While I was out last week, I completely missed this Science article all about HIV denial and the AidsTruth.org website, and features frequent commenter Richard Jeffreys:
For 20 years, a small but vocal group of AIDS "dissenters" has attracted international attention by questioning whether HIV causes the disease. Many AIDS researchers from the outset thought it best to ignore these challenges. But last year, another small and equally vocal group decided to counter the dissenters--whom they call "denialists"--with a feisty Web site, AIDSTruth.org. It has started to attract international attention itself. "It's great," says Mark Wainberg, head of the McGill AIDS Centre in Montreal, Canada. "We really need to get more people to understand that HIV denialism does serious harm. And we were in denial about denialism for a long time."
Launched by AIDS researchers, clinicians, and activists from several countries, AIDSTruth.org offers more than 100 links to scientific reports to "debunk denialist myths" and "expose the denialist propaganda campaign for what it is ... to prevent further harm being done to individual and public health." The site also has a section that names denialists and unsparingly critiques their writings, variously accusing them of homophobia, "scientific ignorance of truly staggering proportions," conspiracy theories, "the dogmatic repetition of the misunderstanding, misrepresentation, or mischaracterization of certain scientific studies," and flat-out lies. "There was a perceived need to take these people on in cyberspace, because that's where they operate mostly, and that's where the most vulnerable people go for their information," says immunologist John Moore, an AIDS researcher at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University in New York City.
Read the full article here.
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Dr. Smith, did you read the full article, particularly the last paragraph by Cohen?
"AIDStruth.org has seen its popularity rise from about 60 unique visits a day to 150."
I'm sorry, but describing 150 daily hits as rising "popularity" is wishful thinking at best. The site has been up for 14 months.
Based on this fact alone, you could write a similar article with the opposite conclusion -- Gee, how unpopular and irrelevant is the anti-denialist crowd when after more than a full year, they have no blog, and only get 150 daily hits?
According to your stats, you get 2,150 hits a day. (per the site meter)
Dean Esmay gets 30,000 hits a day.
A webcam watching paint dry on a Texas barn could get 150 daily hits.
Damn, I missed it too. That was an oversight.
Dr. Smith, did you read the full article, particularly the last paragraph by Cohen?
"AIDStruth.org has seen its popularity rise from about 60 unique visits a day to 150."
I'm sorry, but describing 150 daily hits as rising "popularity" is wishful thinking at best. The site has been up for 14 months.
Based on this fact alone, you could write a similar article with the opposite conclusion -- Gee, how unpopular and irrelevant is the anti-denialist crowd when after more than a full year, they have no blog, and only get 150 daily hits?
According to your stats, you get 2,150 hits a day. (per the site meter)
Dean Esmay gets 30,000 hits a day.
A webcam watching paint dry on a Texas barn could get 150 daily hits.
Hi Drew,
Yes, I noticed it--so? Surely you're not arguing that the validity of a site is measured by its number of hits?
Additionally, AIDStruth writes only about that topic, a niche site, whereas Dean writes about politics, pop culture, etc.--areas that get a lot more traffic. His is also a blog which promotes discussion, while AIDStruth is more of a reference and news site. You're comparing apples and oranges here.
Look all this is irrelevent. The only thing that is matters is the role of mycoplasmas in chronic illnesses like cfs. Dr. nicolson and DR. Shyh ching Lo had a correlation(with pcr/this infection does not produce antibody reposnse in animals) and an animal model where monkeys/mice injected died with illnesses like CFS, AIDS Fibromyaligia. Dr. Nicolson had secret contacts in the pentagon that revealed some scary info.
www.projectdaylily.com
Well, we could always engage in the battle of the T shirts (I hope these links work):
http://www.zazzle.com/cr/design/pt-shirt?linkover=true&percentage=0.000…
http://www.zazzle.com/cr/design/pt-shirt?linkover=true&percentage=0.000…
Frankly if the traffic got much higher I'd worry about why that was, and what it said about the number of people encountering denialist propaganda.
This is probably a good opportunity to note that there are ten other people involved in AIDSTruth and that I'm a little embarrassed that there's an inverse correlation between the extent to which I was quoted in the piece and my contributions to the site. Also, I hope no one thinks that I'm in any way representing anybody when I post to blogs or anywhere else; I've been using the net since the days of 2,400 baud dial-ups and unless explicitly stated otherwise, I'm not representing anyone other than myself!
Tara,
Thanks for the reply. As a gay man in his 50's, I'm very concerned about the issue. I've seen numerous friends and lovers die over the years, and an equal amount of horror stories about AZT as from the virus.
I lurk a lot on the web, trying to find out if I'm at risk, whether the tests are valid, whether the treatments work. The AIDStruth.org website is bizarre to me. It is shrill, endlessly disparaging, obsessed by the dissidents, but refuses to debate them:
"We will not: Engage in any public or private debate with AIDS denialists or respond to requests from journalists who overtly support AIDS denialist causes"
In contrast, my friends are buzzing about an interesting piece in the Gay & Lesbian Times in San Diego last week, which took a reasonable, objective look at the issue. This was an informative piece-- the miniscule 150 daily hits of AIDSTruth.org simply is not. They don't even have a blog. It's just one-sided.
p.s. (Kent T is my partner. Sorry for the double-post -- his original post was delayed for several hours, so he asked me to try to post it. Feel free to delete either one).
Hey, I agree Drew. Im agnostic on hiv but that Aids truth site is ridiculous. That guy John Moore just insults respected scientists with impunity.
Believe me I thought the "Deniers" were nuts too, until I saw that film Hiv fact or fraud. I dont beileve it all, and I think
Duesberg is wrong in saying its only a lifestyle disease, and no microbe is involved, but its a debate the public deserves to hear, and make up their own mind.
Drew, could you post a link to said article? I'd like to see how the issue was treated.
If you find AIDStruth shrill, remember that scientists are constantly having their reputations attacked and their work misrepresented by denialists of all shades (creationists, germ theory denialists, etc. Some, like cooler, believe in a wide variety of denialism causes and conspiracy theories). The side of evidence based medicine is backed by tons of research (if you were to print out said research, it would weigh in in the tons range) while the denialists rely on long abandoned hypotheses, conspiracy theories and lies. Forceful and honest responses to the denialists are needed, but debates suggest that the denialists have some standing in this discussion, which they don't.
Cooler, what "respected" scientists are insulted?
Shyh ching Lo
garth nicolson
nancy nicolson
Peter Duesberg
charles thomas
Richard Strohman
kary mullis
luc montagnier
Walter gilbert
Andrew Mantious
All these scientists questioned the Hiv hypothesis at some time, And John Moore has said anyone questioning the hypothesis is a charlatan, so hes calling all these people charlatans.
sorry for those that dont know the pedigree of these scientists
Shyh ching lo MD PHD cheif of the most sophisticated lab in the world, Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. They identified the dead bodies on 9/11, and are equipped to detect new bio war agents our enemies might use.
Peter Duesberg retroviral expert
Charles Thomas former harvard professor
Garth/nancy nicolson phd respected cancer researchers, honorary naval seals for their help on veterans illnesses. Authors of www.projectdaylily.com that recieved rave reviews from a nobel laurete and other scientists. Has to be read to be beleived, based on a true story of what can happen if youre an honest scientist trying to help sick veterans.
Kary Mullis Nobel prize winner
etc etc
If watching people catch exotic diseases, waste away, and die many decades before their time isn't convincing, what is? Death is sort of the ultimate unfavorable outcome. Three million people world, 40,000 USA die of HIV/AIDS every year.
We see people decline treatment and go off and die every once in a while. The record is 5 days. A patient had a sore throat, was given a broad spectrum antibiotic and explicit instructions to call in no matter what and to come back if it didn't clear up. He didn't call in. A few days later he was found dead from a sore throat that turned into pneumonia. Age mid 20s. It is disturbing but it happens over and over again.
Cooler,
Colonel Greenspan is the director of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology.
I have found no papers on SciFinder by an author "Shyh-Ching Lo" or "Shyh Ching Lo."
I like to give people the benefit of doubt, however, I am not interested in checking the rest of your sources since I must be missing something vital already, i.e., your first source.
"but its a debate the public deserves to hear, and make up their own mind."
Are you for intelligent design as well?
Dear Sir:
In the spirit of "the openness" of science we salute Peter Duesberg for his challenging and courageous voice speaking out against the present scientific establishment. His extensive experience and knowledge about retroviruses lends merit to his critical evaluation of the possible causative role of HIV in the AIDS disease.
However, there is a fundamental difference between our judgement of the AIDS disease and that of Duesberg. We believe that the disease of AIDS is an infectious process. Despite our respect for Duesberg's expertise in retroviruses, we think his assessment that no microbe, including any mycoplasma, could possibly cause the full set of AIDS diseases is premature. It has been know for many years that microbes known as mycoplasmas can cause immune suppression, weight loss, diarrhea, and chronic debilitation in animals; but mycoplasmas were not considered fatal in humans. The recent discovery that previously unrecognized pathogenic mycoplasma, M. incognitus, causes fatal system infections in experimental monkeys, has suggested that this microbe could be playing a disease-promoting role for AIDS. It is significant that mycoplasmal infection has been found in diseased brains, livers, and spleens of AIDS patients, as well as some HIV-negative patients displaying similar symptoms.
Luc Montagnier, the French discovered of HIV, is the most famous but not the only eminent scientists who endorses the possibility that mycoplasmal agents could play a significant role in AIDS. Many mycoplasmologists worldwide have now joined the search of these microbes in patients with AIDS. We also applaud Montagnier's courageous strong stand at the recent International Conference on AIDS that mycoplasma could be the key co-factor of AIDS disease.
There are many intriguing, but certainly not well understood, biological characteristics of M. incognitus and the infection it produces. The infection suppresses the immune system, causes immune derangement, and can be associated with chronic debilitating disease.
The biology and nature of these mycoplasmas need to be carefully researched, using modern technology. The rapidness of advances in understanding the significance of mycoplasmal disease in humans will be directly proportional to the amount of funds available. At present, only a very small amount of money supports mycoplasma studies.
We believe the most healthy and responsible scientific attitude in dealing with AIDS research is to explore all possible avenues. To make any conclusion lightly or prematurely, such as ruling out any possible role of microbes in AIDS, or to commit oneself exclusively to a particular agent and completely rule out any other possible role of a different microbe, may all result in a greater loss of AIDS victims.
Shyh-Ching Lo M.D. PHD
Chief, Division of Geographic Pathology
Col. Douglas J. Wear, MC USA
Chairman
Department of Infectious and Parasitic Disease Pathology
Department of Defense
Armed Forces Institute of pathology
Washington, DC
In an open letter to Peter duesberg in 1990.
Miami Hearld 1990
Shyh-Ching Lo, the researcher in charge of AIDS programs for the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, doesn't believe it should be: The presence of the antibodies to HIV-far from being a sign of doom-is proof the body is capable of coping with the virus, Lo contends. Nobody is able to explain how the dormant HIV particles manage to suddenly whip the antibodies.
"There is no good explanation for why and how the virus breaks out of the antibody protection," says Lo. "I'm not saying that HIV plays no role in AIDS-the data shows a clear correlation with disease. But AIDS is much more complicated than HIV."
Lo, an obscure microbiologist, with no grants or establishment support, went looking for a new explanation. In 1986 he announced that he had found it: a previously unknown organism that-together with HIV-caused AIDS.
For nearly three years, his theory was ignored. Shyh-Ching Lo's research was turned down for publication almost a dozen times before the Journal of Tropical Medicine, available in few hospital libraries and on no major electronic databases, agreed to print his findings. His attempts to find funding have failed. Even the presentations he has given at professional meetings have gotten him nowhere; his colleagues don't even show up.
The problem was that Lo was using a complex new research technique he had devised himself to come up with a revolutionary finding. Given the stakes, no one was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Until last December, when an official at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases decided Lo's work merited at least a closer look. The agency brought a dozen specialists together to look at his data. Experts in AIDS and other infectious diseases flew into San Antonio, Texas, expecting, they admitted, to demolish Lo.
Lo laid all his cards on the table. He had detected an organism similar to a bacteria, called a mycoplasma, in cells taken from AIDS patients. He could not find the organism in cells of healthy individuals. When he injected the organism into four silvered leaf monkeys, three quickly developed low-grade fevers. All four lost weight. All four died within seven to nine months of infection. When they were autopsied, there was Lo's mycoplasma in their brains, livers and spleens.
Lo also reported finding the mycoplasma in the damaged tissue of six HIV-negative human beings who had died from unspecified causes after suffering from suspiciously AIDS-like symptoms.
Lo did not argue that his mycoplasma-dubbed mycoplasma incognitus-caused AIDS. "This might be a key co-factor that promotes disease in HIV-infected individuals," he says. "It might be an opportunistic infection that takes advantage of immune compromise. Or it might be the primary cause of the disease, with HIV perhaps helping it along. All I know is that it is there and that it changes the properties of HIV. But it is too early to know how or what that means."
The scientists quizzed Lo for two days. They knew that tiny, bacteria-like mycoplasmas can cause immune suppression and debilitating, chronic diseases in animals. But in human beings, mycoplasmas are only known to cause nonlethal diseases: light pneumonias and some genital infections.
"When I showed the mycoplasmas from my pathology studies, they didn't believe they existed," Lo recalls. "When I showed them that the organism existed and proved it was a mycoplasma, they said my cultures were contaminated."
Two days later, Lo had turned skepticism into interest. "The documentation was absolutely solid," said Joseph Tully, head of mycoplasma programs for NIAID. Participants formally recommended further study of the link between the mycoplasma and AIDS, and experiments with drugs that could kill the new microbe.
One year later, NIAID has funded no such research. "We have not been pulled into the AIDS programs in any real way," Tully says.
When asked for an interview concerning Lo's work, NIAID director Anthony Fauci said through spokesperson Mary Jane Walker that he "will not talk about mycoplasma or any other AIDS co-factor."
http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/data/ebhiv.htm
Cooler here, this bug is found by pcr at much higer rates in people with CFS/fibromyalgia, you cant look for antibodies, the monkeys injected with it that died showed a weak antibody response, it was not a contaminent either Lo controlled for that.
http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&q=shyh+ching+lo
Hi, his name and credentials pop up at the AFIP website. I have a much longer post awaiting approval that explains exactly what he said when questioning hiv.
The mycoplasmas do something in HIV theory never had much support and died 15 years ago. There was never any real proof and a lot of proof against it was quickly accumulated. In one series of 42 dead patients, they found 1 positive. Mycoplasmas are common human commensuals that rarely seem to cause serious disease. All were of course, HIV positive.
1: Mod Pathol. 1991 Jul;4(4):481-6.Links
The incidence and distribution of Mycoplasma fermentans (incognitus strain) in the Chicago AIDS autopsy series: an immunohistochemical study. Chicago Associated Pathologists.Miller-Catchpole R, Shattuck M, Kandalaft P, Variakojis D, Anastasi J, Abrahams C.
Evanston Hospital, Illinois.
Mycoplasma incognitus is a recently described organism that was originally isolated by Shyh-Ching Lo from spleen and Kaposi's sarcoma (KS) tissue of patients with AIDS. The mycoplasm has since been found in selected AIDS autopsy cases in which there were tissues with unexplained areas of necrosis. Mycoplasma incognitus is now known to be closely related to Mycoplasma fermentans. In order to determine the incidence and distribution of M. fermentans/M. incognitus in an unselected series, we performed a retrospective immunohistochemical study of 42 HIV-positive autopsies from the Chicago AIDS autopsy series. One case (2.4%) was found to be positive. The patient was a 27-year-old white male homosexual who had no evidence of Kaposi's sarcoma nor of any other neoplastic disorder and who died of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. Antigen was present in the macrophages of the patient's spleen, liver, and bone marrow but was not associated with areas of necrosis. All other tissues sampled from this case (brain, heart, testis, lymph nodes) were negative. In the remaining autopsies, organs of the reticuloendothelial system as well as other randomly selected tissues (e.g., lung, heart, testis, pancreas) were screened and found to be negative. Tissues from several non-AIDS autopsies were also found to be nonreactive for M. fermentans/M. incognitus. We conclude that M. fermentans/M. incognitus is not a common agent found in the Chicago AIDS population; that it may be identified in tissue without morphologic abnormality; and that it is not randomly present in non-AIDS autopsies.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Several scientists on that list admitted that they were wrong. It happens.
I do recognize one name on that list, knew him personally years ago. He is a charlatan who is frequently wrong and was run out of his institution for his part in some pretty horrible events. A thoroughly disgusting individual with an unpleasant personality fairly characterized as evil. I'd forgot he even existed, few who have dealt with him would ever want to remember it.
He found a definite correlation, isolated and cultured the mycoplasma, (novel strain) and the monkeys injected with it died. The monkeys only showed a weak antibody reposnse late, which might be the reason it was difficult to identify in this study if it were present. HE could see the damage w/electron microscopy. The control monkey didnt die.
Lo's hypothesis was AIDS was much more complicated than hiv, after all how could a virus, hiv, that only infected a very small% of t cells cause organ failure?
For example, if ten people have a fever doesnt mean the cause is the same for all of them. In the patients he examimined, the mycoplasma was a major complicating factor, for these patients it might not have been, but Lo seemed to embrace the "mulit factorial" hypothesis where there were several different factors that can cause AIDS/immune suppression.
Sorry, you cant debunk a scientist that has an animal model, like Koch stressed, having an animal model is important to prove a microbe is pathenogenic, and the mice and monkeys Lo injected sickened and died. The novel strain Lo found was much different than the other strains and not found in healthy controls and was not the ordinary commensel mycoplasma. Ive read Lo's patents on this mycoplasma and he made sure it wasnt's a contaminent.
Here is his solid research with refrences, the only scientist to fulfill most, if not all of Kochs postulates in a single study, no such original documents exist for hpv/hep c, but they were backed by big pharma so it didnt matter.
This bug is found by pcr in cfs/fibro, looking for antibodies is useless, the monkeys that died only showed antibodies when near death. Do pub med search on Garth Nicolson and you will see the correlation with these diseases.
http://www.aegis.com/pubs/atn/1990/ATN09501.html
Another major difference in the population of that Chicago study is that there was "necrosis" in the organs, where as Lo studied patients with full blown organ failure, a much different patient profile.
Im not saying hiv has nothing to Aids, but I agree with Dr. lo when he said in 1990 that Aids was much more complicated than hiv. Im not saying mycoplasmas cause all cases of AIDS either, it seems as though each cause if an AIDS death should be looked at individually, some might be hiv, some might be mycoplasma, some might be lifestyle/duesberg, more expirements are needed.
The fact that hiv only infects a small fraction of tcells,(ive heard from one in hundred to on in 10,000) and most if not almost all animals injected with it dont get AIDS is probably the reason some scientists question hiv.
Lo's mycoplasma "incognitus" turned out to not be novel. It is fermentans, a fact even Lo admits now. Even Lo doesn't believe your theory anymore. M. fermentans is, as I said, a human commensual, found in 45% of normal humans. It also predates human AIDS by who knows how many millions of years. If it caused AIDS, the world would be a lot different place. BTW, if mycoplasmas caused any of the diseases ascribed to them, it would be no big deal. As bacteria they are easily cured by many antibiotics. We would be treating AIDS with antibiotics and that would be the end of it.
We are done with this subject. Might just as well discuss the theory that bubblegum causes AIDS. Did you know that 80% of all AIDS patients consumed bubblegum at one time? If correlations proved cause and effect, the risk factors for AIDS would be a mile long. They don't.
Robster FCD,
The Gay & Lesbian Times article that Drew may have been referring to is
A sample quote:
Certainly, it would seem scientists such as Duesberg, a tenured professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, the recipient of the Outstanding Investigator Grant from the National Institutes of Health and a once-revered expert in the field of retroviruses, would have everything to gain from jumping off the denial bandwagon.
"I could easily conform," Duesberg told the Gay & Lesbian Times. "I would be right there up on top again."
Since he began questioning the accepted model of HIV in 1987, Duesberg hasn't received a dime in government funding.
"Since I questioned HIV/AIDS, I'm only teaching the lab course," he said. "I haven't had a graduate student in 15 years.
"Some of [the students], under the condition of anonymity, tell me that this is what they were told. 'You spent a lot of time and paid a high price to get into Berkeley. Duesberg is not the way to go.... This will kill your career.' They have done a fairly good job excommunicating me."
However, not all Duesberg's work has been dismissed. Known for isolating the first cancer gene in 1970, his theory that cancer is caused by irregularities in the chromosomes, not the genes, was published this year in Scientific American. While lauding his ideas, however, the journal carefully covered its tracks in regard to Duesberg's unpopular HIV theories, via an editorial labeling him "a pariah with good ideas."
There were some interesting letters, both pro and con, as well as editorial that pretty much supported the conventional theory, but thought that the dissidents were an important voice who should be heard.
Oops. I botched the link. Try this.
Shyh ching Lo
Not mentioned on AIDSTruth, has suggested more than a decade ago that he thought that a mycoplasm that he had discovered might be involved in the disease process of AIDS.
garth nicolson
nancy nicolson
charles thomas
Not mentioned on AIDSTruth
Peter Duesberg
Once well respected, but on the subject of AIDS, he is clearly wrong and willing to lie about science to support his position. His predeliction for homophobia is mentioned. He mistakes risk factors for causes, displays a lack of epidemiological knowledge.
Richard Strohman
Supporter of Bialy and Duesberg, no other mention on AIDSTruth.
kary mullis
Has some pretty nutty pseudoscientific beliefs before you even get to his AIDS denialism. Has a tendency to attack people for the crime of disagreeing with him, even on areas where he has no expertise (global warming). As to his views on AIDS, he is demonstrably wrong on his criticisms of AIDS. Supporter of Duesberg.
Andrew Mantious (sic)
Andrew is a supporter of Duesberg, no other mention of him on AIDSTruth. His actions on this site display his tendancies to abuse scientific literature, misrepresent the work of others and ignore any and all evidence he is presented with opposing his position.
luc montagnier
Suggested that there may be other organisms involved in the AIDS disease process, but that HIV was still required for AIDS. He is correct. Coinfection with other STIs makes it easier to contract HIV, and many OIs are caused by pathogens. Is mentioned several times on AIDSTruth in respectful terms.
Walter gilbert
AIDSTruth mentions that while Gilbert once supported the denialist position, he no longer does.
So the people attacked by AIDSTruth deserved it, while some you suggest were attacked aren't even mentioned, and two are mentioned with respect.
Robster,
Your response is ludicrous. I'm not interested in engaging juveniles on this very tough, emotionally-wrought issue.
Mike P,
That is the correct link -- the Sherman article in the Gay & Lesbian Times. I thank you for it. I thought Sherman did an excellent balanced job, presenting both sides of the argument, although I wish he would have talked a bit more of the drugs. It was really informative -- also the published letters after the fact, were thought-provoking as well, both sides making good cogent points.
And your comprehension of language is: FAIL.
It wasn't describing the site as popular, it said that its popularity was rising. That's simply true, given the statistics cited. Your objection is inane.
"The average size of an M. fermentans incognitus cell is about 180 nm, compared to an average size of about 460 nm for an M. fermentans cell. "
This and kochs postulates folfilled with this mycoplasma. Animal model. Deal with it. Read the patent and learn
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5242820.html
From Lo's patent in 1993.
A commensol form of mycoplasma would not cause disease in animals, secondly, Nicolson theorizes the commensal mf could cause human disease if it penetrated to the blood and tissues, although Lo proved several ways this was a novel strain, Lo never recanted anything, if you read www.projectdaylily.com you might learn a lot more about Lo and mycoplasma and how it was part of the biological weapons program.
Its pretty sad that many doctors wont even mention this to people that are suffering with CFS etc even though there is far more evidence than Gallo had in 1984 that this is the cause of human disease.
Dont diminish the possibilities of other microbes that cause CFS and Fibromyalgia, you are so quick to dismiss other microbes, what about Robert Gallo's hypothesis in 1984? Your right correlations dont prove causation, thats why theres animal models/kochs postulates.
Where was his animal model?
How does a microbe, hiv, that only infects 1 out every hundred cells or so cause organ failure?
Where are the original papers w/ animal models on HPV or HEP C? clue, they were backed by drug companies so they didnt need much evidence, the mycoplasma hypothesis isnt, its only backed by scientists w/o conflicts of interest.
R,
I said John moore trashes people and has said that anyone that questions hiv is a charlatan.
Hi Drew H.,
Sometimes on these blogs you have to swat away the kids, but don't worry about it.
Over the years, I passively accepted the theory that HIV causes AIDS, but in truth, I hadn't put much time or thought into it.
The Sherman article in the Gay & Lesbian Times wasn't bad, more of a teaser.
Duesberg's principle hypothesis is based on "poppers." Here's a pretty good piece on poppers by a "Denialist" (is that the proper term?) named John Lauritsen, who was a prominent gay NY journalist in the 80's.
The critical thing about poppers is twofold: (1) they are extremely toxic and (2) they are/were almost exclusively used by gay men.
Duesberg's hypothesis is incomplete, of course, but he thinks that popper use accounts for most of the Gay male AIDS cases in the 80's, particularly those where the AIDS-defining disease was Kaposi Sarcoma.
Let me know if this makes any sense or bores you. I'm fairly agnostic and mellow on the issue.
Mike,
I am familiar with poppers. There was nothing good about inhailing them for me. The couple of times I tried them, thank goodness they only gave me a BIG bad headache. Heck, maybe that saved MY life?!?!?! I guess we will never know...
Frankly, that makes sense. I have been thinking that if Duesberg is right about one thing, he is probably right about the other.
One thing I just learned looking at poppers on Wikipedia that I am pretty surprised about -- GlaxoSmithKline manufactured Amyl Nitrite?? Holy smokes!!! They made AZT also? Sounds like a double whammy to me!
I can't help but wonder what Randy Shilts would think if he were still alive. I know that I find out more "stuff" as I dig deeper. He was a good reporter. He would have eventually gotten to the bottom of this.
This was an informative piece-- the miniscule 150 daily hits of AIDSTruth.org simply is not.
To be fair to Jon Cohen, much of his piece was about the Australian court case that became a cause celebre among AIDS denialists (many genuinely thought the decision would go in their favor).
There were some interesting letters, both pro and con, as well as editorial that pretty much supported the conventional theory, but thought that the dissidents were an important voice who should be heard.
This is the start of the editorial:
http://www.gaylesbiantimes.com/?id=9943
"Flooded with congratulatory e-mails from AIDS dissenters worldwide in response to last week's feature, "AIDS dissidents: blinded by pseudoscience or asking the right questions?" we thought we'd state our position on the AIDS dissident movement: You're all nuts!"
But they do go on to say:
"Yet, despite the fact that AIDS dissenters are at odds with majority opinion, they are part of our collective story and should not be silenced. Their message may be reckless, even dangerous, but so is blindly accepting the status quo. We welcome watchdog groups that police pharmaceutical and insurance companies, or anyone who stands to profit off the sick and dying."
I can't make much sense of this paragraph, but it saddens me to think that someone might equate lying about the contents of the scientific literature with being a watchdog. I'm not quite as mellow on the issue as this new cadre of mellow, highly persuasive contributors to Aetiology.
The article did seem to have some kind of revelatory effect on AIDS denialist Henry Bauer (who seems to have featured in all the articles they have managed to get in local and student press recently), Bauer renounced his prior bigoted views on homosexuality:
http://www.henryhbauer.homestead.com/Iwaswrong.html
Let me know if this makes any sense or bores you. I'm fairly agnostic and mellow on the issue.
No, it doesn't make any sense. Yes, it does bore me.
The hypothesis that poppers caused either AIDS or KS was explored and abandoned (just like mycoplasmas) becuase the evidence did not support it.
Even stalwarts of the popper/KS connection like Harry Haverkos now accept the role of HHV8 in KS.
However, HIV Denialists that prefer to live in the 1990s have failed to keep up to date with the scientific progress of the last 13 years. They keep on referring back to old articles by Lauritsen and ignore everything that has been learnt since.
Even Lo doesn't believe mycoplasma has anything much to do with AIDS anymore. It was proved long ago that M. incognitas doesn't exist. Lo no longer calls M. incognitas a separate species. M. fermentans is found in 45% of healthy people. Finding bacteria in humans is meaningless by itself. We are all heavily colonized.
Evidence that Lo's mycoplasma (Mycoplasma fermentans incognitus) is not a unique strain among Mycoplasma fermentans strains.Sasaki T, Sasaki Y, Kita M, Suzuki K, Watanabe H, Honda M.
Department of General Biologics Control, National Institute of Health, Tokyo, Japan.
Mycoplasma fermentans incognitus has attracted much interest either as a cofactor for the progression of AIDS or as a pathogenic agent in non-AIDS-related diseases (S.-C. Lo, M. S. Dawson, P. B. Newton III, M. A. Sonoda, J. W.-K. Shih, W. F. Engler, R. Y.-H. Wang, and D. J. Wear, Am. J. Trop. Med. Hyg. 41:364-376, 1989; S.-C. Lo, M. S. Dawson, M. Wong, P. B. Newton III, M. A. Sonoda, W. F. Engler, R.Y.-H Wang, J. W.-K. Shih, H. J. Alter, and D. J. Wear, Am. J. Trop. Med. Hyg. 41:601-616, 1989; S.-C. Lo, J.W.-K. Shih, N.-Y. Yang, C.-Y. Ou, and R. Y.-H. Wang, Am. J. Trop. Med. Hyg. 40:213-226, 1989). In the present study, the genetic and serologic properties of the incognitus strain and other M. fermentans strains were compared. Furthermore, the replication of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1), determined by reverse transcriptase activity and HIV-1 p24 antigen level, in peripheral blood mononuclear cells was evaluated after stimulation with mycoplasma cell lysates. The psb-2.2 viruslike infectious agent DNA probe, used to identify the incognitus strain in the tissues of AIDS and non-AIDS patients by Lo et al. (Am. J. Trop. Med. Hyg. 41:364-376 and 40:213-226, 1989), showed reaction patterns similar to those of two M. fermentans strains isolated from cell cultures but not to that of the type strain PG18. Restriction enzyme patterns of the incognitus strain with EcoRI and HindIII were also similar to those of M. fermentans strains isolated from cell cultures. There were no remarkable differences in the immunoblot profiles between the incognitus strain and the other M. fermentans strains. These results suggest that the incognitus strain is not a unique strain among M. fermentans strains. Further, cell lysates of each M. fermentans strain could also enhance the replication of HIV-1 to a level similar to that of the incognitus strain as determined by the reverse transcriptase activity and the amount of the p24 antigen.
"Duesberg's hypothesis is incomplete, of course, but he thinks that popper use accounts for most of the Gay male AIDS cases in the 80's, particularly those where the AIDS-defining disease was Kaposi Sarcoma."
Yeah sure, perfect sense. A fair number of cases of HIV/AIDS occur in newborn children. And as I recall, "poppers" are a popular recreational drug in the under 1 year old set. Not to mention that in most of the world, 50% of AIDS cases occur in women.
Does drug use cause AIDS?
Ascher and Sheppard looked at the possible role of poppers in the aetiology of Kaposi's sarcoma.
In a cohort of HIV+ and HIV- men they found KS exclusively in HIV+ men regardless of popper use.
Kochs postulates have been satisfied with HIV and AIDS many times. Chimpanzees get viremia readily but AIDS slowly. But they do come down with it at least sometimes eventually. Not surprising, the virus came from them and they are much better adapted to it than humans. In addition, the standard animal model is now SHIV, a hybrid of HIV and a close relative that infects monkeys and causes ....monkey AIDS.
Another large primate has also been used accidently, the human. HIV almost wiped out hemophiliacs on 3 continents due to factor VIII made from contaminated blood. Many became HIV + and many of those died of AIDS. Screening of blood and manufacturing changes ended that mini-epidemic. Many people also got HIV from blood donors. In some cases the paper trail is clear enough to see who gave the blood and what happened to the recipients. With a HIV+ donor, recepients end up Hiv+. Follow them long enough and they all die of AIDS. Nothing new about any of this.
1: J Infect Dis. 2000 Oct;182(4):1051-62. Epub 2000 Sep 8. Links
Progressive infection in a subset of HIV-1-positive chimpanzees.O'Neil SP, Novembre FJ, Hill AB, Suwyn C, Hart CE, Evans-Strickfaden T, Anderson DC, deRosayro J, Herndon JG, Saucier M, McClure HM.
Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center, Atlanta, GA 30329, USA. soneil@rmy.emory.edu
Chimpanzees are susceptible to infection with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-1; however, infected animals usually maintain normal numbers of CD4(+) T lymphocytes and do not develop immunodeficiency. We have examined 10 chronically infected HIV-1-positive chimpanzees for evidence of progressive infection. In addition to 1 animal that developed AIDS, 3 chimpanzees exhibit evidence of progressive HIV infection. All progressors have low CD4(+) T cell counts (<200 cells/microL), severe CD4:CD8 inversion, and marked reduction in interleukin-2 receptor expression by CD4(+) T cells. In comparison with HIV-positive nonprogressor chimpanzees, progressors have higher plasma and lymphoid virus loads, greater CD38 expression in CD8(+)/HLA-DR(+) T cells, and greater serum concentrations of soluble tumor necrosis factor type II receptors and beta2-microglobulin, all markers of HIV progression in humans. These observations show that progressive HIV-1 infection can occur in chimpanzees and suggest that the pathogenesis of progressive infection in this species resembles that in humans.
"Since I questioned HIV/AIDS, I'm only teaching the lab course," he said. "I haven't had a graduate student in 15 years.
"Some of [the students], under the condition of anonymity, tell me that this is what they were told. 'You spent a lot of time and paid a high price to get into Berkeley. Duesberg is not the way to go.... This will kill your career.'"
Sounds like good career advice to me. If I were to want to become a historian of the Holocaust, I wouldn't go running to David Irving to teach me. If I wanted to enter the biological sciences, I wouldn't go to grad school at the Institute for Creation Research. If I wanted to become a chemist, I wouldn't go to a die-hard adherent of phlogiston theory. Duesberg may have the chops to teach a grad student, but the grad student/professor-mentor relationship is about more than just saying "This is how it will be." It is, in my experience as a grad student, an apprenticeship where you will be working as much on your professor's work as your own, and your professor will try to guide you into an avenue of research more like his or hers. This is why finding a condusive professor in a viable field may well be more important than the name of the school.
HIV denialism has been weighed in the balance and found wanting by the relevant scientists. As far as they're concerned, it's not a viable field and discouraging people from hitching their wagon to Duesberg's dimming star is the only responsible way of advising someone. He doesn't publish hardly anything, he doesn't get grants, he doesn't do the research which would guide and shape one's own and, in the opinion the people from whom one would be seeking a job soon after graduation, the quality of the professor one chooses to study under is an indication of the quality of the student to the extent that any grad student who cannot recognize a crank is not bright nor knowledgable enough to be worth bothering with.
It may strike one as unfair, but the same principles obtain in almost any field which requires any specialized knowledge. If I wanted to become an art restorer and went to a school where they didn't teach a thing about color theory, perspective, but did teach that the best way to restore a painting was to spread the paint on with a trowel and then use an axe to cleave off the excess, then I wouldn't get many job offers.
For those of you who think HIV does not, or may not, cause AIDS- you don't have the background to understand the data. In science, disagreements are settled with data. This is different from social issues which are settled by persuasion. Also, statements made by scientists are not scripture, so a negative statement about HIV from the early days is subject to correction.
The bottom line is: There is no scientific debate, HIV causes AIDS. The disagreement is a social issue spread by ill-informed people. If you think Duesberg brings it into the scientific arena- read his early arguments (no data, just argument). Sad to say, he seems to have a psychological problem. As each fact about HIV was elaborated, he devised an argument against it. So, I am afraid that his expertise has failed him on this topic.
For those who think AIDSTruth is too strident in its opposition to denialists- that is like saying a welfare agency is too strident in its opposition to child abuse. I don't know how widespread the problem is; but I recall the case about 2 years ago in which a woman killed her 5-year-old daughter by denying HIV-AIDS and refusing to have the girl tested and treated. The woman knew she was HIV positive when she delivered the girl; that was a lot of lead time for saving the girl's life.
Drew,
As an outsider in this debate, it is difficult to see why you find Robster's response ludicrous and juvenile.
The strategy he relates is after all a common response to other denialists like creationists, and probably the basic strategy among scientific organizations. It is often not considered effective to elevate anti-science sentiments to a position to reason with in the public sphere, since it is always based in unreasonable positions promoted by mostly unreasonable individuals. As for a scientific debate it is always within science on the facts.
What is it you found ludicrous and how does that translate to juvenile, or vice versa if that is the case? I took a brief look at AIDStruth.org, and it seems to be an excellent source to answer your concerns of "whether the tests are valid, whether the treatments work", and even if the answer to "if I'm at risk" is diluted onto a massive amount of research papers the site gives links to resources that probably answers that more directly.
For anyone new to these threads, it might be worth pointing out that Aetiology is one of the few blogs where you can encounter heterosexual Federalist Society members posing as gay men.
The hypothesis that HIV causes AIDS was declared at a press conference in 1984 by Heckler and Gallo with no scientific proof. The current proof that HIV causes AIDs is found on a government sponsored web site which declared that "all scientists believe that HIV causes AIDS". The drug treatment for HIV is essentially a form of iatrogenic genocide with AZT, and/or the newer protease inhibitors essentially killing those who trust in the medical system. It is ludicrous to attempt to eradicate a nucleotide sequence in the human genome with deadly cytotoxic drugs. Ariel Glaser and her mother Elizabeth, the icons of the largest pediatric AIDS foundation in the US, were both killed by AZT toxicity. The BBC has documented unethical medical experimentation on minority orphan chidren without consent using deadly HIV drugs. See: Guinea Pig Kids at the BBC web site. The HIV causes AIDS hypothesis is a BIG LIE which soaks up 8 billion in public taxpayer funds every year for HIV research which has shown no mechanism of disease, no animal model and no vaccine after 20 years. Taxpayers want an accounting of their money. It's time to stop the madness and turn off the money for this huge medical mistake, which is now supported by paid political activists and drug company shills. The government of South Africa has correctly rejected the HIV drugs, and we should too. The reason why there is no debate is because the HIV "apologists" have nothing to stand on except a belief system supported by 8 billion public dollars a year and media censorship by government agencies. The public disgrace called "the hypothesis that HIV causes AIDS" has failed and it's over. Everyone knows about it now.
for more information see www.reviewingaids DOT com
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&T…
This study shows how mycoplasma incognitus causes disease in rats, while the ordinary mycoplasma fermentans doesnt, proving Lo's point.
On HIV, ok 99.5 percent of animals injected with hiv dont get AIDS , a small proprtion do with siv (that doesnt exist in the wild) What can we conclude with that? Dont ask me.....more expirements are needed.
How does hiv that is only present in a small number of tcells cause organ failure, how does it kill so many T cells when its barely present?
How odd, neocon GOP lawyers. Are they just trolling for fun? Or is this part of some plot to encourage gays to get HIV, get sick, refuse treatment, and then die quietly and cheaply? About the only allies of the HIV deniers would the "god hates fags" fundie crowd who think AIDS is god's gift to the gay community.
Liked the AIDSTruth website BTW. It would be useful to have Deniers list of claims with refutations like talkorigins does with the creo nonsense. It can take 10-20 times longer to refute a lie than to make the lies up. Making up stuff is quick and easy. OTOH, there are only so many lies so they just repeat them over and over.
To everyone,
In order to understand where the dissidents come from and what they are saying, it can be summed up in this video with duesberg and some other scientists. Hiv fact or fraud. In order to combat them/agree with them you can see this video to hear their ridicoulous/wonderful video.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5064591712431946916
As usual, every time Prof. Smith brings up the subject of HIV/AIDS, the whackjobs come out of the woodwork. The fact of the matter is very simple. Peter Deusberg is no more credible on the subject of HIV/AIDS, then fellow whackjob Michael Behe is on the subject of evolution or fellow whackjob Brian Josephson is on the subject of cold fusion or fellow whackjob Arthur Butz is on the subject of the Holocaust.
Wow. Is this still really being endlessly debated? As with any science that I don't know about, I go with the consensus until the consensus shifts. It shifts because people do research that shows unexpected results. The results are interesting and others jump in to do more research in related areas. The results continue to come in in favor of the "new" hypothesis.
I've simply waited patiently for denialists to provide airtight research that can't help but change the minds of their colleagues. Year after year, this doesn't happen. Year after year, the accepted hypothesis is strengthened by new research.
What's to debate other than, as Noble says, the same old "articles" that seemed so pertinent back in the 90's? The scientific method isn't a debate. It's a process. It's the grandest process for getting at the truth (or as close as we can come) that humans have ever developed. Let the science proceed and let the truth come out as it will.
Forty Mules:
"Iatrogenic genocide" is what Josef Mengele carried out sixty-five years ago; accusing doctors generally of this crime makes you sound hysterical. What happened to make you so bitter?
Drew H. & Mike P,
Wikipedia has an interesting section on poppers.
It does note that they were made by Glaxo's predecessor, Burroughs Welcome.
Regarding health effects, it states:
Suggestions of a link between poppers and either AIDS, HIV infection or an AIDS-related cancer called Kaposi's Sarcoma have been made and are a subject of on-going debate.
It then goes on to dismiss a causal link:
However, some researchers are looking for causal mechanisms to explain the correlation.[34] In a 1986-1988 series of study reviews and technical workshops with leading authorities, mandated by the US Congress, it was concluded that nitrites are not a causal factor in AIDS infection or Kaposi's sarcoma.[35]
Cite "35", though, is not a peer-reviewed paper but some gov't report.
Of course, Wiki is not a scientific authority, just a good starting place.
David/Hank, your writing style is so obvious that I'm afraid your attempts to hold a dialogue with your alter egos (whatever happened to Barry B?) are inadvertently providing some welcome light relief from the horrors of the Maniotis thread. May I suggest that you try dictating the gist of what you want to say to a third party, and have them write the post in their own words? I think you'd find it would work a lot better.
Cue righteous indignation in 5, 4, 3, 2, ...
I'm very amused at denialists getting angry about AIDS truth dot org. Attacks and ad hominems? I've seen evidence and quotes from people on that site. Lots of references, all the ones I looked up were actually supporting the stuff they're cited for. Unlike Andrew Maniotis' random lie references.
I must have missed all the monkey heads John Moore put on the denialist pictures. Maybe cooler and forty could send a link to those. Obvious to me, AIDS truth is just giving info and when that info upsets someone, they scream about meanies.
Or go on science blogs and pretend to be denialist gay men with lots and lots of experience with HIV and AIDS. If Mr. Jefferys is right, that's really Pathetic.
Wow. Talk about poseurs!
Wow. Again. "Iatrogenesis literally means "brought forth by a healer" (iatros means healer in Greek); as such, it can refer to good or bad effects, but it is almost exclusively used to refer to a state of ill health or adverse effect or complication caused by or resulting from medical treatment." (Wikipedia.)
Your outburst is ironic since it seems Ariel Glazer's parents fought for getting children admissible for treatment:
( http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE0D61039F930A35750C0… )
Dont mock "denialists"
They honestly beleive what they say. Its not hard to believe some scientists question the hiv hypothesis when most every animal injected with hiv doesnt get AIDS and Hiv is bareley present, In Robert Gallo's book "virus Hunters" he admits that hiv is present in only 1 of 10,000 t cells. Most viruses cause damage before antibodies only, not after.
I'm agnostic on hiv but think it's a debatable topic.
Cooler the 9/11 conspiracy theorist is agnostic on HIV like Michael Behe is agnostic on evolution and the KKK is agnostic on race relations and like one of "cooler's" other identities BillyBipBip is agnostic on 911 being a plot of Zionists.
Cooler is like a repeat conspiracy theorist. Mycoplasma bioweapons released on US troops in the Gulf War, chemtrails, a Navy Seal doctor who tried to stop 911 but was ignored by an official at the Pentagon whose position doesn't exist, now HIV.
DEAR LOSER
DONT EVER ACCUSE ME OF LIES, YOU UGLY OLD LADY. I NEVER STATED ANY OF THESE STATMENTS THAT 9/11 WAS A PLOT BY THE ZIONISTS, I WATCHED THE FILM LOOSE CHANGE THATS GOTTEN LIKE 50 MILLION VIEWS AND I POSTED ON ONE OF THEIR SITES YOU LOSER, NEVER DID I MAKE THESE STATMENTS ABOUT ZIONISTS, UGLY OLD LADY, YOU PIECE OF GARBAGE.
IVE SEEN YOU POST ON ON OTHER SITES THAT THE HOLOCAUST DIDNT HAPPEN! (I DONT NEED PROOF, YOU DIDNT)
It must hurt to be exposed, but all caps? Cooler if your conspiratorial ways are embarassing to you, the next time you try a new conspiracy theory consider paraphrasing your previous posts on 9/11 sites instead of just pasting so that people can't track you and find out what kind of a person you are.
FYI if someone hasn't read the other thread,
"Cooler" has used the exact words of "BillyBipBip" who is a 911 conspiracy theorist at several sites so I assume he and Billy are the same. Cooler has not denied being BillyBipBip even though I mentioned it twice. I am not an expert on Cooler's or Billy's different personalities but I do know he is a 911 conspiracy theorist and I do know most 911 conspiracy theorists implicate "Zionists" or Jews in general in the events of 911. Somehow or another. Directly or indirectly. There's always Mossad or some rich Jewish investors or something. I'm glad Billy denies he goes that far but like denialists and homophobes theres some bad bad company there.
Drew,
Your response is ludicrous. I'm not interested in engaging juveniles on this very tough, emotionally-wrought issue.
I googled the AIDSTruth site for each of said individuals. Unless Cooler's inconsistent grammar and spelling led me to miss someone, what I wrote was an accurate representation of what is present regarding each individual.
------------
Raven,
Thanks for finding Lo's current stance on mycoplasma and AIDS. Let's watch as it is ignored.
Ive already soundly rebutted everything that raven said about dismissing mycoplasma incognitus as human pathogen, scroll above. Lo has never recanted anything.
I never stated mycoplasma causes AIDS, rather it probably serisously complicates it in some patients, and is the cause of many cases of CFS/RA/fibromyaligia
As far as HIV's role in AIDS a since there is no reliable animal model and its barely detectable (in tiny fraction of t cells) in a patient, a simple study following 10-20 people who just tested positive who are not taking drugs/azt, not coinfected w other microbes/ and not under catastrophic stress would be one I'd like to see.
Adele,
your like one of those people who wanders around the neighborhood with nothing to do besides look through the trash and spread gossip and lies.
You have no idea who "billy" is, clue, I know him but its not me. I met him on that site. Hell, you cant defend any arguments so you try and dig up dirt on people. Grow up.
This thread is an excellent study of a typical rhetorical/psychomarketing tool, using details and rhetorical argumentation to distract pattern-recognition of larger contexts, campaigns, and anything perceived damaging to a program. From Right Wing, Inc's, Intelligent Design's, and Exxon's GE skeptic campaign's playbook. And of course, the good ol' list of talking points.
On poppers.
You guys are conspiratorial-meme junkies. You morons can prove to yourself you're morons. Buy a one-way ticket to South Africa [you won't make it back]. Then visit all the impoverished townships and go door-to-door telling the grandparents and siblings raising all the tens of thousands of orphans of their dead children and siblings that if these desperately poor people had simply not been popper abusers, hey, they'd be with us today. You guys are dumb enough this might actually sound like a good idea to you -- you know, expose the South African government's plot to hide its population's epidemic popper abuse problem. You'll think much clearer if you remove the syringes from you forearms.
Cooler
Bringing the tactics of a collection of dishonest political actors to a science discussion isn't the best way to establish credibility. Informed people will dismiss you as a liar. How to avoid that? Here's one suggestion. First, show that you understand, in deep detail, the scientific arguments and evidence against your point of view, then start laying out your evidence. Neither I nor anyone else will be holding our breath. Science has built into it a requirement of being able to admit mistakes, very publicly. Whatever you do for a living, likely this, doesn't have that requirement, clearly.
Neither science, nor the treatment of sick people using science, is built on nor functions on the back of a list of talking points, which is the only thing you're doing. Something you are obviously practiced at doing.
"I'm agnostic on hiv but ..."
Agnostic about science....now where have I heard that before? The evidence you present -- in the form of your behavior -- is proof that you are not "agnostic". In other words, that you are lying about your motivation.
Wait, I just realized there could be another reason for your behavior. You've redefined the word "agnostic" to be a synonym for "against". No, no, I get it now. By "agnostic" you mean "I'm against it for no reason I'll ever tell you and am using this word as one more dishonest psychomarketing tool so you won't notice I take one side and work the hell out of a few talking points". Yeah, that's probably what you mean. Research becomes a "talking point" when its handled with such obsessively narrow, one-sided, contextless certainty as you do.
If you're "agnostic", let's hear the arguments against your position, even just a bit from time to time.
Cooler, anybody who takes a position on a biomed researcher's blog that a single experiment proves anything, or even a group of such by a single researcher, or ten, or a hundred, and ignores, lets say just the volume of counter evidence is a.... well, you're too practiced and skilled at this to be stupid. One doesn't do medicine, or science, like this. This is how politics is done. A letter from a dozen researchers backing a more tolerant view of Duesberg has merit, especially when discussing the internal political structure of biomedical research. But it's worse than meaningless in a discussion about biomed research results; it's a ploy to use grievance to elevate your "evidencery" argument by evoking a common freedom-of speech/research frame.
I agree denialists and their suspicions shouldn't be mocked. But when the same people attempt to undercut solid and solidly vetted biomed research with tools designed for political campaigning, and don't exhibit even a basic understanding of biomedicine and research, those with such understanding are morally obligated to publicly go after such stupidity. Because then the denialists have turned themselves into a public health threat.
Even if, say, mycoplasma turned out to be relevant, turning a few studies into a campaign turns you into an amoral operative for someone or something. Why amoral? What you're doing is completely irresponsible and it's simple to see why that is so. What if you're wrong? If someone ill acted on your severely cherry-picked, carefully rhetorically-thought-through presentation of "evidence"? What do you know about mycoplasma? Give us a precis of the basic biology and history.
[By the way, the mycoplasma-CFS link is only one of many possible etiologies for that illness, but comes nowhere close to the most-seriously-considered-possibility classification. It appears more and more likely CFS has multiple etiologies. This is something I know about. To repeatedly use that link as support for mycoplasma in AIDS is bogus. It's a rhetorical gimmick. Find something else.]
People like you have some trick you perform inside your head, I'm not certain how it's done, that allows your ego or your financial needs or, these days often, faith-in-something needs, drive you to become unconscious of the damage you do to other actual people and institutions. This packaged crap you're presenting could only be relevant if the thousands of AIDS researchers working very hard on this were all....well, you know, like you.
Sometimes you people really amaze and fascinate me. Then ten seconds later I remember the trail or death, destruction, and ruin [Iraq] you always trail behind you. That's not very fascinating unless one is interested in psychopathology.
I'd put you in with the popper people, except you are obviously smarter than that. You'd send somebody else to South Africa do that for you. Spend your time on something honest. Like oh . . . healing the sick or doing actual research or even raising money for these researchers you're so enamored with. But you've got a job to do so you couldn't give a damn.
.
.
PS. If you have, or will have, kids, think how proud they'll be when you show them all of this work you've done. Somehow, I don't think they'll ever see it. From you, at least. Be careful, your real identity and your work will last to infinity, in all practicality. You have no idea what a curious college kid will be able to access ten or twenty years from now.
Dont mock "denialists"
They honestly beleive [sic] what they say.
So do creationists, 911 troofers, antivaxers, etc. Oh and small children when asked about Santa Claus.
In Robert Gallo's book "virus Hunters" he admits that hiv is present in only 1 of 10,000 t cells.
You mean Virus Hunting, right? From 1991? Better research has been done since (and that's just a piece from 2000!).
Most viruses cause damage before antibodies only, not after.
You mean the damage occurs before antibodies are produced? Lots of viruses can do damage before, after, and during antibody production. Hepatitis B and C are both great examples, as is HPV and practically all of the herpesviruses. Do you fact-check these statements before you repeat them?
I'm just leaving the house for awhile. I just noticed this from cooler.
". . . mycoplasma . . . cause of many cases of CFS[/RA/fibromyaligia.]"
Any time, any place, buddy, I'll take you on over that one. That qualifies as an out and out lie.
Anyone familiar with the 20-plus years of research into this baffling illness wouldn't be so stupid to open themselves up to proof of their ignorance. Like I said above, find something else.
I've changed my mind. You DO get classified with the popper kids. You're Wile E. Coyote with nothing under your feet on this one. You just don't know it. Yet.
That extra little step you took blew it. But then you people always end up, somehow, going a bit to far because your overall message is at it's core dishonest.
Bring it on.
Any time, any place.
Wow, someone is pretty angry. When Dr. Lo filed his patent for pathenogenic mycoplasma he clearly stated the major role mycoplasma had in CFS. Garth nicolson has found a clear correlation with these types of diseases
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?itool=abstractplus&db=pub…
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&do…
DR. garth nicolson has confirmed this, both of these researchers are far more intelligent than you are. Dr. lo was one of the most brilliant scientists of his generation in China, thats why hes the highest ranking in the army scientist and heads the infectious disease branch of the AFIP. He had something gallo and the virus hunters that gave us hep c/hpv didnt have, an animal model.
Dr garth nicolson and nancy nicolson has recieved thousands of letters for their help and were made honorary navy seals for their work on gulf war illness, have you ever helped anyone thats sick? I was sick for many years and they helped me tremendously. Dont deny other sick people these honest scientists research and instead push them with propaganda from the drug companies that own you.
As far as hiv, yes some viruses come back after antibody, most don't, more research needs to be done, ie the study I mentioned before.
Remember, garth and nancy nicolson have recieved thousands of letters from people who are cured bc of their research, what have you ever done?
Im not saying all cases of CFS are caused by this, but for the ones that test positive they deserve to review the data themselves and recieve treatment if they want it. Of course you'll tell them "there is no solution until a drug company says so."
Cooler,
As far as hiv, yes some viruses come back after antibody, most don't, more research needs to be done, ie the study I mentioned before.
Hep A, antibody production begins while the patient is experiencing clinical symptoms including liver cell death. The antibodies expressed in Hep B patients differ depending on the current disease state of said patient.
Your comment that "most don't" means that some do. Viruses don't work by majority rule. Some viral infections have run their clinical course by the time antibody production is ramping up. But in no way is this evidence that an infection (especially a chronic one like HIV) cannot be ongoing while antibodies are being produced.
It's striking how much speculation goes into hiv.
First 150 chimps were injected with hiv, they all were supposed to die in a year or 2, most if not all of them didnt ever get AIDS, suddenly hiv became "species specific" to save the hypothesis.
People were supposed to die within a couple years, when they didnt hiv suddenly became a "slow virus" with a 10 yr window period.
There were many long term progressors, suddenly these people had "special genes"
It became widely known that hiv didnt infect enough cells to account for a direct cell killing role, suddenly to "save the hypothesis" , Hiv is an autoimmune disease that kills cells indirectly.
The only way to resolve this is to follow 10-20 hiv positive people with no risk factors azt/drugs/othermicrobes/intense stress and see what actually happens.
.
Not mad, bra, excited. I don't get to play like this too often. But come on, man dat's lightweight having me do your paper chasin'. Get serious, bra.
The leg work this once, you lazy ass. You make the claim, you take the blame. You provide the evidence, not me. Links are for checkin' you out, man, not for us to be runnin' ragged all over the place. No evidence for eye, it be a lie. Simple equation. Sides, you wanna play death by standard deviation avalanche, I'm in. I'll be sendin' snow your way, bra, ain't got time to mess around with your lazy ass bullshit.
_____________________________________
I have someone very close to me who has CFS and I have closely FOLLOWED the research over the last 20 years.
You know . . . gotten this person into studies and their blood into virology studies, spoken to and corresponded with researchers internationally, proposed treatments for this person's physicians, have a two-hundred item bibliography just of the photocopies in my files and half-dozen technical books on my shelves, attended CFS medical conferences, am ten minutes from one of the nation's top three medical schools w/library, repeatedly consult a clinician who in turn has been repeatedly consulted by the NIH about CFS, known dozens and dozens of CFS patients, some for years, been online w/medline from my place, 1987 to now, followed related illness in the same manner, here's some of mine and another just below. [See the difference?] Read my ass off. And etc. Lots of etc.
My motivation is deeper and wider than you are capable of comprehending. Obviously. Or you wouldn't put yourself in such a self-destructive position. And, I'm smarter than you.
Wrong subject. Wrong person. Wrong lie.
Let's go, buddy. Another round. I'll be back. Then, at least act like you're serious.
Lazy ass bullshit.
Oooooooooooooooooooooooh
"Not mad, bra, excited. I don't get to play like this too often. But come on, man dat's lightweight having me do your paper chasin'. Get serious, bra."
"The leg work this once, you lazy ass. You make the claim, you take the blame. You provide the evidence, not me. Links are for checkin' you out, man, not for us to be runnin' ragged all over the place. No evidence for eye, it be a lie. Simple equation. Sides, you wanna play death by standard deviation avalanche, I'm in. I'll be sendin' snow your way, bra, ain't got time to mess around with your lazy ass bullshit."
You dont make much sense to be honest. "bra" what the hell does that mean? You sound like you're on crack!
Anyways you need to go to Garth and nancy nicolsons website to see the evidence/treatment for mycoplasma infections in chronic illnesses, and the thousands of letters they've recieved thanking them.
www.projectdaylily.com
www.immed.com
Clear correlation with CFS/ALS gulf war syndrome and mycoplasma, Couple that with Lo's animal model and youve got an infection the public deserves to hear about, oh I'm sorry, its not supported by a drug companies so lets just forget about it, just scrtutinize to death in a way you'd never scrutinize research that a drug company sponsored.
This blog needs some new life!, its the same three people who keep responding and repeating the same things! Theres a pattern here, if the research is sponsored by drug companies and the CDC its mindlessly excepted, if its a theory advanced by honest scientists w/o conflicts of interest it is scrutinized and several futile attempts at debunking are attempted!
Hopefully some more scientists will start weighing in, I really dont want to hear from the same 3 people the same thing over and over again. I sure hope there are more open minded scientists out there. Adele, Raven, Robster are like robots, I dont even bother reading half of their posts anymore.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?itool=abstractplus&db=pub…
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&do…
Add Chris noble to that list.
Cooler,
First 150 chimps were injected with hiv, they all were supposed to die in a year or 2, most if not all of them didnt ever get AIDS, suddenly hiv became "species specific" to save the hypothesis.
Viruses often act differently depending on the species they are in. Some are entirely species specific. In this case, HIV, as others have pointed out to you repeatedly, the symptoms in chimps are similar to early symptoms in humans.
People were supposed to die within a couple years, when they didnt hiv [sic] suddenly became a "slow virus" with a 10 yr window period.
You see, science advances as we gain more information and understanding. What we thought 25 years ago was incomplete, and out knowledge is more complete now. When you test a hypothesis you check the results and either adapt, reject or accept the hypothesis. That is what scientists have done in regard to HIV/AIDS. The denialists, when their behavior, drug abuse and treatment causes disease hypotheses were disproved, they held fast and wouldn't adapt or reject their ideas.
There were many long term progressors, suddenly these people had "special genes"
You mean CCR5delta32? Why the scare quotes? Making fun of a gene doesn't make it disappear. Scientists noted something unusual, studied it, found something fascinating, published it, and your response is to be incredulous?
It became widely known that hiv didnt infect enough cells to account for a direct cell killing role, suddenly to "save the hypothesis" , Hiv is an autoimmune disease that kills cells indirectly.
Again, you notice something interesting it, study it, write about your results. Indirect killing does occur, but the number of cells infected was originally underestimated, as discussed above. Yet again, the denialists refused to change their position.
The only way to resolve this is to follow 10-20 hiv positive people with no risk factors azt/drugs/othermicrobes/intense stress and see what actually happens.
We already know what happens in untreated cases. Those "othermicrobes" [sic] cause opportunistic infections and the patient dies. Your "only way" study is unethical as it relies on not giving patients a treatment. It isn't how studies are performed.
I dont even bother reading half of their posts anymore.
Obviously. heh
The only way to resolve this is to follow 10-20 hiv positive people with no risk factors azt/drugs/othermicrobes/intense stress and see what actually happens.
Try not to panic, cooler, but everyone is full of "other microbes." Other people on here would know better than me, but you're certainly infected with Pneumocystis jiroveci, candida, mycobacterium avium, probably also toxo, cryptococcus, Epstein-Barr virus, cytomegalovirus, herpes zoster. These pathogens are controlled by the immune system, particulary T cell responses specific to each pathogen, and they rarely cause disease unless the T cell response is compromised in some way (e.g. by receiving immunosuppressive treatments to prevent organ rejection after transplantation, or by HIV infection).
Here is an example of the kind of study you're looking for, it's called a natural history study and if you go to PubMed and search for the terms "HIV natural history untreated" (or similar keywords) you'll find many more.
Scand J Infect Dis. 2004;36(6-7):466-73.
The natural course of disease following HIV-1 infection in dar es salaam, Tanzania: a study among hotel workers relating clinical events to CD4 T-lymphocyte counts.
Bakari M, Urassa W, Pallangyo K, Swai A, Mhalu F, Biberfeld G, Sandstrom E.
Department of Internal Medicine and Microbiology/Immunology Muhimbili University College of Health Sciences (MUCHS), Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
Current HIV management guidelines are based on natural history studies from the developed world. Data on the similarity of the natural course of HIV-1 infection conflict with studies in the developing world. A cohort of 1887 hotel workers with no access to antiretroviral therapy was followed between 1990 and 1998 in Dar es Salaam through annual clinical evaluations and CD4+ T-lymphocyte (CD4 cell) count determinations. 196 (10.4%) were HIV-1 sero-prevalents; 133 (7.9%) were HIV-1 sero-incidents; and 1558 (82.6%) remained HIV seronegative. Follow-up duration was 13,719 and 82,742 months for HIV-1 seropositives and HIV seronegatives respectively. Clinical events occurred at median CD4 cell counts similar to those previously reported from the developed world, but death occurred at higher counts. Off-duty last 6 months, chronic diarrhoea and a faster CD4 cell count decline were associated with faster disease progression and death. In Tanzania HIV natural history is similar to that from the developed world and similar management guidelines could be employed.
------------
If you get the full paper you'll find the following (I'd recommend verifying this for yourself, given what we've seen from Dr. Mantiotis I'd not suggest you take anyone's word for anything).
"During the study period, none of the subjects was on antiretroviral therapy. Chemoprophylaxis against TB and other bacterial infections were not offered to the study subjects, as this was not the recommended practice at the time."
"Collected blood samples were tested for the presence of HIV antibodies by Enzygnost anti HIV-1+2 plus ELISA (Behring, Marburg, Germany). All reactive sera were tested by a Western blot assay (Genelab, USA) which was interpreted according to WHO criteria."
"The median follow up-duration was 39.0, 41.0 and 46.0 months among HIV-1 seroprevalents, HIV-1 sero-incidents and HIV seronegatives respectively."
The mortality during follow up was as follows:
43/196 (21.9%) people that were HIV-infected at the time of entering the study died (median peripheral blood CD4 T cell count at last sampling prior to death, 90 cells)
22/133 (16.5%) people that seroconverted during the study died (median peripheral blood CD4 T cell count at last sampling prior to death, 186 cells)
20/1558 (1.2%) people that remained HIV uninfected throughout the study follow-up died (median peripheral blood CD4 T cell count at last sampling prior to death 634 cells)
So, over 2-3 years of follow up, one in five HIV infected people died, one in a hundred uninfected people died. HIV infected people experienced peripheral blood CD4 T cell declines, uninfected people didn't.
"Bra" is the Hawaiian Creole version of "bro". It's used extensively in the islands. Here it's used as a p.o.v. voice.
I was trying to lighten the mood a bit. I was hoping you would be inclined to listen to a reasonable presentation about the CFS patients and their work that you trampled on with your CFS error.
There are other diseases and other patients with their own history of run-ins with the medical establishment. I'm not certain whether you give a damn, or not. But it's possible you could learn something from them. I've been writing it in a spirit of commensalism of illness. What do you want? A discussion that goes beyond "correlations", or simply to keep score? I can do either.
I'm dealing with car problems and mechanics today, and have to go out again right now.
Year after year, this doesn't happen. Year after year, the accepted hypothesis is strengthened by new research. -- John
Strengthened by new research? Oh really, John? Perhaps you should learn the value of critical thinking. If you can muster the courage, you could test your abilities with the following:
Lack Of Certainty
So, it looks like the prevailing "consensus" on HIV is going to endure yet another radical alteration, which will only "strengthen the consensus", right John?
A favorite quote from the article:
"It was thought infected cells produced more HIV particles and that this caused the body to activate more T cells which in turn were infected and killed...Modelling by UK and US researchers suggests that, if that was true, cells would die out in months not years."
Wasn't it Dr. Duesberg that said "there are no slow viruses, only slow virologists", or something to that effect. Well, it looks the the almighty consensus is finally coming to the same conclusion, John. Painfully, it is much to late for the thousands killed by AZT, but you, John, you have the opportunity to correct your own blinding ignorance. Give it a go!
_____________________________________
For anyone new to these threads, it might be worth pointing out that Aetiology is one of the few blogs where you can encounter heterosexual Federalist Society members posing as gay men. -- Richard Jefferys
For anyone new to these threads, I suggest they review your post history Mr. Jeffreys. Even a cursory review will reveal your insidious penchant for HIV cheerleading, no matter the human costs. Perhaps, you'd like to turn over a new leaf. What say you, Mr. Jeffreys? Does this new research shake your undying love for HIV, even just an itsy little bit?
Here's yet another laughable quote from the article:
"HIV is an incredibly complex virus and research is ongoing to try and establish exactly how it works. We need more studies in this area before we can draw any clear conclusions."
Surely, you can do better than that, Mr. Jefferys. In your expert opinion, how many more years do you think it'll take before we can draw some clear conclusions? I'm not so easily swayed by mere consensus as poor "John". I'm sure you've already been briefed by your employer, so as to coordinate what the official new spin will be. That way you won't risk confusing HIV's dwindling brethren, followers such as John, who might be easily influenced into "thinking for themselves". I trust that you'll succeed, Mr. Jeffreys for you are the epitome --the most pure example--of the caliber of the corruption that now typifies American social institutions; therefore, I eagerly await your putrid and vile reply.
____________________________
In other news....Anybody seen Sicko, yet?
I bet it's a big hit with the resident peanut gallery. How did you find it, Adele? What about you, Robster? Color me an optimist, but I think maybe Americans will finally wakeup now that Moore has pointed out the obvious:
The US is 37th in the world in terms of quality of health care--slightly ahead of Slovenia, but behind Costa Rica--but number one in terms of per capita health care spending, or $7,000 per person per annum.
Wasn't some idiot on this blog trumpeting in another thread that US had the greatest health care quality in the world? Somebody help me out here? Who was that idiot? (Hint: there may be more than one...)
Kevin
I wonder why Tara hasn't devoted a blog entry to this very important consensus-altering HIV research....what say you, Tara? Or, are you only interested in picking on Dissidents when discussing the science "supporting" HIV?
"Researcher Professor Jaroslav Stark, from Imperial College London, said: "Scientists have never had a full understanding of the processes by which T helper cells are depleted in HIV, and therefore they've been unable to fully explain why HIV destroys the body's supply of these cells at such a slow rate."
great article kevin
Kevin wrote:
I eagerly await your putrid and vile reply
OK then.
Kevin, on June 19, 2007 at 01:05 PM, in the "Long Shadow of Smallpox" thread:
"Of course, I employed mostly alternative treatments, which are frequently disparaged by members of the peanut gallery here; however, I did not completely shun modern medicine. After much research, I realized that my compromised immune system had been caused by the antibiotics that my numerous doctors were giving me, indiscriminately, for recurring bacterial infections."
Kevin, in January of 2004:
"I tell any doctor I see what works and what doesn't for my particular situation; they basically do whatever I suggest re: antibiotics and other treatments. (I did see a doc recently who wasn't familiar with my history, who tried to tell me that antibiotics would do nothing for me. After much arguing, I cut a deal explaining that I would return in two weeks and educate him on just how necessary antibiotics were for acute exacerbations of my chronic condition. I plan to call him tomorrow). I am halfway thru a Biaxin regimen and feel almost well, but I know it is only temporary. Currently, I cannot even go out to a bar that is at all smoky without developing a sinus infection a few days later. I will begin the H2O2 irrigation tonight and keep you posted."
--------------
You also quote Jaroslav Stark, then treat that quote as if it were mine, I'm not sure why. This story is actually an excellent example of way a college press release and the mainstream media can make a complete hash out of communicating scientific results, although sadly Stark clearly aided and abetted them in this process. It's also another opportunity for denialists to reveal their ignorance of the literature.
To begin at the beginning, there is no "runaway hypothesis," let alone a "popular theory." This is Stark's interpretation of a number of commentaries and studies detailing the role of immune activation in the pathogenesis of HIV infection, mainly those written by Mark Feinberg, Zvi Grossman Louis Picker, Marc Hellerstein and colleagues.
Stark and colleagues somehow decided that these commentaries suggest that HIV infects memory CD4 T cells undergoing homeostatic division and kills them by direct cytopathicity in 0.5 days; this assumption is central to their mathematical model and it's taken from a David Ho paper from Science in 1996. Look at the commentaries on immune activation by the above authors, see if you can find an a reference to this paper. Zvi Grossman's most recent commentary makes one reference to a different David Ho paper from 1995, in this context:
"We and others have proposed that increased turnover rates of T cells reflect a response to recurrent antigenic stimulation in the presence of inflammation8, 28, 38, 40, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49 and not a homeostatic proliferative response to ongoing virus-mediated killing of infected and uninfected cells39, 50, 51, 52."
The 1995 Ho paper is ref#50. Mark Feinberg's commentary is here (I'm not sure if access to full text is free or not):
http://www.jci.org/cgi/content/full/112/6/821
It also does not suggest that HIV infects and directly kills memory CD4 T cells undergoing homeostatic turnover in 0.5 days, and also does not cite David Ho's 1996 Science paper.
So, what Stark and colleagues have done is rather shady, because they've misinterpreted commentaries written by other scientists about immune activation, glommed them together into a non-existent theory (of their own invention), which they've then refuted with a mathematical model!! And to top it off, because the Imperical College Press office issued a misleading press release to go with the study, and because the mainstream media have done a terrible job of keeping up with the literature on HIV pathogenesis, they've got a ton of press coverage and entered denialist lore.
I wrote about this a little, I started out trying to be kind about the paper but ended up getting a little frustrated with Dr. Stark.
Perhaps someone else can handle the fallacy of imagining that you have to have a complete understanding of the pathogenesis of a disease in order to figure out causation.
Mr. Jefferys, yeah, I was wondering how long it would take the deniosaurs to pick that up. What was it a week?
Kind of puts the old lie to these ideas about consensus and conspiracy and silencing though. All Dr. Stark has to do to get on BBC is come up with an oddball computer paper put out a press release and bask in the glory. Just think how much fame and fortune if someone could really disprove a really substantial part of HIV causing AIDS. Like I dunno in the LAB not in some friggin computer?
And also, Dr. Stark with all the problems in this paper isn't questioning HIV causes AIDS. Denialists like to say there's no debate in science, so when they see some they have to explain it by demoting whatever party they like most to "denialist" or as they say paradigm shifter or rethinker.
Too bad for them there are all kinds of debates in science all the time. And Dr. Stark is now in one of them!
I now feel bad, as I got a thoughtful and informative email from Jaroslav Stark last night explaining that, while the assumption regarding the lifespan of infected cells in the model is taken from that David Ho paper, that wasn't intended as an endorsement of Ho's views on cytopathicity. While there certainly is no "runaway hypothesis," I think it was unfair of me to suggest that he and his co-authors were intentionally misrepresenting the work of Feinberg and others by trying to amalgamate it into one theory, it seems more like they were just naive about how to present what they were doing - and their intent in doing it - to the media. I toned down and corrected my blog posting accordingly.
Kevin,
I'm a big Michael Moore fan and big enemy of HMOs and health insurance. Give me single payer now. I look forward to seeing Sicko, but it hasn't opened in my area, and I typically catch movies after the first few weeks.
Mr. Jefferys, I am deeply touched by your concern for Prof. Stark's feelings. I'm not surprised he is now busy contacting you and everybody else to make amends for his contribution to the remarkably honest and objective mainstream scientific debate on HIV/AIDS praised by Adele. I trust we will soon have him appear on AIDStruth.orgy declaring in true scientific form the purity of his faith along with Rodriguez and Padian.
However, alhough it breaks my heart, I don't think the AIDStruth Inquisition should let Prof. Stark, who really should have known better, get away with his fault pas so easily.
Mr. Jefferys, in the name of HIV science, I propose we dispense with pity and professional pleasantries and expose Prof. Stark for the heretic he is this very instant.
1. Prof. Stark made up the name "runaway theory", in an attempt to lump together representatives of (a) school(s) of thought in HIV science. Has he seriously misrepresented this/these school(s) of thought in his paper. Yes or No?
2. Does the results of the mathematic modelling he has done present a problem for this/these schools of thought. Yes or No?
3. Or has he attacked a windmill, something of no relevance to current HIV science in a manner identical to the Denialists. Yes or No?
4. If '3' is the case, how can you, Mr, Jefferys, excuse the naivete of such a blundering buffoon, including his entire team, his institution of learning and the peer reviewers, before they have all purged themselves of their sins publicly?
You even call Prof. Stark "thoughtful". How can he be thoughtful if he has not yet rejected his own naive and mistaken research?
Inquisitive minds with deep pockets and very long reach demand you explain yourself Mr. Jefferys
The "blundering buffoon" is "Pope" here who tries to exploit a disagreement between scientists like it doesn't happen every day. Anthony Liversedge's favorite thing to do I think.
"Pope's" questions aren't good ones. Maybe you should ask,
1) Has Dr. Stark's research said HIV doesn't cause AIDS?
2) Does Dr. Stark's research say HIV can't kill T-cells?
3) Is a computer model more important than what we actually see in patients and in the lab?
And the answer to them, is, no.
Adele, although I'm impressed with your ability to come up with scientifically relevant questions, I think you should stay with your animal models for now and let Mr. Jefferys divert the issue himself.
1) Has Dr. Stark's research said HIV doesn't cause AIDS?
1. Was Prof. Stark's research designed to prove a negative: that HIV does not cause AIDS?
2) Does Dr. Stark's research say HIV can't kill T-cells?
2. Was Prof Stark's research designed to prove a negative: that HIV can't kill T-cells?
3) Is a computer model more important than what we actually see in patients and in the lab?
3. Why don't you ask that question of the guys that work with phylogenetic trees or computer generated estimates of HIV/AIDS incidence/prevalence in Africa?
Claus Jensen wrote:
1. Prof. Stark made up the name "runaway theory", in an attempt to lump together representatives of (a) school(s) of thought in HIV science. Has he seriously misrepresented this/these school(s) of thought in his paper. Yes or No?
Not just HIV science, human immunology. Read the papers - what do you think? You must understand them since you've already concluded HIV doesn't cause AIDS.
Claus JENSEN. Ok, that makes sense. Sorry I confused you with Anthony Liversedge. Although you gotta admit you two ARE like an old married couple. Bicker make up bicker hate scorn make up. Bicker bicker.
Claus Jensen said
Why don't you ask that question of the guys that work with phylogenetic trees or computer generated estimates of HIV/AIDS incidence/prevalence in Africa?
I said "in patients and in the lab." Phylogenetic trees are about something you can't usuallly see in patients OR the lab. Prevalence is in the whole population, not just in patients and the lab.
Sometimes you have to computer model. The oldest sampels of HIV are how old? fifty years? So you're left with phylogenetics. Honestly I'm skeptical like what, 1905 or 1940 but you have to start somewhere.
HIV prevalence, you can't test everyone so you never know. That's why you computer model. Not perfect but it can get close.
But killing T-cells? We KNOW T-cells decline. We see T-cells dying in the gut in days after someone's infected. In blood they go down consistintly. So you design a computer model but how many factors does it have? And how many factors in a body? And if the model says something we don't see in patients or lab then to me the model's wrong.
Stark and all those other modelers I know they're trying to help figure out these mechanisms and of course I say they can do their thing and I hope they find some good results but I'll trust some live data against any model.
That dodge was even worse than the previous by Adele.
I have alreay told you what I think: Stark is a heretic. You should burn him at the stake.
But the question was what you think? An even more pressing question now that you've upped the stakes from HIV science to 'human immunology'. What's the difference? I was under the impression that HIV science is the branch that writes and rewrites human immunology and virology as it goes along.
So there you have it, now are you going to answer my questions?
I'm flattered that somebody saw fit to use their connections to assign me a new identity. I saw it immediately became the subject of some scientific comments from the young lady who chooses to bicker here rather than with the father of her children.
And now, Adele, if you please, what exactly has Stark's computer model presented you with that you don't see in the lab or in the patients?
Phew.
I thought, having seen a good cross-section of Homeopathy Nuts, Electrosensitivity Nuts and (especially) Anti-Vaccine / MMR / Thimerosal Nuts, plus assorted "All Doctors and mainstream scientists are paid shills of Big Govt / Business / Pharma" loons - all online and ranting tirelessly - that I'd seen 'em all...
...but the "HIV isn't the cause of AIDS" nuts on here are well up there, at the very least.
Why do some people seem so utterly determined to believe Illuminati-style conspiracy theories rather than accept that science is a sort of self-correcting (if slowly) super-wiki where human beings take wrong turns but most correct themselves when they see a better piece of data?
I mean, who needs the conspiracies?
I used to watch and enjoy The X-Files, but I never felt an overwhelming need to adopt its worldview.
I can only think there must be some deep-seated psychological need to feel you are being conned and lied to that this kind thinking fulfils.
On a more positive note, wanted to say Kudos to Tara and the folks at AIDSTruth. The tidal wave of BadScience Garbage around in the media, and on the Internet, is threatening to submerge people, and anyone who stands up to combat the disinformation deserves a vote of thanks from the rest of us scientists. My admiration for single-handed bullshit-busters like Orac, David Colquhoun, PZ Myers at Pharyngula and Ben Goldacre at BadScience.net knows no bounds... but you have to figure debunking collectives like AIDSTruth may be the easier way to go.
Claus, you might read the Editor's Summary to find it and it's recognized by Yates too whos'e the main author. Go to medicine dot plosjournals dot org and lookup Yates A and Stark J. You can read the whole thing it's open access.
In patients T-cells decline slowly and gradually. In the model there should be a rapider fall to a set point. So Yates and them talk about why they think their model doesn't explain things. You should really read it. If you do you'll see why it doesn't support you.
I told you what I think about models but I'm prejudiced.
Oh and if you want to talk about my personal life maybe we should talk about yours too. OK?
To be less facetious, this discussion represents a return to the subject of my first postings in these loony denial threads: the foolishness of people like Duesberg in imagining that that they've somehow understood enough about the maintenance of T cell homeostasis to know all of the ways it might (or might not) be undermined. Nobody does, it's that simple. For convenience, denialists typically lump immunology research in with "HIV science" (Celia Farber once wrote on the NAR blog that she thought the field of cellular immunology only exists because of HIV), but you know with great certainty that were they ever to need an organ transplant they would happily benefit from the progress that's been made in the field. Almost more than all the other bigotry and bunk, this makes me nuts.
I am perfectly happy to admit that it has taken me multiple reads of Stark's paper to begin to get a handle on the approach they took. I'm also open to criticism for dashing off a blog post about it before I'd fully grasped it. I don't think they've deliberately misrepresented anyone's work, they just may have overreached a bit in the way they've turned the commentaries of other authors into specific assumptions. I think the crux of it is here (from their PLoS paper - IA stands for immune activation):
"The increased susceptibility of activated or proliferating T cells to infection [26] suggests a specific and plausible candidate mechanism. Both IA (a response to antigenic stimulation) and homeostatic proliferation (a response to lymphopaenia) may fuel the fire by generating new susceptible cells and thus more infection. Elevated turnover results in more infection, possibly more IA or homeostatic compensation, and runaway depletion of CD4+ T cells."
OK. But the fundamental assumption of the model is as follows:
"We assume that homeostatically activated or dividing cells (y) are more susceptible to HIV infection than resting cells (x)."
Oops. I think this is the zinger, because I can't recall any literature suggesting that memory CD4 T cells upregulate CCR5 as they undergo homeostatic turnover (which is essentially a process of self-renewal in which the memory CD4 T cells in your body divide about once every 50-60 days).
And to use Mark Feinberg & Guido Silvestri's commentary as an example of work they're model is based on, these authors don't suggest that memory CD4 T cells undergoing homeostatic turnover are primary targets for HIV infection:
"The expansion of a pool of fast-replicating but short-lived effector cells, of both CD4+ and CD8+ T cell lineages (Figure 1b), carries a number of important implications for our understanding of the pathogenic mechanisms of HIV disease. First, the expansion of effector-memory cells may exert a continuous drain of the naive T cell pool, which could, in turn, result in reduced capacity of the host immune system to generate primary responses to newly encountered antigens. Second, the expansion of such short-lived effector cells following HIV infection does not effectively lead to the establishment of a normal pool of true memory cells, i.e., the slow-proliferating, long-lived cells that show strong proliferative responses to recall antigens and that are believed to mediate protection from various infections, including lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus in mice (20) and HIV in humans (21). Third, the expansion of effectors that are able to produce large amounts of proinflammatory and proapoptotic cytokines may play a salient role in promoting the exaggerated bystander immunopathology associated with HIV infection. Finally, the generation of large numbers of activated CD4+ T cells that are known to be preferentially infected by HIV provides a fertile substrate for viral replication (21), thus creating the conditions for a vicious cycle in which more viral replication induces more immune activation, which in turn allows more viral replication, and so on."
You can see the "runaway" idea here, but the notion of infection of homeostatically proliferating CD4 T cells is not mentioned. The commentary is about an excellent paper by Marc Hellerstein that used labeling to measure the turnover of T cells in HIV-infected and uninfected individuals: http://www.jci.org/cgi/content/full/112/6/956
What's complicated here is the immunology, it's such a brainache that some of what I've written here only occurred to me as I was writing the post. I'll drop Jaroslav Stark another note and see what he says, and leave it up to Claus as to whether he wants to recommend the indictment of PLoS Medicine's peer reviewers for missing something.
Mr. Jefferys, my question was is Prof. Stark's 'zinger' so serious that it invalidates his conclusions with regard to the 'popular' views of how HIV causes CD4 cell depletion?
If it is, then yes! it's a scandal that his paper got as far as being published in a peer-reviewed journal (although that's seen before right David Ho?).
If the 'zinger' is not as serious as the apologists make out, then I'd say its the usual knee jerk smoke screen and damage control from you guys.
Pending
A generic problem here is the different ways that "raw" scientific information is "processed" on it's way to the public arena.
My experience has been that - as I would have expected - the people who write the statements about diseases on MAINSTREAM organisation websites (places like the CDC) put hundreds of collective hours of effort - including going back to the expert panels for checking and re-checking - into writing comprehensible not-too-technical-language consensus statements that are consistent with all the best and most tested and reliable data. Note: "consistent with". Not: "a bit of a guess including the bits we aren't sure about and don't quite understand yet"
Then these statements get critique-d as "cover-up" because they don't nod to old and discredited ideas - "excluding dissenting voices!" - or incorporate the latest stuff that appeared in the journals last month and is still awaiting confirmation / refutation / qualification / revision by other labs, other commentators, review writers and experts etc etc - "IGNORING this new key evidence!"
Next, some conspiracy dingbat writes his take on the literature and regurgitates a load of half-digested and imperfectly understood stuff quoted, half from reviews by fringe figures, a dollop off some conspiracy-denialist website, a third from very recent (i.e. "still provisional") papers, plus conspiratorialist Netforum-derived interpretation that these new studies "blow the standard view out of the water"...
...and so on and so on.
BUT... this Conspiracy-gobbledegook take on things has LOTS OF DETAIL.
So it seems to offer you "a glimpse at what the other lot AREN'T TELLING YOU".
In fact, what it is really missing is all the higher order interpretative processing by multiple experts that goes into the simple-language consensus statements.
Unfortunately, not all of this "letting you in on the secrets THEY won't tell you" stuff is as obvious as, say, the loons' websites like www.whale.to
Sometimes it comes in scientific-seeming wrappers, of which this thread offers several examples.
Again, I applaud the people on AIDSTruth, and some of the posters here, for taking the time to explain, in detail, why the "HIV doesn't cause AIDS"-ers' science is wrong.
But boy do they have a tough job ahead trying to convince people who "want to believe" (i.e. in nonsense and conspiracies).
Mr. Jefferys, my question was is Prof. Stark's 'zinger' so serious that it invalidates his conclusions with regard to the 'popular' views of how HIV causes CD4 cell depletion?
If it is, then yes! it's a scandal that his paper got as far as being published in a peer-reviewed journal (although that's seen before right David Ho?).
If the 'zinger' is not as serious as the apologists make out, then I'd say its the usual knee jerk smoke screen and damage control from you guys.
Pending
Pending, meaning you don't have a bloody clue and never will, unless someone that actually understand the immunology - all of whom understand that HIV causes AIDS as a result of that knowledge - explain the data to you, a twerp with no idea about the science who claims HIV doesn't cause AIDS. Scandal, indeed.
I realized it may not be relevant to the model output, as they've averaged the turnover times for effector memory CD4 T cells (which do express CCR5) and central memory CD4 T cells (which don't). I have a suspicion, however, that shifting the proportion of infected CD4 T cells into the effector memory CD4 T cells (which Louis Picker has shown make up the vast majority of infected CD4 T cells in vivo) may slow the memory CD4 T cell decline in their model considerably. Then you can try and turn it into a scandal!!
The argument about what causes AIDS will go on and on. However, I do agree with the above comments about mycoplasmas and that they could be a likely cause as they have been found in both AIDS and chronic fatigue patinets. Another possibility is HHV6A, which is very destructive to the human body.
Rethinkers do not support that HIV causes AIDS. Many HIV-Positives have stopped taking the meds and are extremely healthy. Since stopping the meds, my CD4's have dropped and have risen but CD4's are not a very good yardstick of anyone's health. After stopping the antiretrovirals, my blood and liver enzymes are now normal, something that did not occur while on them and I haven't experienced any illnesses.
No matter where anyone stands on the HIV issue, it is possible for AIDS persons to restore health naturally and without toxic drugs.
Tk tsk, Mr. Jefferys, your main delight seems to be calling people different names.
But I don't mind admitting I was being a bit 'facetious' when I said it would be a scandal if Prof. Stark's paper had been accepted despite the glaring 'zinger' discovered by you - and other professional apologists weeks before you (there you go, a name for a name as they say in the Good Book).
In all fairness then, I'll stick out my science illiterate neck and say that whatever could turn Prof. Stark's mathematical model into something useful for you guys will not be the simple change you first suggested. I shamelessly base that opinion on appeal to Prof. Stark's authority. His suggestion had to do with ongoing mutation of the virus to make it a fitter killer of its host. I kinda like that world view.
Come to think of it, (thinking as I go along just like you science types) I'll stick that neck out even further and bet you that the mathematical model which will end up the preferred one for people who have a "bloody clue" about immunology to explain slow and esentially unpredictable CD4 decline will feature co-factors as its main factor.
Dr. Aust
Thanks for enlighting us with your brilliant psychoanyalsis. Maybe you can have your show one day! Unfortunately thhe scientists that have questioned the hiv in the past 10-15 years are much more qualified and intelligent than you are, too bad. Not only that they aren't bought and paid for like your idols Gallo and Moore.
Kary Mullis Nobel Prize winner
Peter Duesberg Retroviral expert
Shyh Ching Lo Highest ranking scientist in the Army
Walter Gilbert Nobel Prize Winner
Andrew Mantious
Lynn Margulis
Luc montagnier
And they are more, you people intimidate people and create an unscientific environment that discourage the rest of the scientific community from speaking out.
Tk tsk, Mr. Jefferys, your main delight seems to be calling people different names.
I have ratcheted up the ad hominems a bit recently. When you know the kind of foul bigots you're dealing with, it can be tough to keep them in check. Cooler, you suggested a natural history study involving 10-20 people, but never said anything about the one that involved 1887 people - any comments? Since handwaving is part of his Papal duties, Pope may be able to offer some help.
other professional apologists weeks before you
What's this a reference to? One of the other grim aspects about the media coverage was that I didn't see one article which interviewed Mark Feinberg, Guido Silvestri, Zvi Grossman, Danny Douek, or any of the other researchers on whose work the model is ostensibly based. Sloppy journalism.
Hello,
that study didnt control for confouding factors.
I would see an actual study thats designed to prove/disprove the HIV hypothesis once and for all.
Since there is no reliable animal model and HIV only infects a small fraction of T cells there needs to be one final study.
I dont't belive there is much risk, even if the HIV hypothesis is correct, people are not supposed to take ARV's until the t-cells are 200 or so, so if people get to this stage they can begin ARV's if they want to.
I agree with montagnier/gallo when they said many years ago its wrong to tell people that there is a 100% chance of death, like Montagnier said that alone can harm them tremendously.
All the studies in the past 20 years have been designed with the premise that HIV causes AIDS, and were measuring something else entirely. If they were designed to actually test the HIV hypothesis they would be rigorously controlled for confounding factors.
Cooler
Being a professional scientist this last quarter century, I've actually met a lot of pretty eminent scientists, including a bunch of National Academy types and even a few Nobel Laureates. They are brilliant, but they are not brilliant at everything they touch, even within science. They are certainly not infallible. That is the nature of the game.
I started out in Chemistry and Linus Pauling was one of the great figures of what I was taught about how molecules are put together. But his theories about Vitamin C, which founded a dynasty of Alt therapy nonsense, were and are dead wrong.
I wrote essays about Wally Gilbert's DNA sequencing method. It was a great piece of work, but that doesn't make him an immunologist.
PCR is a landmark invention, but that doesn't mean Kary Mullis knows jack shit about virology.
And some of the people you list have actually realised they got it wrong and explained as much publically, as has been pointed out higher up the thread.
It is about the best experimental DATA, which is what shapes the consensus view. One of the key skills science teaches you, and which even eminent people can forget, is that data quality, and weight of quality data, trumps "standing" and "intuition". In fact, sometimes becoming a name in science has dangers, because people give you the chance to muse out loud about stuff you don't know anything much about.
And I don't agree about an "unscientific climate". Science proceeds by people extending, filling in, and sometimes challenging paradigms. But you have to be able to see when your own ideas have been superceded by better ones, or by better evidence. It is not the fact that Duesberg made the suggestion in the first place that has damaged his standing. It is clinging to it like a limpet, against all the evidence, because for whatever reason he simply can't accept that he got it wrong and the majority view got it right.
Sorry if you find my tone sarcastic. But after years debating with people who find elaborate conspiracies where none exist I have become a little impatient and frustrated at the torrent of disinformation that you and your friends pump out. And I can't be bothered any more trying to reason with people whose obsessions preclude reasoning.
A.V. Hill (British Nobel Laureate): "Laughter is the best detergent of nonsense"
that study didnt control for confouding factors.
What do you mean? Have you read the paper?
I agree, and Dr. Gallo was an M.D not a Phd, that means he really wasnt trained to be a scientist, rather a medical doctor. At that time Duesberg was much more knoweledable about retroviruses, and was a bona fide research phd scientist.
But Mr. Jefferys what would you do without us foul bigots defending ourselves from time to time? (haven't you noticed the headline of this thread?) If we weren't here, you'd never have the chance to impress people like Dr. Aust, whose main function apart from thanking AIDStruth for keeping America safe seems to be to say "conspiracy theory" as often and as far out of context as possible - or am I just being paranoid again?
Anyway, the only thing I'm gonna wave the next couple of hours is a white flag.
PS. You're right those journalists were being sensationalist and sloppy. Better get Geffen and the boys to lean on them a bit. Remember what godfather Fauci wrote in the AAAS Observer way back in '89,
AIDS has created a whole new interaction between scientists and the press (...) Journalists who make too many mistakes or who are too sloppy are going to find that their access to scientists may diminish (There's you cue Dr. Aust, now say "conspiracy")
AIDStruth definitely needs to diminish sloppy journalists' access to sloppy scientists like Stark.
Dr. Aust would you answer a few questions for me as this is not "disinformation" as you put it? My experience with rethinkers is that they are rational that is why they question the present dogma.
Someone said, All scientists have accepted the hypothesis that HIV causes AIDS
If HIV causes Aids, then where is the animal model?
Scientists have injected HIV into hundreds of primates and zippo, nada, no monkey AIDS. They had to close down the Yerkes Primate HIV wing. Why? No AIDS in primates. Primates are a natural reservoir for HIV in the wild and don't get sick. Yes Adele, all primates including human ones.
What if we injected HIV into humans? They should get AIDS and die, right? But we can't really do such a medical study. So, we don't have any medical studies of injecting HIV into human primates in the peer reviewed medical literature. Or do we? Yes, we do.
We have tens of thousands of health care workers puncturing themselves with HIV contaminated needles.
"Thirty-six per cent of medical and 17 per cent of pediatric house officers reported percutaneous exposures to needles contaminated with blood of AIDS patients. "
Concerns of medical and pediatric house officers about acquiring AIDS from their patients. Am J Public Health. 1988 April; 78(4): 455-459.
We have our primate model in health care workers. But where are the peer reviewed medical literature reports of thousands of AIDS cases in health care workers from their HIV laden needle punctures? There aren't any. Do a medline search as I did, and there aren't any. There is one case reported in Brazil, that's it. There should be thousands of cases internationally in the peer reviewed literature. The silence is deafening.
"938 health care workers were followed after needle puncture with HIV, or similar occupational exposure, none developed AIDS." N Engl J Med. 1986 Apr 24;314(17):1127-32.Occupational risk of the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome among health care workers.McCray E.
All these needle punctures are really happening. We know this because of the hepatitis antibody testing.
Approximately a quarter of all surgeons have hepatitis B antibodies. If HIV is really the cause of AIDs, there should be thousands of occupationally acquired AIDS cases in the peer reviewed medical literature. The silence is deafening.
Among surgeons, 28% have occupationally acquired hepatitis B infection. None have occupationally acquired AIDS. JAMA. 1978 Jan 16;239(3):210-12.Hepatitis B infection in physicians. Results of a nationwide seroepidemiologic survey.
Among Danish surgeons, 23% have Hepatits B antibodies indicating prior occupational exposure and infection. "The prevalence of anti-HBs was five times higher among these surgeons than that in an age-matched control population. Hepatitis acquired during occupation as a surgeon was predominantly of type B, in contrast to hepatitis acquired before entering the surgical profession. Danish surgeons must be regarded as a group at high risk of hepatitis B infection."J Infect Dis. 1979 Dec;140(6):972-4. Hepatitis B virus infections among Danish surgeons.
"No health care worker in the world has contracted AIDS from a patient" Risk of AIDS to health care workers. Br Med J (Clin Res Ed). 1986 March 15; 292(6522): 711-712. A M Geddes
So, in fact, we do have our monkeys to inject with HIV particles to see if they get AIDS. These monkeys are health care workers. And the results are the same for all primates. None of them get AIDS from the HIV injection experiment.
For more info: www.reviewingaids DOT com.
"No health care worker in the world has contracted AIDS from a patient" Risk of AIDS to health care workers. Br Med J (Clin Res Ed). 1986 March 15; 292(6522): 711-712. A M Geddes
Forty brain cells, why are you citing this paper from 1986 and ignoring subsequent data? Dishonesty? Sel-delusion? Wishful thinking? Denialist Time Warp Syndrome?
Could someone tell me where is a study that proves HIV is sexually transmitted as Dr. Nancy Padian's study, the longest on record, does not reflect it to be so regardless of what she tries to state. The facts speak for themselves along with many discordant couples who have remained so. My husband and I could have been one of her participants as we have been together for 10 years and he is still HIV-Negative but then again according to the mainstream when they cannot give a logical answer, they call it a statistical fluke. Well, one thing is for sure, there are a lot of "statistical flukes" out here.
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No Patience for Patients Ain't Cool, Cooler
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cooler
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I have no doubt that mycoplasma causes illness, nor that it's potentially treatable, nor that it might covertly cause pathologies, nor at best a fraction of a percent of CFS cases have been "cured" by anti-mycoplasma therapy, nor any doubt mycoplasma is a proven cause in more than 0.00% of CFS cases.
Garth Nicholson and others have been debating mycoplasma's role in CFS before the CFS patient community for seven or eight years, so I know about his work. Because you've recently been enlightened doesn't make it new to everyone else as well.
Think how condescending your behavior is to CFS patients who have been listening to that debate. The certainty with which you talk about mycoplasma in CFS makes that "condescending and irresponsible".
The list of infectious agents reactivated in CFS patients is very long. The list of the therapies CFS patients pursue is very long. Would you voluntarily have your spleen removed? Long ago, after a presentation by a charismatic local physician, who had published research, including a definition, on a CFS-like syndrome and tied it to the spleen, I listened as many of his patients gathered around him. No spleens, on medication the rest of their lives.
You're dropping your mycoplasma right into the middle of $5,000 replacement of mercury-based dental fillings with gold, elimination diets, scores of books on CFS, all claiming to have a "cure", multi-level-marketing-based mail-order vitamin and supplement vendors..it's a huge list, a chorus of alternatives.
Some of this is sensible and research-based, a lot is stupid, some is dishonest and damaging. And you come along and have something so important to add that you can spout off and be relevant through ignorance?
I'm not arguing mycoplasma research is invalid. I'm arguing who knows what's valid? You don't, and you're unaware you've become part of that chorus. Your drive to, essentially, sell mycoplasma has made you unconscious of your effect on sick people. It's not intentional on your part, but you were still unconscious.
No one is getting cured of CFS. No one.
In the first 18 months or so there are a few spontaneous recoveries. Beyond that, "cures" are simple good spells between relapses. Patients run that cycle repeatedly. Do you want to be someone pushing patients into that hope/collapse cycle? You don't have to be.
CFS has a smart, sophisticated, well-organized patient community. If anyone has antenna tuned for the slightest hints of successful therapies, it's CFS patients. No one is getting cured.
Anecdotal accounts, a form of self-reporting, of complex disease has, over many decades, have repeatedly shown themselves to be unreliable. Scientist, whose job it is to gauge these things have a duty point out such things. With CFS I've personally watched an almost continuous stream of therapeutic ideas -- first interesting clinical reports, then promising pilot studies, finally multiple, disappointing full-scale studies, -- fail for over twenty years. The pattern becomes quite predictable after awhile.
Science isn't a bunch of results, its a process.
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I'm going to do just one technical example. The enormous problem over the past two decades of defining who has CFS and who doesn't.
First, there has only been a clinical case study criteria for symptoms, inappropriate for good experimental work. There was nothing else so it was used. The criteria themselves are a Chinese menu list.
Second, most CFS research has been done with self-selected patients, those who come to fatigue clinics or physicians' practices, another serious problem for good research.
Third, finding controls has been difficult, as there's no consensus method for including non-CFS people with CFS-like symptoms. They should not be excluded.
This patient selection problem has been a major reason repeatable experimental results have proven all but impossible in CFS research. And if you can't repeat the same experiment with different subjects, you really have nothing.
Mycoplasma research falls victim to this as does any other research. It's clear, you'll see momentarily, that mycoplasma-CFS work was done on an unsuitable patient population.
Here's how the CDC solved the subject selection problem -- the Wichita study.
In Wichita, between 1997 and 2000, 56,000 residents were screened down to 7,000 who were then followed-up at 12-, 24-, and 36-month intervals with telephone interviews and clinical evaluations. From these, subjects and 2 control groups, totaling 227 people, were picked. They were then, 2-at-a time, brought into a special clinic set-up inside a Wichita hospital where they underwent a 2-day in-hospital study. Testing included: gene expression profiling, autonomic nervous system status, hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis status, specimen collection, sleep lab assessment, neurocognitive assessments, illness classification by empiric criteria, evaluation of functional impairment, fatigue & accompanying symptoms, and medical & psychiatric exclusions.
All this just for a proper experimental population for such a waxing and waning, multi-system, poorly understood illness.
An international group of 20 researchers were divided into four teams with medicine, mathematics, molecular biology, engineering and computer science expertise in each. The data set was over 500 clinical and epidemiologic measures and 20,000 gene expression measures per patient. Times 227.
Teams pursued their own ideas for understanding this immense amount of data. New things were discovered, such as a small set [under 30] of genetic markers which may delineate sub-populations. The complexity of the results dictated an entire issue of Pharmacogenomics was given to their publication. 14 technical papers.
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This is the first time, ever, there's been a trustworthy group of patients and controls for CFS research. It took almost twenty years to get there.
CFS-Mycoplasma research has the same selection weaknesses. CFS patients who follow the research know this. You're bright enough to see how disrespectful to CFS patients it is to show up insisting one has answers, yet knowing nothing of such longstanding issues.
I'm talking about disrespect to patients here, not clinicians and researchers.
This is a much-maligned patient population. You may be too young to know CFS was a nation-wide sarcastic joke -- literally -- on late night talk shows, at small-town diner "coffee tables", in the writing of newspaper columnists. Imagine your feelings if mycoplasma research got the same. These patients spent 20 years fighting just to be taken seriously as ill people. Yet, you didn't treat them so.
And so we end up with this sort of clipping:
Consider that these unseen patients were only an instrument to you. Simply because you had seen a CFS-mycoplasma connection somewhere. Yet, here you are attempting to get scientists to take you seriously. This is more than ironic. It can't work. If every specific patient population, and there are many, operated the way you are, everyone would lose.
As bright as you are, your failure to calibrate your sales pitch to an audience, suggests you don't see a need to do so. You know biomedical research existed before you discovered it, but its unclear you can get from there to the actual patients, to an immense heritage of knowledge, to the tens of thousands of researchers, and so eventually arrive at some humility when standing before that trio.
What you're doing here isn't science. It's thinly veiled vituperation.
I'll create a character to say it in another way:
HOW DARE YOU malign and lie about an illness I've spent 20 years learning about! CFS patients have been made laughing stocks. They've been somatisized by the medical establishment. Patients lose families simply because they won't get well. What makes your concerns so goddamn important you can crap on these CFS patients? WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU, DR. BOZO! YOU HAVE NO RIGHT!
See.
One runs afoul of this when one's focus isn't learning and understanding, but selling or winning. The length of your illness, what was or wasn't done to you, how long your recovery took, I know none of this. But I can see, and others here better than I, a rough outline of your biomedical knowledge. Tripping ove CFS patients shows that circumscribed knowledge.
You tripped over them in the dark. Your darkness.
There have always been dissidents in the lab, thank goodness. Have you considered helping them? Of asking them what you could do? In contact with anyone who has?
You have a motivation, history, and intelligence that you could use to actually make a positive contribution. Why are you so adverse to becoming a knowledgeable person about this important part of your life?
That, of course, can only be answered by you.
But [as representative of], one patient to another, please, for the sake of fellow patients if for no other reason, please try to answer that question. Few patients, you'll find, think ignorance of their illness and of biomedicine are effective tools for helping them.
There's not a single patient anywhere who was healed by scoring enough points in a debating match. Not a single, solitary one.
Reality doesn't work that way.
At this point, your behavior shows you don't give a damn about sick people, just your ego.
Some things are as true today as they were 20 years ago, like fine wine. Besides, I liked the title. If it is no longer true, then instead of frothing at the buccal mucosa, give us some references in the peer review literature for all the thousands of occupationally acquired AIDS cases in health care workers. I already looked. There arent any. the silence is deafening.
Cloned HIV DNA inserted into a plasmid does not occur in nature. The HIV infectious particle is an RNA virus as someone pointed out earlier. The fact this unnatural HIV DNA-plasmid is cytopathogenic for cord cell T cells is interesting, but doesn't explain why HIV RNA does not kill T cells.
"Although HIV-1 is directly cytopathic for CD4+ T cells in vitro, the largely debated issue is whether lymphocyte depletion in vivo is a consequence of viral cytopathicity, lymphocyte redistribution between the circulation and lymphoid organs, activation-induced death of uninfected cells, or impaired hematopoieis" Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2002 July 9; 99(14): 9503-9508.
In other words, in vivo, HIV does NOT KILL CD4 cells, everyone agrees on this. HIV is so benign, it is being used as a gene therapy vehicle.
"Uses for HIV Lentiviral Vectors; Scientists have recently been using the HIV lentiviral vector to repair neurons. HIV is also being developed as a delivery system to provide successful gene therapy in many diseases such as metabolic diseases, cancer, viral infection, cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, hemophilia, retinitis pigmentosa, and maybe even Alzheimer's disease ."
see www.reviewingaids DOT com
Cloned HIV DNA inserted into a plasmid does not occur in nature. The HIV infectious particle is an RNA virus as someone pointed out earlier. The fact this unnatural HIV DNA-plasmid is cytopathogenic for cord cell T cells is interesting, but doesn't explain why HIV RNA does not kill T cells.
You haven't demonstrated that you have read or understood the paper. All you have done is copied and pasted the abstract and demonstrated your complete scientific ignorance.
The culture was transfected with HIV DNA. In nature HIV does this step by itself there is nothing unnatural about it. How would you tell the difference between HIV DNA inserted into the genome of T-cells by transfection or by the virus?
The culture expresses HIV virus particles that then infect more cells. This is a standard laboratory technique.
Also note that controls using HTLV-1 sequences and no retroviral sequences were also used. It wasn't the transfection process that was important but the HIV DNA.
HIV is so benign, it is being used as a gene therapy vehicle.
Now you're being disingenuous, Forty. HIV-derived vectors are not HIV.
In other words, in vivo, HIV does NOT KILL CD4 cells, everyone agrees on this. HIV is so benign, it is being used as a gene therapy vehicle.
Do you read the links that you post.
Firstly, I take it from this that you accept that HIV exists and it has been isolated and sequenced.
Secondly, anyone that reads this page will notice that these potential HIV vectors are not replication competent because they do not contain all of the necessary HIV genes. Even then there is still some concern that recombination and mutation could allow these viruses to become replication competent and potentially pathogenic.
Now you're being disingenuous, Forty.
Now?
I already looked. There arent any. the silence is deafening.
I'm going to call your bluff on this one - BULLSHIT.
http://www.pubmedcentral.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=507860&blobtype=pdf
http://www.pubmedcentral.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=294468&blobtype=pdf
and
Risk of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV-1) infection among laboratory workers.
Chronic fatigue is very real to those who suffer with it. I had it for over 25 years and at the early stages doctors generally thought that it was in the patient's mind as when they ran blood tests, they would find nothing. However, the patient knows the highs and lows that this problem can bring. There are weeks of extreme tiredness followed by some normalcy. Now, I find this problem to be more seasonal, meaning more fatigue when the hot months arrive. What really is amazing is the fact that chronic fatigue and AIDS symptoms are almost a mirror image of each other. I would not have made the connection if not for AIDS. I will admit to this for whatever reason, the antiretroviral medication did seem to help with chronic fatigue. However, I was not willing to accept the risks involved with the long-term use of these drugs.
Does the drug company pay you per ad hominem? This one isn't worth a nickel.
Dear Honorable drug company representative,
Of course, we can play tinker toys with our HIV components and make them have a cytopathogenic effect on T cell cultures in vitro. And no, you are mistaken, proviral DNA in plamid form is not RNA DNA which we have all previously agreed to accept as the infectious particle found in nature. We have already discussed PCR for HIV DNA in serum is not acceptable by Adele for routine HIV testing. Cant have it both ways, unless (of course) you are a member of AIDS INC, a place where all logic is suspended to keep the money coming in from the NIH and sell more deadly drugs. Small differences in nature make a huge difference in the outcome, as we all know.
The article we need to see is entitled, " Cytopathological effects of HIV on T Cells in vivo". In this article, which has never been written or published, HIV is isolated and cultured from one or more human patients who are in the process of dying or died from AIDS. This HIV is then injected into our primate animal model. This is an expensive experiment because the latency period for Hiv is quite long, and it may take 5, or 10 years to observe a pathologic effect. Actually, this 5 to 10 has been increased to 10 to 20 (any one for 20 to 30?) During this period of observation waiting for the animals to drop their T cells and die from PCP, we will have to spend a huge amount of money on bananas, and Chimp droppings removal services. By the way, this was done at the Yerkes primate center and it was closed down because it was a collossal failure.
Chimps don't get AIDS from HIV.
We have also unknowingly done this experiment in human primates as described above.
Our new "monkey" subjects are our very own healthcare workers who have been unwittingly injected with HIV for 20 years (through occupational exposure to HIV laden needle punctures), with virtually Zero occupationally acquired AIDS reported in the peer reviewed medical literature. If you disagree with this statement, please post the reports of the thousands of AIDS cases in health care workers. You haven't done so because there aren't any. The silence is deafening.
Of course, we can play tinker toys with our HIV components and make them have a cytopathogenic effect on T cell cultures in vitro. And no, you are mistaken, proviral DNA in plamid form is not RNA DNA which we have all previously agreed to accept as the infectious particle found in nature. We have already discussed PCR for HIV DNA in serum is not acceptable by Adele for routine HIV testing.
What do you mean with RNA DNA? And no, I said cell-free HIV DNA tests aren't acceptable and does anyone disagree? Why would anyone use the most difficult and least reliable test when RNA is around? Why would you cut down a tree with sandpaper if you had a chainsaw? If the sandpaper doesn't work it doesn't mean trees can't get cut down.
Chris explained what plasmids are used for but let me try too.
A plasmid encoding full length infectious HIV is inserted into cells. A plasmid encoding HIV but with a few mutations that inactivate the virus is inserted into a second group of the same cells. The first plasmid gets infectious virus made from it and has cytopathic effects on the cells. The second plasmid doesn't make infectious virus and doesn't have cytopathic effects on the cells.
Now you can say
1) It's not the transfection killing the cells, that is how you get the proviral DNA into the cells.
2) It's not the plasmids. Their composition is exactly the same or 99.99% you can even make it 100% if you want to by switching some bases around but keeping same makeup.
3) It's not what happens with the plasmids in the cells. They get processed the same
4) It has to be something DIFFERENT between what the two plasmids MAKE, that is VIRUS. The first plasmid makes infectious virus the second one doesn't.
The Fortieth version of science makes sense when no one uses controls like that second plasmid. But scientists use controls.
Why do some people seem so utterly determined to believe Illuminati-style conspiracy theories rather than accept that science is a sort of self-correcting (if slowly) super-wiki where human beings take wrong turns but most correct themselves when they see a better piece of data?
I mean, who needs the conspiracies? -- Dr (F)Aust
Thank you for bringing up the issue of a self-correction, Dr (F)Aust. However, it should be noted, first, that your posts in this thread cement you as a naive philistine, for you are obviously incapable of understanding the import of your own insights regarding modern scientific research and the concept of "self-correction". Ironically, it is the HIV rethinkers who have corrected their stance "when they see a better piece of data". Furthermore, the philistine label is most appropriate given your inflated ego and your incessant penchant for responding to those with whom disagree using character attacks that shift the focus away from the data. As Dr. Lynn Margulis noted earlier this year, character attacks are anti-science and otherwise unacceptable when engaging in scientific debate.
Now that I've expressed my disappointment in your obvious lack of integrity, let's examine your claim that modern science is self-correcting. As I posted in another thread, there are substantial intellects who strongly disagree with you on the matter. You may think that simply labeling them as "Illuminati-style conspiracy theori(sts)" is an acceptable response, but such antics just serves to further discredit your alleged authority. If you'll review the above link you'll find my recent post on the status of the supposed "self-correcting" mechanism in Science, but I would like to recommend that you deflate your ego a bit and read the book, Overdosed America by Dr. John Abramson, faculty member at Harvard Medical School. In doing so, you'll find that one does not need to be a conspiracy-theorist to question the integrity of the scientific consensus, but rather, such questioning follows naturally if one is honest and unbiased--criteria which you obviously fail to meet.
Dr. Abramson writes:
"Ultimately, the issue is not the quality of our medical science, but the political context in which American medicine unfolds. The overwhelming power that the drug and other medical industries now wield over American politics, science, and health care has created an imbalance between corporate goals and public interest that is not longer self-correcting." -- Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine
He presents strong arguments to support the claim that the health sciences are no longer self-correcting -- far more evidence than you have presented to justify your weak counter-argument. That said, a quick look at the Table of Contents will give you an idea of the rude awakening that is in store for a naive philistine, such as yourself:
Chapter 2:
Spinning the Evidence: Even the Most Respected Journals Are Not Immune
Chapter 7 (my favorite chapter):
The Commercial Takeover of Medical Knowledge
Given your role, Dr. (F)Aust, as "a professional scientist this last quarter century", surely you'll reply with some measured insights into the issues that Dr. Abramson addresses, even without having read the book. Right? After all, you must have some understanding of the highly politicized climate in which the scientific research of today is being produced. No?
Kevin
Dr. Aust, you can safely ignore Kevin. He made himself sick by overdosing on antibiotics, then blamed his doctors for it. Now he claims his illness was iatrogenic AIDS. See the start of this post, above. Both he and cooler abundantly meet the definition of a troll.
Dr. Aust, you can safely ignore Kevin.
Though it's true that he can ignore me, he cannot ignore, nor can he escape from the truth inherent to what I have written. And neither can you, Richard Jeffreys. No matter how often try to divert attention away from the facts of the matter, I'll be here to expose you for the charlatans that you are.
Kevin, the honest Troll
And for the record, you are cherry-picking again, Richard. Perhaps, I should direct readers, including Dr. (F)Aust to my response which provides the necessary context for understanding my comments.
Anyone reading this blog can see that you are deliberately cherry-picking from my comments -- some of which are nearly 4 years old and from an entirely different discussion board -- one where sick people are trying to make sense of the extremely poor care they are being given. Of course, such honest attempts at getting well are not welcome in your world, are they, Mr. Jefferys? You don't want immuno-compromised people to know that they can regain their health, do you? No, because if more of them are clued-in to the corruption and the truth about the extent of their inadequate care, then your life will no longer have meaning -- isn't that right, Mr. Jefferys? My sickness was indeed iatrogenic and my present health is proof-positive (pun intended) of that fact and your ill-placed and irrational Faith in a failing paradigm will not change my mind, nor the minds of thousands of others who are awakening to the truth. As Noreen Martin posted previously in this thread, "one thing is for sure, there are a lot of "statistical flukes" out here..." and, even more aptly put, Noreen understands that it is possible to get well:
"No matter where anyone stands on the HIV issue, it is possible for AIDS persons to restore health naturally and without toxic drugs.
Shhhhhhhh...haven't you heard, Noreen? Telling the truth about your unconventional experience with HIV/AIDS is taboo. After all, "AIDS" patients aren't supposed to live long enough to tell the truth. Besides, Richard Jefferys won't like you, if you tell the truth. Sadly, he's not alone in harboring such contemptible sentiments. No one in the Medical Science Complex wants to have to admit that they are making patients sicker with life-long therapies, and they especially don't want to hear that there are natural treatments that are far more effective at reconstituting immune health.
But you and I know the truth, Noreen, and I'm happy you are here to share in the experience.
Kevin
I do agree with you that most doctors do not want to hear about natural procedures or cures. Some of the problem is that they are ignorant in them and are not being taught them in med school and by the time they are out, they don't have time to learn about them. If anyone is interested in how I regained by health, I have written two books, which are available at amazon or any bookstore. I don't profess to know all the answers but I do know what worked and is working for me.
Noreen
Most family doctors I know spend a lot of their time extolling healthy lifestyle - don't over-eat, healthy diet, moderate drinking, regular exercise and so on - to their patients.
And if there were any reliable scientific evidence something "natural" worked, they would be encouraging you to do it. I know one thoroughly conventional doctor who tells his patients who feel a bit down in the winter to buy bright light boxes. I know a couple who recommend valerian and hops to people who are having trouble sleeping. I know others who suggest people who are feeling anxious try Yoga and relaxation classes.
What they tend to be a little unimpressed with is mysterious (often expensive) witchcrafty super-herbs-via-the-net stuff where there is no evidence that it works.
In all medicine, it is a fact that people sometimes get mysterious serious illnesses that later go away of their own accord without the doctors ever figuring out what was going on. My wife, who worked for many years in internal medicine, used to tell me these stories regularly.
But because spontaneous remission / recovery is a reality for some illnesses, if a patient comes in and tells the doctor their whats-itis is getting better and they attribute the recovery to the Black Cohosh they are taking (even though there is no evidence anywhere in the literature that Black Cohosh does anything for the condition) the doctor's default (and evidence based) assumption is "spontaneous recovery, while simultaneously taking Black Cohosh that did nothing except make them feel more in control".
Exacerbating this is that people often WANT to believe it is the "natural remedy" that did the trick rather than a spontaneous recovery with no explanation - or even a recovery due to the effects of mainstream medicines they may be taking simultaneously.
This last is widely recognised phenomenon, especially in cancer treatment - people choose to attribute their recovery to the miracle herb their neighbour told them about rather than to the toxic chemotherapy drugs they are also taking.
At bottom, though, it comes down to this. If a proper trial says something works, it works. If a proper trial says it doesn't, it doesn't.
HOWEVER, when you tell your doc about all the Altie things you are doing they tend, while not looking impressed, not to rub your face in it. At least, a lot of the docs I know. The point is often that if you are doing things that are good for you, like taking more exercise or eating healthier, as a "self-help intervention", that is good. The healthy living steps can only help, provided they are sensible. And just feeling you are taking steps yourself to get better may be helpful. So if you seem to feel better, the doctor often will not tell you "don't take that stuff". Unless it is something that is likely to interfere with any conventional meds you are on, in which case they might get a bit sharp with you for good reasons. Or unless you decide, now you have your natural therapy regime, to stop taking the conventional meds that the evidence suggests is what is keeping you healthy.
I have nothing against "natural" remedies or healthy living. I have taken St John's Wort a couple of times when I felt down, I have taken Valerian and Hops to sleep, I've done Yoga to relax. But when I get a MEDICINE, prescribed by a doctor, I want to know that the tests say it works better than a placebo. And if the doctor gives me a "natural" remedy, it should have been tested, and proven to work, the same way.
You have to have proper, randomized, blinded trials. That is the bottom line. Because otherwise you can never work out if something works. People telling you it worked for them is not reliable. Because people fool themselves without knowing they are doing it.
This is also a reason why consensus in science almost always wins out over "lone wronged genius", by the way. There is always a chance (though usually vanishingly small) that the maverick everyone else thinks is a nut is right. However, it is far, far, far more likely that the lone genius is in fact a guy who has talked himself into an error.
Richard Feynman put it best: 'Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.'
Does the drug company pay you per ad hominem? This one isn't worth a nickel.
I can see you still haven't learnt what the ad hominem fallacy entails.
Observing that you are scientifically illiterate is not a fallacy.
On the other hand ignoring the data that I present to you under the false pretext that I am paid by the drug companies is.
Dear Honorable drug company representative,
Of course, we can play tinker toys with our HIV components and make them have a cytopathogenic effect on T cell cultures in vitro. And no, you are mistaken, proviral DNA in plamid form is not RNA DNA which we have all previously agreed to accept as the infectious particle found in nature. We have already discussed PCR for HIV DNA in serum is not acceptable by Adele for routine HIV testing. Cant have it both ways, unless (of course) you are a member of AIDS INC, a place where all logic is suspended to keep the money coming in from the NIH and sell more deadly drugs. Small differences in nature make a huge difference in the outcome, as we all know.
If you are trying to convince me that you are scientifically illiterate then you are succeeding. Why do you pretend that you understand any of this?
Does Forty accept HIV exists? Rather than ask the question does HIV exist? Let's focus on asking the more important question, does HIV cause AIDS?
This demonstrates that you are being totally dishonest. You argue at one stage that HIV doesn't exist and now you use HIV based vectors as supposed evidence that HIV is benign. You can't get your story straight. Your arguments are mutually exclusive and you don't care.
You won't asnswer a simple question and you accuse other people of being evasive.
You mentioned HIV lentiviral vectors. Do a search on Pubmed. There are hundreds of papers with experimental results. Are they experimenting with fairy dust? Why don't you tell them that forty mules knows more than they do?
Our new "monkey" subjects are our very own healthcare workers who have been unwittingly injected with HIV for 20 years (through occupational exposure to HIV laden needle punctures), with virtually Zero occupationally acquired AIDS reported in the peer reviewed medical literature. If you disagree with this statement, please post the reports of the thousands of AIDS cases in health care workers. You haven't done so because there aren't any. The silence is deafening.
You are being dishonest again. You have been given the evidence that health workers and laboratory staff have been occupationally infected with HIV and developed AIDS. Now, rather than deal with the evidence you dismiss this as "virtually Zero". You don't find it a bit of a coincidence that these people get infected with HIV and then develop AIDS?
Obviously in the land of Denial anything less than thousands is Zero with a capital Z. That could explain the average IQ of Zero.
As of 2003, 57 healthcare workers in the USA got HIV from patients. This is despite triple cocktail HAART post exposure prophylaxis, which works most of the time. All health care workers have it drilled into them to take standard blood borne disease precautions.
Chris and others. You are dealing with a few mentally ill trolls looking for attention. If bouncing trolls amuse you, why not. But otherwise, you are wasting your time.
Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol. 2003 Feb;24(2):86-96. Links
Comment in:
Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol. 2003 Feb;24(2):82-5.
Occupationally acquired human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection: national case surveillance data during 20 years of the HIV epidemic in the United States.Do AN, Ciesielski CA, Metler RP, Hammett TA, Li J, Fleming PL.
Surveillance Branch, Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention, National Center for HIV, STD, and TB Prevention, Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 1600 Clifton Road NE, MS E-47, Atlanta, GA 30333, USA.
OBJECTIVE: To characterize occupationally acquired human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection detected through case surveillance efforts in the United States. DESIGN: National surveillance systems, based on voluntary case reporting. SETTING: Healthcare or laboratory (clinical or research) settings. PATIENTS: Healthcare workers, defined as individuals employed in healthcare or laboratory settings (including students and trainees), who are infected with HIV. METHODS: Review of data reported through December 2001 in the HIV/AIDS Reporting System and the National Surveillance for Occupationally Acquired HIV Infection. RESULTS: Of 57 healthcare workers with documented occupationally acquired HIV infection, most (86%) were exposed to blood, and most (88%) had percutaneous injuries. The circumstances varied among 51 percutaneous injuries, with the largest proportion (41%) occurring after a procedure, 35% occurring during a procedure, and 20% occurring during disposal of sharp objects. Unexpected circumstances difficult to anticipate during or after procedures accounted for 20% of all injuries. Of 55 known source patients, most (69%) had acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) at the time of occupational exposure, but some (11%) had asymptomatic HIV infection. Eight (14%) of the healthcare workers were infected despite receiving postexposure prophylaxis (PEP). CONCLUSIONS: Prevention strategies for occupationally acquired HIV infection should continue to emphasize avoiding blood exposures. Healthcare workers should be educated about both the benefits and the limitations of PEP, which does not always prevent HIV infection following an exposure. Technologic advances (eg, safety-engineered devices) may further enhance safety in the healthcare workplace.
STEP OFF WASHED UP DRUG COMPANY HACK. THE SCIENTISTS THAT INCLUDE NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS THAT HAVE QUESTIONED THE HIV HYPOTHESIS ARE FAR MORE INTELLIGENT THAN A LOSER LIKE YOU!
One more for the road. There are many studies documenting occupationally acquired HIV exposure mostly from needle sticks. It is also much more of a problem in high HIV endemic areas, SE Asia and Africa.
1: N Engl J Med. 1997 Nov 20;337(21):1485-90. Links
Comment in:
N Engl J Med. 1997 Nov 20;337(21):1542-3.
A case-control study of HIV seroconversion in health care workers after percutaneous exposure. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Needlestick Surveillance Group.Cardo DM, Culver DH, Ciesielski CA, Srivastava PU, Marcus R, Abiteboul D, Heptonstall J, Ippolito G, Lot F, McKibben PS, Bell DM.
National Center for Infectious Diseases, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GA 30333, USA.
BACKGROUND: The average risk of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection after percutaneous exposure to HIV-infected blood is 0.3 percent, but the factors that influence this risk are not well understood. METHODS: We conducted a case-control study of health care workers with occupational, percutaneous exposure to HIV-infected blood. The case patients were those who became seropositive after exposure to HIV, as reported by national surveillance systems in France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The controls were health care workers in a prospective surveillance project who were exposed to HIV but did not seroconvert. RESULTS: Logistic-regression analysis based on 33 case patients and 665 controls showed that significant risk factors for seroconversion were deep injury (odds ratio= 15; 95 percent confidence interval, 6.0 to 41), injury with a device that was visibly contaminated with the source patient's blood (odds ratio= 6.2; 95 percent confidence interval, 2.2 to 21), a procedure involving a needle placed in the source patient's artery or vein (odds ratio=4.3; 95 percent confidence interval, 1.7 to 12), and exposure to a source patient who died of the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome within two months afterward (odds ratio=5.6; 95 percent confidence interval, 2.0 to 16). The case patients were significantly less likely than the controls to have taken zidovudine after the exposure (odds ratio=0.19; 95 percent confidence interval, 0.06 to 0.52). CONCLUSIONS: The risk of HIV infection after percutaneous exposure increases with a larger volume of blood and, probably, a higher titer of HIV in the source patient's blood. Postexposure prophylaxis with zidovudine appears to be protective.
Dear Raven,
Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol. 2003 Feb;24(2):82-5.
Occupationally acquired human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection: national case surveillance data during 20 years of the HIV epidemic in the United States.
of the 57 health care workers who became Hiv positive from occupational exposure, how many came down with AIDS? ZERO. If there had been any AIDS cases in the 57 HIV positives, this would have been reported. 69% of the source patients had AIDS. However no mention of the per centage of the health care workers who had AIDS. Why omit this data? Because the number was ZERO. I saw this article a few days ago when doing the literature search. And try to resist the ad homs, it doesnt become you. Unless of coure you are on the payroll, and are paid per ad hom, like the othe drug company reps here. If you are trying to post a reference that show AIDS from occupational exposure, this isn't it.
Try again. note; this was posted by accident on the other thread, my apologies for the duplication.
Raven said One more for the road. There are many studies documenting occupationally acquired HIV exposure mostly from needle sticks. It is also much more of a problem in high HIV endemic areas, SE Asia and Africa.
1: N Engl J Med. 1997 Nov 20;337(21):1485-90. Comment in:
N Engl J Med. 1997 Nov 20;337(21):1542-3. A case-control study of HIV seroconversion in health care workers after percutaneous exposure. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Needlestick Surveillance Group.
Yes of course, there is occupationally acquired HIV exposure, O.3% of the time, according to this one.
This is our primate HIV injection experiment conducted on a grand scale using health care workers as "primates".
How many of these occupational HIV cases came down with AIDS? NONE of them. Zero, NADA.
Our primates don't get AIDS from the HIV injections just like chimps don't get AIDS from HIV injections. Dont you agree?
Our primates don't get AIDS from the HIV injections just like chimps don't get AIDS from HIV injections. Dont you agree?
Did you read these papers?
Did you understand them?
What's the "dissident" explanation?
Did you read these papers?
Did you understand them?
What's the "dissident" explanation?
That HIV doesn't cause AIDS and that you're desperately grasping at straws whether the primates are chimps or health care workers
That HIV doesn't cause AIDS and that you're desperately grasping at straws whether the primates are chimps or health care workers
Brilliant analysis. The laboratory worker that got AIDS after occupational infection with HIV - nahh - just put your fingers in your ears and go nahhh - nahh - nahhh.
I hear you loud and clear, '"THE" lab worker that got AIDS'. Can you hear it yourself?
I hear you loud and clear, '"THE" lab worker that got AIDS'. Can you hear it yourself?
Read the papers. Can you explain why the laboratory workers that had documented occupational infection with HIV all suffered the classic CD4+ cell loss associated with HIV disease? Coincidence.
of the 57 health care workers who became Hiv positive from occupational exposure, how many came down with AIDS? ZERO. If there had been any AIDS cases in the 57 HIV positives, this would have been reported. 69% of the source patients had AIDS. However no mention of the per centage of the health care workers who had AIDS. Why omit this data? Because the number was ZERO. I saw this article a few days ago when doing the literature search. And try to resist the ad homs, it doesnt become you. Unless of coure you are on the payroll, and are paid per ad hom, like the othe drug company reps here. If you are trying to post a reference that show AIDS from occupational exposure, this isn't it.
Obviously none of you have read the article that raven cited.
Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol. 2003 Feb;24(2):86-96
Occupationally acquired human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection: national case surveillance data during 20 years of the HIV epidemic in the United States.Do AN, Ciesielski CA, Metler RP, Hammett TA, Li J, Fleming PL.
There were 57 documented cases of occupationally acquired HIV infection. 26 of them had developed AIDS by the time this article was published.
In case Forty IQ points is still having trouble, look at table 1 on page 88 (Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol. 2003 Feb;24(2):86-96).
Documented occupationally aquired HIV infection 57
With AIDS26 (46%)
Not AIDS31 (54%)
So at least 26 out of the 57 have developed AIDS. This is consistent with: a) HIV causes AIDS or b) HIV doesn't cause AIDS.
When are the 'rethinkers' going to stop lying?
Let's list what Forty untruths has said so far
Either forty is lying or he's so completely scientifically illiterate he can't do a literature search and understand the papers.
When a house officer gets AIDS
Dear drug company representative,
Number one, this is a government CDC surveillance report which starts off by telling us they found nearly 24,000 AIDS cases among health care workes. This is not a report from the peer review literature (its from the CDC), of course, but GREAT!! This is exactly what we wanted to prove that HIV cause AIDS. 24,00 cases !!. Now I can be a BELIEVER like our honorable drug company reps. I have wanted to be a believer like everyone else for a long time. Just needed the data to be convincing.
Problem is that all these 24,000 cases were not occupationally acquired AIDS. These were the bad boy gay heathcare workers who had outside party time activities, IV drug users, gay, minorities and others who got their AIDS from something other than occupationally acquired from needle sticks.
Of these 24,000 AIDS cases in healthcare workers, there were only 26 cases of documented occupational exposure, and this is from the CDC, and we know that nobody would ever lie to the CDC , and the CDC would never lie to us. Right?
There were also 122 AIDS cases in healthcare workers who were "possible occupationally acquired HIV infection", And another 51 healthcare workers claiming to have occupationally acquired AIDS with no history of any recognized risk related to occupational or non-occupational exposure.
Here we have a government surveillance report of 24,000 health care workers with AIDS, and 26 of them had a documented occupational exposure to HIV laden needles sticks. Another 51 AIDS cases were claiming to be occupationally acquird, yet had no documentation of exposure to HIV laden needle sticks.(the obvious motivation here is shifting the liability to workman's compensation coverage)
Does this report prove that Hiv causes AIDS in our primate experiment? remember that's the experiment where we inject HIV into chimps and they don't get AIDS. Does this CDC report contradict the chimp experience, and show that in human primates injected with HIV occupationally, they get AIDS?
Why did the authors not include the healthcare workers AIDS data in the abstract? Not convincing enough?
Franky, I would be convinced if the report originated in the peer reviewed medical literature, perhaps describing fifty to a hundred AIDS cases in each major inner city medical center dealing with occupationally acquired AIDS cases involving AIDS in nurses, residents, interns and attending surgeons, and with the publication written by an MD author, not ghostwritten, and not funded by HIV drug companies. I haven't been able to find any of these, Have you?
Lets ask Adele, Raven, cooler, the Pope and kevin for their opinion on this one.
Next time, post the link to the pdf so everyone can find it easily;
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/ICHE/journal/issues/v24n2/4900/4900.we…
Whoever this person is, they reveal more of their ignorance with every post. I'm sure the people at Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology will be surprised to learn that their journal is not peer-reviewed!!
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/ICHE/board.html
What do you think the "peer-reviewed literature" is, 40?
Several chimps have developed AIDS after being infected with HIV, took 10 years or so for the first one and it's happened to a few more since. The abstracts have been posted before, I forget what the handwaving response was (probably like this one about healthcare workers).
The story of the doctor who contracted HIV is compelling. Unfortunately, he experienced first hand what many HIV-Positives have gone through. He had some symptoms but what if they were caused by something else? Most don't consider that possibility and with the quality of the HIV Antibody Tests, many test false positive. The article did not state if he took the antiretrovirals or not. One thing is for sure, during the unknown period of time, his wife did not contract HIV.
Pregnancy is known to cause false positives and with the recommendation to test pregnant women twice in their pregnancy, how many false positives will occur, which poses more dangers. The April 2007 study published in Environmental and Molecular Mutagensis states their was clear evidence of AZT-induced increased incidence of cancer originating in the cells that line the blood vessels in male mice and mononuclear cell leukemia in female rats. There was also evidence of increased liver cancer and reproductive cancer. The author of this study stated that the risk for a subset of these children in mid and late adulthood appears highly plausible. Bottom line, these findings imply a strong potential for AZT-induced genetic damage in the developing fetus. There was a time in medicine when the fetus was protected at great length, now toxic drugs are given based on these bogus tests. Another alarming situation is the force-feeding via tubes in the stomach of orphans in New York City of these drugs, the story being broke by Liam Scheff and I believe a documentary may be on the way.
It is good that the rethinkers question all of this because things are not so cut and dry as some of you make it out to be. For instance, the golden yardstick of CD4's are now being questioned by Dr. Mellors, "The rate at which an untreated HIV-Positive person's CD4 cell count is declining is a poor predictor of the risk of AIDS or death in individual patients." A study by researchers at Imperial College London refutes the long-standing theory on how HIV slowly depletes the body's capability to fight infection by attacking T-cells. By using mathematical model of the process by which T-cells are eliminated and produced, the researchers have shown that if the runway theory was correct, T-helper cells numbers would fall to very low levels over a number of months, not years. Adding the fact that the viral load test is only accurate 6 to 9% of the time in the prediction leading to AIDS, Journal of Infectious Disease.
Another thorn in the side to the AIDS establishment is that a study in Africa conducted by the World Health Organization revealed that HIV-Negative populations can have T-cell counts below 350, a number that would, according to their guidelines, qualify for an AIDS diagnosis in HIV-Positive populations. If these guidelines are followed, some people would be started on antiretrovirals who weren't infected with HIV.
I believe that all HIV-Positives and AIDS persons could be placed on low dose naltrexone and fair much better. In fact, the low level dosage of 4.5 was what Dr. Bihari found to help AIDS patients over twenty years ago. This drug has a safe track record, is inexpensive, no side effects, non-addictive and it works. It has stopped lung and pancreaous cancers, stops MS in its tracks and is helping a host of other immune deficiency diseases. Surprisinly, most doctors have not heard about this miracle drug. It's probably because the patent has long expired on it and the drug companies will not spend research money on it because they can make more money selling AIDS medicines. This drug runs about $22/month. However, doctor can prescribe it off-label as they often do for many drugs. The best thing is that is helps the body's own endorphins to do their job and prevent opportunistic infections, which is what kills AIDS persons in the first place and it does not have heart attacks or kidney and liver failure as side effects, like the current medications. Again, I would encourage all to check out lowdosenaltrexone.org.
Yes, this is a peer reviwed publication. Not disputing that. However, the government CDC surveillance report is not. Got anything else? It's not that I don't trust the government. I know the government would NEVER lie to us. Right?
In addition, there are a few questions about the data which I raised in another comment. 24,000 AIDs cases in health care workers and only 26 AIDS cases were documented HIV laden needle sticks? The rest were gay drug user party goers? Slightly problematic.
Lets have a report written by MD's describing occupationally acquired AIDs in inner city hospitals in interns, residents, surgeons, nurses dealing with AIDS patients, not ghostwritten and not funded by big Pharma. There should be at least 50 to 100 acquired AIDS cases in each major medical center. More would be more convincing.
There aren't any. This prevents me from believing that HIV causes AIDS, and I want to be a believer. Maybe you can help by giving a few more links.
This statement by our honorable AIDS political activist is so bogus as to be laughable. Chimps dont get AIDS because they test positive for HIV and it occurs in them naturally in the wild, and they dont get sick from it. Go look it up.
Injecting HIV into hundreds or thousands chimps and then reporting AIDs in one or two of them 10 years later reminds me of the type of academic fraud found with Hwang Woo Suk (stem cell scandal), and Somervile (the white mice with the black fur made by magic marker), done under the severe pressures of academia.
For your information, my pompous arrogant paid AIDS political activist and drug company rep, when you see a comment which is discordant with your AIDS activist beliefs, this is not "ignorance" as you so aptly describe it. It means your beliefs are being challenged with information contrary to your AIDs activist political catechism. You are requird to believe this bulls__t in order to keep your job. Others are not.
for more info, reviewing aids DOT com
Dr. Noble, Forty has asked my opinion on the paper referenced by you and Raven. But you know it's not easy for us denialists to read and understand science, so please clarify a few things first:
1. In the course of 20 years there has been only 57 confirmed cases of occupational transmission. Several years there wasn't a single (the cases tend to cluster in other words - in itself strange) Why is it so hard to establish occupational infection in a highly tested, highly aware, highly at risk if not careful group of people?
2. The authors state that they use two different sources, AIDS surveillance and HIV surveilance data - mixed. How large a percentage of the confirmed cases were AIDS cases 'back determined' perhaps a decade or more as occupational in absence of more plausible explanations? The figure for the 'possible'(as opposed to confirmed) cases is 88% according to the authors:
The lack of timeliness may explain why most (88%) of the cases of possible occupationally acquired HIV infection, in which it is difficult to establish the time of infection and obtain details about specific occupational exposures, are seen among healthcare workers already reported as having AIDS rather than with more recently diagnosed HIV infection
3. You DID notice this little nugget, didn't you?:
Healthcare workers with a history of high-risk behaviors (eg, male-male sexual contact, INJECTION DRUG USE, or heterosexual contact with a known HIV-infected individual) are classified as having documented occupationally acquired infection if the health departments' epidemiologic investigation concluded that an occupational contact was the only exposure to HIV during the period when HIV seroconversion occurred, or if DNA sequencing results showed that the viruses of the healthcare worker and the occupational source were closely related
So if an IV, not to mention other drugs, user has been classified as a confirmed occupationally acquired HIV case, then continues his drug use with some ARVs and some "you're HIV+ and you're gonna die" voodoo thrown into the mix, his declining health will still be attributed to that one occupational needlestick.
Noreen, does it not give you pause that you're following a treatment regimen promoted by a doctor (Bernard Bihari) who understands perfectly well that HIV causes AIDS and that CD4 T cell counts are a valid surrogate marker for cellular immunodeficiency? Mellors is discussing the rate of decline, not the elevated risk of opportunistic infection that occurs below particular peripheral blood CD4 T cell count levels. Mellors also just published a MACS analysis showing that differences in viral load explained more than 51% of the variability in time to AIDS and 58% of the variability in time to death. I don't doubt you'd disagree with him about that. I don't think anyone here would dispute your right to make whatever healthcare decisions you feel are best for you. What I think is problematic is suggesting that your personal decisions are appropriate for other people. Or worse, extrapolating your personal situation to claim HIV does not cause AIDS. I have the distinct sense that Demian probably emailed you and suggested that you contribute, after his gambit involving pretending to be several gay men fell flat.
First, LDN is working for many others but I guess that you would rather people stay on the harmful antiretrovirals and I guess that you would debate the Lancet study where people didn't live any longer on the meds than people like myself who do not take them.
Secondly, who is Demian? I have never heard of this person nor has anyone contacted me to contribute. I have only come back here to let you folks know that I am "alive and well", like the website so to let you see that it can be done without the antiretrovirals. Incidentally, there are many persons doing the same thing you just don't know them.
What you are arguing then Noreen is that Bernard is right about LDN and wrong about HIV.
The Lancet study now becomes perhaps the fifth or sixth denialist myth you've posted. It does not contain a comparison with people not on ART. The same researchers that published the study you're referring to had already found that ART massively improved survival in their cohorts (look at the ART Cohort Collaboration website). Since this comes up so often, perhaps it's worth looking at the study in detail. What they did in the "treatment response" study was look at mortality after just one year of ART, comparing different cohorts that initiated ART in different time periods. The differences they were analyzing were as follows:
One year after starting ART:
1995/96: total n=1232 / #deaths=27 (2.2%)
1997: 4785 / 98 (2.1%)
1998: 4583 / 85 (1.9%)
1999: 3699 / 67 (1.8%)
2000: 3203 / 63 (2.0%)
2001: 2783 / 49 (1.8%)
2002/03: 1932 / 25 (1.3%)
They also included a supplemental analysis on the Lancet website with two years of follow-up:
Two years after starting ART:
1995/96: 1232 / 53 (4.3%)
1997: 4785 / 151 (3.2%)
1998: 4583 / 144 (3.1%)
1999: 3699 / 109 (3.0%)
2000: 3203 / 99 (3.1%)
2001: 2783 / 69 (2.5%)
As you can see, a very small proportion of people died, particularly given that a proportion of these individuals initiated ART in advanced disease. In the later period, people started ART with lower CD4s, yet survival at two years was 97.5%.
The part of the paper that denialists like to abuse are the hazard ratios (I got into a long discussion about this on the NAR blog where, ironically, it ended up like I was taking the anti-science position because I screwed up the interpretation of the hazard ratios!).
Essentially what the researchers did is adjustments where the makeup of the cohorts in the different time periods was adjusted for e.g. if there were less older people in the later years (and because older people progress faster), then less people *should* have progressed so the data is adjusted for age. Of course, taken individually, any of the studies on which these adjustments are based would be hotly disputed by denialists! When you look at the hazard ratios for mortality at either 1 or 2 years after starting ART, they are slightly reduced in the most recent periods compared to 1998, but the difference isn't statistically significant; because of the effectiveness of ART, few people die after starting it as you can see from the numbers and percentages above (98.7% surviving at one year, 97.5% surviving at two years).
1 yr HR for mortality (2002/03 compared to 1998): 0â¢96 (0â¢61-1â¢51)
2 yr (2001 compared to 1998): 0â¢95 (0â¢71-1â¢27)
If ART has gotten better over time as newer drugs have been approved, then the improvement in progression and mortality should begin to emerge the longer people are followed - the difference did not reach statistical significance in the first one or two years due to the relatively low numbers of events that occurred.
I'd imagine Duesberg's favorite part of the study (he has the PDF posted on his website, although I don't think he has the supplementary table with the 2 year follow-up data), are the hazard ratios for AIDS, because there, although relatively few people experienced an AIDS event during the first one or two years of ART, more did in the more recent period and the HR for this achieved significance e.g. at 1 year:
1995-96 total n=1096 / # AIDS events=103 (9%) adjusted HR=1â¢07 95% CI=(0â¢84-1â¢36)
1997 4460 / 287 (6%) 1â¢30 (1â¢09-1â¢54)
1998 (reference) 4222 / 222 (5%) 1 1
1999 3328 / 192 (6%) 1â¢07 (0â¢88-1â¢30)
2000 2873 / 204 (7%) 1â¢18 (0â¢97-1â¢43)
2001 2421 / 172 (7%) 1â¢23 (1â¢00-1â¢50)
2002-03 1656 / 105 (6%) 1â¢35 (1â¢06-1â¢71)
But the explanation was the increased number of people with TB; differences for all other AIDS events were non-significant:
Tuberculosis
1995-96 total n=1096 / # events=8 (0â¢7%) adjusted HR=0â¢73 (0â¢33-1â¢63)
1997 4460 27 (0â¢6%) 0â¢97 (0â¢57-1â¢63)
1998 4222 29 (0â¢7%) 1 1
1999 3328 34 (1â¢0%) 1â¢50 (0â¢91-2â¢48)
2000 2873 38 (1â¢3%) 1â¢69 (1â¢04-2â¢75)
2001 2421 28 (1â¢2%) 1â¢48 (0â¢87-2â¢50)
2002-03 1656 26 (1â¢6%) 2â¢94 (1â¢70-5â¢08)
Other AIDS defining conditions
1995-96 1096 94 (9%) 1â¢09 (0â¢84-1â¢40)
1997 4460 261 (6%) 1â¢34 (1â¢11-1â¢61)
1998 4222 195 (5%) 1 1
1999 3328 160 (5%) 1â¢01 (0â¢82-1â¢25)
2000 2873 170 (6%) 1â¢12 (0â¢91-1â¢37)
2001 2421 146 (6%) 1â¢19 (0â¢96-1â¢48)
2002-03 1656 81 (5%) 1â¢15 (0â¢88-1â¢50)
If you look at the percentages in all of these analyses, they're all going in the right direction (fewer events in more recent periods compared to 95/96) except for TB (which is because there is an increase in the number of people co-infected with TB now compared to earlier years). I vaguely recall Anthony Liversidge trying to compare the hazard ratios and say that people were X% more likely to develop AIDS in the more recent period or something like that, I don't think that it had even dawned on me at that point that what it meant was that there was an increased likelihood of TB because there were more TB co-infected people in the more recent cohorts. Liversidge also argued that if no-one had started ART, no one would have died during the study. Would that that were true.
A further complicating factor is that the hazard ratios are derived by comparison to 1998, when people started ART with higher average CD4 counts than in recent periods:
CD4 counts
1995-96: 275
1997: 383
1998: 382
1999: 364
2000: 326
2001: 312
2002-03: 310
So, does this study show that ART hasn't reduced mortality as denialists claim? No, it shows no such thing. I assume the ART Cohort Collaboration will publish more on this subject, e.g. now they might be able to compare three or four year follow-up data from these time periods.
Noreen,
I probably speak for everyone on here when I say I'm very concerned about everyone in your place. A CD4 count around 100 and viral load over 100,000 is not "normal" test results. It's your decision to ignore your doctors advice and I support your right to do that but your doing an experiment with your own health.
Sad thing is, this "experiment" was done by thousands of people before effective antivirals were around. It's still being done by even more people in places without drugs being easy to get. Test results like yours are I think the word is ominous. Some people back in the eighties in the United STates survived two years or five years or ten years after they got infected. But when CD4 counts are as low as yours and multiple times not just once including below 100 which you never ever see in a healthy person, your immune system is getting hammered. Doctors can help people deal with side effects of medication but there's no pill for restoring your immune system without dealing with the cause, the virus.
Noreen, I read on LDN there were a few papers saying LDN can help IN COMBINATION WITH antivirals. Whatever LDN is doing for you and I'm glad you feel its helping, it's not helping your immune system or controling virus.
I'm not going to insult you and ask you to reconsider. But please go back and look at that Lancet paper you just talked about. It doesn't say what you think it says. It compares survival in people who took cocktails early and other people who took cocktails several years later. It's comparing the first formula with a later formula and it found they were kind of similar. It didn't compare people taking drugs and not taking drugs. This is a common lie from people like 40 or Andrew who know better but for a reason I really don't understand lie about it to people like you who aren't scientists. Don't trust me. But don't trust them either. Read the paper for yourself.
Low CD4's are seen in many non-progressors as I am in contact with many of these people. Others have CD4's worse than mine and they too are healthy. At what point in medical history did CD4's become important and based on what? If we would go back to the pre 1993, I believe, decision to count CD4's, then about half of all the AIDS cases would go away and we don't want that to happen do we?
Why should I take the meds when my blood and liver enyzmes are better off without them and I haven't any symptoms, thanks to LDN. Yes, Dr. Bihari does use antiretrovial medications with some of his patients but some only take the LDN. Unless my health took a drastic turn for the worse, I would not entertain the antiretrovirals. Let's compare my lab work to those on the meds and see whose is better. Maybe some of you consider having abnormal labs an acceptalbe risk but I don't. I go on what I see and how I feel and not on theories.
But when I get a MEDICINE, prescribed by a doctor, I want to know that the tests say it works better than a placebo. You have to have proper, randomized, blinded trials.
I agree, Dr. Aust. That's why I'm curious to know why you don't hold HIV medications to the same standard. It's a fact that most HIV medications are "fast-tracked", which is another way of saying that the studies involving them do not conform to the basic standard of being randomized and/or blinded. To say nothing of AZT where the early studies were a complete clusterfuck, and certainly not placebo-controlled.
Does Dr. Aust care to comment on that fact? (Probably not since he tends to go silent when the facts are presented.) That said, why did you fail to respond to my claim that science of today is no longer self-correcting? After all, you, Dr. Aust, are the one who first mentioned the subject, claiming that science has retained its ability to self-correct, in spite of numerous examples to the contrary. You really should provide reasons supporting such a claim. You are a "professional" scientist, right? You do understand how real debates advance, right? Perhaps, I offended you? If so, I would offer my apologies, but I find such patronizing gestures inappropriate given the seriousness of this situation.
______________________________
Because people fool themselves without knowing they are doing it. -- Dr. Aust
Your most recent testimonial proves that you understand a thing or two about fooling yourself. I've got two very basic questions for you, Doctor...two questions questions that you do not seem to want to honestly answer, yet they are the best place to begin our evaluation.
Are people still dying from HIV/AIDS?
and
How are they dying?
Before we answer these questions, let's look at why HIV apologists, such as yourself, try to invalidate my right, and more importantly, the rights of fellow scientists to ask these two very basic questions. This implicit censorship, among professionals, is very telling. After all, the evidence exposing HIV/AIDS as a mistaken explanation is quite apparent; twenty years of shoddy science is not easily defended. I find one example particularly telling; the ridiculous back-peddling often employed by those who "study" HIV is unmistakable, and their scripted recantations are downright Orwellian--such an unbecoming environment for producing good science--yet, Dr. Aust, and others on this blog, prefer to remain oblivious.
Science is not alone in the loss of self-correcting mechanisms. The hollow testimonies of the numerous shills in our society are unavoidable, and they would be almost entertaining, that is, if they weren't so goddamn disconcerting. Whether its housing, education, or health care, those in control of the funding have proved to be more interested in using that money to increase personal wealth, to obscene levels, in spite of obvious detriments to the integrity of the social institutions they purport to serve. The economy (housing bubble), civic responsibility (cynical citizens who don't vote) and personal health (profiteering trumps care concerns) are all riddled with damning examples of frequent and blatant abuses of public trust by those in control. Consequently, a culture of accepted corruption--across institutions--has become normalized while legitimate endeavors and concerns suffer from neglect. Such massive corruption has eroded the self-correcting mechanisms that previously assured the integrity of these institutions, and those responsible for the decline should be held accountable. In fact, many of those who now hold professional status should lose it.
Where HIV/AIDS is concerned, a system of rituals and a "secret" language disguised as specialized science has replaced the system that has worked for so long--a system based primarily on independent inquiry, real Science! Scientists and doctors, alike, are complicit in allowing this to happen. The abandonment of "do no harm" is an important component to understanding how this could happen to such a damaging degree. Once again, professional complicity was absolutely required before such specious science could ever become normalized. Don't you agree, Dr. Aust? Regardless, accountability will be necessary before change can occur.
The negative results of endemic corruption are obvious throughout our society, and the pathetic and impotent claims produced by HIV science provide some of the most absurd examples:
"HIV is very enigmatic but always fatal...well, at some point in the future it's fatal...we just can't tell you the when or the how, unless you take these pills 12 times a day; then, we can tell you...because we can monitor your "markers" for HIV, as you get sicker from the drugs. Also, we'll continue to ignore these debilitating and deadly side effects, while also refusing to recognize the irrelevance of HIV markers, in spite of research suggesting otherwise. We also ignore the obvious changes in cause of death and the disparities in disease presentation in different parts of the world. Remember, it's a very enigmatic virus...just take your pills and the side effects, take those too...they're part of the deal. You'll die if you don't. Did I mention that? We haven't even gotten to the conflicting mutation theories but boy do they mutate..."
Dr. Aust, you and your colleagues, have had twenty years to come up with an answer, and this is the best that you can do. HIV/AIDS is a money tree for Big Pharma, and it's inability to explain the realities of this disease condition are becoming ever more apparent. Your posturing has grown tiresome, and it is a danger to public health.
____________________
Finally, let's answer those two basic questions, shall we?
Are people still dying from HIV/AIDS?
Yes, and the numbers who are dying from "AIDS" are virtually unchanged. Thus, it appears that HIV positivity is a red herring, unless of course you continue to shoot Meth and/or begin a regimen of life-ending retrovirals.
How are they dying?
This is where things get interesting...whether apologists will admit it or not, many more patients are obviously dying from the medications. Liver failure and physical deformities have also become normalized. Of course, the apologists will argue that the alternatives are worse, but as Noreen and myself understand, the "real" alternatives can mean the difference between living and dying.
As for HIV, the only thing that mutates faster than the virus are the laughable theories used to explain-away its numerous explanatory deficiencies.
Kevin
Noreen,
I wish we could cut AIDS cases in half. That's why some of us are researching AIDS.
CD4 counts have always been important but we didn't know this until the 1970s. With HIV the CD4 count is the best predictor of progression to AIDS and death in HIV positive people. Even more important than viral load is as important as that is. Some people with low CD4 will survive for years, but most don't. This is based on measuring CD4 counts and following disease progression in thousands of patients.
You can live for a long time with liver enzyme abnormals just ask all those people on statins. You can't live very long without your immune system.
Noreen someone lied to you about that Lancet paper. They told you it compared people on drugs to people not on drugs. They also lied to you that CD4s aren't important. I hope their lies don't hurt you like they've hurt some people.
Adele, thanks for your concern as you seem to be genuinely concerned and not want to argue for the sake of arguing like others. I agree that the immune system is important but I don't agree that CD4's are a very good indication of health. Health must consist of many factors and the person's life style habits. How can we base it on one set of numbers? Take the early cases of GRID, they had things in common, which were life-style issues. How do you explain, to this day the majority of actual AIDS cases are in the male population? If 250,000 to 1 million Americans do not know that they have HIV, then why over the years hasn't the AIDS cases increased because at some point in time they "should" have developed AIDS. There are so many things that don't add up. It may take years to learn what is the truth. However, in the interim those of us affected by all of this have to weed through information and do what we think is best for us.
Why did the authors not include the healthcare workers AIDS data in the abstract? Not convincing enough?
It may come as a surprise to you but scientists do not focus on convincing scientifically illiterate trolls.
Franky, I would be convinced if the report originated in the peer reviewed medical literature, perhaps describing fifty to a hundred AIDS cases in each major inner city medical center dealing with occupationally acquired AIDS cases involving AIDS in nurses, residents, interns and attending surgeons, and with the publication written by an MD author, not ghostwritten, and not funded by HIV drug companies. I haven't been able to find any of these, Have you?
The real question is why do people like you get offended by being labelled as a Denialist?
You denied that data existed. You even claimed to have read this very reference.
The important point is that out of 57 documented cases of occupationally acquired HIV infection 26 have been recorded as progressing to AIDS.
This confirms everything that we know about HIV and AIDS.
The risk of HIV transmission through needle-sticks is relatively low compared to other pathogens although the risk is higher during acute infection or end-stage AIDS when the viral load is higher.
Your "predictions" about the number of health-care workers that "should" have been infected are just self-serving numbers that you pulled out of thin air.
You lied about the paper. You haven't admitted to doing so.
If 250,000 to 1 million Americans do not know that they have HIV, then why over the years hasn't the AIDS cases increased because at some point in time they "should" have developed AIDS.
You are being a bit loose with the numbers here. There are a lot of people that are infected with HIV and don't know. This is reflected in the number of people that are diagnosed with HIV infection when they turn up in hosptital with a variety of life threatening opportunistic infections that are extremely rare in inmmunocompetent people.
Here's an interesting video interview of two members of AIDStruth.org:
http://health.scribemedia.org/2007/06/22/fighting-aids-denialism/
in germany, also, there is still a small (but, astonishingly, in the last months growing) number of aids denialists, mostly not 'open' (because of fear of verbal attacks) but hidden.
there seems to be a deep longing in some people for such thinking.
and - i always feel sad seeing people first just say 'see - i don't do anything, no pills, and I'm just fine' - and months later have to visit them in hospital. pcp (eg) isn't something necessary nowadays ...
http://ondamaris.blogspot.com/
I have read all the Duesberg stuff and find it very interesting and it all seems very logical to me. (from a lay level of study) And I sympathize with anyone who is sick and terrified. I pray for all people every night.
But here is what I have noticed
The term "Aids Denialists" has me suspicious. Why does this term exist? Cancer causes are debated ad infinitum. I've never heard of a "cancer denialist".
The Denialist term is purely political. And it seems driven by certain gay organizations and individuals as well as publications and philosophies that will overly defend thier beliefs.
If the modern concept of Sexually Transmitted Aids is a relatively new concept, shouldn't it follow that errors are easily made. Is it possible to make an arguement that overly protective groups have hindered the process of understanding all the elements of this syndrome. It should be very telling when a Scientist, such as Duersberg (spelling?) contradicts conventional wisdom and is shunned to a ridiculous degree? What the hell for?
I have read posts from all over this site saying "here comes the vaccination/aids denialist wackos". What is wrong with a contradictory viewpoint. Nothing. Thats your answer.
Keep in mind that almost all scientific/medical people have read books to get their opinion. Only a tad do the actual research and see the events. Many Scientists and Medical people are extremely linear in their process because that type of thinking got them through years of extremely tough schooling. Thus, those same individuals are not encouraged to be so analytical, but rather fastidious in their compliance to the training that is fed. (nothing wrong with this. Father and two Brothers are surgeons).
Can you please show me the picture of the hiv isolation required by Koch's postulates?
The notion that science is self-correcting is absolutely valid only to the extent that the dissenting views are adequately considered. Additionally, uniform criteria must be employed in the acceptance or denial of the evidence presented for any new postulate. It is not at all clear that either of these things has been the case in this debate. Consensus is not a scientific argument. There has been no new theory in the history of science that enjoyed consensus support at the moment of its inception, by definition. The level and degree of ad hominem attacks on the part of those with a vested interest in the consensus viewpoint in this thread vastly exceeds those of the minority viewpoint both in frequency and for level of vitriol. This is inevitably rationalized along the line of lives will be lost if the minority viewpoint is allowed to gain credibility or currency. When the minority viewpoint consists, in part, of the hypothesis that it is the consensus viewpoint that is already killing tens or hundreds of thousands of patients, this response is entirely unsatisfactory. Not only is it unscientific, but it is anti-scientific. The use of the term "denier" is a dangerous and misleading term laden with connotation and innuendo that undermines the credibility of those of us who would prefer to be engaged in purely scientific argument.
At every turn, the notion that HIV causes AIDS, while it may be partially or entirely correct, has been fraught with difficulties and setbacks requiring nearly constant revision of its primary tenets. Each such revision suggest the unscientific and ad hoc nature of the previous draft. The "deniers" have proposed experiments that would unequivocally prove or disprove their either their own hypotheses of those of the the consensus. Given that the consensus effort, even with its tens of billions of dollars of expenditures, has failed to provide us with a convincing model of the AIDS syndrome, let alone a safe protocol for dealing with it. For a relatively modest sum, the experiments of the "deniers" could be carried out, and it is very, very difficult to discern what the risks would be entailed in doing so, other than to grants and reputations should those studies bear fruit. And yet we see instead, on this thread, scientists seriously proposing that so and so is an unreliable source because "he can't even get grants any more". These are sad times indeed for medical science. The notion that modern medical science is any longer self-correcting is patently absurd. If it was, it would put some of its money into the dissenting viewpoint. The only chance the "accepters" of this thread with ever have of laying the dissenters' ideas to rest is to fund them and let them hang themselves if indeed they are incorrect. This used to be a self-evident truth, because there used to be a significant not-for-profit subset of scientists.