s views to add up. HIV-Positive persons have to weight much information and make a decision based on which side out-weights the other to them. Personally, I have found flaws with both sides but nevertheless, have made my decision and contiune to be just fine. There again, my views about medicine are differnt than mosts and my treatment approach too, but it is working for me!
#37 Rev. BigDumbChimp
July 2, 2007

You people condescendingly dismiss any theory that’s not supported by a drug company or the CDC, so I’m not going to get into an argument with the same robots.

….or not supported by science or research or repeatable experiments or evidence…
#38 apy
July 2, 2007

Larry,
“So you are saying that if — hypothetically — you agreed with my views about the holocaust, you would then conclude that I am a “rational” person and would therefore automatically agree with — or at least be more inclined to agree with — my views against Darwinism? Or vice-versa? Why shouldn’t your argument cut both ways?”

Credibility and validity are quite different things. If I do something that makes my opinion seem uninformed it hurts any other statement I make. However, having a believable statement does not make me any more valid, it just means some people might question it less, or put more effort into proving it wrong.
#39 ERV
July 2, 2007

noreen Martin–…denatured foods…

*amused*

Do you only eat raw foods (raw soybeans, raw eggs, raw meat)? After you consume these ‘natured’ proteins, how exactly, do you, personally, absorb the proteins in your foods without denaturing them?

Inquiring minds want to know. Linky.

lol– Digestion Deniers
#40 Travis
July 2, 2007

I was thinking the same thing ERV. I’m glad someone was less lazy than I and pointed it out.
Unless there is some new definition of denatured that I am unaware of. I suspect noreen just doesn’t know what she is talking about.
#41 Patriot Games
July 2, 2007

Raven said: My reading is that about 20% refuse HAART. Most of them die within a few years.

My bullshit meter is blinking off the scale. Care to post a link to ANY REFERENCE that supports your outlandish claim that most people who refuse HAART die within two years. Current time from infection to AIDS is 10 years and up.

People who blindly trust the medical system and take their HAART to heart die of liver failure, stevens johnson syndrome, and cardiomyopathy. If they live, they have a hideous distortion of the face called lipodystrophy reminiscent of the Phantom of the Opera.

One thing is plain as day. Those people who took AZT died of AZT toxicity within two years. Why should anyone trust Raven, and Raven’s toxic drugs after the AZT fiasco, and after the Dr. Ho “Hit em Early and Hit em Hard” Fiasco. Even your idol, John Moore admits the mistake. The issue is trust in the institutions of the medical system. After these mistakes which killed hundreds of thousands in a pattern called iatrogenic genocide, the trust is gone. Once gone it is difficult to regain.

for more information see reviewing aids DOT com
#42 noreen Martin
July 2, 2007

I won’t even waste my time on commenting on the last remark. I do know how to live without toxic drugs but I guess that some of you would prefer all of us HIV-Positves not have that choice or I guess that some won’t recognize that is can be done; this places a great flaw in the current theory. Many are doing the same as I am in contact with them. They too realized, that these toxic drugs are not necessary for their existance.
#43 Dale
July 2, 2007

I suspect, noreen, that many people, including myself, are happy to give you the choice to live without drugs but would feel better about it if it were clear that you were making an informed choice, a choice based on a clear understanding of the science rather than on your misconceptions.
#44 Sensor
July 2, 2007

I’m down for a review of the unanswered question –

what is the gold standard? The purified, particulate reference standard?

Anyone?

That’s one. Two is,

most of the children here say that they only believe in science that is falsifiable, and that is testable.

HIV causes anything has been ‘falsified’, that is, proven to be a fig bucking lie, a thousand times.

When do we get our candy?

Evolutionary theory is not testable. So, when do we get our candy?

Just wondering, fig puckers.

Hey fasteddie, you grabass, listen, what is a needle ‘chock with hiv”? What test are you using, jackass? What test, what’s the stucking fandard?

Answer the question nwat-toes.

Thanks,

SENsOR Senses ALL
#45 Sensor
July 2, 2007

Hey Tara, you sloppy amateur,

don’t tell anybody that posting the same garbage over and over again is ‘spamming’, unless you’re planning to take your whole unholy site down, you toad.

Thanks, look forward to your response, you infected pustule,

love,

SENSOR
#46 Sensor
July 2, 2007

I’m sorry, I wasn’t clear, the message there was that you post the same stinking garbage all the time, and yet you think it smells like chocolate.

We smell what’s coming out of your head, Tara, and it’s shasty nit.

SenSoR SenSes ALL
#47 Travis
July 2, 2007

I don’t understand why you wouldn’t comment on it. Can you describe what you mean by denatured foods? It is brought up that the statement is questionable and all you do is say you won’t waste you time and start discussing toxic drugs and your, and other people’s knowledge of living without them. I’m not terribly convinced about what you say and I don’t really see where you have shown that what you know is correct. In these comments you’ve made a number of statements but I haven’t seen much in the way of evidence.

“The doctors patch one up until the next sickness arrives by medicating and vaccinating the population, which has one of the worse longevity records on the planet.”
As was mentioned this is just wrong. I see you answered this question but still haven’t shown any evidence, and what you say still appears to be wrong. Countries like the US do have a high infant mortality rate but can you show some evidence that this is due to anything you are concerned about? Looking at the countries doing much better I see plenty of countries with heath care, while possibly socialized, that is practiced in basically the same way.

“Some of you may not be aware that benzene will cause AIDS, which has nothing to do with HIV or sex.”
If you are going to make a statement like this please back it up.
#48 noreen Martin
July 2, 2007

Dale, regardless of what my conceptions are base upon, they work for me and many others. Why don’t one of you highly, esteemed scientist (that’s a compliment) follow me and others? Surely, we must have something to contibute to this issue. I suspect though that it would be very difficult to get anyone interested because most do not want us to burst a hole in their drug theories.
#49 Sensor
July 2, 2007

Travis,

please look up Benzyne and immune suppresson and T Cell and anything else you want to, doofus, stop being a priss.

Travis,

what is the standard used as the particulate reference for “”"”HIV Tests”"”"”?????

Thanks,

Noreen’s Pal
#50 Tara C. Smith
July 2, 2007

Well, that’s certainly convinced me that y’all have a point to your arguments, “sensor.” Bravo.
#51 Travis
July 2, 2007

“Countries like the US do have a high infant mortality rate but can you show some evidence that this is due to anything you are concerned about?”
I want to reword this, it’s not really what I meant but I missed it when rereading. Countries like the US do indeed have much better infant mortality rates and higher life spans. I object to my sentence using “countries like”.
It should be more like:
Are you refering to the high US infant mortality rate? Can you show some evidence that this is due to anything you are concerned about?
#52 Sensor
July 2, 2007

CHRIST! I almost missed it!

These idiots are AFRAID! You see, the two groups that threaten their relgion the most are getting together, and it makes them quiver in their livers!

Duh. How funny. I mean it’s gotta suck knowing that the more you try to convince the majority of the nation that sex and weather will kill them, and that their lives are meaningless accidental horsesh**, caused by genetic drift with no plan or direction except by Richard Dawnkin’s hairless ballios, the less they believe a fingle sucking word you jackholes say.

And now they’re getting together. Funny SH**!!!!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHHAHASHA HAHAHAHA
#53 Sensor
July 2, 2007

TARA,

What is the purified particulate reference standard for HIV tests?

SENSOR Senses All
#54 noreen Martin
July 2, 2007

Sensor, I am glad that you agree with some of my points, however, a little more respect for others wouldn’t hurt. Travis, I did not respond before because some are not interesing in learning and just want to argue. To answer your question, denatured means not it its natural state. It is food that has been over-processed, inferior ingredients, heated, soaked in water, peeled, etc. and has lost its life-giving ingredients such as mineral salts, vitamins, enzymes, etc., which are so necessary to health.

I do believe that most doctors only patch the patient up and never try to get to the root cause of the patient’s problem. Prevention is necessary if we are going to win this country’s health care crisis. Diet and the patient’s health habits are critical to one’s health.

There are many references on google to benzene and AIDS. The Alberta Reappraisers has an article and an attorney in Nevado also has refernce to this.
#55 ERV
July 2, 2007

Travis– I was thinking the same thing ERV. I’m glad someone was less lazy than I and pointed it out.
Unless there is some new definition of denatured that I am unaware of. I suspect noreen just doesn’t know what she is talking about.

I was in powerlifting until recently. Big woo in the supplement industry– protein powder companies used to knock other companies by saying their competitors used ‘denatured’ protein.
And then the superstition that you cant put protein powder in your oatmeal because the heat will denature (“ruin”) the protein.
Its a pet peeve of mine.
#56 Travis
July 2, 2007

I would not recommend using the word denatured for that. I think it will just confuse people with the biochemical definition of denatured.
#57 Sensor
July 2, 2007

Norreen,

you’re a sweetheart, but don’t worry about the nazis in the aids shark tank, they don’t have feelings, and they’d be happier if you and everybody else who ever tested poz was dead or on the drugs. So, f-em.

Trav, you didn’t answer my queston, that Tara also didn’t answer,

but I got it answered over here on the other blog:

http://scienceblogs.com/aetiology/2007/06/introduction_to_hiv_and_hiv_de.php#comment-486338
#58 Travis
July 2, 2007

Though I suppose the word does, at least considering the base, apply to other things. I know that when you mentioned denatured foods I immediately thought you were refering to the proteins in it becoming denatured.
#59 noreen Martin
July 2, 2007

“Denatured” is a very old term to eliminate any confusion I will refer to it as unnatural, which makes better sense because it is no longer in its natural state.
#60 Sensor
July 2, 2007

Don’t miss it, the Denialists (tara and gang) admitted there’s no purified particulate reference standard for tests.

That means there’s no purified particle, they sent a list care of nazi Noble over and so have a look.

http://scienceblogs.com/aetiology/2007/06/introduction_to_hiv_and_hiv_de.php#comment-486338

see if you can find the purified reference particle here, I see the word assembled and inferred and fragment in every line.

Where’s the particle, assholes? Where’s teh particle that causes your wetdreams? You sick lying “”"falsified”" pucks. You oughtta be rounded up and fed Aids drugs till it hurts.

You all ought to be tested with “HIGHLY SENSITIVE” “DETUNED” Elisas until they get the result they “SUSPECT” is “ACCURATE”

HAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAH

Yeah, I”m sure you’d show them your “COULDN’t POSSIBLY BE ME WHO HAS “”"AID”"” CARD”, and get yourself a “FALSE POSITIVE”

HHAHAHAHAHAHAH

SUCH BULLS**

You people are low low lowdown. I pity the fools that believe youre voodoo.

SenSoR SenSes ALL
#61 Dan
July 2, 2007

but don’t worry about the nazis in the aids shark tank, they don’t have feelings, and they’d be happier if you and everybody else who ever tested poz was dead or on the drugs

Well, you’ve got to admit…it would make their job much easier.

But, don’t fret, they’ve still got the “good old days” to look back upon…Rock Hudson, Ryan White, Kimberly Bergalis…ahhhh…the happy memories for AIDS promoters.
#62 T. Bruce McNeely
July 2, 2007

Holy crap, talk about opening up a can-o’-worms!

Well, if you want to get your AIDS info from the likes of Sensor, then be my guest. Whatever…

Re: Benzene – Small n noreen, it’s well known that Benzene is toxic to bone marrow and causes aplastic anemia, which can cause immunosuppression, and many of the same effects as HIV infection.
Carbon Tetrachloride can cause acute hepatitis. Are you going to tell me that there is no such thing as Hep A, B and C viral hepatitis?
My brother underwent bone marrow transplant for malignant lymphoma (doing well 3 years post-treatment BTW) and developed PCP pneumonia as a complication. Did he have AIDS? I’d really like to know. Thanx.
#63 T. Bruce McNeely
July 2, 2007

Oh yeah, I forgot…
How not to get AIDS:
Don’t shoot drugs.
If you have to shoot drugs, use new needles and syringes (don’t share them).
If you can’t do that, then clean them thoroughly with bleach before you shoot.

Got it?
#64 noreen Martin
July 2, 2007

Many conditions have more than one cause but what is really amazing is that most readily accept that HIV can be the only cause of AIDS.

Those undergoing certain treatments such as heart transplants have to take immune-suppresive drugs so that their body won’t reject the new organ. However, I wonder what their CD4′s are while in this state? Certainly, they must be lower than the healthy public. Does anyone have any statistics about this?
#65 David Marjanović
July 2, 2007

I was referring to our low longevity rates compared to other civilized populations on the planet. While we’re at it, check out our infant mortality rates too.

The shocking infant mortality rate of the USA is very easy to explain: In the USA you don’t have universal healthcare. You have tens of millions of people who have no health insurance whatsoever. That’s unique in the so-called First World.

Incidentally, there’s an obvious reason for why AIDS isn’t being researched in lab mice: rodents can’t be infected with HIV. Only chimps and humans can be, and only in humans does it lead to a full-blown disease. Hey, compare smallpox and cowpox. Only humans can get smallpox.

And Sensor, if you giggle like a madman, people will assume you’re a madman, and won’t waste their time talking to you.
#66 noreen Martin
July 2, 2007

Bruce, you are wrong, not all who have AIDS shoot drugs as you put it. Why is it hard to accept that many factor contribute to good health and by the same token many negative influences will pile up and eventually lead to AIDS? Why does most of our diseases have to have some mysterious virus or other bug as the cause. I think that a lot of this is just hipe, have you heard about the bird flu lately?
#67 Travis
July 2, 2007

It is hard to accept that these factors pile up to lead to AIDS because this doesn’t appear to be the case. Lots of unhealthy factors might lead to poor health, hell, I guess it’s possible they could lead to similar symptoms as AIDS but that is different than leading to AIDS.
I object to your use of the term mysterious. It makes it seems like they are some sort of strange and unknown thing but they are not. We are able to understand a lot about them.
I don’t understand your comment about bird flu. I heard a story about it last night while listening to the radio. Yes, some people may have overhiped bird flu, SARS etc. but I don’t see how that applies here. The fact that the risk of something has been overhiped doesn’t change that they are caused by a virus.
#68 noreen Martin
July 2, 2007

I was making the point that when we first heard about bird flu, it was blown way out of proportion and immediately placed fear into the general public. When in fact, unless one had some close ties with birds there isn’t any cause for alarm. At that time, all we heard is that it will mutate and we will all be doomed. Well, I guess a comet, etc. could hit the Earth and cause catastrophic damage but I don’t think that we should alarm the public unless it is a real possibility.

How do you know that malnutrition, stress, radiation, other diseases and treatments plus the person’s bad health habits will not lead to AIDS. You cannot base AIDS on bogus HIV Tests or viral load tests, which have not been validated and both come with disclaimers right inside the box.
#69 T. Bruce McNeely
July 2, 2007

Small n: If you will check my earlier comment (july 2, 1:08PM) you will see that I am merely adding some stuff I forgot to what I previously recommended.
Yes, not looking after your health will lead to all sorts of diseases. However, Helper T-cell deficiency resulting in immunodeficiency is extremely rare except for:
1. immunosuppression by a toxic agent, such as chemotherapy, benzene (I guess) and so forth.
2. chronic infection by HIV, which happens to result in the disease called AIDS.
Why is this so difficult to understand?
Anyway, I am still waiting for your answers to my questions (comment July 2, 07:19PM)
#70 T. Bruce McNeely
July 2, 2007

whoops, correction: previous comment, at 7:02PM.
#71 noreen Martin
July 2, 2007

In regards to your brother, did he have AIDS? According to the CDC’s definition, it would depend upon what his CD4′s were, which I am sure they would not have tested him unless he was HIV-Positive. You see when HIV-Negative persons have low CD4′s, a fact that my doctors verified when questioned and when it was found that HIV-Negative persons have had high, viral loads, The CDC now does not want doctors to test HIV-Negative persons because it doesn’t look good for the current hypothesis.
#72 Cooler
July 2, 2007

Noreen,
How long have you had a low tcell count 200 or less w/o meds?
#73 Chris Noble
July 2, 2007

Incidentally, there’s an obvious reason for why AIDS isn’t being researched in lab mice: rodents can’t be infected with HIV.

That’s not completely correct. There is a mouse model.

The SCID-hu mouse as a model for HIV-1 infection.

You take SCID mice and implant them with human fetal liver and thymus tissue. They then produce human CD4+ cells which HIV can and does infect.
#74 noreen Martin
July 2, 2007

Wow, I will have to guess without researching into my medical records. Since I have been off the meds for 17 months now and most of this time, I’d say at least over a year, they have been below 200.

As stated before one reason I don’t place much stock in a CD4 count is when I was sick and dying and prior to the meds, they were 78. About 5 months ago, they dipped to 86, yet there was nothing wrong with me. At last count, they had climbed to 131. The key to all of this is symptoms and not a number, which goes up and down like a yo-yo. Even while on the antiretroviral medications, they would fall.
#75 cooler
July 2, 2007

It seems you have made a choice after looking at the evidence on both sides, and it is working out well, congrats,
#76 noreen Martin
July 2, 2007

I feel that this is the right decision for me. However, I realize that many people look to what I do and if my health turned for the worse or if I ever had to take the meds again, I would be the first to let others know. I am a tough cookie but an honest one.
#77 Roy Hinkley
July 2, 2007

noreen,

What role, if any, would you say the writings of Harvey Bialy and D. David Steele have played in your decision to discontinue taking antiretrovirals?
#78 noreen Martin
July 2, 2007

Boy, Dr. Bialy is in a class of his own and I haven’t really read anything that he has written, except what is on You Bet Your Life. He and I have not always seen eye to eye and I will leave it at that. On the other hand, I think the world of David Steele and consider him to be a friend. However, when I decided to stop the meds, I can say that I had never had any contact with either one. I stopped the meds March 2006 and David did an interview with me in July 2006 on his site. So to answer your question, they didn’t play any role in my stopping the meds, I had contact with them after the fact.
#79 Michael
July 2, 2007

Yes indeed, the AIDS advocates would prefer if the HIV dissenters would just shut up and go away. But I have my doubts that this will happen anytime soon.

I personally believe the public, and especially our HIV diagnosed gay and black brethren, deserve to hear all sides of this issue, not just one side. The vast majority of those diagnosed as HIV positive are full adults with more than 90 percent being over the age of 35. I am quite sure these people are old enough and mature enough to make their own decisions. They deserve to hear both sides, yes both sides of the AIDS debate, and deserve to be made aware of all sides of the issue and be able to make their own decisions about their own health. Wouldn’t you yourselves want to hear all sides to a health issue before deciding on your own treatment with drugs that are very potent with many side effects including death? I also think that to do any less than present both sides is a disservice to all of mankind. I believe the vast majority of press is quite guilty of such a diservice. Especially including the gay media which has profited quite well from the many pages of HIV drug ads in most every issue in most all of the gay press and magazines.

I do not believe that the issue of HIV/AIDS is or was ever a “one size fits all” proposition. It never has been, as can be verified from the fact that recently in Boston alone, they were able to quickly find 1000 long term nonprogressors for a study, who have never taken the HIV drugs and yet remain long term well and healthy. Very little has been done to look at this group, which may well be nearly 1/2 of American HIV positives. What little has been done has only been to attempt to find out if there were chemical or genetic differences in their blood that the pharma companies could somehow possibly benefit from. There have been absolutely no studies in 25 years on behavioral, lifestyle, nutritional, or emotional differences. There is no money to be made by big pharma from finding out such facts. Any researcher attempting to do so would be blocked from the start by the grant givers of the NIH as it would potentially destroy the funding of 99.99% of other virologist and pharma research based lines of study. I also think that one of the main reasons nothing else has been studied with the Long Term NonProgressors, is because it makes the AIDS orthodoxy look quite bad when there are so very many who have been diagnosed with HIV, yet remain healthy for decades. It also creates the very obvious problem for the orthodoxy that the dissident scientists may be quite right after all that HIV is most probably not the causative factor in the immune suppression AIDS. As such, these long term nonprogressors have understandably been a major threat and embarrasment to the mainstream HIV scientists.

If the idea of reasonably considering both sides of this issue is either repulsive or “scary” to any of you, perhaps you should ask yourself why or if those beliefs you hold so dearly are even rational. Such responses say much more about you yourselves than it says about the issue of HIV dissident beliefs.
#80 cooler
July 2, 2007

I totally agree Micheal. Good Post. Because of the internet many intelligent HIV positive people are going to find out about the “dissidents” views sooner or later and they are not going to be able to mock those who question much longer, they will be forced to debate and they will get humilaited.
#81 T. Bruce McNeely
July 2, 2007

Michael:
BFD.
Lots of viral diseases have different effects depending on host factors. That’s why some people die of influenza and some don’t. That’s why some people who get viral hepatitis recover without a problem, some develop an asymptomatic carrier state and some develop cirrhosis and liver failure.
I don’t think 1/2 of all HIV positive Americans are long-term non-progressors, it’s more like 5 to 10 per cent. Do you have a reference for this?
Yes, I think people should hear all sides of a debate, but they should know that a certain side of the debate is promoted by delusional “scientists” expounding mistakenly outside their field, as well as loonbags like Cooler and Sensor and their victims.
#82 Chris Noble
July 2, 2007

Noreen, If I remember correctly when you were diagnosed with AIDS you had a low CD4+ count and several opportunistic infections. You started HAART and recovered from the opportunistic infections and you saw a significant rise in your CD4+ counts. When you discontinued HAART your CD4+ counts started to fall again.

I hope that you have made the right choice. However if you do get another bout of AIDS related opportunistic infections I hope you are prepared to rethink your decision.
#83 Michael
July 2, 2007

DT. You have been rattling and prattling about PCP in HIV diagnosed. You said:

“What they (the denialists, as you prefer to call us) cannot do however is give examples of severe opportunistic infections occurring in HIV negative patients in anything but very small numbers”.

Your statement does not hold water, because what “they” as in YOU and the rest of the AIDS orthodoxy, cannot show us “denialists” any significant cohort of PCP/HIV positive cases that were NOT ALSO EXTREME ILLICIT DRUG ABUSERS.

Not only that, but in older studies, you also can’t show any significant cohort that WERE NOT ALSO TAKING high dosage AZT which has been repeatedly proven to cause extreme immune suppression which is what leads to PCP!

Your repeated inclination to endlessly refuse to EVER consider other majorly contributing factors of immune suppression before you jump in to claim HIV as the culprit of all HIV positives immune suppression could certainly be construed as your lacking all integrity on the subject, or possibly mean that you are seriously delusional.

Though it was refreshing to see that you admitted up above that the very definition of AIDS is…your quote: “The rather unwieldy way in which AIDS is defined….”.

unwieldy??? That is putting it quite mildly. The definition of AIDS (aquired immune deficiency syndrome) even includes MORE THAN 50 PERCENT COMPLETELY SYMPTOM FREE AND HEALTHY PEOPLE! And you call this reliable and responsible and accurate medicine and science?
#84 cooler
July 2, 2007

Look at this loser, cant defend a single argument so you resort to name calling. The scientists that have questioned the HIV hypothesis in the past include experts and nobel Prize winners, much more intelligent than you, and they are not bought off like Gallo and Moore.
#85 cooler
July 2, 2007

The previous post was dedicated to bruce mc fooly
#86 T. Bruce McNeely
July 2, 2007

Cooler:
“loonbag” is not name calling.
It is a description.

Kary Mullis is a denier.
He is a Nobel Prize Winner.
He may well be more intelligent than me.
He also is a loonbag.
#87 noreen Martin
July 2, 2007

Dr. Noble some of what you state is true, however, my CD4′s dropped even while on the meds and I was doing other things at the time, like taking over 50 supplements and herbs, eating healthy, etc., which could not have hurt. Pretty much what I am doing today, except not taking so many supplements and I have swapped LDN for the antiretrovirals, which is helping my body ward off the O.I.’s. Even most doubters must recognize that my situation is not normal.
#88 Michael
July 2, 2007

Bruce. I usually don’t respond well to people whose initial response to something I write is “BFD”. The reason is because this comes across to me as a rather juvenile response, and I immediately assume that I am probably dealing with a smart alecky know it all punky kid.

However, I will make one exception for you out of common courtesy.

Considering the Boston LTNP study quickly found 1000 LTNP’s who were even willing to be in a study, shows that the number must be rather large, considering most of the LTNP’s do not want anything to do whatsoever with the HIV scientists, doctors, or HIV dogma which is why they were not ever taking any of the medications to begin with.

Take any group of 100 people in any issue, and you will only find a small percent that are willing to be enrolled as a part of any study. Therefore, common sense dictates that the 1000 LTNP’s enrolled in Boston must represent only a fraction of a very large number who were not willing to be part of any study.

There are no references or numbers or studies available as to how many LTNP’s there are, most likely for the very reasons that I stated above that this group is first of all a threat to the beliefs of the orthodoxy, and has also been for the most part completely ignored all along, and has also, for the most part, ignored all of the orthodoxy in return. And many of these LTNP’s completely reject the belief that HIV causes AIDS, and do not even want to be around the people who would hold them in disdain or project upon them that they will die of AIDS if they don’t get medicated.

This factor alone should clue you in to the major problems in uncritically and unquestioningly accepting the orthodoxy position on HIV and AIDS. If not, well, that is OK too. We dissidents understand. We all used to think the same things about HIV and AIDS that you do!
#89 Medical Board
July 2, 2007

noble doctor noble said

Noreen, If I remember correctly when you were diagnosed with AIDS you had a low CD4+ count and several opportunistic infections. You started HAART and recovered from the opportunistic infections and you saw a significant rise in your CD4+ counts. When you discontinued HAART your CD4+ counts started to fall again. I hope that you have made the right choice. However if you do get another bout of AIDS related opportunistic infections I hope you are prepared to rethink your decision.

Dear noble doctor noble, if you plan on practicing medicine on Noreen without a license, perhaps you should inform her that you have no credentials, no office, no patients, and no brain.
#90 noreen Martin
July 2, 2007

OH Medical board, don’t be too harsh on Dr. Noble as I have been practicing medicine without a license for some time. You see, I had to develop my own treatment plan, meaning, diet, supplements and herbs. Luckily, I was able to find doctors who were smart enough to prescribe LDN to me. I plan to continue on doing so by my next book, called The Cure but don’t tell the establishment, it will be our little secret!
#91 cooler
July 2, 2007

LOL
#92 Chris Noble
July 2, 2007

Dear noble doctor noble, if you plan on practicing medicine on Noreen without a license, perhaps you should inform her that you have no credentials, no office, no patients, and no brain.

Who’s practising medicine without a license? I am simply expressing my hope, as a concerned individual, that Noreen has made the correct choice and that she continues to re-evaluate her choices if her condition changes.
#93 T. Bruce McNeely
July 2, 2007

Michael:

Thank you for your reference. Unfortunately, your ass is not listed in the Index Medicus.
#94 Michael
July 3, 2007

Bruce.

Here is one reference to LTNP’s that I found for you. Admittedly not the best one, and it is several years old, but like I said, in all this time, there isn’t any official government or mainstream researcher looking into the subject or counting how many Long Term NonProgressors there are.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbFGJwC8xX4&mode=related&search=
#95 Peter Barber
July 3, 2007

Hi, noreen. You said:

I was doing other things at the time, like taking over 50 supplements and herbs, eating healthy, etc., which could not have hurt.

I agree that eating healthily could not have hurt (though that’s a truism). But many supplements and herbs do have side-effects. Off the top of my head: Ephedra (high BP and strokes), Aristolochia (renal damage), comfrey (liver damage), Hypericum perforatum (cytochrome P450 induction).

Many synthetic drugs are identical to or derived from naturally-occurring molecules. Why would pharmacologically-active constituents of herbal remedies not have similar side-effects to their synthetic counterparts?
#96 Peter Barber
July 3, 2007

Sorry, noreen, I was going to ask you about this as well:

For instance, every disease is treated by the germ theory of medicine and thus treated accordingly. When the person is sick or dying, at that point that may be the appropriate approach in life. However, unless the root cause or the true cause of the problem is ever addressed, …

I assume you don’t include surgical conditions in “every disease”, but even so, there are plenty of medical conditions which have no link to pathogenic micro-organisms (i.e. germ theory does not apply). Some cancers do, such as cervical cancer (HPV), hepatoma (EBV), but the majority do not (e.g. lung, breast, prostate). Metabolic disorders are genetically determined. And interestingly, autoimmune diseases generally show an inverse relationship with exposure to pathogenic micro-organisms; this shows, if nothing else, that doctors and scientists do not assume the germ theory in all cases.

But even in infectious diseases, rarely do doctors regard the treatment of the presenting individual’s infection the end of the story. Hence health education, investment in sanitation, contact tracing, vaccination programmes, and all the basic research behind the scenes.

I think I must have misunderstood you. Could you rephrase your comment?
#97 noreen Martin
July 3, 2007

A point could be made that a few natural products may have some problems. However, in the “big” picture of things, vitamin supplements and herbs products are statastically safter than modern drugs. When was the last time that over 50,000 persons died from one herbal product. If that had happened the FDA would have had a field day and would be raiding vitamin shops again. Yet, they turn a blind eye to Vioxx, AZT and other dangerous drugs.

My comment about the germ theory is this, long ago medicine had the choice to accept the “germ” theory of medicine or “pleomorphism,” which many scientist believed was the correct theory. However, Pasteur and his comtempories were more politically correct and like HIV, we have been living with it ever since. This doesn’t necessary make it right, just more popular.

Bottom line, those of who do entertain pleomorphism believe that the “terrain” or the body’s soil is very important to health. Having the proper PH goes a long way to contribute to one’s well-being. Louis Pasteur was claimed to have stated on his death-bed that Be’champ was right, the germ is nothing the terrain is everything. So I give the germ its proper respect because they are always with us and this is part of nature. However, we can do something to keep them from getting a strong-hold in our lives and this can be nicely accomplished by eating a proper diet with a proper acid/alkaline balance.
#98 Sage
July 3, 2007

Dear all you o so genuinely interested in Noreen’s alternatives to inhibitors and terminators, it never seizes to confound you that a chemical after all is but a chemical, a molecule after all but a molecule, whether it comes from a sunny garden herb or a laboratory assembly line.

‘Tis simple, gentlemen (and a lady), for the root of your incomprehension is the root of the difference you labour so to fathom: The eyes of modern medicine stares blindly at the molecule, the gene, or the chemical to be synthesized, and so quite forget the herb, the garden and the sun. The eyes that seek in this manner the isolated phenomenon, will, as Noreen has already told so many times with such infinite and loving patience that I suspect she must be one of the Cottingley fairies, tend to exchange the disease for the symptom.

Modern medicine exclaims just like you learned gentlemen (and a lady), “healthy eating and exercise, pshaw! Truisms all! Where’s the science in that? Where the glory? Nay, the glory is in the symptom. To ‘cure’ the particular symptom, in spite of the general decay, to wage successful war on Nature that is cheating death.”
As in other wars, technology is what modern medicine looks to in its glorious campaign: the technological solution to the symptom is how it aims to free every little naughty Adam and Eve from the supreme rule of Nature.

The approach to medicine Noreen personifies is harmony, the opposite of the strife and intolerance of your modern medicine, which is but an avatar of the god you ridicule in every second post here while you continue to worship him blindly under his new name ‘Science’ – a name as empty and ready to be filled with hatred and prejudice as every other he has had in history.
#99 David Marjanović
July 3, 2007

Your statement does not hold water, because what “they” as in YOU and the rest of the AIDS orthodoxy, cannot show us “denialists” any significant cohort of PCP/HIV positive cases that were NOT ALSO EXTREME ILLICIT DRUG ABUSERS.

Not only that, but in older studies, you also can’t show any significant cohort that WERE NOT ALSO TAKING high dosage AZT which has been repeatedly proven to cause extreme immune suppression which is what leads to PCP!

Frankly, this ignorance is breathtaking. Do you even know that AIDS is not limited to the First World? How many drug abusers are there in the Congo, how many people are HIV-positive there, how many take AZT or other brute-force drugs, and how many die every year of AIDS?

Noreen, it is possible to exaggerate “supplements”. As long as your kidneys work, you can’t poison yourself with vitamin C, but poisoning oneself with vitamin A or other fat-soluble vitamins is entirely feasible (if expensive). Also, if you take “over 50″, nobody knows how they interact with each other!

And BTW, you can forget about the acid-base balance. Not long ago a post taking this nonsense apart was among the top 5 Scienceblogs posts. The pH of your blood is regulated very effectively within very tight limits by such measures as breathing: exhaling a bit more CO2 removes carbonic acid from your blood, and breathing less deeply does the opposite. Then there are all the buffers like phosphate… you’d need to try very, very hard to change your blood pH by eating/drinking, and that would be dangerous anyway. If you feel like drinking vinegar (I’d never get the idea, but my sisters both love it, and we’re all healthy), do it. If you don’t, don’t.
#100 David Marjanović
July 3, 2007

The eyes that seek in this manner the isolated phenomenon, will, as Noreen has already told so many times with such infinite and loving patience that I suspect she must be one of the Cottingley fairies, tend to exchange the disease for the symptom.

So you say HIV is a symptom of AIDS — just another opportunistic infection? Show us.

Thanks to Chris Noble for explaining the “mouse” model.

Nothing is wrong with exercise (AFAIK it bolsters the immune system, just by far not enough to deal with AIDS). Nothing is wrong with healthy eating (as long as it is healthy). They are just not enough to prevent HIV infections from breaking out.
#101 David Marjanović
July 3, 2007

The approach to medicine Noreen personifies is harmony, the opposite of the strife and intolerance of your modern medicine, which is but an avatar of the god you ridicule in every second post here while you continue to worship him blindly under his new name ‘Science’ – a name as empty and ready to be filled with hatred and prejudice as every other he has had in history.

Oh no. Science is not an empty name, it has a definition. As long as you can answer the question “if I were wrong, how would I and anyone else know?”, you are doing science. If you can’t answer it, you’re not doing science.

I note that you haven’t tried to answer it, instead waxing poetic about harmony and strife. I’m not saying you’re wrong — I’m saying you haven’t yet shown that you’ve even said anything meaningful.
#102 noreen Martin
July 3, 2007

Yes, the body does have some natural buffers but if one eats properly, the correct acid/alkaline balance and follows the proper food-combining rules then these germs would not be able to get a foothold and cause havoic in the body.

You forget one thing, all herbs are considered to be food, that is why the FDA has not stopped the sale of them. And yes, just like food, some people may have some allergies to some plants. However, no one is advocating excessive amounts of these. There are ways such as logging onto Consumer Labs and Drug Digest to invetigate what are quality products and if there are any interactions with herbs and medicines.

The problem is that many are not familiar with natural supplements and that can be confusing. Why not use what works for the patient to get well? I beleive in prevention but even I admit that when the patient has progressed beyond that and into sickness, then all means should be considered to help the patient regain one’s health.
#103 noreen Martin
July 3, 2007

Was Sage calling HIV a symptom? I don’t believe it to be so any more than a white blood cell or any other component in the blood is one. If HIV is a symptom, then where is the study showing what it is doing or causing? Just because something is at the crime scence, doesn’t make it the criminal.
#104 Tara C. Smith
July 3, 2007

First noreen, the competition at the time of Pasteur and Koch wasn’t with “pleomorphism,” it was with miasma theory. Pleomorphism was fringe at best.

Bottom line, those of who do entertain pleomorphism believe that the “terrain” or the body’s soil is very important to health. Having the proper PH goes a long way to contribute to one’s well-being.

Proper pH where, noreen? Skin? blood? vagina? gut? mouth? All of the above? Of course this is fairly tightly regulated anyway, but variations in pH occur naturally between individuals, and even within the same individual and in different parts of the body or different times of day even. Methinks the whole “proper pH” is yet another scientific-sounding unproven idea espoused by many science deniers.

Louis Pasteur was claimed to have stated on his death-bed that Be’champ was right, the germ is nothing the terrain is everything.

You are mistaken. That urban legend surfaces almost as much as Darwin’s deathbed conversion. And even if Pasteur had recanted, it wouldn’t change the work of thousands of other scientists (both before and after Pasteur; read for example about John Snow and cholera) who’ve proven the germ theory well beyond a shadow of doubt.

So I give the germ its proper respect because they are always with us and this is part of nature. However, we can do something to keep them from getting a strong-hold in our lives and this can be nicely accomplished by eating a proper diet with a proper acid/alkaline balance.

And where is your evidence of this? I’m in agreement that keeping our normal flora healthy and happy is a good thing, and you won’t be able to find many (if any) infectious disease researchers who will disagree that host factors play a role in disease outcome as well (indeed, every text you’ll find will have a triad of host/pathogen/environment that all interact in the establishment of disease). But to say diseases are just a result of a pH imbalance or only due to “the terrain” and eating right will cure/prevent everything is incredibly oversimplistic.
#105 noreen Martin
July 3, 2007

Later, I will check in with you folks. I have a family member, who is battling cancer and I am going over to give him several supplements to help with his condition. I suppose that some of you would rather he just receive the current therapies of surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, which sometimes stops the cancer but do nothing to build up one’s immunity.

On the issue of science, although doctors are not scientist, they are close enough and they too have their prejudices and closed mindedness. When I first saw my infectious disease doctors, they were not familiar with chelation therapy, although it is a legal medical procedure. Instead of questioning and wanting to know more, all they did was to give me a choice, either stop this procedure or they would not treat me. Now, that’s really scientific.
#106 apy
July 3, 2007

I believe this is the post David Marjanović is referring to when he talks about acid/base control.

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2006/09/your_friday_dose_of_woo_acid_base_or_woo_1.php

noreen, how are you verifying your pH level? urine? From the post, urine seems to be quite an unclear indicator of the body’s pH, and in fact there seems to be very little you can do to alter your body’s pH. What are you doing to verify your pH?
#107 Luna_the_cat
July 3, 2007

noreen, do you believe then in medicating someone for a condition they don’t have? Would you suggest giving antibiotics to someone who didn’t have an infection?

Genuine chelation therapy exists for metals poisoning, which has (although I doubt you believe this) distinct and recogniseable (by doctors!) symptoms and diagnostic tests. Administering a therapy desinged to rid the body of heavy metals when no such poisoning actually exists is useless at best, and damaging in itself at worst (see, for example, this study in rats, where chelation in the absence of lead exposure led to brain damage).

In the absence of any evidence that you had excess levels of metals in your body, your doctor was acting in your best interests. *I* wouldn’t support someone using something that I believed would hurt them, no matter how enthusiastic that person was him/herself, if I had any interest at all in their wellbeing.

You seem to apply entirely different sets of standards to different forms of treatment. In conventional medicine, you seem to want 100% certain assurance that any therapy does more good than harm and does what it says on the label, whereas for the “alternative” theories you seem to take it all on good faith that it isn’t “chemical” or “artificial” or “damaging” and that it will help you.

On something of a side note: Could I just point out that little old herb-women in England were treating people with heart disease with foxglove preparations long before digitalis was isolated and dosage controlled, but no-one actually kept statistics on how many people they killed; your assumption that “herbs are safer” probably stems in large part from lack of data. The difference between the digitalis the herb-women used and the digitalis in use now, is that digitalis now is purified, strength-tested, dosage-tested, and comprehensive patient records are kept.

The fact is that prescribed medicines go hand-in-hand with patient records, whereas “herbal administrations” don’t come with any systematic recording of outcome whatsoever, so no-one HAS any statistics at all. All you’ve got are the people saying “yes, they’re wonderful” — who speaks for the people who die? And what about the people who use “alternative therapies” until they are too far gone for conventional medicine to help them, then turn to conventional medicine in the expectation that the treatment they were offered a year previously will still work, and then blame conventional medicine when it doesn’t?

Doctors tend to stick with things which have been tested under controlled circumstances and which appear to work; but not only do you not seem to believe this, you seem to actually WANT them to gamble with your life with things which haven’t been properly tested, or which have failed to show benefit in those tests to which they’ve been subjected (although the people who sell them will tell you that’s wrong), and to prescribe you things which may hurt you and which there is no evidence you need. And then you simply refuse to believe them when they say this is NOT what they do. Your expectations confuse the heck out of me.
#108 apy
July 3, 2007

“I have a family member, who is battling cancer and I am going over to give him several supplements to help with his condition. I suppose that some of you would rather he just receive the current therapies of surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, which sometimes stops the cancer but do nothing to build up one’s immunity.”

I hope you are doing more good than harm.
#109 noreen Martin
July 3, 2007

As usual some of your talk about therapies that you do not know about. For every one’s informtion, there are differnt types of “chelates,” some containing hydrogen peroxide and some containing minerals to assist with the patients health, not all forms are to revove heavy metals . As far as these natural remedies not being tested, who is going to test them, the powerful drug companies? I think not. You may not want to hear about natural claims but trying telling those who make these claims that they do not work.

Bernard Shaw, I believe stated it best, They would rather bury a whole mountain side ethically than to cure one patient unethically. I believe like in the movie War Games when the missiles were incoming and no one could get the computer to work, the general said to leave the kid alone, Hell, I would piss on a spark plug if I thought that it would work. Sometimes, especially in life-threatening and hopeless situations, it is then time to think outside of the box.

Who speaks for those who have died from the antiretrovirals? Certanily not the drug companies but persons like myself, who have seen the light and know that there is a better way.
#110 Luna_the_cat
July 3, 2007

As with your understanding of the word “denatured”, it would appear that your understanding of “chelation” also involves meanings not included in the scientific definition. I suspect that “alternative therapy” got hold of this (very specific) concept and started applying it in …rather different…ways. The accepted “conventional” definition of chelation is quite adequately expressed here: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/chelation

H2O2 is not a chelator.

More and more, it becomes clear that you have made up your mind and that is all there is to it as far as you are concerned; and it is on the basis of emotional appeal rather than evidence. I have no doubt that much of this was prompted by fear and anger at your own illness. That’s sad, and I hope things work out for you, and I wish you well, but I still see a lot of wishful thinking and conspiracy-mongering, as opposed to actual analysis of evidence, as disappointing as that often is, in your approach.
#111 noreen Martin
July 3, 2007

Tnose of us who understand natural treatments understand the language such as, chelation therapy and denatured. Having first hand experience with this therapy, I found it to be extremely helpful but then what do I know, I had the treatments some of you only read about them. And I believe, how the treatments made me feel is evidence enough for me.
#112 Little Old Herb-Woman
July 3, 2007

That’s funny, Luna the cat, you’re a namesake of my familiar. Tell me child, do the pupils of your eyes pass from change to change, from round to crescent, from crescent to round, as his do range?

Digitalis and many other plants were and are indeed prescribed, but perhaps not always by your MP. Oh yes, we put it to many uses we do, me and my herb sisters, many uses. And I assure you we monitor the outcome very carefully teeheehee…

But you must be young indeed if you do not think experiments are performed and records kept, or that we don’t, like the other young man suggests, ask ourselves, how we could know if we were wrong. Know if we were wrong, mmm mmm…? We have lived with our herbs for an hundred generations and more don’t you know? You should know Luna. How long have you lived with your chemo-therapies and your white coated priests?
Our herbs greet us with their colours and their fragrance morning and vesper, we cook our meals with them, we cure our sick and quicken the blood of our lovers with them, they accompany us on our nocturnal journeys and our thousand year memory twines its roots around theirs.

Whereof drink the roots of your memory, Luna the cat?
#113 apy
July 3, 2007

What herbs would you give in place of chemo-therapies? Also, do you have a paper on it I could read? Possibly a clinical trial or something to show it works a statistically significant amount of the time (perhaps statistics are also bad?)
#114 noreen Martin
July 3, 2007

Touche’ Little Old Herb Woman!
#115 Dale
July 3, 2007

Who speaks for those who have died from the antiretrovirals? Certanily not the drug companies but persons like myself, who have seen the light and know that there is a better way.

Begging your pardon noreen, but according to your own words, your life was likely saved by antiretrovirals.
#116 noreen Martin
July 3, 2007

Yes, they did help to get me well but if had contiuned to stay on them, at what point would I have liver failure, kidney failure, heart attacks, nerve problems and the dreaded “buffalo humps?” These medicines are not so safe when one looks at the big picture. Why should I take them when I have found a better alternative?

Where I disagree with the current concept is that these meds should only be given when there are symptoms or the patient is sick and dying. I had cancer, what would have happened if they had continued to give me radiation treatments every day. Why do you folks find it so hard to see that long-term use of the antiretrovirals are harming and killing the patient?
#117 Adele
July 3, 2007

apy,

You’re forgetting, people didn’t die of cancer much when the herb women were around. So the herbs MUST be better than chemotherapy! That’s denialist logic.

Or maybe people died too young to get cancer then. They died of infectious diseases and things and the life expectancy was like 30 or 35. Roughly unchanged for thousands fo years by the skillful herbalists. Then along came the white-coated scientists with their unnatural sanitation and their unnatural vaccines and unnatural antibiotics and people are living twice as long. So long they can die of cancer and heart disease not diarea and TB etc.

And now some people blame the scientists for everything and wish they had the herb lore again.
#118 noreen Martin
July 3, 2007

Actually, check history, say from the 1980′s upward and look at the cancer rates and how they have drastically increased from about 1 in 35 to the present cancer statastics. Yes, we have made some progress with antibodics but some have over-prescribed them and now we have resistnat stains on the planet. No one is blaming science but how the system is stacked against anything natural. For instance, there is something that can kill over 650 pathogens within six minutes, bugs do not become resistant to it and it is grand-fathered in under the FDA’s rules. Have any of you heard about it?
#119 Luna_the_cat
July 3, 2007

Little old herb woman, how very poetical of you. However, I’m very likely older than you are, and you are trying to teach your granny to suck eggs.

Little old herb women used foxglove, monkshood, tansy and all kinds of therapeutically useful and deeply dangerous herbs. They also tied cloths full of dried earthworms around peoples’ necks, treated persistent nosebleeds by telling the sufferer to wear red beads, treated children with rickets by dragging them through the soil of a cemetary after nightfall, and treated tuberculosis by passing the sufferer through the split in a tree which had been hit by lightning. As track records go, there was a heck of a lot of hit-and-miss, nothing to guard against people being misled by coincidence and confirmation bias, and no large-scale record keeping beyond “personal experience”, not to mention any trials where it was tested whether the substance itself was having any effect beyond “hopeful expection”.

Modern medicine uses a lot of “folk therapies” and folk medicines as its starting point…but then it weeds out the bullpuckey by testing, which is, I suppose, very unpoetical indeed.

Cats take a dim view of human silliness.
#120 noreen Martin
July 3, 2007

Don’t forget the thieves using garlic to ward off the plague while stealing from the dead. Many studies are out there about natural products, if you do a little research. Here is just a few that have some: cat’s claw, cayenne, tumeric, antler velvet, grape seed extract, ellagic acid, lycopene, beta glucans, revivo and colloidal silver. Studies on the above prove them to work.

You people worry about my health, I worry about yours because if you have a life-threatening illness, you are certainly limiting your options in life.
#121 Luna_the_cat
July 3, 2007

noreen, I suggest you take a look at this study of life expectencies:
http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/35/4/969.pdf

First thing to think about, is that the entire population is aging — the “bell curve” swell of the Baby Boomers, the biggest percentage of the population in an age category, is getting steadily older, thus there are more and more people moving into an age group where cancer is a bigger risk.

Second thing is that life expectencies for everyone went up between 1980-1985. That also means more people getting older, thus the risk of cancer increasing. Your risk of cancer is higher at age 78 than it is at age 70, so more people making it to age 78 before dying means more people at risk of cancer.

Third, and this is perhaps the most significant, is that mortality improved least in the lower socioeconomic groups — not a surprise considering that these same groups have higher crime rates and worse nutrition. However, this is also the group with the least access to “conventional medicine”, and the most use of “alternative therapies” in preference to conventional medicine for treatment of issues like cancer (see, for example, this study of breast cancer survival).

Just as a matter of interest, you see. Cancer tends to show up in people who don’t die of other things first.
#122 Luna_the_cat
July 3, 2007

Ah, yes, colloidal silver. Very useful for keeping plastic containers sterile. But do you understand argyria?

Please, please read this: http://together.net/~rjstan/rose2.html
#123 noreen Martin
July 3, 2007

That is not an issue unless it is incorrectly manufactured. By the way, NASA uses it to purify the water on the Space Station but what do they know either.
#124 Luna_the_cat
July 3, 2007

The last post seems to have killed off my first link. Here:
http://dermatology.cdlib.org/111/case_reports/argyria/wadhera.html

A major portion of ingested silver is absorbed in the small intestine [1]. On the basis of animal and human experiments it is considered that up to 10 percent of ingested silver salt is initially absorbed. This percentage may be much higher if the mucous membranes of the oral cavity are disrupted. Some soluble silver salts corrode the gastrointestinal mucosa and increase the amount of silver absorbed.

Most of the absorbed silver is transported through blood as a soluble colloid with plasma protein. The plasma protein that is most commonly bound with silver is albumin, forming silver albuminate. The blood level of silver in argyremic patients is reported to vary from nondetectable to 0.005 mg Ag/l [6]. However, Blumberg and Carey report a single patient whose spectrographic analysis of blood reveals blood silver levels of 0.5 mg/l, approximately 1 week after discontinuing the use of silver nitrate capsules [7].

Some of the silver in plasma is carried as a salt and may be deposited in various tissues after being reduced to its metallic form. The highest concentrations of silver are found in the skin, liver, spleen, and adrenals. Although originally believed to not penetrate the blood-brain barrier, it has been shown now that parenterally administered silver salts can accumulate in neurons and glial cells of the brain and spinal cord. The amount of silver deposited in the various tissues is directly proportional to the blood supply of the respective organ.

Animal studies demonstrate that most of the absorbed silver is eliminated through the gastrointestinal system. Even subcutaneously administered silver is excreted in the stool. Renal excretion of silver also occurs and has been shown for one patient to occur up to 3 months after administration of silver [7].
…
dverse health effects of silver depend on the dose and form of exposure, the duration of exposure, the route of exposure (i.e., ingestion, inhalation, or skin contact), and also on the exposed individual’s characteristics (age, sex, nutritional status, and state of health). The general population is exposed to silver mostly through very low levels of silver present in food and drinking water and sometimes in the air. The silver in these sources is a result of the naturally occurring silver in water and soil. Naturally occurring silver can contribute to up to 1 × 10-6 mg silver/m3 of air, 0.2-2.0 parts of silver per billion parts of water (ppb) in lakes and river waters and 0.2-0.3 parts of silver per million parts of soil (ppm). Although the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recommends that the silver level in drinking water not exceed 50 ppb, drinking water supplies in the United States have been found to contain silver levels up to 80 ppb [8]. Studies conducted by Hamilton in 1972 found the daily oral intake of silver from a typical diet to be 27-88 µg per day [9].

Th EPA publishes an oral reference dose (RfD) that is based on the assumption that thresholds exist for certain toxic effects such as cellular necrosis. This dose is expressed in units of micrograms per kg per day and is an estimate of the maximum amount of daily silver exposure to the human population that is not associated with any appreciable deleterious effects over a lifetime. Current RfD for oral silver exposure is 5 micrograms per kg per day. When consumed in relatively smaller quantities, no pathologic changes or inflammatory reactions other than argyria have been shown to result from silver deposition [6]. However, if silver is administered in high doses, whether orally or intravenously, there is ample evidence of adverse effects including death.

Yeah, wonderful stuff. Natural, you know, and therefore not toxic.
#125 T. Bruce McNeely
July 3, 2007

Actually, check history, say from the 1980′s upward and look at the cancer rates and how they have drastically increased from about 1 in 35 to the present cancer statastics

Excuse me, small n, where do you get this stuff? The cancer rate in the 1980′s was NOT 1 in 35. It was about the same then as it is now, about 1 in 3 will develop some type of cancer in their lifetime. They do have a somewhat better chance of survival now because of earlier detection methods and improved treatments.
So far you have talked utter nonsense about germ theory, cancer rates, pH, chelation and denaturation. Why should we listen to you about anything?
#126 Luna_the_cat
July 3, 2007

noreen, I use colloidal silver to sterilise my contact lens cases, too. That doesn’t mean that drinking it is a good idea. We have better products than that; there is a reason why doctors don’t prescribe it any more.
#127 noreen Martin
July 3, 2007

Excuse me, I meant to say 1880′s. I don’t care whether you listen to me or not but you cannot ignore the fact that I am surving AIDS nicely without toxic drugs.
#128 noreen Martin
July 3, 2007

The reason that they don’t prescribe it is because they are not taught about it number one and the drug industry has too much influence with the medical schools plus the Flexnor Report didn’t help the situation any. Incidentally, the EPA states that it is safe for injestion every day over a person’s life.
#129 BD
July 3, 2007

So far you have talked utter nonsense about germ theory, cancer rates, pH, chelation and denaturation. Why should we listen to you about anything?

The words “whipping boy” come to mind.

If you were truly concerned about Noreen’s health choices, it would come through in your(pl) writings. Instead, Noreen is treated with snide, condescending, authoritarian remarks.
#130 Luna_the_cat
July 3, 2007

Life expectancy at birth doubled between 1880 and the year 2000.

No doubt many more people die of cancer today. That’s because many more people died of tuberculosis, polio, whooping cough, and untreated infections long before they were at risk of developing cancer, back then. Heck, our family lost nearly 2/3 of the generation around 1900 to tuberculosis, as opposed to none that I know of in this generation.

Your argument is getting sillier, there.

The fact that you are alive now, is very good. The retrovirals did seem to play a part in that, even if you aren’t currently taking them. It sounds as if you were very ill when you started them. What will you do if symptoms start to show again? — that is genuine curiosity, btw, not a dig.
#131 Luna_the_cat
July 3, 2007

No, noreen, doctors know what colloidal silver is. It just isn’t a valuable treatment. And the EPA states that under the published safe limits there are no known permanent pathological effects other than argyria, which is a far cry from it being either safe or effective for consumption. Your reading is highly selective, there.

I have to go, for now. I will check back later.
#132 noreen Martin
July 3, 2007

No offense is taken by any of your comments as I have survived two, life-threatening diseases and had to toughen-up in a hurry. I only comment here because it is important to question theories and it is important for those who may be searching for other options to know that they exist. I do not wish to beat up on anybody and I would help any of you if you needed any help.

Fair question, first I would evaluate my life style because I believe that sickness/symptoms are an indication of not living by natural laws of health. What laws of health was I breaking? I think differnt, meaning I believe that the cause of sickness has to do with the terrain of the body. When we eat over-processed, fast foods, microwaved foods, over cooked foods, which all of the life-giving nutrients has been removed, how can we expect less than sickness?
#133 cooler
July 3, 2007

Funny how you talk about EPA safe limits, when the amount of mercury given in vaccines on a given day in the early 90′s exceeded the EPA’s safe limit by more than 70 times.
#134 Adele
July 3, 2007

Funny how cut and paste Billy pretends to know what thimerosal is. Very funny.
#135 cooler
July 3, 2007

ahhhhhhhh Adele,
Why are you lying and telling people youre a scientist?
#136 noreen Martin
July 3, 2007

Yeh, it a hoot about mercury in vaccinations too but then everyone will say that it has not been proven. My question to them, do you want your children to be exposed to this? If it is not a necessary ingredient, why is it in there. Certainly not for the patient’s benefit but the manufacturers. The sad thing that mercury-free vaccinations cost only about ten more dollars.
#137 apy
July 3, 2007

What was the life expectancy in 1880′s?
#138 apy
July 3, 2007

noreen,
Is colloidal silver the medication you refer to that cures over 650 diseases? Do you have a paper or study that agrees with this I could read? Thanks.
#139 Adele
July 3, 2007

This debate is kind of a thing of the past since almost all vaccines have no thimerosal now and haven’t for kids for what eight years? Also we have discussed many times methylmercury is not the same as ethylmercury. Guidelines for methylmercury like from dietary source don’t apply to ethylmercury which is the breakdown product of thimerosal. Thimerosal is a very good preservative and hundreds of millions of people got exposed to it including me and most of us debating here. It kept the vaccines that helped double our lifespan from spoiling. Now there are non mercury compound preservatives to do the same thing.

Billy why are you so interested in my scientific qualifications when you haven’t asked anyone else for theirs? I just said on the other thread I have a masters degree. That’s all I’ll say. You’re not going to listen to me anyway. WEll unless I have a nobel prize and believe in aliens and do LSD alot.
#140 noreen Martin
July 3, 2007

A search for the life expectany of the 1880′s came up with 39.6 or let’s just round it off to 40. I will admit that it is not so great but neither are our cancer statastics. Where we have made progress is in the areas of early detection thus allowing for early intervention.

Yes, colloidal silver is the wonder product and there are studies. Bear with me as I have stacks of paperwork upstairs that I will need to go through them.
#141 cooler
July 3, 2007

Because you are lying. You said you work PCR’s and are a scientist. Why are you lying? YOU mentioned that you preformed pcr’s recently, this seems like a big lie.
#142 noreen Martin
July 3, 2007

What about flu shots? I remember reading somewhere that when elderly persons had 5 years of consecutive vaccinations, their chances of alzheimers increased. Boy, I wish I could remember where I saw that. Does anyone have any info about this?
#143 apy
July 3, 2007

“A search for the life expectancy of the 1880′s came up with 39.6 or let’s just round it off to 40. I will admit that it is not so great but neither are our cancer statistics. Where we have made progress is in the areas of early detection thus allowing for early intervention.”

The last part doesn’t seem to help your point either. The life expectancy has risen by 30 years or so, so we have a lot more time for someone to get sick. Our diagnostics have gotten much better in the 120+ years as well, true. I’m not sure how we combine those to bits of data into saying that cancer is more common now than then? If everyone dies younger in 1880′s then they would not get cancer, so we don’t know how prevalent it was, and for those that did get cancer, we didn’t have the diagnostic abilities to identify it as well as today, so again we don’t know how prevalent it was.
Could you explain to me how one comes to the conclusion that cancer is more common now?

Are any of those stack of papers in a peer reviewed journal or anything? I have done a little poking around and so far I can only find claims that it cures all these diseases without any actual evidence or study about it.

It would certainly be nice to think this drug exists that can cure all of these diseases. But I have to wonder, if all the people going into medical school, at least some of the top students would have discovered colloidal silver on their own and at least some of them would come out with a piece of evidence that either A) shows there is a conspiracy to hide this drug from the world B) since in order to know the drug needs to be hidden there must be a study somewhere that shows that it does indeed cure all these diseases and needs to be hidden, some evidence of this would surface.

It seems to me that a lot of these arguments hinge on every single person involved in medicine is owned by the drug companies or willfully letting millions of people die just to pad their wallet. While I am sure there are plenty of people in the industry that are like this, it is difficult to imagine that every single one would be so greedy and callous to allow this to happen. Certainly this is not a formal argument against your case.
#144 noreen Martin
July 3, 2007

A quick research found the following link showing some bacteriology studies, which have been performed:
http://www.silver-colloids.com/Pubs/biostudies.html
#145 Adele
July 3, 2007

BD said
If you were truly concerned about Noreen’s health choices, it would come through in your(pl) writings. Instead, Noreen is treated with snide, condescending, authoritarian remarks.

I like Noreen even though I disagree with her on maybe everything. I can’t think about her the way I think about Lie-a-lotis and the other loony trolls here because they’re not at risk and they couldn’t give a sh– about anyone at risk and alot of times they hate people who are at risk or already have HIV. They’re all about some messed up ego trip or conspiracy theory or religious fantasy that turns them on.

Noreen faces HIV every day. She had to educate herself. I don’t know her education and it doesn’t matter I guess but she doesn’t have a degree in biology like alot of people here. She told us how she asked her doctors for more information and they didn’t give it.

I had that same kind of reaction once there was a relative who had a problem and was upset about the doctor and I called the doctor. Annoyed him I’m sure. And he knew I’m in scinece so he gives me this long string of jargon like ten minutes worth in a two minute conversation. I caught some of it but not everything and then he was gone too busy. So I think hey this is someone’s life here someone really important to me why can’t you talk to me about it for five minutes? I was upset.

I thought about it more though and you know what, this doctor is not a college professor. He’s there to treat people not teach physiology and molecular biology to their family. IT was a curtousy he talked to me at all with his crazy schedule.

Noreen’s experience makes me feel badly for her that someone knowledgeable didn’t give her more information. Still it’s not hard to imagine alot of doctors doing that maybe even meaning to give her stuff and then forgetting about it. And it’s frustrating.

So I can’t get upset with Noreen wanting to learn about her health. Like me she had expectations of those doctors that weren’t in their job description at least what they thought it is. But unlike me and I don’t mean to be insulting but I’ve taken those virology courses and some bioinformatics and whatever. Noreen had to teach whatever she knows to herself. She was like prime real estate for the “rethinker” lies that are out there on the internet with more easy access than good information.

I know other people here can get angry with Noreen because their expecting her to understand more of their arguments. Problem is, she “understands” them a different way because she’s been lied to. I can’t fault her for that.

The denialist freak shows on here are liars and distort everything. Noreen is being honest even if she’s wrong.
#146 noreen Martin
July 3, 2007

I am sure that even in the 1880′s, they could determine what the person died from and if it were cancer.

Maybe you have meet more intelligent persons and doctors who know about it but that has not been my experience and I have questioned many. Drug companies aren’t interested in natural cures that work nor any drug in which the patent has expired, like low dose naltrexone (LDN) because they know that they cannot make big bucks on them. Why do you think that the antiretrovirals are pushed as opposed to LDN?
#147 Adele
July 3, 2007

BillyBipBip wrote
You said you work PCR’s and are a scientist. Why are you lying? YOU mentioned that you preformed pcr’s recently, this seems like a big lie.

I “preformed” a quantitative RT-PCR last Friday. I multiplexed, one probe labeled with Cy5 and the other one FAM. I’m doing another one this Thursday.

Where is your evidence I’m not a tech? I already said I don’t live in Utah.

If you want to talk about big lies just look at your 9-11 conspiracy theories and the “Nicolosons.”
#148 apy
July 3, 2007

in the 1880′s what tools did doctors have available to them to diagnose cancer? Either while alive or post mortem. Let’s say they found something that we could easily identify as cancer today, what could they mistakenly call it? Would most 1880′s doctors be inclined to state that they don’t know what something is instead of giving an answer? Not to mention, people are generally only living into their 40′s, those that do get cancer, how common are they and how hard would anyone be able to work to determine if this is something that is unique to their patient or a more common? How would they determine the cancer is the cause of death?

One cancer statistic that has gone up in the last 100 years, from what I have read, is breast cancer, however no correlation has been found to explain why yet, although don’t mistaken that for lack of trying.
#149 noreen Martin
July 3, 2007

“Noreen is being honest even if she is wrong”

So let me get this right, it is wrong for me to be perfectly healthy and alive without harmful drugs. It is wrong for me to believe that having a healthy PH and terrain is important to my health. It is wrong to have chelation therapy and take my supplements, vitamins and herbal products. It is wrong for me to question my doctors, the very one’s who should have the answers. No Adele, I didn’t need any outspoken “rethinkers” to put things in my head, things were already wrong.

I bet many who are sick would love to be as wrong as I am.
#150 cooler
July 3, 2007

yep I really believe you.

What lab do you do this at?

For a tech you seem to have a lot of time to post all day.
#151 Adele
July 3, 2007

Noreen now you’re making a liar out of me. I said you were honest but now you’re twisting my words just like your denialist friends do. Did you read them? I PRAISED you for questioning. Then you stab me and say I’m calling you wrong for doing it. That’s not true.

It is WONDERFUL if you are healthy and alive. For all I know LDN or other things your doing could be helping you. All I know is your CD4 counts and viral loads are not looking good and many many studies have shown poor outcomes in people with your counts. Maybe you’re one of a few exceptions. I hope so. But I wouldn’t want to bet my life on untested poorly understood remedies.

Also if “rethinkers” didn’t give you any ideas about HIV and AIDS, where did you get them? Did you invent them all independently? You’re smart but it’s hard to swallow that you are such a clever devious liar as Duesberg and Bialy etc.
#152 Adele
July 3, 2007

Yes cooler I guess I should be doing something more useful while my serum incubates for heat inactivation. Maybe I’ll go rack some tips.

What do you know about lab technicians?

Have you ever had a job?

When does school start up again for you?

And do you appreciate the irony in your questions?
#153 noreen Martin
July 3, 2007

Yes, Adele you did praise me. Nevertheless, most do not. As I have stated before, there are many HIV-Positives that have lowere CD4′s and are fine. They just aren’t so vocal or don’t want to be attached. I am in contact with many, who like me, for the most part just go on living.

I get my ideas by reading and questioning those who should know the answers but when they cannot give them to me I have to weigh a bunch of info from both sides on the HIV issue. Obviously, my views about health probably do not come from either side. There again they come from reading and learning about Holistic medicine, which I attribute part of my success in life too.
#154 .
July 3, 2007

Adele said: The denialist freak shows on here are liars and distort everything. Noreen is being honest even if she’s wrong.

Adele, what about these lies from the institutions of our government and our medical system? John Moore has already admitted on Tara’s 20 min AIDSTRUTH video, that Dr. Ho’s Hit em Early Hit Em Hard HIV drug program was a mistake. Who lied to those trusting victims killed by this medical error?. What about all the trusting victims who died from AZT toxicity? Who lied to them? What about the thousands who died from heart attacks after Vioxx? Who lied to them? What about the three young girls who died after a Gardasil vaccination. Who lied to them? What about the hundreds of children who committed suicide directly caused by SSRI drug reactions ? Who lied to them? What about Aubrey Blumsohn who was lead author on the Actonel study which was ghost written and published without him ever seeing the data? Who lied to him? What about Joyce Ann Hafford who was killed by nevirapine? Who lied to her? What about the thousands of Americans killed by chemotherapy during the course of cancer treatment? Who lied to them. What about all the young girls who suffer strokes from blood clots while on birth control pills? Who lied to them? What about all the people with dementia and transient global amnesia from their statin drugs? Who lied to them? What about all the Adult onset Diabetics caused by the junk food standard american diet? Who lied to them?

Adele, you are clearly biased by your cultural and social conditioning. Sadly, you take sides with the real liars, the ones who lie for corporate greed, and peddle toxic deadly drugs to the trusting victims.
#155 Adele
July 3, 2007

Andrew now too embarassed to use his own name says birth control pills are killing our girls.

And vaccines. And health care. That settles it. Let’s all move outside and run around naked catching beetles for food and get pregnant when we’re fourteen and have nine kids and watch seven of them die of diarea and let our teeth fall out when we’re twenty and die at 28.

Dr. Lie-a-lotis takes the most innocuous stuff like vaccines or birth control, things almost everyone takes and pretends they’re some kind of horror poison.

Anecdotes do not equal proof. Mistakes do not equal lies.
#156 harold
July 3, 2007

noreen Martin –

I came late to this discussion. I hope you are still here.

My conscience compels me to write this.

I have seen people die of AIDS and done autopsies on people who died of AIDS.

AIDS is caused by HIV.

Some people are genetically resistant, most aren’t.

Healthy food and exercise are beneficial, but they aren’t enough.

If you are HIV positive, have suffered from opportunistic infections, and have transiently recovered because of mainstream therapy, you will die of AIDS without treatment.

You need to get back on your therapy. You will die without treatment. Of AIDS.

This is going to be my only message. I hope I wrote in a way that breaks through the denial.
#157 noreen Martin
July 3, 2007

Harold, thanks for hour input. You did not state if you a doctor or not. Nevertheless, I am sure that you can attest to the fact that AIDS persons die from opportunistic infections, isn’t that correct? You see, the LDN is keeping them away by boosting my body’s own endrophin levels thus allowing the body to ward them off. I would think that even those of you with scientific minds would not attribute my sucess to luck and neither do I. So, what is the reason that I am so well? If some of you will not attribute it to my diet and health habits then why not the LDN or will you only be satisifed with the antiretrovirals?
I believe that it is high time that a new study be underway about LDN because more patients and physicians are becoming aware of it.
#158 Michael
July 3, 2007

Hey Adele, you, as well as many others on this blog, seem to be a paranoid delusional germaphobe.

If you were serious about your statement to Noreen:

“But I wouldn’t want to bet my life on untested poorly understood remedies”.

Then you certainly would not be considering for yourself or recommending to anyone to be taking lifelong AIDS drugs for all are poorly understood and fairly untested as they have all been “fastracked” through the FDA processes. As a matter of fact, if these were drugs that were commonly given to white heterosexual America, such as Viox, they would have been pulled from use in the first week. But alas, they are given to 97% gays and blacks and drug abusers, so who really cares….. Obviously, not you.

Noreen is just one among many many thousands who did not recover their health after being diagnosed as HIV/AIDS until they changed their beliefs about HIV and dying an inevitable death from AIDS and took charge of their own health:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbFGJwC8xX4&mode=related&search=

All of these people are really quite a threat to your beliefs in the mystical powers of HIV.

But then again, pathetic HIV germaphobes would prefer these people sicken or die so the paranoid and delusional germaphobes can continue to blame it on HIV and continue to obsess over their own delusions rather than admitting they are and always have been wrong to project their own paranoid delusions of inevitable sickness and death from HIV upon others.

Do you think it is somehow caring and compassionate of you or the other AIDS advocates on these threads to project your own negative beliefs on others? It most certainly is not. It is hurtful, damaging, and harmful to all the people in the world that you project this upon. But then again, you people really can’t help yourselves, can you?

Yet in your topsey turvey minds, you believe the dissidents are wrong and doing harm in telling and encouraging people that they can live long normal healthy lives irregardless of HIV or AIDS diagnoses.

Do you realize how upside down and inside out you, as well as the majority of people in the world really are? I am sure you do not and most likely will not even let yourself explore such thoughts, and this, Adele, is called denial. I do realize however, that in your own paranoid and delusional thoughts and beliefs, you, and all of the other paranoid, delusional, germaphobes really can’t even help it that your minds are programmed in this way.

Adele, you pointed at the dissidents and said: “alot of times they hate people who are at risk or already have HIV. They’re all about some messed up ego trip or conspiracy theory or religious fantasy that turns them on”.

When you or the other “AIDS advocates” on these threads say or think such thoughts, there are three of your own fingers pointing right back at your very own self with every word. But this is quite normal behavior for a paranoid and delusional germaphobe and reality denialists is to believe that everyone else is in denial and not their own self.

Actually, it is very humorous, and has greatly helped me to understand the minds of mankind in general. Thank you.
#159 Luna_the_cat
July 3, 2007

What fascinates me, Michael, in a sort of horrified way, is that you genuinely seem to think that people who think that the denialism is wrong and that this wrong information is harming people, actually WANT people to sicken and die. That says more about you than it does anything else. Paranoid? Delusional? Er, yeah.

Whatever kind of life you have had, I am reasonably sure I would not want. I have a hard time even imagining the life that would bring someone to think this way.
#160 Adele
July 3, 2007

The actions of “germs” are documented well.

Also documented is a promise by someone who used to go by “Lincoln” not to comment here anymore if the Parenzee trial was decided for the prosecution.

Although maybe your not that Michael you just write like him and think like him and have the same first name.
#161 Adele
July 3, 2007

Now I’m remembering Michael even promised to switch and start defending HIV science if Parenzee lost.
#162 Dale
July 3, 2007

Yet in your topsey turvey minds, you believe the dissidents are wrong and doing harm in telling and encouraging people that they can live long normal healthy lives irregardless of HIV or AIDS diagnoses.

The dissidents are wrong and doing harm in telling and encouraging people that they needn’t get tested and needn’t worry about transmitting HIV to others. The dissidents are doing harm in deliberately misrepresenting the medical/scientific literature.
#163 harold
July 3, 2007

noreen Martin –

I am a doctor but not practicing any more.

Opportunistic infections are usually what kills in AIDS, but also some types of cancer, such as certain lymphomas. (Some lymphomas are associated with other viruses, such as EBV, this is complex topic that I won’t go into here.)

Although there is a very high “hype to science ratio”, LDN does seem to have some potential as an immune modulator.

As you will note, I am not denying the value of nutrition and exercise. I am not denying the LDN may have some beneficial effects. I am in favor of a “holistic” approach to medicine, as long as it is one that does not abandon scientific principles.

Nevertheless, I would not recommend making yourself a guinea pig by relying solely on unproven treatments.

HIV destroys CD4+ cells eventually. These cells are a central and necessary part of the immune response. You cannot stimulate something that is not there.

LDN may be helping you, any kind of a diet that gets nutrition dense healthy food into you is surely helping, but you must not rely on these alone.

I am fairly young, but I am old enough to have seen AIDS before the treatment era. Untreated or undertreated AIDS is relentless and brutal.

The effect of contemporary antiviral medicine is near miraculous in contrast to what went before.

There is no reason why you should not take a holistic approach, nor even why you should not use LDN if it has no ill effects and does not interact with other medication.

But you must return to mainstream therapy as well. You are lucky enough to be in a rich country where it is available to you, millions don’t have that luck. Don’t throw your luck away.
#164 noreen Martin
July 3, 2007

Maybe you should be practising because you do have a kind heart! I know people who CD4′s, which are in the teens and some even lower, yet they too are healthy. My CD4′s declined even while on the meds. Why don’t we just go back to “symptoms” and treat them accordingly? But if we did that, over half of the AIDS cases in this country would go away and how would that look? Can anyone tell me how can a life-threatening illness have different criteria in different countries? Who is right?
#165 apy
July 3, 2007

Are your friends a randomized double blind selection? Knowing some people that are doing OK does not mean the general public is doing the same, and more importantly it does not mean that they or you will fair well in the future. I’m not telling you that you need to switch your therapy if you feel it is working, simply “I know people that are fine” does not cut it for any form of evidence. Given the complexity of the body and viruses there is no shortage of explanations of why you and your friends are all doing fine, the real question is “how long will it last”.
#166 noreen Martin
July 3, 2007

Well, there is one way to see. I will check back in here every six months and we can through all of this again. Some will tell me to take the meds and I will refuse to do so if I am healthy. After all, isn’t health what this is all about. I think that some of you refuse to give up your theories and look at someone like me, if you did you would have to reconsider your position in life.
#167 apy
July 3, 2007

Maybe they are too busy looking at the other several million people who are dieing?
#168 Patriot Games
July 3, 2007

Adele said; Andrew now too embarassed to use his own name says birth control pills are killing our girls.

No its not andrew. Birth Control pills cause hypercoagulability, deep venous thrombosis and cerebrovascular accidents and stroke.

And vaccines. And health care. That settles it. Let’s all move outside and run around naked catching beetles for food and get pregnant when we’re fourteen and have nine kids and watch seven of them die of diarea and let our teeth fall out when we’re twenty and die at 28.

Luna_Cat says wow to that one.

Dr. Lie-a-lotis takes the most innocuous stuff like vaccines or birth control, things almost everyone takes and pretends they’re some kind of horror poison.

Still not him. Sure, birth control pills prevent pregnancy, and come with a a price of hypercoaguability, excess synthetic testosterone effect with acne, fluid retention, mood disturbances, and impaired ovulation after discontiuing BCP’s.

Sure polio vaccine is perfectly safe. That’s why they discontinued it, The polio vaccine was causing more cases of polio than it was preventing.

Sure influenza swine flu vaccination is safe. That’s why they cancelled the vaccine program and settled hundreds of Guillan Barre court cases.

Sure Gardasil is safe, only killed three young girls so far.

Anecdotes do not equal proof. Mistakes do not equal lies.

Three 11 year old girls dead from Gardisil vaccine is not an anecdote. It’s human tragedy.

AZT, a medical mistake that kills three hundred thousand, is this what you call the truth? Somebody had to be lying somewhere on this one.

Want to see a liar, Adele, turn on your televison set for 30 seconds, and you will see a direct-to-consumer drug ad. They are all lies. They say “Boviva, actonel and fosamax makes your bones stronger”, Sure that’s why all the dentists just received warning letters that these drugs cause the jaw bone to fall apart.

26.11.2004 100 women in Sweden have won legal settlements after suffering adverse side effects from birth control pills: a ruling that could bear major significance in Denmark.
.
A ruling has just been handed down in a pivotal class action lawsuit on side effects of the birth control pill in Sweden – with compensatory damages award to some 100 Swedish women. Daily newspaper Politiken reports today that just as many women in Denmark could be entitled to compensation.
.
After a legal process spanning the better part of a decade, settlements of up to DKK 5 million (673,000 euros) have been awarded to women who suffered adverse side effects after taking birth control pills manufactured by drug company Organon. Several of the women experienced blood clots in the legs and heart, as well as strokes. The severest cases had to have feet amputated due to circulatory problems, while others will have to take drugs for the rest of their lives due to long-term aftereffects.
.
Sven Skouby, M.D., PhD of Frederiksberg Hospital told Politiken that the risk for blood clots as a result of birth control pill use is generally small. But for individuals predisposed to the condition – which may be hereditary – the risk increases some 30-80 times with the use of birth control pills. Despite this risk factor, two out of three doctors neglect to inform patients of possible serious side effects of birth control use, according to a study by Copenhagen University’s Institute for Public Health Science.
.
“If women aren’t given appropriate information, then something needs to be done better. I believe patients should be informed of the potential side effects that may arise – especially blood clots – and should be asked about their family health history,” Skouby told the newspaper.
#169 Andrew Wade
July 3, 2007

I would think that the people who advocate that HIV doesn’t produce AIDS in people, would be able to produce documented cases of people who have had AIDS and not been infected with HIV.

HIV infection (the antibodies anyway) is found in all cases of AIDS by the definition of AIDS, but AIDS-like symptoms can stem from causes other than HIV infection. I don’t happen to know of any cases of AIDS-like symptoms with no known cause, but the existence of such patients would not suprise me in the least, and the mere existence of such cases wouldn’t challenge the HIV-AIDS link.
#170 Andrew Wade
July 3, 2007

On refreshing the thread I see that DT has given a more informative post. Sorry for the noise.
#171 harold
July 3, 2007

noreen –

Yes, staying healthy is what it’s all about.

The problem is that with active HIV, you can feel quite well one moment and yet get into very serious trouble the next.

We can’t test new approaches directly and in isolation against imperfect but effective current approaches, because we can’t deny patients what we know is effective. This is a common dilemma in medical research.

But what we can do is to test new approaches as adjuncts to current therapy. Eventually, if they prove themselves in that context, they may be tested on their own.

I doubt if LDN and a healthy diet are adequate therapy for HIV. I can’t prove that this isn’t the case, of course; it’s theoretically possible, although I think highly unlikely, that they might be.

The point is not that this approach “does not” work as well as antivirals, but that even if it “might not”, you should be on mainstream therapy as well.

You really, really should take the treatment that we know works. I recommend eating healthy food, exercising, and possibly even LDN as well, but you are taking a terrible risk by denying yourself treatments that are known to be potentially effective.

It is a very stressful thing to deal with HIV/AIDS, but in this day and age, in well-off countries, you can lead a full life.

I recommend that you talk to some patients who take an active, holistic approach but also taking modern medications. There are many such.

But most importantly, I can’t tell you how strongly I recommend that you get back on your medications, ASAP.
#172 Adele
July 3, 2007

Not Andrew? You sounded like him. Hard to tell though when you denialists use a different name every post and all go on about the same thing.

AZT, a medical mistake that kills three hundred
thousand, is this what you call the truth? Somebody had to be lying somewhere on this one.

That would be you. AZT did not kill three hundred thousand people. Maybe three hundred thousand people died of AIDS and had taken AZT sometime. That whole “after the fact thing”. Why parrot this number when you don’t know what you’re talking about. Everyone who died of AIDS also had a female mother. Does having a female mother cause AIDS?

Whoever you are based on the site you linked to you’re obviously a knee-jerk ultraconservative. Of course you don’t want women on contraceptives. You’d prefer they would have to get back-alley abortions too, and hopefully die, and then you’d have a more pure Christian society right? You don’t want women protected against HPV either because that might promote IMMORALITY. And you want people with HIV to stay off meds becaus that will get rid of all sorts of people you don’t like.

Guess what, Mr. HillaryWatch? This isn’t just your country and you’d better get used to it.
#173 Pope
July 3, 2007

Noreen,

The pharma reps with the short memory are hoodwinking you again. They refer to the 18-19th. century as the good old days when the herb-women ruled. But the beginnings of what we call ‘modern medicine’ was long established by then. Goethe writes in Faust:

Here was the medicine, the patients died and nobody asked who recovered, thus we have ravaged with infernal electuaries, in these valleys, these mountains, much worse than the pest, I myself have given the poison to thousands, they withered away, I must experience that the unabashed murderers are being praised.

And he ain’t talking about herb-women either.

Karl Marx described industrial England in Das Kapital. That was 1867. But even back in the feudal societies of the middle ages the herding together of people exploitation, famines were what killed. So try to ask them where they get their life expectancy statistics, their whooping cough and their plagues from all the pharma reps with their short memories.

Fact is modern medicine takes credit for a couple of advances in hygiene and living standards, which is the sole reason why they choose the 19th. century as ‘cut off’ date. These advances are sociological phenomena more than medical. As if the little old herb-women would never have thought of washing their hands – as if they hadn’t already.

You have to search elsewhere than European or American population centres, or literal or virtual slave populations for proper comparison.

And psst, a closed fist with index finger and pinkie extended, fresh mountain air and positive thoughts will ward off the voodoo hex Harold is trying to work on you.
#174 harold
July 3, 2007

Andrew Wade –

One thing Noreen has right is that immunosuppression is how HIV/AIDS kills.

In fact, the way HIV destroys the immune system, by destroying CD4+ cells, is somewhat unique, and the pattern of opportunistic diseases seen in untreated HIV/AIDS can be quite characteristic. (There are a few other causes of CD4+ cell deficiency as well, such as congenital deficiency.) That’s how AIDS was discovered.

On the other hand, immunosuppression, broadly defined, is a common medical problem.

Thus, there are many other diseases and health states that overlap in presentation with HIV/AIDS. This is seized on by deniers. But they are not HIV/AIDS, any more than measles is chicken pox because they have some overlapping symptoms.

HIV/AIDS is caused by the destruction of CD4+ immune system cells, as a result of infection with HIV.

(There are many ways to be infected with HIV. Once you’ve got it, it doesn’t matter how you got it. What matters is what you do next.)

Therefore, it isn’t surprising that the treatments which have proven most effective include drugs that inhibit HIV.

Good diet, exercise, enjoyment of life, positive attitude, and psychological and social support are also enormously helpful. But therapy that directly addresses HIV is critical.

With therapy and support, HIV/AIDS does not need to prevent anyone from living a full, satisfying life.
#175 Adele
July 3, 2007

Kickboxer and bullsh– artist Claus Jensen quotes Goether as his source! Cool. Next I’ll talk about Gardasil and quote Jefferson Airplane.

If anyone recalls it was Noreen who brought up late 1800s and compared cancer then and now. No one picked a cutoff but Noreen.

Assuming Goether is the final authority on medical stuff in early 1800s what did his poison dispensers have to do with modern medicine? They were just herb women with more concentrated drugs.

You have to look later than Goether for the start of modern medicine. Oh and Mr. JEnsen when did Faust take place. Hint not the early 19th century.
#176 noreen Martin
July 3, 2007

Pope, you don’t have to worry about them “hoodwinking” me as you put it. Doctor Harold does make some valid points but there again, why does modern medicine feel that every disease on the planet has to be treated only with prescription drugs. This is an insult to nature as the body was meant to heal itself, when given a decent chance. How has mankind managed to survive all of these eons without the drug representative?

Pope, you don’t have to worry about them “hoodwinking” me as you put it. Much to many’s dismay, I am like the Rock of Gilbraltar and am still standing.
#177 harold
July 3, 2007

noreen –

One final word.

There are some people here trying to induce you not to accept medical treatment.

I might compare some people I have known to those who promote war, but send other people off to die. Some people promote their own “theory” about AIDS or cancer, but they let other people “test” it.

You are an autonomous individual, you will have to make up your own mind. You know what my advice is.
#178 Rock of Gibraltar
July 3, 2007

Yes, that is true and by the same token others of you are insisting that I should take toxic drugs for an unproven virus. You see, I haven’t any conflict going on and I am leading a full life. Some of you are the ones, who are hateful, name-calling and stuck in only one position. I have made my decision and plan to continue on in health and like the old saying, if if works, use it. It certainly works for me regardless of what you all think.
#179 Patriot Games
July 3, 2007

harold said In fact, the way HIV destroys the immune system, by destroying CD4+ cells, is somewhat unique.

My dear harold,

if the pattern by which the HIV retrovirus destroys CD4 cells is so unique, then why is it that in this most recent and sophisticated molecular biology diagram of retroviral life cycle (Fig 1) , there is no step identified which actually destroyes or even harms the host cell?

The retroviral life cycle is shown schematically in Figure 1 below. The life cycle begins with the binding of the envelope glycoprotein on the surface of the virus to a cognate receptor on the surface of the target cell. This interaction leads to the fusion of the viral and cellular membranes. Although in the figure this process is depicted as occurring at the plasma membrane, recent data suggest that the ASLVs may use a pathway similar to that used by influenza virus and enter the cell through a low-pH mechanism (Mothes et al., 2000).
After viral and cellular membranes fuse, the viral core is in the host cytoplasm, where the single-stranded RNA genome of the virus is converted into double-stranded linear DNA by the enzyme reverse transcriptase. Understanding the mechanics of the reverse transcription process is important for good vector design (see Overview – What to Avoid in Vector Design). However, the details of the reverse transcription process are beyond the scope of this website. If you would like to learn more about reverse transcription, please refer to Retroviruses (edited by John M. Coffin, Stephen H. Hughes, and Harold E. Varmus, 1997, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press), which is now available as an online publication through the National Library of Medicine website. Once the double-strand viral DNA is synthesized, it must move from the cytoplasm to the nucleus. The viral DNA of some complex retroviruses, such as HIV-1, can transit the nuclear membrane. The viral DNA of some simple retroviruses, including MLV, does not transit the nuclear membrane and these viruses cannot infect nondividing cells. However, it was recently shown that ASLVs (including RCAS vectors) can infect nondividing cells in culture, albeit at a reduced efficiency relative to infection of dividing cells (Hatziioannou and Goff, 2001; Katz et al., 2002). Once the viral DNA has access to the host genome, integration can take place. Integration links the ends of the linear viral DNA to host DNA. The reaction is specific with respect to the viral sequences involved and nonspecific with respect to the host sequences. The site of integration in the host genome influences the expression of the integrated provirus. Although the provirus has its own promoter, the activity of the viral promoter is influenced by the adjacent host sequences. Conversely, the insertion of the provirus can also influence the expression of host genes. The provirus is an insertional mutagen: it can disrupt a gene by inserting into it, or can either enhance or decrease the expression of gene by inserting next to it. Because higher eukaryotes are diploid, this ordinarily does not matter; however, in some cases, insertion near a cellular oncogene can lead to oncogenesis in infected animals. Because the viral DNA becomes part of the host genome, infection is permanent. The infected cells, and all their progeny, will carry the inserted viral sequence. If the infection takes place in a germ cell, or a germ cell precursor, the resulting animal will carry the virus as a transgene (usually called an endogenous provirus). It is sometimes useful, in studying viral replication, to recover either unintegrated or integrated viral DNA. With conventional retroviruses (or retroviral vectors), recovery usually involves PCR amplification and/or cloning. However, it is possible to generate retroviral shuttle vectors that can be propagated either as viral stocks or as plasmids in E. coli. This makes it easy to recover either unintegrated or integrated viral DNA. We have prepared a set of RCASBP(A)-derived shuttle vectors, the RSVPs. These vectors are listed in Table 2; a more complete description is provided in Oh et al., 2002. Once embedded in the host genome, the provirus behaves like a cellular gene. For simple retroviruses, such as ASLVs, expression is entirely under the control of the host’s machinery. The RNA is transcribed by the host’s DNA-dependent RNA polymerase. Unless the experimentalist has inserted an internal promoter, there is, for simple retroviruses, one primary transcript that begins at the U3 R junction in the upstream LTR and terminates at the R U5 junction in the downstream LTR. This full-length RNA is exported from the nucleus and serves as genomic RNA and as the message for the Gag and Gag-Pol polyproteins. A portion of the full-length RNA is spliced to produce the message for the Env protein, and in the case of RSV and the RCAS vectors, there is a second spliced message (see Figure 2B below), which leads to the expression of the src gene in RSV or the inserted gene in RCAS. The messages are translated in the cytoplasm. The gag gene is the 5′-most gene in unspliced RNA. In the case of the ASLVs, the pol gene is in a different reading frame. During ~5% of Gag translation, a frameshift suppression event causes a ribosome near the gag-pol boundary to slip over into the pol gene. This leads to the synthesis of the Gag-Pol polyprotein. Gag and Gag-Pol self-assemble at the plasma membrane, picking up two copies of viral genomic RNA and some small host RNAs — in particular, the tRNA trp, which is used to initiate reverse transcription. The assembled virus buds through the plasma membrane of the host cell. In so doing, it not only acquires a membrane, but picks up the envelope glycoprotein along with it. Either during or shortly after budding, the viral protease cleaves the Gag and Gag-Pol polyproteins, giving rise to infectious virus. The newly budded virus cannot (usually) reinfect the cell that released it. Ordinarily, the infected cell produces enough of the envelope glycoprotein to block its own receptors, a process called receptor interference
#180 Michael
July 3, 2007

Harold. Since you claim to have treated HIV positives, please share with us how many of them died or suffered side effects from the meds you prescribed.

Were you one of the doctors prescribing high dosage AZT from 87 to 96?

Just how many patients have you lost there Harold?

Have you always practised medicine over the internet since retiring to people whose history you have not even taken or whose test results you have not seen?

Just where have you practiced medicine Dr. Harold?
#181 Roy Hinkley
July 3, 2007

Hey Michael,

I think we’d all enjoy hearing your thoughts on the outcome of the Parenzee appeal. How about it?
#182 Michael
July 3, 2007

I don’t know for sure who Harold is, but he ain’t no medical doctor, and he sure ain’t no healer. He may however be a witch doctor disguised as a pharma rep who is pretending to be a retired physician as he is obviously quite obsessed and threatened by Noreen and her health choices. He seems rather adept at trying to convince people that they or others will get sick or die unless they do what he says. That strategy probably works fairly well when peddling drugs.
#183 T. Bruce McNeely
July 3, 2007

Michael, you responded to me thusly:
I usually don’t respond well to people whose initial response to something I write is “BFD”. The reason is because this comes across to me as a rather juvenile response, and I immediately assume that I am probably dealing with a smart alecky know it all punky kid.

Now you have commented thusly:
I don’t know for sure who Harold is, but he ain’t no medical doctor, and he sure ain’t no healer. He may however be a witch doctor disguised as a pharma rep who is pretending to be a retired physician as he is obviously quite obsessed and threatened by Noreen and her health choices.

Obviously a mature response from a thoughtful adult person…
#184 Pope
July 3, 2007

Adele, the name is Goethe, not ‘Goether’, and no need to get so erm… personal, nobody’s gonna pick on you for being a bit silly. Not even Dr. Maniotis is an expert on everything that’s debated here.

Assuming Goether is the final authority on medical stuff in early 1800s what did his poison dispensers have to do with modern medicine? They were just herb women with more concentrated drugs

Goethe’s poison dispensers are the direct predecessors of todays AZT dispensers. They were not women and they didn’t deal much in dietary herbs.

You have to look later than Goether for the start of modern medicine. Oh and Mr. JEnsen when did Faust take place. Hint not the early 19th century

The question, Adele, is when was Faust written?

If I have to look later for the beginnings of modern medicine, it seems you do want to decide the cut off date regardless of what Noreen said doesn’t it? That date is a sociological event, not a medical/scientific one
#185 noreen Martin - the rock
July 3, 2007

Well, one thing is for sure, these HIV blogs are entertaining if nothing else.
#186 DT
July 3, 2007

The only thing that Maniotis has showed himself to be an expert on is the deliberate misinterpretaion of studies and fabricating “quotes” to suit himself. He is scientifically bankrupt.
#187 Pope
July 3, 2007

I correct myself on the sociological event to include better living standards and basic hygiene – which was largely a sociological event coupled with the popularity of the germ theory of disease.

Here’s the kind of people and practices Goethe refers to (more or less right century too)
http://barnesworld.blogs.com/barnes_world/2007/03/michael_geiger_.html
#188 Patriot Games
July 3, 2007

Adele said;

Not Andrew? You sounded like him. Hard to tell though when you denialists use a different name every post and all go on about the same thing.
.
AZT, a medical mistake that kills three hundred thousand, is this what you call the truth? Somebody had to be lying somewhere on this one.
.
That would be you. AZT did not kill three hundred thousand people. Maybe three hundred thousand people died of AIDS and had taken AZT sometime. That whole “after the fact thing”. Why parrot this number when you don’t know what you’re talking about. Everyone who died of AIDS also had a female mother. Does having a female mother cause AIDS?

As of 1992, the number quoted by John Lauritson was 150,000 deaths from AZT, which is half of 300,000 quoted, sorry for the error. However, the message remains the same.

Whoever you are based on the site you linked to you’re obviously a knee-jerk ultraconservative. Of course you don’t want women on contraceptives. You’d prefer they would have to get back-alley abortions too, and hopefully die, and then you’d have a more pure Christian society right?

Sorry to disappoint you, but I am in favor of contraception that is safer than synthetic hormones with fewer side effects, such as the diaphragm for example.

You don’t want women protected against HPV either because that might promote IMMORALITY.

I would be delighted to protect women from cervical cancer in their forties and fifties. However Gardasil injected in 11 year old girls has never been tested in this age group, and has never actually been shown to prevent cervical cancer when these 11 year olds reach their 40′s and 50s.

Unfortunately, the three 11 year old girls who died after Gardasil vaccination will never live to be protected from anything real or imaginary. The afforded protection is largely theoretical. The three deaths however are forever.

Gardasil is a huge experiment for which parents are paying $360 a pop.

Women are already well protected from Cervial Cancer by screening PAP smears, which, by the way, should be continued even with the Gardisil vaccination.

I am opposed to any form of sexual immorality, as well as corporate immorality as described by Michael Moore in his SICKO documentary of corporate abuses of the health care system.

And you want people with HIV to stay off meds becaus that will get rid of all sorts of people you don’t like.

You are quite correct in the last part of your statement, however it is the toxic HIV drug which delivers the iatrogenic genocide, not the absense of them which has been described by Michael as the basis for the long term non-progressors. These are people with HIV who live drug free. Many of them use selenium supplmentation. Although selenum is an inexpensive trace mineral, it has been extensively studied and shown to be beneficial. Since it occurs in nature it cannot be patented and the drug companies cannot make money on it, and are not interested in it.

More on the AZT Phase II trials

Oct 19 , 1987 John Lauritson on the Phase II AZT Trials
.
Regardless of whether or not there was collusion, the AZT trials were invalid, worthless, and fraudulent. “Fraudulent” is by no means too strong a word to use in describing a study in which false data were knowingly retained, and in which improprieties and violations of protocol were knowingly ignored. It is fraudulent to describe an unblinded study, which the AZT trials most certainly were, as being a “double-blind” study, as Margaret Fischl and Douglas Richman did in their NEJM reports. Either Fischl and Richman were unaware that the study had become hopelessly unblinded, in which case they are guilty of incompetence, or they did know and covered it up, in which case they are guilty of fraud.
..
Postscript: 9 March 1988
.
On 27 January 1988, Perri Peltz of NBC news did an exposé on AZT, which closely followed some of the points of my article (without giving me credit). NBC investigators independently found that:
.
1) The test became unblinded early on. Everyone knew who was getting what.
2) A chemist admitted analyzing medications for patients in the trials.
3) Patients in the trials shared medications.
4) There was mass tampering with the rules of the test – patients took other medications. Such violations of the rules of the test took place from coast to coast.
5) A government memo recommended that Boston be dropped from the study because of gross improprieties. Nevertheless, the bad data from this center were retained. The memo observed that if all patients with protocol violations were dropped, there wouldn’t be enough left in the study.
.
New York Native March 30 1992 john Lauritson
.
In fact, the Phase II trials remain the single most important test of AZT: they were the main basis for the drug’s approval by the FDA; they are still cited as proving that AZT “extends life”; they were one of the “historical controls” upon which approval of ddI was based – and they were fraudulent. Fraud in drug testing may be common but it should not be tolerated.
.
If there were justice in the world, the crooks in the FDA, NIAID, Burroughs Wellcome, and their accomplices in the medical profession would pay for their crimes. But it is more important now to save lives. Right now, well over 150,000 people are being poisoned by the nucleoside analogues AZT, ddI, and ddC. Most of these are gay men. We must all help sound the tocsin.
.
We must stop the genocide.

this document can be found at

reviewing aids DOT com and search for “AZT on Trial”
#189 Chris Noble
July 3, 2007

And he ain’t talking about herb-women either.

He isn’t talking about modern medicine either.

Das Widrige zusammengoß.

Da ward ein roter Leu,ein kühner Freier,
Im lauen Bad der Lilie vermählt,
Und beide dann mit offnem Flammenfeuer
Aus einem Brautgemach ins andere gequält.
Erschien darauf mit bunten Farben
Die junge Königin im Glas,
Hier war die Arzenei, die Patienten starben,
Und niemand fragte: wer genas?
So haben wir mit höllischen Latwergen
In diesen Tälern, diesen Bergen
Weit schlimmer als die Pest getobt.
Ich habe selbst den Gift an Tausende gegeben:
Sie welkten hin, ich muß erleben,
Daß man die frechen Mörder lobt.

You may be unable to tell the difference between alchemy and modern evidence based science but some of us can.

Goethe’s literature is a gift to mankind. His scientific theories such as his quaint ideas about colour theory are only interesting from a historical point of view.
#190 cooler
July 3, 2007

http://ahrp.blogspot.com/2007/05/gardasil-vaccine-so-far-3-deaths-and.html

3 deaths and hundreds of serious adverse effects to Gardsil. Oh wait the “experts” (Drug co hacks) hace reached a consensus……… SO JUST SHUTUP AND TAKE YOUR MEDICINE!
#191 cooler
July 3, 2007

have.

Source judicial watch
#192 Pope
July 3, 2007

Dr. Noble,

I don’t know if I shold feel flattered that you could be bothered looking up this quote in teh middle of a muh more important AZT and Gardasil discussion. You must be a completely mindless look-up-things robot after all these years.

I’m quite sure Goethe’s influence on for example Darwin is only of historical interest to you, but what does that have to do with anything?

The character, ‘Faust’, is indeed an alchemist, charlatan etc., that is so well known as to be proverbial even without the benefit of the extended quote in German, which doesn’t add much, my dear Dr. Noble.

Since large parts of Faust is written well before Adele’s cut off date for modern science, it can per definition not be about ‘modern science’ for you can it now?

What next, are you going to tell me that I cannot be talking about AIDS without HIV – per definition?
#193 apy
July 3, 2007

“This is an insult to nature as the body was meant to heal itself, when given a decent chance. How has mankind managed to survive all of these eons without the drug representative?”

This seems to make the assumption that nature wants everyone to be at optimal health. This seems very unlikely. If you remember, we already stated the average age of death was 40 years of age in 1880, medicine has brought it upto the 70′s in various countries. Medicine isn’t attempting to restore some broken balance and bring things back to normal, medicine is really upsetting the balance by attempting to extend our life beyond what it would naturally be, it appears. Most people see this as progress. There is no evidence that nature intends the body to heal itself if given a chance. It seems more likely that a species as a whole will not die out do to a disease, but hardly that everyone will make it.

Do you have any studies or evidence showing that, if left alone, nature is the caring nurse to every individual of a species?
#194 Chris Noble
July 3, 2007

I don’t know if I shold feel flattered that you could be bothered looking up this quote in teh middle of a muh more important AZT and Gardasil discussion. You must be a completely mindless look-up-things robot after all these years.

Why bring up Goethe at all? You’re not satisfied with abusing science you want to abuse literature as well?
#195 Richard Jefferys
July 4, 2007

There are no references or numbers or studies available as to how many LTNP’s there are, most likely for the very reasons that I stated above that this group is first of all a threat to the beliefs of the orthodoxy, and has also been for the most part completely ignored all along, and has also, for the most part, ignored all of the orthodoxy in return.

Here are a few studies (this is far from exhaustive, find them in PubMed and click on “related links” and you can find a lot more).

AIDS. 1993 Sep;7(9):1159-66.

The characterization of non-progressors: long-term HIV-1 infection with stable CD4+ T-cell levels.

Sheppard HW, Lang W, Ascher MS, Vittinghoff E, Winkelstein W.

OBJECTIVE: To identify and characterize individuals with long-term HIV-1 infection who have experienced little or no progressive CD4+ T-cell loss during follow-up. PATIENTS AND METHODS: The rate of CD4+ T-cell loss (CD4 slope) was determined for each of the 290 participants in the San Francisco Men’s Health Study who were seropositive at study entry in 1984. The study population was stratified, by CD4 slope, into 10 groups of 29 individuals and each group was characterized using a variety of cross-sectional and longitudinal laboratory measurements. RESULTS: Approximately 10% of the HIV-1-infected men experienced no net CD4+ T-cell loss during 78 months of follow-up. Compared with all other seropositive subjects, these ‘non-progressors’ were the extreme cases in a relatively continuous distribution of CD4 slopes, rather than a discrete subpopulation. Although they had no net cell loss, their mean CD4+ cell count was approximately 400 x 10(6)/l lower and their mean CD8+ cell count approximately 250 x 10(6)/l higher than seronegative subjects, suggesting early changes followed by stabilization. The CD4 slope was associated with the levels of beta 2-microglobulin, neopterin, p24 antibody, erythrocyte sedimentation rate, viral burden, and the proportion of HIV-1 isolates with tropism for the MT-2 T-cell line. Multivariate cluster analysis of these laboratory markers did not distinguish the non-progressors as a distinct subgroup. CONCLUSIONS: These findings support both a biphasic natural history and the suggestion that the broad range in HIV disease progression rates may be the result of several independent factors interacting in a variety of combinations. Recent changes in laboratory markers, known to predict both CD4+ cell loss and AIDS, suggest that non-progressors are undergoing slow HIV disease progression.

AIDS, August 1, 1994; 8(8): 1123-8.

Long-term HIV-1 infection without immunologic progression.

SP Buchbinder, MH Katz, NA Hessol, PM O’Malley, and SD Holmberg

OBJECTIVE: To identify and describe a subgroup of men infected with HIV for 10-15 years without immunologic progression, and to evaluate the effect of sexually transmitted diseases (STD) and recreational drug use on delayed HIV disease progression. DESIGN: Inception cohort study. SETTING: Municipal STD clinic. PARTICIPANTS: A total of 588 men with well documented dates of HIV seroconversion and 197 HIV-seronegative controls. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: AIDS, CD4+ count, rate of CD4+ cell loss, CD8+ count, beta 2-microglobulin, complete blood count, p24 antigen and HIV-related symptoms. RESULTS: Of 588 men, 69% had developed AIDS by 14 years after HIV seroconversion (95% confidence interval, 64-73%). Of 539 men with HIV seroconversion dates prior to 1983, 42 men (8%) were healthy long-term HIV-positives (HLP), HIV-infected greater or = 10 years without AIDS and with CD4+ counts above 500 x 10(6)/l. When compared with progressors (men with HIV seroconversion prior to 1983 but with AIDS or CD4+ counts less than 200 x 10(6)/l), HLP had a significantly slower rate of CD4+ decline (6 versus 85 x 10(6)/l cells/year), and less abnormal immunologic, hematologic and clinical parameters. However, when compared with HIV-uninfected controls, HLP demonstrated lower CD4+ counts and mild hematologic abnormalities. There were no consistent differences between HLP and progressors in prior exposure to recreational drugs or STD. CONCLUSION: There are individuals with long-term HIV infection who appear clinically and immunologically healthy 10-15 years after HIV seroconversion, with stable CD4+ counts. Lack of exposure to STD or recreational drugs does not appear to explain the delayed course of disease progression in HLP.

N Engl J Med. 1995 Jan 26;332(4):209-16.

Studies in subjects with long-term nonprogressive human immunodeficiency virus infection.

Pantaleo G, Menzo S, Vaccarezza M, Graziosi C, Cohen OJ, Demarest JF, Montefiori D, Orenstein JM, Fox C, Schrager LK, et al.

BACKGROUND. In a small percentage of persons infected with human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1), there is no progression of disease and CD4+ T-cell counts remain stable for many years. Studies of the histopathological, virologic, and immunologic characteristics of these persons may provide insight into the pathogenic mechanisms that lead to HIV disease and the protective mechanisms that prevent progression to overt disease. METHODS AND RESULTS. We studied 15 subjects with long-term nonprogressive HIV infection and 18 subjects with progressive HIV disease. Nonprogressive infection was defined as seven or more years of documented HIV infection, with more than 600 CD4+ T cells per cubic millimeter, no antiretroviral therapy, and no HIV-related disease. Lymph nodes from the subjects with nonprogressive infection had significantly fewer of the hyperplastic features, and none of the involuted features, characteristic of nodes from subjects with progressive disease. Plasma levels of HIV-1 RNA and the viral burden in peripheral-blood mononuclear cells were both significantly lower in the subjects with nonprogressive infection than in those with progressive disease (P = 0.003 and P = 0.015, respectively). HIV could not be isolated from the plasma of the former, who also had significantly higher titers of neutralizing antibodies than the latter. There was viral replication, however, in the subjects with nonprogressive infection, and virus was consistently cultured from mononuclear cells from the lymph nodes. In the lymph nodes virus “trapping” varied with the degree of formation of germinal centers, and few cells expressing virus were found by in situ hybridization. HIV-specific cytotoxic activity was detected in all seven subjects with nonprogressive infection who were tested. CONCLUSIONS. In persons who remain free of disease for many years despite HIV infection the viral load is low, but viral replication persists. Lymph-node architecture and immune function appear to remain intact.

N Engl J Med. 1995 Jan 26;332(4):201-8.

Virologic and immunologic characterization of long-term survivors of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 infection.

Cao Y, Qin L, Zhang L, Safrit J, Ho DD.

BACKGROUND. In most subjects infected with human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1), clinical or laboratory evidence of immunodeficiency develops within 10 years of seroconversion, but a few infected people remain healthy and immunologically normal for more than a decade. Studies of these subjects, termed long-term survivors, may yield important clues for the development of prophylactic and therapeutic interventions against the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. METHODS AND RESULTS. We studied 10 seropositive subjects who remained asymptomatic with normal and stable CD4+ lymphocyte counts despite 12 to 15 years of HIV-1 infection. Plasma cultures were uniformly negative for infectious virus. However, particle-associated HIV-1 RNA was detected in four subjects with a sensitive branched-DNA signal-amplification assay, whereas in five others the levels of HIV-1 RNA were too low to detect. Infectious HIV-1 was detected in peripheral-blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) of three subjects by standard limiting-dilution cultures, and infectious virus was recovered from another subject with use of a CD8-depleted culture. The other six subjects had no detectable infectious virus in their PBMC. A quantitative polymerase-chain-reaction assay revealed that all subjects had detectable but low titers of viral DNA in PBMC. Overall, the viral burden in the plasma and PBMC of long-term survivors was orders of magnitude lower than that typically found in subjects with progressive disease. There was no in vitro evidence of resistance by host CD4+ lymphocytes to HIV-1 infection. However, long-term survivors had a vigorous, virus-inhibitory CD8+ lymphocyte response and a strong neutralizing-antibody response. In two subjects the kinetics of viral replication were consistent with the presence of a substantially attenuated strain of HIV-1. CONCLUSIONS. Subjects who remain asymptomatic for many years despite HIV-1 infection have low levels of HIV-1 and a combination of strong virus-specific immune responses with some degree of attenuation of the virus.

J Immunol. 1996 Apr 1;156(7):2616-23.

Cytotoxic T lymphocytes in asymptomatic long-term nonprogressing HIV-1 infection. Breadth and specificity of the response and relation to in vivo viral quasispecies in a person with prolonged infection and low viral load.

Harrer T, Harrer E, Kalams SA, Barbosa P, Trocha A, Johnson RP, Elbeik T, Feinberg MB, Buchbinder SP, Walker BD.

Although vigorous activated and memory CTL have been associated with HIV-1 infection, data are lacking regarding the breadth of epitopes recognized in a given individual and the relationship to the viral quasispecies present in vivo. In this study we performed a detailed analysis of the HIV-1-specific CTL response in a seropositive person with documented HIV-1 infection of 15 yr duration, stable CD4 counts above 500 cells/ml, and viral load persistently below 500 molecules of RNA/ml of plasma. Epitope mapping studies revealed the presence of HLA class I-restricted CTL responses to six different epitopes in p17, p24, RT, Env, and Nef, which conferred broadly cross-reactive recognition of reported HIV-1 variants. Sequence analysis of autologous viruses revealed the absence of immune escape variants within five of the six epitopes. Despite consistently low viral RNA levels in plasma and viral DNA levels in PBMC, in vivo-activated circulating CTL were detected against three of the epitopes. Five of the six epitopes, including the three dominant epitopes, have been detected in persons with progressive disease, suggesting that nonprogressors may not target unique epitopes. This study demonstrates that HIV-1-specific CTL can be highly activated and broadly directed in the setting of an extremely low viral load, and that neither high viral load nor antigenic diversity is required for the generation of a multispecific CTL response. Although the detection of strong CTL responses, low viral load, and lack of immune escape are consistent with the hypothesis that CTL may contribute to lack of disease progression in this individual, the contribution of these responses to maintenance of the asymptomatic state remains to be determined.
#196 Richard Jefferys
July 4, 2007

Blood. 1997 Aug 1;90(3):1133-40.

Even individuals considered as long-term nonprogressors show biological signs of progression after 10 years of human immunodeficiency virus infection.

Lefrère JJ, Morand-Joubert L, Mariotti M, Bludau H, Burghoffer B, Petit JC, Roudot-Thoraval F.

Despite a decade of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) seropositivity, a few individuals termed as long-term nonprogressors (LTNPs) maintain a stable CD4+ T-cell count for a period of time. The aim of this study was to establish, through the sequential determination of all known predictors of HIV disease, the proportion of such patients having stringent criteria of true long-term nonprogression. Among 249 individuals who were HIV-infected and prospectively followed up over a 10-year period (1985 to 1995), 12 having a CD4+ T-cell count greater than 500/microL (LTNP I group) and 9 having a CD4+ T-cell count less than 500 but stable over time (LTNP II group) after at least 10 years of infection without intervention of antiviral therapy, were studied over the entire follow-up period. The plasma HIV RNA copy number and the serum concentrations of p24 antigen, each anti-HIV antibody, neopterin, beta-2-microglobulin, Immunoglobulin (Ig) G and IgA were determined every 18 months over the study period. Cellular and plasma viremias were cross-sectionaly assayed in all 21 patients. Only two patients had strictly no marker of progression over the follow-up period. They were the only ones who had, over the 10-year period, a viral copy number too low to be detected. The other patients had a viral copy number higher than 400/mL at at least one visit and increasing over the follow-up period, and they evidenced one or more markers of virological or immunological deterioration. Cellular viremia was positive in all patients but two, while plasma viremia was negative in all but one. The population of individuals termed as LTNPs is not virologically and immunologically homogeneous. The majority present biological signs of HIV disease progression. A new pattern of true LTNP can be drawn through stringent criteria based on the whole known predictors. This pattern appears to be rare in HIV-positive population.

J Clin Invest. 1997 Sep 15;100(6):1581-9.

Heterozygosity for a defective gene for CC chemokine receptor 5 is not the sole determinant for the immunologic and virologic phenotype of HIV-infected long-term nonprogressors.

Cohen OJ, Vaccarezza M, Lam GK, Baird BF, Wildt K, Murphy PM, Zimmerman PA, Nutman TB, Fox CH, Hoover S, Adelsberger J, Baseler M, Arthos J, Davey RT, Dewar RL, Metcalf J, Schwartzentruber DJ, Orenstein JM, Buchbinder S, Saah AJ, Detels R, Phair J, Rinaldo C, Margolick JB, Pantaleo G, Fauci AS.

HIV-1-infected long-term nonprogressors are a heterogeneous group of individuals with regard to immunologic and virologic markers of HIV-1 disease. CC chemokine receptor 5 (CCR5) has recently been identified as an important coreceptor for HIV-1 entry into CD4+ T cells. A mutant allele of CCR5 confers a high degree of resistance to HIV-1 infection in homozygous individuals and partial protection against HIV disease progression in heterozygotes. The frequency of CCR5 heterozygotes is increased among HIV-1- infected long-term nonprogressors compared with progressors; however, the host defense mechanisms responsible for nonprogression in CCR5 heterozygotes are unknown. We hypothesized that nonprogressors who were heterozygous for the mutant CCR5 gene might define a subgroup of nonprogressors with higher CD4+ T cell counts and lower viral load compared with CCR5 wild-type nonprogressors. However, in a cohort of 33 HIV-1-infected long-term nonprogressors, those who were heterozygous for the mutant CCR5 gene were indistinguishable from CCR5 wild-type nonprogressors with regard to all measured immunologic and virologic parameters. Although epidemiologic data support a role for the mutant CCR5 allele in the determination of the state of long-term nonprogression in some HIV-1- infected individuals, it is not the only determinant. Furthermore, long-term nonprogressors with the wild-type CCR5 genotype are indistinguishable from heterozygotes from an immunologic and virologic standpoint.

Science. 1997 Nov 21;278(5342):1447-50.

Vigorous HIV-1-specific CD4+ T cell responses associated with control of viremia.

Rosenberg ES, Billingsley JM, Caliendo AM, Boswell SL, Sax PE, Kalams SA, Walker BD.

Virus-specific CD4+ T helper lymphocytes are critical to the maintenance of effective immunity in a number of chronic viral infections, but are characteristically undetectable in chronic human immunodeficiency virus-type 1 (HIV-1) infection. In individuals who control viremia in the absence of antiviral therapy, polyclonal, persistent, and vigorous HIV-1-specific CD4+ T cell proliferative responses were present, resulting in the elaboration of interferon-gamma and antiviral beta chemokines. In persons with chronic infection, HIV-1-specific proliferative responses to p24 were inversely related to viral load. Strong HIV-1-specific proliferative responses were also detected following treatment of acutely infected persons with potent antiviral therapy. The HIV-1-specific helper cells are likely to be important in immunotherapeutic interventions and vaccine development.
#197 Richard Jefferys
July 4, 2007

Program Abstr 5th Conf Retrovir Oppor Infect Conf Retrovir Oppor Infect 5th 1998 Chic Ill. 1998 Feb 1-5; 5th: 92 (abstract no. 76).

HIV disease progression and associated genetic markers.

Buchbinder S, Vittinghoff E, Kaslow R, Keet I, O’Brien S, Carrington M.

Objectives: To describe HIV disease progression, nonprogression and associated genetic markers in the San Francisco City Clinic Cohort (SFCCC). Methods: Kaplan Meier methods were used to evaluate progression time to 1993 AIDS. Nonprogressors (NP) were HIV infected greater than 10 years with CD4 counts persistently greater than 500 cells/mm(3). HLA Class I, II and TAP were determined by molecular methods. Alleles and haplotypes associated with progression to AIDS in SFCCC or previously reported in other cohorts were evaluated using cross validation techniques separately in SFCCC, MACS, and DC Gay cohorts. Participants with fever protective than risk-associated HLA alleles were classified as higher risk. Results: Of 621 men with well characterized seroconversion, 87% developed AIDS by 17 years after infection. Of 597 men with 10 years infection, 12% were NP at 10 years but of this group, only 28% remained NP at 16 years. Four WA markers were associated with rapid progression and 2 with delayed progression in all 3 cohorts. The genetic risk classification was associated with HIV disease progression in SFCCC (logrank score p less than .0003). Of 11 NP with HLA typing, only 2 had any of the protective alleles, and an additional 4 had either the CCR5 or CCR2 polymorphisms associated with delayed progression. Conclusions: A small proportion of HIV-infected persons remain non-progressors by 18 years after infection. Only half of the nonprogressors had any of the identified protective genetic markers, suggesting that immunologic, virologic, or other genetic factors also play a role in very long-term nonprogression.

J Virol. 1999 Aug;73(8):6715-20.

Association between virus-specific cytotoxic T-lymphocyte and helper responses in human immunodeficiency virus type 1 infection.

Kalams SA, Buchbinder SP, Rosenberg ES, Billingsley JM, Colbert DS, Jones NG, Shea AK, Trocha AK, Walker BD.

Cellular immune responses are thought to be an important antiviral host defense, but the relationship between virus-specific T-helper and cytotoxic-T-lymphocyte (CTL) responses has not been defined. To investigate a potential link between these responses, we examined functional human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1)-specific memory CTL precursor frequencies and p24-specific proliferative responses in a cohort of infected untreated persons with a wide range of viral loads and CD4 cell counts. Levels of p24-specific proliferative responses positively correlated with levels of Gag-specific CTL precursors and negatively correlated with levels of plasma HIV-1 RNA. These data linking the levels of HIV-specific CTL with virus-specific helper cell function during chronic viral infection provide cellular immunologic parameters to guide therapeutic and prophylactic vaccine development.

Nat Immunol. 2002 Nov;3(11):1061-8. Epub 2002 Oct 7.

HIV-specific CD8+ T cell proliferation is coupled to perforin expression and is maintained in nonprogressors.

Migueles SA, Laborico AC, Shupert WL, Sabbaghian MS, Rabin R, Hallahan CW, Van Baarle D, Kostense S, Miedema F, McLaughlin M, Ehler L, Metcalf J, Liu S, Connors M.

Laboratory of Immunoregulation, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA.

It is unclear why immunological control of HIV replication is incomplete in most infected individuals. We examined here the CD8+ T cell response to HIV-infected CD4+ T cells in rare patients with immunological control of HIV. Although high frequencies of HIV-specific CD8+ T cells were present in nonprogressors and progressors, only those of nonprogressors maintained a high proliferative capacity. This proliferation was coupled to increases in perforin expression. These results indicated that nonprogressors were differentiated by increased proliferative capacity of HIV-specific CD8+ T cells linked to enhanced effector function. In addition, the relative absence of these functions in progressors may represent a mechanism by which HIV avoids immunological control.

J Immunol. 2002 Dec 1;169(11):6376-85.

Presence of HIV-1 Gag-specific IFN-gamma+IL-2+ and CD28+IL-2+ CD4 T cell responses is associated with nonprogression in HIV-1 infection.

Boaz MJ, Waters A, Murad S, Easterbrook PJ, Vyakarnam A.

Department of Immunology, Guy’s, King’s, and St. Thomas’ School of Medicine and Dentistry, King’s College London, United Kingdom.

HIV immunity is likely CD4 T cell dependent. HIV-specific CD4 T cell proliferative responses are reported to correlate inversely with virus load and directly with specific CD8 responses. However, the phenotype and cytokine profile of specific CD4 T cells that correlate with disease is unknown. We compared the number/function of Gag p24-specific CD4 T cells in 17 HIV-infected long-term nonprogressors (LTNPs) infected for a median of 14.6 years with those of 16 slow progressors (SPs), also HIV infected for a median of 14 years but whose CD4 count had declined to less than 500 cells/ micro l. Compared with SPs, LTNPs had higher numbers of specific CD4s that were double positive for IFN-gamma and IL-2 as well as CD28 and IL-2. However, CD4 T cells that produced IL-2 alone (IL-2(+)IFN-gamma(-)) or IFN-gamma alone (IFN-gamma(+)IL-2(-)) did not differ between LTNPs and SPs. The decrease in p24-specific CD28(+)IL-2(+) cells with a concomitant increase of p24-specific CD28(-)IL-2(+) cells occurred before those specific for a non-HIV Ag, CMV. p24-specific CD28(-)IL-2(+) cells were evident in LTNPs and SPs, whereas the CMV-specific CD28(-)IL-2(+) response was confined to SPs. The difference between LTNPs and SPs in the Gag p24 IFN-gamma(+)IL-2(+) response was maintained when responses to total Gag (p17 plus p24) were measured. The percentage and absolute number of Gag-specific IFN-gamma(+)IL-2(+) but not of IFN-gamma(+)IL-2(-) CD4s correlated inversely with virus load. The Gag-specific IFN-gamma(+)IL-2(+) CD4 response also correlated positively with the percentage of Gag-specific IFN-gamma(+) CD8 T cells in these subjects. Accumulation of specific CD28(-)IL-2(+) helpers and loss of IFN-gamma(+)IL-2(+) CD4 T cells may compromise specific CD8 responses and, in turn, immunity to HIV.

AIDS. 2003 Jun 13;17(9):1291-301.

Structural defects and variations in the HIV-1 nef gene from rapid, slow and non-progressor children.

Casartelli N, Di Matteo G, Argentini C, Cancrini C, Bernardi S, Castelli G, Scarlatti G, Plebani A, Rossi P, Doria M.

OBJECTIVES: Evaluation of sequence evolution as well as structural defects and mutations of the human immunodeficiency virus-type 1 (HIV-1) nef gene in relation to disease progression in infected children. DESIGN: We examined a large number of nef alleles sequentially derived from perinatally HIV-1-infected children with different rates of disease progression: six non-progressors (NPs), four rapid progressors (RPs), and three slow progressors (SPs). METHODS: Nef alleles (182 total) were isolated from patients’ peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs), sequenced and analysed for their evolutionary pattern, frequency of mutations and occurrence of amino acid variations associated with different stages of disease. RESULTS: The evolution rate of the nef gene apparently correlated with CD4+ decline in all progression groups. Evidence for rapid viral turnover and positive selection for changes were found only in two SPs and two RPs respectively. In NPs, a higher proportion of disrupted sequences and mutations at various functional motifs were observed. Furthermore, NP-derived Nef proteins were often changed at residues localized in the folded core domain at cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTL) epitopes (E(105), K(106), E(110), Y(132), K(164), and R(200)), while other residues outside the core domain are more often changed in RPs (A(43)) and SPs (N(173) and Y(214)). CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest a link between nef gene functions and the progression rate in HIV-1-infected children. Moreover, non-progressor-associated variations in the core domain of Nef, together with the genetic analysis, suggest that nef gene evolution is shaped by an effective immune system in these patients.

Blood. 2004 Feb 1;103(3):966-72. Epub 2003 Sep 4.

Skewed representation of functionally distinct populations of virus-specific CD4 T cells in HIV-1-infected subjects with progressive disease: changes after antiretroviral therapy.

Harari A, Petitpierre S, Vallelian F, Pantaleo G.

Laboratory of AIDS Immunopathogenesis, Division of Immunology and Allergy, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois, Rue Bugnon, 1011 Lausanne, Switzerland.

HIV-1- and cytomegalovirus (CMV)-specific CD4 T-cell-mediated antiviral immunity was evaluated by assessing the frequency of interleukin 2 (IL-2)- and interferon gamma (IFN-gamma)-secreting cells following antigen-specific stimulation in blood and lymph node. HIV-1-infected subjects with progressive disease at early stage of infection with no previous history of antiretroviral therapy (ART), subjects with nonprogressive disease, and HIV-negative subjects were studied. On the basis of the ability to secrete IL-2 and IFN-gamma, 3 functionally distinct populations of CD4 T cells were identified: (1) IL-2-secreting cells; (2) IL-2/IFN-gamma-secreting cells; and (3) IFN-gamma-secreting cells. CMV-specific CD4 T cells were almost equally distributed within the 3 functionally distinct cell populations in the 3 study groups as well as HIV-1-specific CD4 T cells in subjects with nonprogressive disease. However, a skewing toward IFN-gamma-secreting cells (70% of HIV-1-specific CD4 T cells) was observed in subjects with progressive disease, and IL-2- and IL-2/IFN-gamma-secreting cells were almost absent. The frequencies of IL-2- and of IL-2/IFN-gamma-secreting HIV-1-specific CD4 T cells were negatively correlated with the levels of viremia. Interestingly, prolonged ART was able to correct the skewed representation of different populations of HIV-1-specific CD4 T cells but was associated with only a partial recovery of IL-2-secreting cells. These results indicate that the composition of the pool of functionally distinct virus-specific CD4 T cells is important for virus control.

J Virol. 2005 Nov;79(22):14169-78.

Phenotypic, functional, and kinetic parameters associated with apparent T-cell control of human immunodeficiency virus replication in individuals with and without antiretroviral treatment.

Emu B, Sinclair E, Favre D, Moretto WJ, Hsue P, Hoh R, Martin JN, Nixon DF, McCune JM, Deeks SG.

The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-mediated immune response may be beneficial or harmful, depending on the balance between expansion of HIV-specific T cells and the level of generalized immune activation. The current study utilizes multicolor cytokine flow cytometry to study HIV-specific T cells and T-cell activation in 179 chronically infected individuals at various stages of HIV disease, including those with low-level viremia in the absence of therapy (“controllers”), low-level drug-resistant viremia in the presence of therapy (partial controllers on antiretroviral therapy [PCAT]), and high-level viremia (“noncontrollers”). Compared to noncontrollers, controllers exhibited higher frequencies of HIV-specific interleukin-2-positive gamma interferon-positive (IL-2(+) IFN-gamma(+)) CD4(+) T cells. The presence of HIV-specific CD4(+) IL-2(+) T cells was associated with low levels of proliferating T cells within the less-differentiated T-cell subpopulations (defined by CD45RA, CCR7, CD27, and CD28). Despite prior history of progressive disease, PCAT patients exhibited many immunologic characteristics seen in controllers, including high frequencies of IL-2(+) IFN-gamma(+) CD4(+) T cells. Measures of immune activation were lower in all CD8(+) T-cell subsets in controllers and PCAT compared to noncontrollers. Thus, control of HIV replication is associated with high levels of HIV-specific IL-2(+) and IFN-gamma(+) CD4(+) T cells and low levels of T-cell activation. This immunologic state is one where the host responds to HIV by expanding but not exhausting HIV-specific T cells while maintaining a relatively quiescent immune system. Despite a history of advanced HIV disease, a subset of individuals with multidrug-resistant HIV exhibit an immunologic profile comparable to that of controllers, suggesting that functional immunity can be reconstituted with partially suppressive highly active antiretroviral therapy.

AIDS. 2005 Feb 18;19(3):261-71.

Different subsets of peripheral blood dendritic cells show distinct phenotypic and functional abnormalities in HIV-1 infection.

Almeida M, Cordero M, Almeida J, Orfao A.

OBJECTIVES: To analyse the distribution, expression of chemokine receptors and ex vivo production of inflammatory cytokines by peripheral blood (PB) monocytes and DC in HIV-1+ individuals. DESIGN: Dendritic cells (DC) play an important role in the establishment and dissemination of HIV infection. DC interaction with HIV depends on expression of HIV receptors and co-receptors. Accumulating evidence supports the notion that DC functionality is impaired in HIV-1+ patients. METHODS: PB samples from 30 naive-treated HIV-1+ progressors were studied. Additionally, 10 adult healthy volunteers (AHV), seven Hepatitis C virus positive (HCV+)/HIV-1- patients and five long-term non-progressor HIV-1+ patients (HIV-1+LTNP) were included as controls. Flow cytometry immunophenotyping was used for the identification, enumeration and characterization of monocytes and DC. RESULTS: PB myeloid DC (mDC) and plasmacytoid DC (pDC) were significantly decreased in HIV-1+ progressors, while unaltered in HIV-1+LTNP. The expression of CXCR2 and CXCR4 and of CXCR4 and CCR5 were severely altered on PB mDC and pDC from HIV-1+ progressors, respectively. By contrast, both the expression of the chemokine receptors analysed and the numbers of CD16+ DC in HIV-1+ progressors were not different from AHV, while altered in HCV+/HIV-1- and HIV-1+LTNP. Furthermore, PB monocytes and DC from HIV-1+ progressors spontaneously produced inflammatory cytokines, in contrast with AHV. CONCLUSIONS: These results support the existence of a selective interaction between HIV-1 and both mDC and pDC, associated with HCV co-infection-independent spontaneous production of inflammatory cytokines, reflecting the occurrence of in vivo activation of the immune system, which might further contribute to the impaired DC functionality.

J Virol. 2006 May;80(10):4758-70.

Neutralizing antibodies do not mediate suppression of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 in elite suppressors or selection of plasma virus variants in patients on highly active antiretroviral therapy.

Bailey JR, Lassen KG, Yang HC, Quinn TC, Ray SC, Blankson JN, Siliciano RF.

Neutralizing antibodies (NAb) against autologous virus can reach high titers in human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1)-infected patients with progressive disease. Less is known about the role of NAb in HIV-1-infected patients with viral loads of less than 50 copies/ml of plasma, including patients on effective highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) and elite suppressors, who control HIV-1 replication without antiretroviral therapy. In this study, we analyzed full-length env sequences from plasma viruses and proviruses in resting CD4(+) T cells of HAART-treated patients, elite suppressors, and untreated HIV-1-infected patients with progressive disease. For each patient group, we assessed plasma virus neutralization by autologous, contemporaneous plasma. The degree of env diversity, the number of N-linked glycosylation sites, and the lengths of variable loops were all lower in elite suppressors than in HAART-treated and untreated viremic patients. Both elite suppressors and HAART-treated patients had lower titers of NAb against HIV-1 lab strains than those of untreated viremic patients. Surprisingly, titers of NAb against autologous, contemporaneous plasma viruses were similarly low in chronic progressors, elite suppressors, and HAART-treated patients. In elite suppressors and HAART-treated patients, titers of NAb against autologous plasma viruses also did not differ significantly from titers against autologous proviruses from resting CD4(+) T cells. These results suggest that high-titer NAb are not required for maintenance of viral suppression in elite suppressors and that NAb do not select plasma virus variants in most HAART-treated patients. Both drug-mediated and natural suppression of HIV-1 replication to levels below 50 copies/ml may limit the stimulation and maintenance of effective NAb responses.

J Exp Med. 2006 May 15;203(5):1357-69. Epub 2006 May 8.

Maintenance of viral suppression in HIV-1-infected HLA-B*57+ elite suppressors despite CTL escape mutations.

Bailey JR, Williams TM, Siliciano RF, Blankson JN.

Rare human immunodeficiency virus 1-infected individuals, termed elite suppressors (ES), maintain plasma virus levels of less than 50 copies/ml and normal CD4 counts without therapy. The major histocompatibility complex class I allele group human histocompatibility leukocyte antigen (HLA)-B*57 is overrepresented in this population. Mutations in HLA-B*57-restricted epitopes have been observed in ES, but their significance has remained unclear. Here we investigate the extent and impact of cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) escape mutations in HLA-B*57+ ES. We provide the first direct evidence that most ES experience chronic low level viremia. Sequencing revealed a striking discordance between the genotypes of plasma virus and archived provirus in resting CD4+ T cells. Mutations in HLA-B*57-restricted Gag epitopes were present in all viruses from plasma but were rare in proviruses, suggesting powerful selective pressure acting at these epitopes. Surprisingly, strong CD8+ T cell interferon-gamma responses were detected against some mutant epitopes found in plasma virus, suggesting the development of de novo responses to viral variants. In some individuals, relative CD8+ T cell interleukin-2 responses showed better correlation with the selection observed in vivo. Thus, analysis of low level viremia reveals an unexpectedly high level of CTL escape mutations reflecting selective pressure acting at HLA-B*57-restricted epitopes in ES. Continued viral suppression probably reflects CTL responses against unmutated epitopes and residual or de novo responses against epitopes with escape mutations.

Blood. 2006 Jun 15;107(12):4781-9. Epub 2006 Feb 7.

HIV nonprogressors preferentially maintain highly functional HIV-specific CD8+ T cells.

Betts MR, Nason MC, West SM, De Rosa SC, Migueles SA, Abraham J, Lederman MM, Benito JM, Goepfert PA, Connors M, Roederer M, Koup RA.

Establishing a CD8(+) T cell-mediated immune correlate of protection in HIV disease is crucial to the development of vaccines designed to generate cell-mediated immunity. Historically, neither the quantity nor breadth of the HIV-specific CD8(+) T-cell response has correlated conclusively with protection. Here, we assess the quality of the HIV-specific CD8(+) T-cell response by measuring 5 CD8(+) T-cell functions (degranulation, IFN-gamma, MIP-1beta, TNF-alpha, and IL-2) simultaneously in chronically HIV-infected individuals and elite nonprogressors. We find that the functional profile of HIV-specific CD8(+) T cells in progressors is limited compared to that of nonprogressors, who consistently maintain highly functional CD8(+) T cells. This limited functionality is independent of HLA type and T-cell memory phenotype, is HIV-specific rather than generalized, and is not effectively restored by therapeutic intervention. Whereas the total HIV-specific CD8(+) T-cell frequency did not correlate with viral load, the frequency and proportion of the HIV-specific T-cell response with highest functionality inversely correlated with viral load in the progressors. Thus, rather than quantity or phenotype, the quality of the CD8(+) T-cell functional response serves as an immune correlate of HIV disease progression and a potential qualifying factor for evaluation of HIV vaccine efficacy.

J Immunol. 2006 Sep 15;177(6):3893-902.

Strong TCR conservation and altered T cell cross-reactivity characterize a B*57-restricted immune response in HIV-1 infection.

Gillespie GM, Stewart-Jones G, Rengasamy J, Beattie T, Bwayo JJ, Plummer FA, Kaul R, McMichael AJ, Easterbrook P, Dong T, Jones EY, Rowland-Jones SL.

HLA-B*57 is associated with slower disease progression to AIDS, and CD8+ T cell responses to B*57-restricted epitopes are thought to contribute to this protective effect. In this study, we evaluate the B*57-restricted p24 KAFSPEVIPMF (KF11) immune response which is immunodominant during chronic infection. Previously, we observed that the KF11 clade variants KGFNPEVIPMF [A2G,S4N] and KAFNPEIIMPF [S4N,V7I], sharing a position 4 mutation, are differentially recognized by KF11-specific T cells. By combining structural and cellular studies, we now demonstrate that the KF11 and [A2G,S4N] epitopes induce distinct functional responses in [A2G,S4N] and KF11-specific T cells, respectively, despite minimal structural differences between the individual B*57-peptide complexes. Recently, we also elucidated the highly distinct structure of KF11 in complex with B*5703, and have now characterized the CD8+ T cell repertoire recognizing this epitope. We now report striking features of TCR conservation both in terms of TCR Valpha and Vbeta chain usage, and throughout the hypervariable region. Collectively, our findings highlight unusual features of the B*5701/B*5703-KF11-specific immune responses which could influence disease progression and that might be important to consider when designing future vaccine regimens.

J Virol. 2006 Nov;80(21):10663-74. Epub 2006 Aug 30.

Nef alleles from human immunodeficiency virus type 1-infected long-term-nonprogressor hemophiliacs with or without late disease progression are defective in enhancing virus replication and CD4 down-regulation.

Crotti A, Neri F, Corti D, Ghezzi S, Heltai S, Baur A, Poli G, Santagostino E, Vicenzi E.

Infection with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-encoding defective nef variants may contribute to a relatively benign course of disease in a minority of long-term nonprogressors (LTNP). We have examined the functions of nef alleles from six individuals belonging to the same cohort of hemophiliacs infected with HIV-1 prior to 1985 and classified as LTNP in 1995. Three out of six individuals have progressed to HIV disease (late progressors [LP]), whereas the three remainders have maintained their LTNP status at least up to 2003. The nef alleles were obtained from both plasma virus and peripheral blood mononuclear cells of all six individuals in 1995 and 1998. The proportion of sequences containing mutations not yielding Nef expression significantly diminished in 1998 versus that in 1995. Several previously defined functional regions of intact nef alleles were highly conserved. However, the major variant obtained in 1998 from plasma RNA of five out of six individuals significantly reduced HIV infectivity/replication and impaired Nef-mediated CD4 but not major histocompatibility complex class I antigen down-modulation from the cell surface. Thus, functional alterations of the nef gene are present in both LP and LTNP, suggesting that Nef defectiveness in vitro is not necessarily associated with the long-term maintenance of LTNP status. Of interest is the fact that isolates from three out of three LP showed a dual CCR5/CXCR4 coreceptor use (R5X4), in contrast to those from LTNP, which were exclusively R5. Thus, in vivo evolution of gp120 Env to CXCR4 use appears to be associated with HIV disease progression in individuals infected with nef-defective viruses.

J Virol. 2007 Mar;81(5):2508-18. Epub 2006 Dec 6.

Isolation and characterization of replication-competent human immunodeficiency virus type 1 from a subset of elite suppressors.

Blankson JN, Bailey JR, Thayil S, Yang HC, Lassen K, Lai J, Gandhi SK, Siliciano JD, Williams TM, Siliciano RF.

Elite suppressors (ES) are untreated human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1)-infected individuals who control viremia to levels below the limit of detection of current assays. The mechanisms involved in this control have not been fully elucidated. Several studies have demonstrated that some ES are infected with defective viruses, but it remains unclear whether others are infected with replication-competent HIV-1. To answer this question, we used a sensitive coculture assay in an attempt to isolate replication-competent virus from a cohort of 10 ES. We successfully cultured six replication-competent isolates from 4 of the 10 ES. The frequency of latently infected cells in these patients was more than a log lower than that seen in patients on highly active antiretroviral therapy with undetectable viral loads. Full-length sequencing of all six isolates revealed no large deletions in any of the genes. A few mutations and small insertions and deletions were found in some isolates, but phenotypic analysis of the affected genes suggested that their function remained intact. Furthermore, all six isolates replicated as well as standard laboratory strains in vitro. The results suggest that some ES are infected with HIV-1 isolates that are fully replication competent and that long-term immunologic control of replication-competent HIV-1 is possible.

Blood. 2007 Jun 1;109(11):4671-8. Epub 2007 Feb 1.

PD-1 up-regulation is correlated with HIV-specific memory CD8+ T-cell exhaustion in typical progressors but not in long-term nonprogressors.

Zhang JY, Zhang Z, Wang X, Fu JL, Yao J, Jiao Y, Chen L, Zhang H, Wei J, Jin L, Shi M, Gao GF, Wu H, Wang FS.

The immunoreceptor PD-1 is significantly up-regulated on exhausted CD8+ T cells during chronic viral infections such as HIV-1. However, it remains unknown whether PD-1 expression on CD8+ T cells differs between typical progressors (TPs) and long-term nonprogressors (LTNPs). In this report, we examined PD-1 expression on HIV-specific CD8+ T cells from 63 adults with chronic HIV infection. We found that LTNPs exhibited functional HIV-specific memory CD8+ T cells with markedly lower PD-1 expression. TPs, in contrast, showed significantly up-regulated PD-1 expression that was closely correlated with a reduction in CD4 T-cell number and an elevation in plasma viral load. Importantly, PD-1 up-regulation was also associated with reduced perforin and IFN-gamma production, as well as decreased HIV-specific effector memory CD8+ T-cell proliferation in TPs but not LTNPs. Blocking PD-1/PD-L1 interactions efficiently restored HIV-specific CD8+ T-cell effector function and proliferation. Taken together, these findings confirm the hypothesis that high PD-1 up-regulation mediates HIV-specific CD8+ T-cell exhaustion. Blocking the PD-1/PD-L1 pathway may represent a new therapeutic option for this disease and provide more insight into immune pathogenesis in LTNPs.

Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2007 Apr 17;104(16):6776-81. Epub 2007 Apr 11.

HIV controllers exhibit potent CD8 T cell capacity to suppress HIV infection ex vivo and peculiar cytotoxic T lymphocyte activation phenotype.

Sáez-Cirión A, Lacabaratz C, Lambotte O, Versmisse P, Urrutia A, Boufassa F, Barré-Sinoussi F, Delfraissy JF, Sinet M, Pancino G, Venet A; Agence Nationale de Recherches sur le Sida EP36 HIV Controllers Study Group.

Some rare HIV-1-infected individuals, referred to as HIV controllers (HIC), have persistently undetectable plasma viral load in the absence of therapy. This control of HIV-1 replication has been associated with a strong, multifunctional specific CD8(+) T cell response. However, no direct link between this immune response and the control of viremia has so far been provided. We investigated parameters of specific CD8(+) T cell response and in vitro susceptibility to HIV-1 infection in 11 HIC. We found high frequencies of HIV-specific CD8(+) T cells. Interestingly, these cells expressed the activation marker HLA-DR but not CD38. This unique phenotype differentiates HIV-specific CD8(+) T cells from HIC and noncontroller subjects and likely reflects a high potential to expand upon exposure to antigen and a capacity to exert effector functions. Accordingly, although CD4(+) T cells from HIC were fully susceptible to HIV-1 superinfection, their CD8(+) T cells effectively suppressed HIV-1 infection. Remarkably, this potent anti-HIV activity was observed without prior stimulation of CD8(+) T cells. This activity was not mediated by secreted inhibitory factors but was due to the elimination of infected CD4(+) T cells and was observed only with autologous CD4(+) T cells, indicating an HLA-restricted cytotoxic mechanism. This constitutive antiviral capacity of CD8(+) T cells could account for the control of viral replication in HIC.

J Virol. 2007 May 30; [Epub ahead of print]

Low Immune Activation Despite High Levels of Pathogenic HIV-1 Results in Long-Term Asymptomatic Disease.

Choudhary SK, Vrisekoop N, Jansen CA, Otto SA, Schuitemaker H, Miedema F, Camerini D.

Long-term asymptomatic HIV-infected individuals (LTA) usually have low viral load and low immune activation. To discern whether viral load or immune activation is dominant in determining progression to AIDS, we studied three exceptional LTA with high viral load. HIV-1 isolates from these LTA were as pathogenic as viruses from progressors in organ culture. Despite high viral load, these LTA had low levels of proliferating and activated T cells compared to progressors, like other LTA. In contrast to progressors, HIV-specific CD4(+) T cell responses in these LTA were maintained. Thus, low immune activation despite high viral load preserves HIV specific T cell responses and resulted in a long-term asymptomatic phenotype.
#198 DT
July 4, 2007

Interesting stuff Richard, particularly how more recent studies put the reasons for non/slow progression firmly into the host immune response camp and show virulence/replication fitness has little to do with it. The other point is that many are confused as to the precise definition of LTNP or elite controllers. Many denialists assume that these individuals are those who are largely asymptomatic after around 10-15 years of infection. Up to 50% of all patients will fit into this category, so they are indeed “common”. But this is not what LTNPs actually are. I am afraid that to find out more, the denialists will have to actually read some studies for a change instead of relying on their faulty gut feelings and hand-me-down grade one science culled from denialist web sites.

Of course, you could point to hundreds of scientific studies on non progressors, but the denialists will just blank their minds to them and chant their tired mantra of “there are no studies on non progressors because the orthodoxy is ignoring them”. I sincerely doubt one single denialist who posts here will bother to read any of these abstracts yo cite, let alone one of the actual papers. How refreshing it would be to have one of them discuss or debate the science for a change, instead of spamming the board with their junk. Here’s a challenge to them – go on, surprise us all.
#199 Luna_the_cat
July 4, 2007

Seriously, thank you, Richard Jefferys. I think it’s safe to say that many people here know that, far from “ignoring” non-progressors, many medical research teams were on the lookout for them from the early days of AIDS research, and have always been thrilled to find a new group, because they offer clues as to defense against the virus. We know because we’ve seen the level of effort that is going into finding treatment or even possible cure or possible vaccines, and also just what makes that tricky. And here you have presented a few of the studies the denialists claim don’t exist!

I also do not expect this to be acknowledged in any way by the denialists, though. I can’t say I’ve seen anyone on that side of this “debate” openly acknowledge when they are shown to lie or simply be mistaken. I don’t know if it is deliberate or unintentional, due to simply not understanding. I do know it’s easier and more emotionally appealing to keep claiming that it’s all a conspiracy to keep people dying…..

As a side note, if one takes the paleolithic hunter-gatherers as being humanity’s “most natural” state of being and era, then going by all the skeletons which have been recovered, the average age of death was 30-33, and this was worldwide. In the neolithic, with the advent of agriculture, the population grew because women had more babies, but the average lifespan dropped to about 20. By the iron age, life expectency had risen again to about 35, and it then fluctuated between 35-40 in various areas of the world for the next few thousand years. It started rising this century. There is a rather interesting survey paper here:
http://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/seminarpapers/dg09102006.pdf

All in all, I would have to say that if one assumes that the physical reality of the ancient remains we find has any validity, then there isn’t any particular evidence that nature “wants” us to have long and healthy lifespans, or that nature particularly cares for us and that a “natural” lifestyle is healthier than modern medicine. In fact, the “natural” life seemed to be anything but healthy, going by detected levels of inflammation response, parasitic infection, skeletal deterioration from infection, degenerative joint disease, and evidence of severe iron deficiency anemia with all the attendant ills that brings; a “healthy” life in which we do not have a series of parasites, infections, and nutritional deficiencies would appear to be quite unnatural!

Going by those “natural” lifespans of the paleolithic, I would have been long dead by now, as would most of the people on this forum.

–noreen, I’m curious. Is there any particular physical evidence or line of reasoning which would force you to re-evaluate what you think about medicine and health? Or have you made up your mind, and there is nothing anyone can say or show you that would make you change it?
#200 noreen Martin- The Rock of Gibraltar
July 4, 2007

Noreen would say that there have been groups of people on the planet who have lived well over one-hundred years such as the Balkans, Brazalians and people in Northern India, who were known to live 150 to 190 years. And I forgot to mention Thomas Parr and some of the Chinese.

I would say that Dr. McCarrison was sent by the British government for ten years to perform feeding experiments on a large scale and he found that any disease could be cured by diet and health habits. He also found that people in India who lived and ate according to Natural Law lived up to 190 years.

I would say that doctors Tilden and Vos had great cures by practicing the “Unity of Disease” theory, many of these patients were given-up to die.

I would also say that McCollum’s, fourteen years of feeding tests on 4,000 animals, upset the notion to what is the cause of sickness. He and other scientists believed that “health is natural.” They found that people will live less than one-half their natural span of life when not eating a proper diet.

Other incidents in history have proven this too be tragically so, like the “Konzprinz Wilhem” and the “Madiera-Mamore” Cases. This is precisely what is going on in Africa and other places on the globe to those, who are undernourished but hey, let’s just give them toxic drugs, the answer for what ails you.
#201 Luna_the_cat
July 4, 2007

Odd how these remarkable lifespans remain unrecorded by any verifiable records. I have seen them repeated as gospel truth on a number of “alternative medicine” websites, but have never seen any verifiable physical evidence of the existance of such long-lived people anywhere. Oldest verified lifespan was, I believe, under 120, and that is quite exceptional. Mythical populations in remote locations whose existance is only documented on “alternative” websites don’t stack up to dead bodies around the world and centuries of detailed paper records, for those of us who really do value verifiable evidence.

Quoting turn-of-the-century research which demonstrated the necessity of vitamins — well known to medical science, thanks — does not support the assertion that all disease is the result of poor diet, or not living by “Natural Law”. There are diseases of deficiency. This is more than well known. And having good nutrition helps one’s overall health and immune robustness. This, too, is uncontroversial and well known, and I know vastly more conventional medicine doctors who give up counselling people on eating a healthier diet because they don’t get listened to, than doctors who don’t think that a healthy diet is important. But again, what is known about nutrition does not support any assertion that ALL disease is caused or fixed by diet and nutrition, and in fact there is that pesky physical evidence that this is not the case. To misrepresent medical science this way is despicable. It’s lying to people.

Yes, yes, yes and yes again — eat healthy. But eating healthy is not some miraculous cure for everything which goes wrong. For heavens sake, look at veterinary medicine; the best, most ideal diets for livestock in the world didn’t do half so much for treating illnesses in herds as the advent of antibiotics.
#202 Luna_the_cat
July 4, 2007

Incidentally, oh troll-of-many-names, do you have any comment to make on the multiple papers above which demonstrate studies of non-progressors?
#203 Patriot Games
July 4, 2007

Richard Jeffreys said:

There are no references or numbers or studies available as to how many LTNP’s there are,
.
Here are a few studies (this is far from exhaustive, find them in PubMed and click on “related links” and you can find a lot more).

The point being made was NOT ” lack of publications dealing with LTNP”, the point was ” LACK OF KNOWLEDGE of the NUMBERS of LTNPs in the population“.

Some say that LTNP are “rare”, some say 0.3 percent , some 3 per cent , some 5 per cent, and the first reference you listed gave us a number of 10 per cent.

RESULTS: Approximately 10% of the HIV-1-infected men experienced no net CD4+ T-cell loss during 78 months of follow-up.

If 10 per cent is the number, then this is much higher than self proclaimed HIV experts like John Moore have been using, and others who claim that LTNP’s are quite “rare”. Whatever that means. The point is we don’t know the numbers. And we should. These numbers vary depending on the definition of the LTNP’s and the composition of the small study groups.

Again, we don’t really know much about this group in terms of relative numbers in the population at large or in the population identified as HIV , and we should. After all, 8 billion a year should be enough to figure this out.

The Bailey article found,

We provide the first direct evidence that most ES experience chronic low level viremia. Sequencing revealed a striking discordance between the genotypes of plasma virus and archived provirus in resting CD4+ T cells.

This is rather bizarre, that the plasma virus is not the same virus as the one found in the T cells. Could anyone explain that?

Many of them discuss CD8 cells and how they seem to work so well in LTNPs.

Betts article,

We find that the functional profile of HIV-specific CD8(+) T cells in progressors is limited compared to that of nonprogressors, who consistently maintain highly functional CD8(+) T cells.

“Several studies have demonstrated that some ES are infected with defective viruses”, so Blankson dealt with this question of, could the LTNPs have replication incompetent virus?

They cultured virus in 6 of 10 LTNP patients and found these cases DID HAVE replication competent virus, and full length sequencing showed no mutations to suggest a defective virus.

Choudhary showed that the HIV found in LTNP was the same as “pathogenic” HIV.

What does this tell us? It tells us that we have only scratched the surface, and we need to devote an order of magnitude more resources to the LTNP question.

for more info see www DOT reviewing aids DOT com
#204 noreen
July 4, 2007

Some of you are clueless. I don’t find my informatiion on “alternative” website but from respectable authors of the past. Some of you think that those who wrote and found this to be true don’t count because they cannot be found on google.

Numerous feeding experiments have been done on animals and they do fare better on a nutritious diet. No one is saying that drugs don’t work, just that it takes more than drugs to live a healthy life-style, which again makes my point, if one lives according to the natural laws of health, then one wouldn’t need these drugs in the first place. Germs cannot get a strong-hold in a healthy environment.

I will come back here in December, five months from now. Due to family issues, finishing a book, a husband, the cats and building a house leaves little spare time. Best of health to all of you!
#205 harold
July 4, 2007

Patriot Games –

I can’t tell if you’re serious or joking.

What you’ve posted is nothing but a brief textbook description of some biology common to all retroviruses.

Here’s a link that leads to a 2005 review article with a decent summary of how HIV destroys CD4+ cells.

Although much more extensive than what you posted, this is a review article, probably written 3 years ago. There have probably been some corrections and additions since then. But it’s a start.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3867/is_200504/ai_n13638698
#206 harold
July 4, 2007

noreen –

if one lives according to the natural laws of health, then one wouldn’t need these drugs in the first place. Germs cannot get a strong-hold in a healthy environment.

I must partly disagree with this statement.

It is certainly true that a person who takes care of themself can resist most infectious disease far better. I strongly agree that a healthy diet and lifestyle are extremely beneficial in your case.

It is not true that there is any diet or lifestyle which is a magic bullet against pathogens. (You are already HIV-positive at any rate.)

Obviously, you have committed to a path, and it is unlikely that a stranger on the internet can change your mind.

Still, I would like to remind you of one thing. You are the only person here who has any serious personal stake in this discussion. I don’t know you, neither do the “denier” posters. I don’t have any financial stake in drug companies, of course, but even if I did, it would hardly motivate me to waste my time here. Some of the “denier” posters may make money from activities related to their views, most probably don’t.

In December, most of us won’t remember to check this blog, won’t notice if you aren’t back, won’t know or be affected by it if you die.

You are the one with serious choices to make.

This really is my last post (even though it will attract a vast number of over-the-top hateful replies, I’m going to let that go). I wish you well, and I hope that you make the choice that is best for yourself and the people who care about you, without letting ego or denial get in the way.

Good luck.
#207 Dale
July 4, 2007

Patriot Games,

While I agree with you that more studies on LNTP might be informative as would having a better estimate of their numbers, I am curious as to how you would propose getting a better estimate. As long as HIV testing is voluntary the numbers are going to be hard to come by, particularly since it is still the case that somewhere between one half and one third of HIV positive individuals still don’t get tested until they have already developed symptoms.
#208 Richard Jefferys
July 4, 2007

It tells us that we have only scratched the surface, and we need to devote an order of magnitude more resources to the LTNP question.

for more info see www DOT reviewing aids DOT com

For more info, see a site that doesn’t believe any resources should be spent studying HIV because the people that put it together have already decided HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. Wacky.

I’d suggest:

for more info see www DOT ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez

With this post and your comment about sexual immorality, I am reminded of this person:

http://www.henryhbauer.homestead.com/

I perhaps should be grateful that for the first – and probably last – time, a denialist paused to mull the issue of T cell immunology. Anyone genuinely interested in the topic, of course, would have availed themselves of the literature but it seems that the blog-posting denialist prefers to endlessly posture and ask to be spoon-fed the science (before regurgitating it as an ugly, misinterpreted mess).

If you actually look at the papers, you’ll see that large cohorts have been followed over time. In the San Francisco Men’s Health Study, 12% met the definition of non-progression at 10 years, 3% at 16 years. It is this type of data that has shown that non progressors are not a fixed proportion of the population. There are multiple other huge cohorts, like the Swiss HIV Cohort (~3% LTNP). A study published in an obscure journal called Science in 1997 pooled data from four cohorts to look at the influence of CCR5 and CCR2 genotypes on progression and reported that 34/891 (3.8%) people with a known date of seroconversion had not progressed to AIDS after more than 16 years.

This is why people tend to estimate the frequency of LTNP at around 1-5%, it’s based on having read the relevant literature.

More information on the elite controller study is available here:

http://www.massgeneral.org/aids/hiv_elite_controllers.asp

They’re aiming to collect 1,000 samples, the last update I heard was in March and they’d collected ~300.
#209 Pope
July 4, 2007

Mr. Jefferys,

What you have posted so far is all very interesting and scientific, and, I’m sure, proves all your pet notions about denialists by merely being posted.

However, I don’t think Patriot games implied that the estimates of the frequency of LTNPs were not based on ‘the literature’. To the contrary he specifically said,

The point being made was NOT ” lack of publications dealing with LTNP”, the point was ” LACK OF KNOWLEDGE of the NUMBERS of LTNPs in the population”.

Which means that, even though we gladly accept you’ve all read understood and assimilated every single HIV paper, and that denialists don’t have one scientific bone in their collective body, there is a lack of knowledge in the literature if you will about the numbers of LTNPs in the population

So I take it your position, Mr Jefferys, once we’re past all the ad homs and logical disconnects in your argumentation, is that there is no such lack of knowledge about the numbers of LTNPs?
#210 DT
July 4, 2007

I should remind you that the original quote was

“There are no references or numbers or studies available as to how many LTNP’s there are, most likely for the very reasons that I stated above that this group is first of all a threat to the beliefs of the orthodoxy, and has also been for the most part completely ignored all along, and has also, for the most part, ignored all of the orthodoxy in return.”

Now I challenge anyone to distil these claims into a single specific statement that “there is a lack of knowledge in the literature if you will about the numbers of LTNPs in the population”, which is how you seem to interpret it.

As scientists, I am afraid we do not play fast and lose with quotations, definitions or statements. We value accuracy. Now the original claim has been roundly refuted, yet you are desperately tring to save face by reading something into the quote that is not there. This is known as clutching at straws.

Richard has given you references as to the different estimates of LTNPs in the population dependent upon differing definitions of it in terms of survival. There seems to be plenty of information in the literature on the subject. The crux of the original quote was that the concept of LTNP was somehow a threat to the orthodox views on HIV, and that it is consequently ignored.

You have been shown ample evidence that this is not so, and that this is not the orthodox position. Can you not just accept it graciously and move on?
#211 Evion
July 4, 2007

Dear honorable AIDS political activist and drug company rep, instead of poisoning the waters with your bitter pills, why not get down to business on the other thread and answer Gold Tagged Antibody Man’s questions. Time for a Bar Bee Keuu.
#212 Tara C. Smith
July 4, 2007

Germs cannot get a strong-hold in a healthy environment.

This simply isn’t true. Healthy people come down with illness every day. Look at the 1918 influenza pandemic–*because* of their healthy, active immune system, young people died at rates much higher than those who were older and more infirm.

As many others have said already, yes, nutrition is important, but it alone isn’t enough. Pathogens can invade even the healthiest body, and “natural” isn’t always better. Pathogens are also “natural,” as are arsenic and snake venom.
#213 Pope
July 4, 2007

DT, happy to oblige.

We can certainly graciously agree to disagree on whether LTNPs are seen as a threat by HIV scientists, and therefore haven’t been studied as thoroughly and in the way they perhaps could have been.

I agree that Richard has provided relevant insight into the “different estimates of LTNPs in the population dependent upon differing definitions of it in terms of survival”

With regard to the quote about knowledge “in the literature” of numbers of LTNPs, here is the distillate:

There are no references or numbers or studies available as to how many LTNP’s there are

How could you have missed it? I have merely exchanged ‘references’ and ‘numbers’ for ‘knowledge’, ‘studies’ for ‘literature’ and ‘no’ for ‘lack of’ in my version.

What seems to have escaped you entirely was that Jefferys concluded,

This is why people tend to estimate the frequency of LTNP at around 1-5%, it’s based on having read the relevant literature.

I have, contrary to your assertion, dealt very precisely with this quotation, which implies 1,that the estimates are based on “the relevant literature” – which nobody has disputed apart from… 2″ that such a “relevant literature” exists and is sufficient.

My question was, does Jefferys find the literature truly relevant and sufficient?
#214 entlord
July 4, 2007

From a public health perspective, I am horrified that HIV denialism has taken root among several African governments. After years of pushing the pharm companies to make the drugs more widely available, we now have the companies finally responding, only to have denialism intrude into the debate, in the area most devastated by HIV.
#215 Pope
July 4, 2007

Tara,

has it ever occured to you that people might be more than what you call the “immune system”?
#216 Tara C. Smith
July 4, 2007

Pope, if you ventured out beyond the HIV threads, you’d see that I’ve written about all kinds of factors that matter in disease development. Nevertheless, one has to start somewhere when investigating how the “environment” affects susceptibility for disease, and the immune system is a logical first step, unless one wants to define “healthy environment” in a manner so nebulous that it’s untestable.
#217 Pope
July 4, 2007

Tara,

you may very well be right, but on the other hand I have a problem with defining the concepts such that “health” can increase suceptibility to, or negatively affect the outcome of, disease.
#218 Tara C. Smith
July 4, 2007

Well, that’s not exactly what I’m saying.

At U of Michigan in the public health school, they used to have a mural that noted something along the lines of health being a state of complete physical and mental well-being, more than just the absence of disease. I can get on board with that, but when it comes to biomedical research, we need to quantitate “health” a bit more, give it a useful definition. What would yours be?
#219 Tara C. Smith
July 4, 2007

Actually, this may be an interesting topic in its own right. Hang on and I’ll start a new post on it.
#220 Noble Rocks
July 4, 2007

Chris Noble is the polymath “Pope” wishes he were, as recently demonstrated by the former’s familiarity with the “literary literature,” e.g. J.W. von Goethe.

The affected erudition of the denialists is constant and constantly fake whether we speak of the scientific literature or older sorts with less immediacy.
#221 Noble Rocks
July 4, 2007

Wow. What a fun read! But why would even a denialist put stock in information from an extremist web site?

A commenter named Cooler and several others have referred to Gardasil killing three women, linking to a neo-con “judicial watch.” These commenters manifestly know nothing about these deaths nor the supposed link to Gardasil.

Gardasil caused these deaths much as Starbucks causes hundreds of car crashes around the world every day. When a car crashes and paramedics find an hours- or days-old receipt for a latte in the driver’s wallet or under the floor mat, they do not conclude that a recent Starbucks visit caused the crash. Unless a causative link can be established, we shouldn’t assume that Gardasil had any role in these three deaths either.

Of five million Gardasil doses, three were given to women who died unexpectedly, each at a different time after receipt of the vaccine. Each death was different. At least one death was due to underlying medical conditions. These deaths should be investigated rigorously, and they are being looked into. At the same time there is no evidence that the vaccine exacerbated underlying conditions or caused death directly.

“Judicial Watch” I suppose wishes to win some money from the manufacturers of Gardasil. The motivations of Cooler and Company are not as obvious. Then again, I doubt that they have motivations per se, just psychological problems.
#222 Chris Noble
July 4, 2007

The point being made was NOT ” lack of publications dealing with LTNP”, the point was ” LACK OF KNOWLEDGE of the NUMBERS of LTNPs in the population”.

Considering that one of the most commonly held “Dissident” positions is to stop all HIV testing this is disengenuous.

Besides we do know that if we follow any HIV+ cohort over a number of years that the vast majority show progressive CD4+ depletion and eventual progression to AIDS. There is room for a few percent but not much more.
#223 Death From Gardisil
July 4, 2007

Three healthy 11 year old girls die after Gardisil Vaccinaton and it’s merely a coincidence. Sure, by the way, there’s a bridge for sale. You interested?
#224 DT
July 4, 2007

I understand 2 of the three were not “healthy girls”.
I am keeping a relatively open mind on this one, but you still have to show there is more than just background noise.
#225 Andrew Wade
July 5, 2007

Three healthy 11 year old girls die after Gardisil Vaccinaton and it’s merely a coincidence.

From the sales figures, Merck sold over a million shots the last quarter of last year. The death rate for teenagers is about 50 per 100,000 per year. From this, we would expect about 20 of the recipients to die within 14 days of receiving a shot each quarter. Coincidences happen. Now two of the deaths in VAERS did involve thrombosis, so just maybe there is some “there” there. But that’s not a lot of data to go on.
#226 Death From Gardisil
July 5, 2007

Three healthy 11 year old girls die after Gardisil Vaccinaton and it’s merely a coincidence?

From the sales figures, Merck sold over a million shots the last quarter of last year. The death rate for teenagers is about 50 per 100,000 per year. From this, we would expect about 20 of the recipients to die within 14 days of receiving a shot each quarter. Coincidences happen. Now two of the deaths in VAERS did involve thrombosis, so just maybe there is some “there” there. But that’s not a lot of data to go on.

Mind telling the viewing audience the number of suicides making up your death rate number? Posting only part of the data is called lying by omission.
#227 Adele
July 5, 2007

My youngest was three when she tripped and broke a front tooth on the coffee table. Which vaccine should I blame it on?

A local high school boy ran his car into a tree late last year and died. Can we blame that on the flu vaccine he had?
#228 Adele
July 5, 2007

Death,

Why stop there? With your logic you could blame all teen deaths on HPV vaccine. How’s this, all teen suicides are caused by fear of death from vaccines or fear that a teenage crush will be killed by a vaccine.

If only we could go back to those days before HPV vaccine. When no one died until they were 95 years old and all children were free and happy Fundies and never ever had PREMARITAL SEX.
#229 Rock of Gibraltar
July 5, 2007

What did the autopsy state was the cause of these deaths? Was there any link to this vaccination?
#230 Rock of Gibraltar
July 5, 2007

In theory, this vaccination might work but has it been properly tested and what effects will it have long term on this girls? Cervical cancer cases have dropped thanks to early detection and not all cases are linked to HPV.

Without strong evidence though, how can Gardisil be blamed for these deaths?
#231 Death From Gardisil
July 5, 2007

Adele, the logic is that teen suicide numbers, as well as teen death from accident numbers, should be excluded from the teen death rate numbers which were posted because none of the three who died after their Gardisil vaccination committted suicide or died from a car accident.
DUH! Try to get with the program.

By the way there were quite a few adverse reaction reports as well. Some included things like Guillan Barre which is not pretty. Remember, older vaccination programs like swine flu were discontinued because of large numbers of Guillan Barre cases ending up in court costing big bucks. Of course, now things are different. No recourse to the courts anymore because the vaccine makers are fighting terrorism.
#232 Rock of Gibraltar
July 5, 2007

Actually, Congress did implement funding for children who have been harmed by vaccinations.

I had two, separate reactions in regard to vaccinations. There is some ingredient, preservative, etc. that does not agree with some of us. Granted, it does not happen all of the time but like a plane crash, if it happens to you it is 100%. To many physicians, these incidents are acceptable risks as I have heard it so many times but I wouldn’t try telling this to the parents. I do feel that the patients should have informed consent and told about the risk involved with many procedures, drugs, vaccinations, etc., which most of the time they are not told this.
#233 Rock of Gibraltar
July 5, 2007

I would be curious to know if any of these girls were on birth control pills?
#234 Adele
July 5, 2007

So did none of the three die of a problem they already had? No. Two did. Do we know about the third? Out of what was it three or was it five million people who got it, three died total, one died without any known problems, or did she? I don’t like to sound like a robot because these are real people and tragedies but these numbers 3 out of 5 million are not enough to separate from coincidence. This vaccine does really well against the worst HPVs and it could help alot of people. Should we take it from them becuase three people died unless we know the vaccine caused it?

Like everyone else I’m not just blindly for this thing Gardasil by the way I think not Gardisil or am I wrong. It’s obvious by now if there’s any real adverse reactions they’re very low frequency and they’re also getting monitored.

Death, “no recourse to the courts?” Do you get that from your ultra-conservative web sites? That’s nuts. Of course there’s recourse to the courts. Sometimes I don’t understand you “patriots”. You hate big companies, you hate the government, but you want recourse to the courts, but then you also hate lawyers and you hate the “liberal” courts. Can you bring this together for me?
#235 Andrew Wade
July 5, 2007

Adele, the logic is that teen suicide numbers, as well as teen death from accident numbers, should be excluded from the teen death rate numbers which were posted because none of the three who died after their Gardisil vaccination committted suicide or died from a car accident.

And if three kids commit suicide shortly after taking Gardisil next quarter, will you assume the suicides are unrelated? Should we exclude liver failure from the rates because none of the three happened to have died of liver failure? In any event, I found the suicide rates: 22 / 100,000 / year for males, and 4 / 100,000 / year for females. (US, 1991-1993, ages 15-24). The rates will be a bit different for 2007.
#236 Adele
July 5, 2007

Three healthy 11 year old girls die after Gardisil Vaccinaton and it’s merely a coincidence?

Just a little update. It’s spelled GARDASIL. And what the hell are you talking about? No deaths in 11 year olds were reported.

One girl was 12. She had a pre existing heart problem. She also had influenza and it caused inflammation and that caused heart failure.

Then a 19-year old woman. Who died of a blood clot. She was taking birth control pills, Rock, and as you told us when you called yourself Noreen, there’s a small number of women who have predisposition to blood clotting and don’t do well with the pill.

Then a third woman whose age is unknown although they refer to her as a woman so she’s probably 18 or older. A different blood clot, she was on the pill too.

Death Patriot got the 11-year-old misinformation from Phyllis Schlafly or some other extremist thats all over the place spreading lies about this vaccine.
#237 Adele
July 5, 2007

Another little update.

VAERS reports three Guillain-Barre diagnosis after HPV vaccine.

Guillain-Barre prevalence is like 1 in 100,000. So if 5 million women get vaccinated we expect maybe about 50 of them have Guillain-Barre. A few of the 50 might find out they have it days or months after getting vaccinated.

Just like the deaths it’s impossible to separate this small number from the normal background of disease. 400 cases of Guillain-Barre diagnosed in a year of having the vaccine, ok, but three no way.
#238 noreen Martin- The Rock of Gibraltar
July 5, 2007

Thanks Adele, I would be quicker to point to the pill that the vaccination, if given a choice in the cause of these two deaths.
#239 Patriot Games
July 5, 2007

Adle said;

Three healthy 11 year old girls die after Gardisil Vaccinaton and it’s merely a coincidence?
.
Just a little update. It’s spelled GARDASIL. And what the hell are you talking about? No deaths in 11 year olds were reported.
.
One girl was 12. She had a pre existing heart problem. She also had influenza and it caused inflammation and that caused heart failure.
.
Then a 19-year old woman. Who died of a blood clot. She was taking birth control pills, Rock, and as you told us when you called yourself Noreen, there’s a small number of women who have predisposition to blood clotting and don’t do well with the pill.
.
Then a third woman whose age is unknown although they refer to her as a woman so she’s probably 18 or older. A different blood clot, she was on the pill too.
.
Death Patriot got the 11-year-old misinformation from Phyllis Schlafly or some other extremist thats all over the place spreading lies about this vaccine.
.

Not really, I merely assumed they would be 11 because that was the age group targeted by the Texas state governer’s executive mandate that was later repealed because of popular outrage.

TWO Gardisol deaths related to BCP use (associated with hypercoagulability) is highly significant, and warnings should be immediatly issued to advise all BCP users to avoid Gardosil vaccination. Why has this not been done?

Adverse reactions to the vaccine including the devastating Guillan Barre cases will have no court recourse because vacccine manufacturers were given immunity with one of the anti-terrorism bills as a rider, remember that?

A few more comments about Gardisil

1. The vaccine is expensive. $360

2. Lack of testing in 9 to 13 year olds.

3. Lack of evidence of duration of protection with estimated duration of 5 years.

4. Efficacy has not been demonstrated and is unknown. In fact, booster shots will be needed.

5. Benefit of Gardasil to 9-13 year olds is doubtful. Cervical Cancer affects 45-55 year olds, 40 years afterwards.

6. Questionable Safety when used in with other vaccines such as Hep B and Meningitis.

7. The US Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System is showing considerable serious injury from this vaccine, especially neurological and immune dysfunction, collapse, paralysis, Guillain-Barre syndrome, dizziness, vomiting, rash, syncope, seizures and headache.

8. Gardasil may actually cause an increase in cervical cancer due to false security in those who receive it, and decline PAP smears.

9. Gardasil does not guarantee safety from HPV: Regular Pap screening tests will still be needed.

10. The incidence of cervical cancer is low, and it would cost about 360 million to pay for vaccine to prevent 1 or two deaths.

11. HPV is usually benign with the virus clearing up on its own within 8-12 months.

12. Pap screening already works and has been very effective in reducing cervical cancer rates.

13. Gardasil gives the wrong message to kids about sex and may encourage promiscuity.

Still crazy about Gardasil?
#240 Patriot Games
July 6, 2007

Are mandatory vaccinations really mandatory?

No, they are not. There are three types of exemptions from vaccinations:

1) Medical exemption (all states)
2) Religious exemptions (47 states)
3) Philosophical exemption (22 states)

People are hoodwinked into thinking their child must be vaccinated to atttend school. All that’s needed is to fill out an exception form to attend school. The decision ultimately rests with the parent, not the government.
#241 Adele
July 6, 2007

Funny, “Patriot Games” just cut and pasted that list of unsupported claims about Gardasil from Jeffrey Dach, MD. Wow. The same Dach who used to post on Barnesworld before it went quiet.

So are you Jeffrey Dach, Mr. “Patriot Games”, or did you just plagiarize him in the typical denialist fashion?

If you’re not Dach, maybe you don’t understand you should tell us where you get your unsupported opinions. It doesn’t matter if you change a word or two your still a thieving disgrace to Phyllis Schlafly’s “moral” standards.

Here’s a funny change Dach wrote “In fact, there’s already been talk of the need for booster shots” and Falcon Plow changed it to “In fact, booster shots will be needed.” Hell if you’re uninformed at least be confident about it!

Here’s the whole quackery from Dach:
“1. The vaccine is costly. ($360 for series of three shots)

2. Lack of testing in 9-13 yr olds.

3. Lack of evidence of duration of protection (estimated duration of 5 years).

4. Efficacy has not been demonstrated and is unknown. In fact, there’s already been talk of the need for booster shots.

5. Benefit of Gardasil to 9-13 year olds is dubious. Cervical Cancer affects 45-55 year olds, 40 years later.

6. Questionable Safety when used in conjunction with other vaccines (Hep B and Meningitis ).

7. High rate of vaccine injury: the US Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System is showing considerable serious injury from this vaccine, especially neurological and immune dysfunction. Included are reports of collapse, paralysis, Guillain-Barre syndrome, dizziness, vomiting, rash, syncope, seizures and headache.

8. Gardasil may actually cause an increase in cervical cancer due to a false feeling of security in the females who receive it and decline PAP smears.

9. Gardasil does not guarantee safety from HPV: Regular Pap screening tests with their incumbent costs will still be needed.

10. The incidence of cervical cancer is low, and it would cost $360 million to pay for vaccine to prevent only 1-2 deaths.

11. HPV is usually benign: The virus clears up on its own within 8-12 months.

12. Pap screening already works and has been very effective in reducing cervical cancer rates.

13. Gardasil gives the wrong message to kids about sex and may encourage promiscuity.”
#242 DT
July 6, 2007

Ahh, Jeffery Dach…….
Those were the days. I’m coming over all misty-eyed.
He was the “MD” with narcissistic personality disorder who tried dismally to bluff his way around on Google groups, the chap who didn’t know that H2O was hydrogen hydroxide, and when his error was pointed out tried a chemistry bluff of his own and cocked it up by calling water hydrogen dioxide thinking it was 2 oxygens to one hydrogen, the “MD” who thought I was variously a ward clerk in an ID unit, a psychiatrist, a computer programmer, a veterinarian at the University of Edinburgh and a pharma shill all rolled into one, the creationist who tried to take on bona fide scientists on their own field, ….God we had such fun with him back then!

Here’s the whole quackery from Dach:
“1. The vaccine is costly. ($360 for series of three shots)
So what? Relevance?

2. Lack of testing in 9-13 yr olds.
Moot point, but I’ll give you that

3. Lack of evidence of duration of protection (estimated duration of 5 years).
Protection is protection, however long it lasts. Wanna make something of this?

4. Efficacy has not been demonstrated and is unknown. In fact, there’s already been talk of the need for booster shots.
Efficacy proven, and so what if booster shots are needed? It works.

5. Benefit of Gardasil to 9-13 year olds is dubious. Cervical Cancer affects 45-55 year olds, 40 years later.
Doh! – HPV’s main period of acquisition is 15-25 yrs. Cervical cancer does not happen instantly, fool! CIN is maximal between 20-30 yrs and invasive carcinoma peaks at 45 years. We are not trying to prevent cancer in 9 year olds, so to imply this is the height of stupidity.

6. Questionable Safety when used in conjunction with other vaccines (Hep B and Meningitis ).
References please??

7. High rate of vaccine injury: the US Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System is showing considerable serious injury from this vaccine, especially neurological and immune dysfunction. Included are reports of collapse, paralysis, Guillain-Barre syndrome, dizziness, vomiting, rash, syncope, seizures and headache.
Would this be like the report of the whole class of schoolgirls in Australia who developed mass hysteria after vaccination? There was nothing wrong with any of them.

8. Gardasil may actually cause an increase in cervical cancer due to a false feeling of security in the females who receive it and decline PAP smears.
Possible, but the math indicates it will prevent more cases that regular smears will

9. Gardasil does not guarantee safety from HPV: Regular Pap screening tests with their incumbent costs will still be needed.
A fail safe – nothing wrong with that surely?

10. The incidence of cervical cancer is low, and it would cost $360 million to pay for vaccine to prevent only 1-2 deaths.
Reference please? You think cervical cancer kills 1-2 per million? Then why are the age standardised mortality rates 90/million globally and about 30/million in the US? Your figures are wrong. I agree it is not very cost effective at present, but check what the price is in 5 years time.

11. HPV is usually benign: The virus clears up on its own within 8-12 months.
Tell that to a kid with a vagina covered in warts, will you.

12. Pap screening already works and has been very effective in reducing cervical cancer rates.
It works, but inefficiently. Those who need screening most are those who aren’t screened. Cervical cancer rates are actually RISING world wide and in the west.

13. Gardasil gives the wrong message to kids about sex and may encourage promiscuity.”
Depends who is giving the message. By your argument I guess we shouldn’t promote a cure for lung cancer either, just in case it “gives the wrong message to people about the dangers of smoking”
#243 DT
July 6, 2007

I almost forgot, we also had a great time with him when he tried to bluster his way through the mysteries of DNA, but repeatedly got confused between guanidine and guanine.
#244 DT
July 6, 2007

Re HPV vaccine:
This weeks Lancet has an article on the Glaxo bivalent vaccine. Effective, and it prevented 90% of cases of CIN.
http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0140673607609477

However, they do point out a potential problem – although not statistically significant (the confidence interval spans zero), they did show a 2.5% increased risk in spontaneous abortions (CI -0.5% to 5.5%, P=0.106).
#245 Patriot Games
July 6, 2007

I dont know who that guy is you think I am, try again. Nice blog though.

Gardadil is a huge experiment on the population. Vaccines such as Gardasil are not mandatory, and parents can obtain exemptions should they decide to decline the vaccination for their child.

We are still waiting for the EM photos of HIV host cell cell damage. How about it? Why not admit that HIV is a benign passenger virus which does not damage the host cell? Or is that too much for your drug company sponsors to accept?

For more information see www. reviewing aids DOT com.
#246 DT
July 6, 2007

“I dont know who that guy is you think I am, try again. Nice blog though.”

Jeffrey, seems like you don’t know much, not even who you are. Tell me, are Dr Quack’s sock puppets a bit smelly these days? What happened to YBYL? – Folded has it under the onus of pasting monkey heads onto pictures?
#247 trrll
July 6, 2007

We are still waiting for the EM photos of HIV host cell cell damage. How about it?

Once again, this demand makes no sense. Cell damage is a biochemical phenomenon, not something structural that you can take an EM photo of. Indeed, all of the cells that you see in EM picturesare already dead due to massive damage from the procedure of preparing them for EM.
#248 trrll
July 6, 2007

However, they do point out a potential problem – although not statistically significant (the confidence interval spans zero), they did show a 2.5% increased risk in spontaneous abortions (CI -0.5% to 5.5%, P=0.106)

If the confidence interval spans zero, then they didn’t “show” any increase at all. The best you can say is that IF there is an increase, you can state with 95% certainty that it is less than 5.5%.
#249 JanieBelle
July 7, 2007

Holy crap, Dr. Tara.

Looks like the only whacko denialists that missed this thread are the gravity denialists. (Although I skipped a few comments in the middle there, so maybe I just missed them.)

Too funny.

Kisses
#250 Adele
July 7, 2007

Someone wrote,
I dont know who that guy is you think I am, try again. Nice blog though.

Give me a break. There aren’t enough of you guys not to know who each other are. What’s next, you don’t know who Phyllis Schlafly is either?

Jeffrey Dach or not Jeffrey Dach, you cut and pasted and acted like it was yours. You’re in the same group with Andrew Maniotis.
#251 DT
July 9, 2007

Patriot, I have been reflecting on your statement “I dont know who that guy [Jeffrey Dach]is you think I am, try again.”

Now does it not seem very strange that you have authored two separate posts in this thread that word for word match statements on a web site by Jeffrey Dach, “MD”?

I know that if there were a million denialist monkeys tapping on keyboard for a few million years that something similar might arise by chance, but logically there are only 2 explanations:

1. You have studied Jeffery Dach’s web site in some detail, and decided to pass off his thoughts as your own, which is plagiarism if nothing else. To then go and claim you “don’t know who the guy is” seems rather disingenuous and churlish, no?

2. You are Jeffery Dach, but are ashamed to admit it (if this is the reason, I can understand completely).

So wich of these above options is true? In Jeffery’s own words, all of his eager readers are waiting for your answer.
#252 Peter Mc
June 28, 2008

Wow Tara, you do bring ‘em out from under the rocks.

ERV: digestion deniers. Imagine attending a convention. IK.
#253 Debate Over
March 25, 2009

Luckily, this pointless debate (how to control infectious conditions, using tools that only kinda work) is losing steam thanks to a new technology that’s similar to colloidal silver, except that it works way better: silver sol. Goodbye infectious conditions and dull debates!