I don't often provide a lot of background into HIV science or HIV denial, instead referencing previous posts I've made or websites such as AIDStruth.org or the NIAID fact sheet. For those of you who may be looking for more background in a nice, concise format, HealthDot has a 20-minute interview with John Moore and Jeanne Bergman (both who help run AIDStruth.org) regarding the issues of HIV science and HIV denial--including a few minutes on what journalists can do.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
Tara points out that we missed a nice little article in Science last week about our friends at AidsTruth. They discuss their ongoing efforts to counter HIV/AIDS denialism on the Web.
Launched by AIDS researchers, clinicians, and activists from several countries, AIDSTruth.org offers more than 100…
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…
Dr.Tara C. Smith is one of the original Gang Of Four(teen) here at Scienceblogs.com. She blogs on her Aetiology as well as contributes to Panda's Thumb and Correlations group blogs. At the 2nd Science Blogging Conference last month Tara moderated the session on Blogging public health and medicine…
One of the things that's been rattling around in my head since ScienceOnline back in January is the need for a greater diversity of voices in science communication generally. I don't mean diversity in the sense of racial and gender make-up of the people doing the communication, though that would be…
The Full Professor says
I just have a life that doesn't revolve around Aetiology (thank god).
Right near the end of his 1500 word assay!! I think only Maniotis writes more than the Full Professor and not even Maniotis lately what do you think?? Only MAniotis sometimes says something even though its strange halve the time, Drain just insults people and talks about "fingering" what a professional progressive gentleman.
What doesn't the FullProf get about this.
Example, prevalence estimates for 1986. How bout Brookmeyer et al, hay et al, Rosenberg et al and Hyman et al they're all in a table in Journal of NIH research July 1991.
Brookmeyer, 560-800,000
Hay, 460-560,000
Hyman, 480-510,000
Rosenberg, 660,000
You cant just say, what, all of these estimates has part of it above 500,000 so lets all just say its ONE MILLION. That's what Full Professor Drain Bworn says though because he doesn't know any statistics or hes so fixated on one million hell do anything to make it that.
Wonder what this guy thinks about syphilis that's even more transmissable than HIV and its been around forever and its still concentrates in risk groups and geographically. I guess syphilis isn't sexually transmited either is it Full Professor.
Oh well Full Professor Drain Bworn don't quit your day job. Oh I forgot do you have a job any more or are you just denialist webmatser?
Forgot something Fool Professor is always ranting about back calculation. Well if you don't have alot of coverage in your population with tests than back calculation is maybe the best way to estimate. I hope Tara corrects me if I say something stupid but that's how I understand it.
Fool Professor is saying, let's get ride of of the best estimates because I don't like them and just keep the stuff based on tiny tiny test numbers that get extrapolated to a whole population and were huge over estimates for eighties numbers.
So if the Fool Professor is giving us proof back calculation doesn't work maybe but he doesn't do that and I don't think he can.
Histerian says
Carter asks for any specific and notable flaws regarding a criticised piece by Peter Duesberg.
No carter said
In what way are they flawed?
Carter didn't ask for "specific and notabel" flows he asked for the way they were flawed and seth said its because of bad or no peer review Chris said they were flawed because they didn't review the literature and Elk just agreed with both of them. Apy or elk one of them said they could give specific examples but carter didn't ask for them. Carter doesnt seem to be all there if you ask me.
When you put words in someones mouth like you did with Carter your not a very good historian are you Tony Tiger.
Yes historian
The masters posting here of prevailing paradigm cant pic a single issue from Duesberg and say anything detremental because they deep down inside the back of their minds, because they know the points he makes are correct and anything they say will go to demonstrate they're only dupes trying desperately to hold onto HIV.
Yesss, Yessss Hisssstorian,
The massssterses possstsss the prevailing paradigmssss. Very tricksssy. Very cruel on poor Carter, cruel hard massstersss, gollum. Filthy massssterses! We mentions Lord Duesberg and they gives us no juicy fissssshhes.
OMG Carter, do you want examples or not? You just have to ask so go and do it already!
"Duesberg and say anything detremental because they deep down inside the back of their minds,"
----------
Wow, Carter, I wish I was smart like you. You can, without any actual knowledge of biology, distinguish good studies from bad. Without any actual knowledge or experience, you can tell that an entire industry is selling drugs they know won't work, and you can divine my secret motives without ever meeting me.
And all without any possibility of being wrong. Wow. I. am. so. impressed.
It has been discussed at length here how Duesberg maligns individuals, deciding after death that they must have been big drug users.
So, I'll tell you what: write down a claim of Duesberg's, in a single sentence, such as "retroviruses are harmless" or something, and I'll do my best to tell you why it is wrong.
Apy or elk one of them said they could give specific examples but carter didn't ask for them.
They can give them but because Carter didn't ask for them they didn't give them.
...
What a truckload of BS. Anyway, let's put it clear. Now. I ask it:
Give us some specific examples, please.
Dear Historian,
You refer to "flaws regarding a criticised piece" by Dr. Duesberg. How, I must ask, does a flaw regard? Perhaps you, like Dr. Duesberg, are not particularly adept with the English language, so I will let slide this linguistic curiosity and instead focus on what you consider me and others too paralyzed with awe and fear to do--expose even a single flaw in the work of Duesberg.
I begin with some wide, "concept" flaws. To support his drug-AIDS hypothesis, Duesberg has repeatedly drawn parallels between increase in AIDS incidence and increase in drug abuse, the latter measured by drug-related emergency room visits, drug-related fatalities, even the volume of drugs seized by the feds from year to year (as if these stats must reflect actual trends in drug consumption). When drug use goes up (as it did in the 1980's), AIDS also goes up. When drug use is down (mid-90's), AIDS also goes down. Duesberg forgets that correlation does not necessarily equal causation. He gives no proof that any type of drug use can cause AIDS, much less drug use in general. In other words, no mechanism, unlike the case for HIV, where hundreds of studies have shown the direct and indirect toxic effects of HIV infection, HIV proteins, even host responses to HIV infection.
Had Duesberg been able to present a model mechanism, it turns out that his hypothesis is trash in any case. It appears that the correlation between government drug and AIDS numbers for the period covered by Duesberg was coincidental. After most of Duesberg's reviews had been published, AIDS deaths continued to drop while drug use--measured by emergency room visits, etc.--went back up and as the number of people taking antiretrovirals increased, too.
Duesberg doesn't take correlation to causation, and his correlation falls apart with time. No simple flaw, that, but a fatal flaw that shows the deficiency of Duesberg's hypothesis.
What else? Seth has just noted Duesberg's truly despicable behavior towards a man whom he, Duesberg, used as a propaganda piece (drug-free HIV never turns into AIDS or death)...until the man developed AIDS and died. At that point, Duesberg accused the patient of lying to him, labeling him a closet addict. This is the same tack Duesberg takes with the HIV-positive children of HIV-positive but non-IDU mothers (perhaps 20% of all vertically-infected children in the USA): whereas the children of IDU mothers develop AIDS because they "shared drugs" with their mothers before birth, the other HIV-positive children who develop AIDS are simply the "natural" background of various diseases and deformities. Duesberg fails to provide any proof for such a "background."
These examples show Duesberg's approach to data: if they fit the hypothesis, milk them. If they don't fit, ignore them, attribute them to lies and deception, or give a hand-waving "that must be due to something else" non-explanation.
Historian, there you have two broad "flaws" that by themselves self-torpedo the good ship Duesberg. There are many, many more. Let us examine Duesberg more closely.
Carter asks why Duesberg's reviews satisfy lower standards than one should expect of a high school report. To start with, when researching literature, one should try to get quotes correct, i.e. use the exact words in the quote and use ellipsis when two quotes were not uttered together. It's also a good idea to portray the context correctly.
Duesberg fails at all of this. Here is a quote from a news article in Science 272, page 1884:
We have all the hoopla about antiviral drugs, and you get any virologists aside and they'll say this is not how we're going to win," contends retrovirologist Jay Levy of the University of California, San Francisco. To clear all the virus from the body, Levy says, "it's high time we look at the immune system.
In their horridly-written 1998 Genetica "review" Duesberg and co-author David Rasnick rendered Levy's words like this:
With all the hoopla about antiviral drugs, and you get any virologist aside and they'll say this is not how we are going to win, it's high time we look at the immune system
Duesberg and Rasnick could not even cut and paste (and yes, kids, there were word processors back in 1998), and the resulting "quote" makes no sense. They mangled the start of the sentence, made a plural into a singular (virologist), put a sentence fragment onto the end that is part of a separate quote, and failed to include any context whatsoever.
Of these scholarly infractions that should embarass any good high school student, the first two are plain sloppiness and the third, while it may be dishonest, could be considered, at the least, evidence of substandard education and scholarly abilities; leaving out the context is the worst and can only be called dishonest. Duesberg gives the Levy quote as evidence that "orthodox" scientists "informally" "have concerns about the medical consequences of anti-HIV treatment" (page 120).
Levy is saying no such thing in his quote. To Levy, "winning" means eradicating the virus from the body. Levy questions the exuberance ushered in by PI "hoopla," cautioning that drugs alone are not going to cure HIV infection.
On every level of scholarship, from the most basic (not managing to transcribe a simple quote), to the more complicated and intentional (taking quotes out of context), to the "big picture" flaws of the hypothesis, Duesberg's "reviews" are not reviews at all, they are partisan attacks on science from an apparently bitter man who has compromised, in my view, whatever intellectual integrity he may have had.
Perhaps, in the past, Duesberg has performed excellent work. When I read his "reviews" on HIV and AIDS, however, I do not see brilliance. I see merely a poor writer with apparently poor research skills and self-prescribed intellectual blinders.
Brilliant response.
The graph that you copied and pasted from Duesberg's paper has five data points: 1985, 1990, 1995, 1996, and 2000.
The only reference that Duesberg has ever given for 1985 is the Curran paper. Duesberg rounded the estimate of 500,000-1,000,000 up to 1 million with no justification.
I've also given you another reference from 1985 that gave an estimate of 240,000.
The acquired immunodeficiency syndrome in a cohort of homosexual men. A six-year follow-up study.
No. You picked out only the estimates that agreed with your preconceived idea of a flat line. You represent this as the official data when it is clear from reading the very papers that you cite that nobody believes in this imaginary flat line. You also completely omit any mention of the errors in the estimates.
What are you saying then? You aren't being coherent. HIV exploded into homsexual populations in San Francisco but somehow the total prevalence was absolutely flat?
You can take your cheap shots of racism and stick them where you pulled your epidemiology from.
Have you actually looked up statistics for STI's like gonorrhea? The prevalence in African american populations is several times higher than for whites.
Stop listening to clueless twits like Bauer and Duesberg telling stories about how "true" STI's behave. Read some epidemiology textbooks.
I've already talked in some detail about Duesberg's Genetica article.
HIV as a surrogate marker for drug use: a re-analysis of the San Francisco Men's Health Study.
Duesberg invented 45 "HIV free AIDS cases" in a vain attempt to counteract the devastating study by Ascher et al. Duesberg blatantly lied when he claimed that he used the CDC definition of AIDS.
It is difficult to fathom how such a blatant lie got through peer review until you realise that Duesberg was himself the guest editor of this journal. The "dissidents" were given an entire issue of Genetica to give their best shot at explaining their theories.
Carter,
The problem with listing all of Duesberg's flaws is that it takes 10x as much text to refute a claim as it does to make it. I'll give you one example: his predictions about how AIDS should be seen in a population (from his "Drugs and noncontagious risk factors" paper), based on what he claims ALL infectious diseases do:
He says AIDS should 1) "spread randomly between the sexes." However, we know this isn't always the case--example of syphilis (see for example this publication).
2) "Cause primary disease within weeks or months after infection." Also not always the case. Look at something like Helicobacter pylori, where you can be infected for years prior to developing a peptic ulcer (and most people are never symptomatic). Many infectious agents can cause disease long after initial infection.
3) "Coincide with a common, active, and abundant microbe in all cases of same disease." What he wants is to always be able to isolate the pathogen (especially from blood) at any stage of the disease in high numbers. This is also false--see for example the reactivation of herpes family viruses, which are difficult to isolate in reactivations. (Guess what we typically use for diagosis: serology).
4) "Coincides with a microbe that lyses or renders nonfunctional more cells than the host can spare or regenerate." My question: huh? He doesn't give a reference for this at all, probably because this isn't some kind of accepted prediction, period. A microbe can do very little as far as sheer population of cells damaged and still be highly pathogenic.
5) "Generate a predictable pattern of symptoms." Well, this one depends. All microbes have a list of symptoms associated with them, but they'll inevitably vary from person to person anyway. With HIV, the symptom is actually more universal than most pathogens: T cell depletion. This immunocompromised state then allows other microbes to seed the host and cause disease, causing the secondary symptoms (which will depend on whichever microbe infects them). We see a similar phenomenon with immunocompromised patients regardless of the cause of their immune system disruption.
Dr. Smith,
These are all speculations, theres not much hiv in the blood but it could possibly be an immune response tha kills the cells...................speculations, there are other viruses that are latent and come back 10 years so it is possible for hiv to act this way.............speculation, no hard direct evidence
My uncle had a broken arm that didnt heal for 10 years, therefore everybody with a broken arm wont heal for ten years..............you dont make exceptions into the rules, you need direct evidence.............
Since there is no reliable animal model for HIV, the only way to see if this virus can do all of these things no one can seem to explain you need an epidemiological study THAT CLEARY STATES IN THE OBJECTIVES/AIMS to test/confirm/refute Gallo's hypothesis by honest scientists who truly want an answer, not hacks like the wainberg/gallo mob.
Epidemiiological studies that assume HIV already is the cause AIDS are useless, as they all have been, bc that is the very question at issue, and they didnt do much to control for confounding factors like AZT etc, and were conducted by hacks who view HIV dissidents as Nazis and with this irrational mindset its gonna be hard for them to do an honest study.
If my neighbor claimed a space alien visted her backyard, and in all my subsequent investigation assumed that an alien did visit her backyard,I presumed it to be true, and my studies were only designed to examine how tall the alien was, how handsome he was, what food he liked, whether or not he liked country music and not whether he really existed, it would be foolish for me to say I confirmed an alien did visit her, for how can you confirm something that you already thought to be true.
This is what all the science after Gallo's Orwellian press conference was.
My Advice to you Tara as a young scientist is to take some direction from the worlds most brillaint scientist, Dr. Shyh Ching Lo md PHD, unlike hiv he had an animal model with mycoplasma incognitus, Ive posted his research several times, every animal he injected it with died (mice/primates,)
This is the only microbe people need to worry about, we are being duped, it was part of the biological weapons program, and is slowly spreading through the population. Im sure if the CDC or a drug company supported mycoplasma research the trolls here would to. IF you read Project day Lily youll find out how this microbe was the centerpeice of the bioweapons program, and this book has been given rave reviews by several scientists, including a nobel laurete, Roger Guillemin, M.D., Ph.D.
For lurkers learn about how mycoplasma incognitus was part of the bioweapons program
By Garth and Nancy Nicolson phd's
http://www.projectdaylily.com/
A summary of The cheif scientist of the Armed forces Lan Dr. Shyh Ching Lo md phd, one of the very few scientists since Koch that discovered a microbe that killed/sickened every animal injected
http://www.aegis.com/pubs/atn/1990/ATN09501.html
testing
On Sept 12, 2007, Carter says:
Carter, we suspect that you don't actually read any of the scientific papers you "quote," but it seems you don't even read the posts on Tara's Blog. Your claim again demonstrates the Denialist habit of ignoring any actual scientific argument while repeating the same refuted claims ad nauseum.
Just scroll up in this one thread and you will find many specific criticisms of claims made by Duesberg. Specific issues where Duesberg has been shown to be wrong.
Many of the criticisms of Duesberg posted on this thread include links to actual scientific papers that refute Duesberg. Just scroll up and you will find:
Adele debunking Duesberg on June 29, 2007 6:13 PM:
Tara debunking Duesberg on June 30, 2007 5:36 PM:
Dr. P. S. Duke debunking Duesberg July 1, 2007 7:32 AM:
Chris Noble Debunking Duesberg July 1, 2007 6:43 PM:
(A detailed debunking with links to more than 10 references backing up his contention that Duesberg's argument that AIDS is caused by drug toxicity is not supported by the literature.)
Chris Noble Debunking Duesberg July 1, 2007 8:57 PM:
Trrll discussing the rejection of Duesberg's ideas over time July 2, 2007 1:09 AM:
DT Debunking Duesberg July 2, 2007 10:01 AM:
Chris Noble debunking Duesberg (and Darin's defense of Duesberg) on August 7, 2007 3:00 AM:
Chris Noble on August 15, 2007 12:31 AM:
Chris Noble debunking Duesberg (and Darin's defense of Duesberg) (again) on August 15, 2007 9:28 PM:
Chris Noble on August 16, 2007 8:12 PM
Chris Noble on August 16, 2007 8:12 PM:
Chris Noble responding to Epidemiology-LISA's defense of Duesberg on August 18, 2007 10:12 PM:
But cooler, this is exactly what Duesberg is doing. He makes up his own rules that don't have any basis in infectious disease epidemiology, then says that AIDS fails to fit these rules, therefore it doesn't have an infectious etiology (circular logic and strawman argument, anyone?). I've given you evidence showing that Duesberg's hard-and-fast characterizations of how pathogens "work" are in serious error--those aren't "exceptions," they're just examples showing how he's in error on every single one of those points.
Jesus Mary Christmas! You drop dead die hards have given enough spurious information to make ones head spin.
How about we go with the idea that "we really dont know and we need more studies" Opps. But thats exactly what most of your studies say anyway.
Your rebuttals have the air of resounding hatred of Duesberg because he refutes your bad and inconsistent crap. For that you cannot stand for and therefore immediately close your minds.. Youre saying, "how dare you Duesberg"
Carter,
There are another points where Duesberg is wrong.
1) AIDS is not a collection of disparate diseases. AIDS is related which a specific immune pathophysiology which led the patient to be prone to a range of diseases.
This can be proven using a range of published works both from HIV/AIDS researchers, but also from researchers looking to the mechanisms underlying the OI diseases, the later ones not allways working in the HIV AIDS establishement.
2) This pathophysiology is totally similar in Africa and in the US, this can be shown better now because testing devices are similar.
Reviews on it have been published so I dont want to paste them here. If you post your email address I can send you some by pdf.
Duesberg, as it is well known, managed to have the support of Mbeki, but despite major state support, could not prove his theories right. Persons in South Africa still have AIDS and need to treat it, and the Duesberg approach was not good enough to save them. This cannot be ignored even by the SA government, who is now improving access to retroviral therapies.
I should say however that I sympathize with the fact that you are asking questions, can argue quite well despite the fact that you dont have access to literature.
AND not quite Duesberg, you have proven that you can change your mind.
Carter, if you are HIV+, are you checking your CD4 count ?
or would you wait until it is low, and you have an OI ?
Carter, please follow Franklin's suggestion and re-read some of this thread. Our criticisms of Duesberg are not based on "spurious information." They are based upon peer-reviewed information and upon Duesberg's actual words.
Pointing out the errors of another does not have to be an act of "resounding hatred," but, in any case, my motives and those of every other participant are irrelevant. If Duesberg fabricated data, botched quotes, and misrepresented studies, he did so whether I hate him or respect him; proving his errors exist does not depend on my personal feelings, if any, for the man himself.
Truth be told, I don't hate Dr. Duesberg. I feel sorry for him. I feel sorry for his child, who may someday have to grapple with the possibility that many people, most of them Africans, died early deaths in part because of his father's folly. Most of all, I feel sorry for the families of those who died because they or their governments subscribed to Duesberg's denial, and for those who will continue to die so long as the reality-denying movement he spawned remains active.
In the event that Carter and the "Historian" require more information, here are several more errors from Duesberg's so-called reviews.
The high school student learning about research papers is taught to give valid references for all claims.
From the 1998 Genetica review by Duesberg and Rasnick, page 98:
"Indeed, in 1998 a national survey has confirmed directly that all American AIDS patients are on anti-HIV drugs (Perlman, 1998)."
On page 106, Duesberg modifies his earlier assertion:
"Indeed, a national survey just confirmed that all American AIDS patients are dying on anti-HIV treatments (Perlman, 1998)."
Let us leave aside the poor writing in these two sentences (How does a survey confirm "directly" "all" cases of anything? What does it mean that "all American AIDS patients are dying on" a drug?).
The true issue is that the article referred to as "Perlman, 1998" makes neither of these claims anywhere in its entire text. In fact, it makes quite the opposite claim: that far too many HIV-infected patients, including AIDS patients, do not have access to antiviral drugs and a proper standard of care. Don't take me at my word; look through the archived article for yourself (www.aegis.com/news/sc/1998/SC980602.html).
Duesberg starts with an article that effectively refutes his claims, asserts that it says the exact opposite, and gives it as a reference. There's simply no explanation for why a scholar would do this...except dishonesty. Duesberg and Rasnick invented a lie and gave an invalid reference for it.
Also, the article is a news piece in the San Francisco Chronicle, and Duesberg relies heavily on such articles instead of primary sources. A scientific review is meant to review the scientific literature, not the scientific literature as portrayed in local newspapers.
Still not convinced? Carter may like this example, since it runs in the vein of his derisive "BareBack Mountain" joke:
On page 96 of the Genetica review co authored with David Rasnick, there is a quote about "poppers" from a Swiss German-language magazine. Duesberg treats us to a lesson in (bad) translation practices. When passages from one language are translated into another in publications, one typically provides the original, then a literal translation; with the translation, it is customary to note the identity of the translator, as in "translation by xxx" or "author's translation." Duesberg does not mention his translator; presumably, he has done the work himself.
He translates the following:
"...seit Jahren von vielen Leuten--vor allen Schwulen--beim Sex zwecks Verstaerkung der Lust verwendet wird"
as
"used as a gay drug for years."
This is an unacceptable, inaccurate translation, not to mention offensive. What, exactly, is a "gay drug?" A drug that is attracted to similar drugs? A drug used only by gay people?
A literal and faithful translation of the original would be, "...used for years by many people--especially homosexuals--to increase libido during sex." Duesberg's mangling of the English language in other instances is perhaps understandable; his inability to translate his native language halfway adequately, all the while apparently injecting his own widely-reported prejudices, is just...I'm not sure what word to use here.
I fully endorse Tara's observation: "The problem with listing all of Duesberg's flaws is that it takes 10x as much text to refute a claim as it does to make it." Sometimes, it's 100x; I could go on like this all day if I were interested in wasting more time on the amateurish writings of Duesberg. All year, in fact. I have found sadly little in his "work" on HIV and AIDS that is sound.
Carter and others reading this, if you are HIV positive or have friends who are, please rethink your position before you bet your life and others' lives on the ignorance-based, scholastically deficient claims of Peter Duesberg.
Truth be told, I don't hate Dr. Duesberg. I feel sorry for him. I feel sorry for his child, who may someday have to grapple with the possibility that many people, most of them Africans, died early deaths in part because of his father's folly.
It's incredible!!! I feel exactly the same about all the stubborn "We are the scientific community" Aids apologists and their kids!
I mean, how many Africans died and will die just because the self-righteous, pompous and/or greedy population of the developed countries made them believe in some HIV=Aids=LSKD* equation folly?
(* Life Saving Killer Drugs)
Cooler says
This is what all the science after Gallo's Orwellian press conference was.
like, after the press conference nobody cared about isolation anymore they ALL just assumed gallo was right.
Cooler if you would just read a damn paper someday instead of a fiction novel called daylily you would know theres like hundreds and hundreds of labs who isolated HIV after that press conference. Yes they confirmed there was HIV in these patients with AIDS and yest they confirmed it is pathogenic.
Oh am I to late for MY Duesberg crap example? I like how duesberg says 'catch AIDS'. You don't "catch" AIDS you get HIV, HIV causes immunodeficiency then the immunodeficiency usually lets some OIs and other AIDS conditions start and THATS AIDS. Catch AIDS my foot. The guy can't even talk right about science why would anyone listen to him.
hundreds and hundreds of labs who isolated HIV
Hey! Another very interesting example of Aids mathematics, first introduced during this fantastic dog fight
zéro*isolation=(hundreds+hundreds)*labs_who_isolated
Carter, if you are HIV+, are you checking your CD4 count ? or would you wait until it is low, and you have an OI ?
That's hearsay and bull shit and you know it!
Except you might be right in that it rings true for the unfortunate ones who believe in your almighty devastating virus theory who thusly suffer from and quite possibly will die an early death from induced drug toxicity.
Ok its not hundreds, I was wrong and I can admit it. It's not hundreds and hundreds its thousands. HEre's just a few studies with isolation from the last couple month:
Nieves DM et al JNeurovirol July2007 "Characterization of peripheral blood human immunodeficiency virus isolates from Hispanic women with cognitive impairment."
In this study, aimed at determining if the tropism and coreceptor usage of circulating viruses correlates with cognitive function, the authors isolated and characterized HIV from the peripheral blood of 21 Hispanic women using antiretroviral therapy.
Meng Z et al AIDS Res Hum Retroviruses. 2007 Aug;23(8):1049-54. "Genetic Characterization of Three Newly Isolated CRF07_BC Near Full-Length Genomes in China"
Pando MA et al Retrovirology. 2007 Aug 13;4:58
Voronin Y et al J Virol. 2007 Jul 25; [Epub ahead of print]
"Primary Isolates of Human Immunodeficiency Virus 1 (HIV-1) are Usually Dominated by the Major Variants Found in Blood"
Spreen won't believe any of the thousands because he knows more about mol bio than anyone else including all virologists on the planet so no isolation is good enough. Sucrose gradients aren't enough. Molecular characcterazation of the proteins not enough. Cloning not enough. Verify the clones code the proteins not enough. Full length clonging not enough. EMs not enough. Coculture not enough Direct from tissues not good. Direct from blood not good. Using magnetic separation not good. All of them together thousands of times independently also not enough.
Everyone knows GOSH you have to be able to pick up a virus with your fingers and fry it in a pan with some butter for you to believe in it so sorry no that kind of isolation never got done.
Wow I think i said something brilliant!! I'm understanding the germ theory deniers now.
I never saw a virus or a bacteria on the menu at a restaurant! So they don't exist! They don't cause disease! Because they haven't been isolated and served to diners!
I did see some fungus though so I guess fungus exists. Probably not Pneumocystis though that's not a pizza topping anywhere.
Here's just a few studies with isolation from the last couple month
That's fantastic. I'm sure you know about the HIV-isolation challenge. There's something like $100000 you can put in your pocket. You don't need hundreds or thousands of isolation, you just need one. Show them one publication of HIV isolation and the money is yours!
But of course, you're right. Personally I couldn't care less whether HIV is isolated or not. I mean, bacteries have been isolated, it seems, but still I don't believe they cause diseases, I think they're just part of an overall process modern science doesn't care about to look at at all.
Can't spreen get anything right? Its not 100,000 dollars its 50,000 and you only get to put half of it "in your pocket"
Like I said along time ago I'm not dealing with those killers for any kind of money. I don't want a free trip to wherever their doing their HIV vertical transmission now and I don't want their money. Sheesh they actually invited ME expenses payed to California to debate them! TAlk about scraping the bottom of the barrel. "World famous denialist debates part-time nameless faceless tech." OMG.
I just gave spreen four references why doesn't he get the money himself if he's so excited about it. Jan wont use those references to ask for the money because he knows its a bogus "challenge" it's fake it's a fraud it's a stupid publicity stunt. If I had killed someone refusing good treatment for them I wouldn't want more publicity but thats just me evolution didn't give us all a sense of shame I guess.
What is this you say?
....isolation is good enough. Sucrose gradients aren't enough. Molecular characcterazation of the proteins not enough. Cloning not enough. Verify the clones code the proteins not enough. Full length clonging not enough. EMs not enough. Coculture not enough Direct from tissues not good. Direct from blood not good. Using magnetic separation not good. All of them together thousands of times independently also not enough.
Here's what I think:
Isolation = Only ever in vitro with lots of stimulants/supernatants!
Coculture = Not direct (see below)
Direct from tissues/blood not good. = Where, pray tell? Not with out adding something to the mix.
Sucrose gradients & Molecular characterization & Verify the clones = Not Specific (like the test themselves)
Em's = Never free from other particles and debris, mostly cartoon enhancements.
Using magnetic separation = Science fiction
Thousands of times independently = REALLY? "An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation...." Gandhi
OK, exit spinning Adele. I think the following is infinitely more interesting.
It's on top of this thread but somehow I overlooked it. Somehow? Hi, hi, hi... Well... I must admit that I haven't read more than say 1% of this silly discussion leading nowhere.
Anyway, I like this:
Before denialists play the Duesberg card- I have read his early arguments, while doing so I thought "there must be a psychiatric diagnosis for his condition."
As far as I know there isn't but I don't really need one because the opposite is already quite well defined with the term "Brain-washed".
Personaly I call it the herd nerd syndrom or the hypnosis of the masses, concerning people, like for instance good ol' Seth, who cannot believe something is wrong for the sole reason that an overwhelming majority of people think it's true.
Carter what do you think about all those examples about Duesberg making stuff up? Just gonna ignore those now? Change the subject? Quote some Gandhi?
You worship Lord Duesberg so why don't you defend him from all that stuff up there from Franklin and Chris et al? You can't can you? Poor carter.
"Here's what I think:
......
Sucrose gradients & Molecular characterization & Verify the clones = Not Specific (like the test themselves)
--------------
Great, Carter! You have answered your own question about what is wrong with Duesberg's papers... he thinks that HIV has been isolated, and describes cloning as "the most rigorous method available to date". So clearly, he doesn't know what he is talking about when it comes to virology, because what you think is something different.
Duesberg is clearly a poor scientist and an unreliable source of information, especially on this topic. I'm glad you cleared that up for everybody.
If I may quote Duesberg again from the same paper:
Therefore my answer to why I do not claim the prize myself is simply that Dr. Duesberg has publically claimed the prize and therefore has precedence over any claim I might wish to make myself.
In addition, as the challengers are not satisfied with the strongest method science has to offer, I am left with no option but to wait until science has a stronger method. I expect this method, in turn, to be arbitrarily rejected by people with no relevant knowledge, and so the merry day will wear on.
"for how can you confirm something that you already thought to be true."
--------------
Cooler, this isn't hard to understand.
Lets say I think that my car will run on water. I put water in my gas tank. I predict the car will start. The car does not start but is damaged.
Under these circumstances, I have to evaluate my assumptions, because my predicted outcome did not occur.
Papers about AIDS/HIV are the same way: researchers predict an outcome based on what they think is true. If the outcome is unexpected, they are wrong about something and have to reexamine the study and its premises.
So EVERY STUDY TESTS ITS ASSUMPTIONS.
Exactly, when your hypothesis fails to meet expectations it should, you reconsider and consider a new theory, in your example you would realize that water cant run a car and its not a good hypothesis, aids inc has been met with these failed predictions, but they have not reconsidered.
The hundereds of chimps inoculated with HIV were all supposed to die of AIDS, after 20 years they didnt, a real scientist would reconsider because of failed expected predictions.
HIv was supposed to be directly killing TCells, when it was found out it only infected a small portion of T cells, 1/1000 or so its time to discard that hypothesis, instead of speculating on elaborate ways on how hiv destroys tcells, to this day, know one really knows, because you are not allowed to toss a bad hypothesis bc of political reasons, so just keep speculating on elaborate magical ways hiv destroys the immune system, it was first supposed to do it in one year, lets just extend it to ten years.
People with hiv were supposed to die within a year, that was the original prediction by AIDS inc, when that expectaion failed, instead of extending the window period by 9 years, its time to consider a new hypothesis, buy AIDS inc had to carry on even though all thier predictions failed.
HIv was supposed to be pretty contagious, the prediction made by AIds inc that at least 10-20% of people exposed to the virus would get it, but the PAdian study showed serodiscordant couples who had unprotected sex had a 0%percent transmission rate, another failed prediction, a sign of a horrible hypothesis that failed all predicted expectaions you would expect if the theory were true.
See hiv fact or fraud on google video
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6830231400057553023
When Duesberg invents 45 "HIV free AIDS cases" and lies by categorically stating that he is using the CDC definition then I do say "how dare you". This brazen dishonesty is criminal.
You are mistaken however if you conclude that the antagonism towards Duesberg is of a personal nature. It is all based on the science and Duesberg's disregard for this science.
On the other hand it is worth pointing out that Duesberg's "rethinking" was, and remains, a personal matter.
From Bialy's book.
Good points, Chris.
For more on Duesberg's deeply personal attacks on scientific progress, see a recent article on aidstruth, www.aidstruth.org/Malignant-Narcissism.pdf
I appreciate especially the title of a section in this article: "Duesberg's HIV Denialism: Egotism without Expertise."
It is interesting that Duesberg's defenders--above all, Carter and "Historian"--have had nothing to say in response to specific examples of Duesberg's scholastic ineptitude and dishonesty. Or are they waiting for more examples? I, for one, have plenty more if the Duesberg Denialists need more proof.
Where are you getting this factoid from? The estimate I found from 1985 was a median of 4.5 years from infection to diagnosis of AIDS (not death).
Where are you getting this from?
no one knew anything about hiv in the early days so all kinds of "estimates" were thrown around, this is what happens when a new plauge is announced at a press conference and all dissent is not allowed bc thats where the funding and government support is going, not one paper published for the worlds scientists to examine and the hypothesis was set in stone beforehand.
With these circumstances nobody knew anything about hiv, whether it folfilled kochs postulates or not, whether it killed cells directly or not, how long it would take to become sick............so people just assumed it would act like most other viruses, induce disease in animals, cause disease within a short period of time, usually before antobody production, not 10 years later...........see the previous post how it failed every expectation.
Cooler, as Chris just asked,
Where are you getting this from?
Hand-waving will not do. Where are the references for your quite frankly ridiculous claims? And where is the evidence--if anyone did, in fact, make such claims--that such "estimates" represented the views of the entire biomedical community?
Cooler, you are proving nothing here apart from your own monumental ignorance of the scientific literature.
The evidence is that nobody knew anything so all kinds of speculations were made, no one knew anything bc the whole theory was put forward without any discusssion/confirmation, it was announced at a press conference in orwellian fashion, a microbe with no animal model that wasnt even found in all aids patients in gallo's study, that was in 1/10000 t cells, kochs postulates were thrown out the window...............
But all these anamolies couldnt be critisized bc the government supported this hypothesis, and if you were a scientist youd better believe in it unless you want to lose your career, like what happened to Duesberg.
My estimates were from the general zeitgeist of the time, because no one knew anything about the disease, people were forced to make speculations, scientists had no idea how it kills the cells, how long the ever extended window period would be, the transmission rate..................BECAUSE IT WAS NEVER AN ISSUE, THE GOVERNMENT SAID HIV IS THE CAUSE OF AIDS and the details, nevermind how fishy and fallacious, were irrelevent.
Girls and boys, I suggest you reread 98% of your own posts, or are they rants, of specific flaws attributed to Peter Duesberg, as you will find they are terribly opinion based or make little to no sense to anyone seriously trying to follow your thinking or your evidence re: presumed errors of Duesberg.
And please understand that ad hom and screedful ranting does not prove or disprove Duesberg and greatly disways one from reading your post. As does simply rehashing what several other poster said about Duesberg, such as Franklin has presented. So hopefully you will explain yourselves in a more understandable manner with the reference to back it up other than he said/she said, and minus the ad hom which simply makes one quite leary and turned off of whatever point you are attempting to make.
Now again, and more understandably I hope, what specifically are the flaws attributed to Peter Duesberg, and what specifically and irrefutably and impeccably and truthfully backs up such statements?
If you guys are so concerned about refrences, please provide me with the first scientific paper that prove hiv causes AIDS, in 1983 only a few scientists suspected a retrovirus as a cause of AIDS (big loser scientists like Jay levy/essex/gallo recovering and desperate from their failed cancer virus program)
Cancer is not contagious, how dumb can these people be?
In 1985 everybody knew as a fact that hiv caused AIDS...........please provide me with the scientific paper that created this ubiquitious consesnsus that must have been published in between these years..............or was this consensus caused by politics and not science? Im waiting for that paper.
See hiv fact or fraud on google video.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6830231400057553023
That's a long winded way of saying that you made it up.
The antibody test for HIV was only developed in 1984. How could it have been possible to accurately determine the median time between infection and AIDS at that stage? How could it have been possible to determine the transmission rate? Nevertheless, by 1985 a great deal was known about these factors.
I gave you an example of Duesberg inventing 45 "HIV free AIDS cases" complete with references.
I noticed your complete absence of any intelligent response to this.
Please look up the meaning of ad hominem before you start accusing people of using it.
Mr. Noble has stated, among ten million other things: "When Duesberg invents 45 "HIV free AIDS cases" and lies by categorically stating that he is using the CDC definition then I do say "how dare you". This brazen dishonesty is criminal."
This is called "leading" Mr. Noble. I have no need or use of being led. Please allow me the common decency to determine if Duesberg "invented", or "lied" or, did something criminal.
Obviously unbeknownst to you, I am actually intelligent enough to form my own opinion when reading or appraising something, and I am fully capable of making such determinations, and do not need to be told what my opinion or belief should of such should be by you or any others.
Please tell us Mr. Noble, where and when Duesberg said this very statement, and what the exact CDC definition was at that very time, so that we can see for ourselves what exact point and honesty there is to what you are saying. And you are also most welcome to point out the exact nature of the error as you see it.
Mr. Noble, It is fine to tell us that YOU BELIEVE he lied, or that YOU THINK he did something that is criminal. But certainly we are all intelligent enough to see this for ourselves if you would but provide the evidence to substantiate it. So allow us the common decency and basic human respect to make such a determination of such for ourselves, as otherwise everything you say will likely simply be held as opionated, biased, and perhaps even most likely lacking in truth or substance.
And the same to ElkMountain, Franklin, and the rest of you.
Michael, since when are you a "historian"? And didn't I tell you several times to pick one name and stick with it?
I get a kick coming here watching you guys twitch. Odd enough is your hell bent pompous supremacy attitudes, but to take highly simple questions and make biased and convoluted judgments is most asinine. Compared to Bob Gallo, Duesberg is a Lord. (Whether I worship at anybody's alter is a completely different question). Gallo made public speculations by 1982 that AIDS might me caused by a retrovirus. Everything else is happenstance and correlation. Thank God Peter had the cajonies to question his ass.
You've done a piss poor job trying to convince anyone that Duesberg's papers are anything but accurate, but then again you can't explain to logical satisfaction Padian et al, and Rodrerguez et al, let alone massive amounts of positives not taking drugs whom are vastly living longer and healthier (right Noreen?) nor explain why so many individuals question your convoluted science (if you're so right) with all your 100s of thousands of papers, either.
I guess you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink. The details are in a post in this very thread.
45 HIV free AIDS cases?
Read Duesberg's Genetica article. He categorically states that he used the CDC definition. He is unmistakably wrong.
"aids inc has been met with these failed predictions, but they have not reconsidered."
-------
Well, that's okay, since there is no organization or group known as "AIDS Inc." I suppose we shouldn't expect them to do much research.
What is interesting to me, cooler, and should be to you, is that studies of HIV show that it infects T-Cells at a much higher rate when it is combined with mycoplasma penetrans, which is your personal best bet for a cofactor (see your post above). But with or without, HIV can be seen to infect the T-Cells and destroy them in vitro. So I'm not sure what you mean.
What would be helpful would be if you could find a specific study and show how it either doesn't meet reasonable, stated expectations, or how it doesn't test or illustrate the HIV/AIDS link.
That's a long winded way of saying that you made it up
No, noble, somethings are just common sense, you dont need a scientific paper to prove that jumping of a tall building will kill you.
With hiv its common sense that hiv would have a higher transmission rate than the 0% as shown in the padian study if it were pathenogenic
Its common sense that a virus should infect more cells than not, not less than 1% as in the case with hiv
Its common sense that the virus should induce disease in animals to make a good case, if it doesnt you should have some good epedimeilogical studies that are designed to test for hiv as the cause of aids in patients with no other risk factors, they are none, they all assumed it to be true, and when they came across thousands of LTNP's , they gave them special genes to save their hypothesis.
By the way Noble, still waiting for that first scientific paper that proves hiv causes that must have been published between 1983-85.............
Nonsense. Nancy Padian was kind enough to address deniers' mythologizing her paper in a post at AIDSTruth. But I suppose she's just the first author of the paper in question; what would she know about her own research, right?
"Compared to Bob Gallo, Duesberg is a Lord."
----------
One whom you apparently believe knows less about virology than yourself. Congratulations, your lordship.
Honestly, dude, you just have no idea what the content of any of these arguments is, do you?
You should realize, looking at your own motives, why denialism exists.
For one thing, people don't listen. For another, they have things they want to believe.
You accuse those of us who think the hypothesis is well supported of having "rose colored glasses" and engaging in wishful thinking or in Gallo's case outright deception... and yet, denialism is somehow magically free of these problems. How does that work? Why is it that people profiting from the denialism movement are somehow above the greed motive?
You just don't make much sense. And you don't seem to have a clear idea of what you think, or what is reasonable. So, not having convinced you isn't a big surprise, you just can't be convinced.
Also those estimates I made were not made up....they are based on historical precedent............most viruses cause disease before antibody production, not 10 years after.
Slow viruses are concoctions of mad scientists who need to buy time to make a name for themselves, like when Gadusek started drilling holes in monkeys heads to try and folfill kochs postulates when he couldnt induce disease by normal inoculations, just keep on extending the window period, get out your drill and manufacture a slow virus so you can get your payday like Gallo did.
most viruses have a much higher transmission rate than 0%
most viruses induce disease in animals, such as polio.
They were not made up, they were reasonable estimations based upon the history of the way microbes act.
Still waiting for that paper published in between 1983-85 that proved hiv caused AIDS.
Common sense says that the Sun circles the Earth. Common sense is a poor guide to science and it is the last resort of cranks with no evidence.
Don't you find it a little hypocritical on your part that you insist that we provide documented evidence but "common sense" is sufficient for you?
"Its common sense that a virus should infect more cells than not"
-------------
Wow, cooler. That is a highly specialized sense of common sense you've got there. I didn't even know that virology behavior was a matter of "common sense."
My wife is a dietician. She told me a story (the reason I fell in love, actually) about work one day. A doctor had put a woman on a tube feed that was too high in sodium or potassium or something... it was more or less guaranteed to cause renal shutdown. The Girl stops the Doc, and asks him why he changed her order. He goes on a long winded thing and she says, "Actually, Dr. _____, the literature doesn't support that,"
He cuts her off. "We're not talking about the literature,-----, we're talking about common sense."
So of course the patient almost dies before their tpn is adjusted back to the appropriate formula.
Is that the kind of common sense you've got, cooler? The kind where you go past you area of expertise and pretend you know a bunch of shit you have no way of knowing except through your "common sense?"
The kind where you go past your area of expertise and pretend you know a bunch of shit you have no way of knowing except through your "common sense?"
Well Seth, you're free to stay in your area of expertise and blindly accept any crap the crap-experts come up with. But other people are not like you and tink they are perfectly able to recognize shit way out of their specific area of expertise. Let'em be, what do you care?
Yes, Cooler you are right. Hiv-Positives can live normal lives without having to take the antiretrovirals for the rest of one's life. More and more people are realizing this and doing this very thing. Even some physicians are seeing the results of this approach. Under the right circumstances, the drugs can save lives as they are not specific to only HIV and assist to attack whatever is harming the patient. I predict that down the road, common sense will prevail and the patient will be weened off of these drugs and a more conservation approach will be used.
Noreen,
I am curious;
Has your CD4 count grown up, and do you consider that you have managed to reverse the AIDS conditions using a non-retroviral approach for the control of the disease ?
I can see many approaches, with some overlap between them, presented in the literature/ web (Kurosawa group, the Naltrexone, the Knox Van Dyke, and even the Mathias Rath, and I am sure that there are many more). Could you tell us which ones that don't work, and how did you arrive to this conclusion?
Thanks in advance for your answers,
where you go past your area of expertise and pretend you know a bunch of shit
BTW: History has shown again and again that the position from where one can best recognize scientific crap is way out of the concerned specific area.
For example, which virologist can recognize today that the H5N1=avian flu pandemic is absolutely rediculous? Almost everybody I know thinks the bird flu hype is total bullshit but among the virologists Stefan Lanka seems to be quite some "Last of the Mohicans".
"But other people are not like you and tink they are perfectly able to recognize shit way out of their specific area of expertise"
-----------------------------
Yes, I know. But the fact that you think you know something isn't an indicator that you actually know it. You, for example, don't know enough about Bechamp, Duesberg, and Hamer to realize that they contradict each other... and yet you consider yourself knowledgeable about their work. Your common sense has made you ignorant, not merely of actualy biology, but also of the alternate theories your promote.
Common sense is worthless in a clinical setting. Common sense has never led to a new discovery... how can it? Its common, not new, sense. Trusting our common sense would keep us ignorant and poor, believing in gnomes and faeries and sky gods.
You can become a well informed amateur with a little effort, and stop relying on your common sense and rely on knowledge and reason instead, or you can remain the ignorant thug you already are and use your common sense to kill people.
I already know that you have no qualms about your common sense being a weapon for evil and death, spreen, but I'm curious which person cooler wants writing his orders when he's in the ICU, the person trusting their gut or the person trusting their clinical knowledge?
Still waiting for that paper published in between 1983-85 that proved hiv caused AIDS.
Waiting? You're crazy man, thousands of them have been all around for more than 20 years already! Where have you been, in your bed? Wake up, you lazy!
Huh? What? Can I tell you where to look? Well, I don't know exactly where they keep the material but have a look around, I bet you will find the stuff easily.
Oh yeah, just one thing. You mustn't look for one single paper, you must look for a whole stack of publications. It's well known that no single paper ever provided solid proof that HIV causes Aids but if you put the untold thousands of publications on the HIV=Aids=LSKD* equation together, you'l find strong evidence that the approach neatly holds together.
HAAAHAHAAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
AIDS mathematics:
(zero proof)*(published a million times)=(strong evidence)
* Life Saving Killer Drugs
Obviously common sense and historical precedent are not the best way of gaining new information, but they do provide information on how microbes usually act, especially when the virus hunters have given little evidence of their theories.
Since you guys present no evidence besides gallo's flimsy paper in 1984, precedent has to be used because AIDS inc refuses to confirm/reject Gallo's no animal model, 1/10000 cells slow virus with a carefully controlled epidimelogical study that is designed to see if truly see if this microbe does all these magical things Gallo said it could.
You guys cant provide me with the scientific paper from in between the years 1983-85 that proves hiv causes AIDS, or a carefully matched controlled epidemiological study that is designed to test/disprove gallo's hypothesis......................when you fail to cite these studies, common sense and historical precedent is all you're left with.
The rethinkers have been demanding further studies to take place.........its AIDS inc that never has or will design a study to confirm Gallo's dubious hypothesis, for how dare anyone design a study that questions the sacrosanct hiv hypothesis! These people belong in jail like your hero Wainberg said they ought to be!
Braganza, thanks for your chivalry! My CD4's overall have not gone up but I found that they bounce all over the charts anyway. My non-traditional approach has worked well for me. I systemically eliminated negative influences, which affected by health. I found that all of the approaches that I used is the key to my success.
After stopping the meds, my blood and liver enzymes started to revert back to normal. I swear by LDN as I haven't had anything that could be remotely called an opportunistic disease. Obviously, I believe in supplements, however, I only take a few now for maintaining health. Basically, I just live a healthy life style to include proper nutrition, positive thinking, eliminating all toxins that are humanly possible and exercise. Lastly, I relied upon my inner intuition and medical knowledge to devise my game plan.
A quote from one of my books, "I never accepted that these two diseases or any other for that matter were incurable. Since modern medicine does not offer much hope for incurable diseases, I decided to chart my own course and take responsibility for my destiny. I believe that the mind is capable of great healing capacity if given time and the proper ingredients in which to build upon."
Braganza, thanks for your chivalry! My CD4's overall have not gone up but I found that they bounce all over the charts anyway. My non-traditional approach has worked well for me. I systemically eliminated negative influences, which affected by health. I found that all of the approaches that I used is the key to my success.
After stopping the meds, my blood and liver enzymes started to revert back to normal. I swear by LDN as I haven't had anything that could be remotely called an opportunistic disease. Obviously, I believe in supplements, however, I only take a few now for maintaining health. Basically, I just live a healthy life style to include proper nutrition, positive thinking, eliminating all toxins that are humanly possible and exercise. Lastly, I relied upon my inner intuition and medical knowledge to devise my game plan.
A quote from one of my books, "I never accepted that these two diseases or any other for that matter were incurable. Since modern medicine does not offer much hope for incurable diseases, I decided to chart my own course and take responsibility for my destiny. I believe that the mind is capable of great healing capacity if given time and the proper ingredients in which to build upon."
OH WOW
Here's a new study which says shit about CD4's
sciencedaily. com/releases/2007/09/070906145322. htm (remove spaces)
"But after more than six years, we are sure that CD4 depletion by itself does not necessarily result in progression to AIDS".
"We hope that studies in these natural host models will lead to improved HIV vaccines or new therapeutics that might someday make HIV-infected people more like these disease-resistant sooty mangabeys."
Here again another mainstream piece establishing the mere fact Rodreguez is correct, I think, therefore why the daily poisoning of HIV infected?
Notice subsequently, "Hope...lead to improved" [meaning after 23 years they still aint got it right yet and virtually have no idea what they're doing] which is more nails in your coffin because after all, it's plain to see the mainstream wants to continue on the route of shit MONKEY BUSINESS no matter what. AND this is where are money goes? Jesus Mary Christmas!
So there is no HIV animal model? Then a paper talking abotu SIV comes up that barely agrees with something you believe and now the animal model exists and is correct?
Nothing in this paper seems to suggest that HIV does not cause AIDS, so are you saying that all along you have been claiming CD4 counts are not enough but HIV does cause AIDS or are you saying that HIV does not cause AIDS at all or are you saying HIV doesn't exist?
The only way the link you posted (and really, what is up with the spaces, was it too much work for you to remove them?) can help your cause at all is if you agree that HIV does cause AIDS but how it causes it is more complicated then just CD4 counts.
So what is it carter?
OMG, Tara... I just realized in your high school book report you stated that Eliza Jane died in SEPTEMBER... she died in MAY!!
Can't you get ANYTHING straight??
darin
Wow michael geiger you again? I had no idea you were the historian?
What the hell do you mean this is just opinion. What about what I said yesterday, Duesberg talking about "catching AIDS" when that's ridiculous? You don't catch AIDS you get HIV etc. Thats not my opinion no one talks like that its real sloppy and it doesnt make much sense.
Howbout you respond to just one of those criticisms of Duesberg up there most of them have all the references. Maybe you can start with this one elkman said,
From the 1998 Genetica review by Duesberg and Rasnick, page 98:
"Indeed, in 1998 a national survey has confirmed directly that all American AIDS patients are on anti-HIV drugs (Perlman, 1998)."
On page 106, Duesberg modifies his earlier assertion:
"Indeed, a national survey just confirmed that all American AIDS patients are dying on anti-HIV treatments (Perlman, 1998)."
And then he said
"Perlman, 1998" makes neither of these claims anywhere in its entire text.
And the link is
(www.aegis.com/news/sc/1998/SC980602.html)
So Michael you have all the information you can go and find Duesbergs article, look up the pages this stuff is on, go on the internet and read the article your Lord says says this stuff. I just did and elkman is right. your Lord Duesberg is totally wrong about it it's totally the opposite of what Duesberg says. Duesberg's a big idiot or hes a liar maybe both.
I wanna see you defend it Michael Geiger that one example. Find something in that newspaper and prove your Hero isn't lying about it. I think you'll keep avoiding it and babbling.
You said it the other day Michael Geiger I guess you said it about yourselve
Such human behavior of complete avoidance that is found in the babbling of the responders is absolutely fascinating.
FULL PROFESSOR Drain Bworn is such a blast. Tara already knows about that error. Jeanne told her about it on this blog and Tara thanked her and said she'd write the editor about how to change it. She didn't go nuts and scream and rant like a denialist. Take notes deniosaurs.
Plus it's just a mistake. May or September, still looks like the poor child died of AIDS.
OK contrast to Duesberg who's "reviews" aren't even reviews. And they're so full of holes and lies and stupidity even a FULL PROFESSOR from Southwest Northern Uni could find them if they could get over worshiping Lord Duesberg for two minutes. And those mistakes if theyre really mistakes I doubt it They're really lies but if they are mistakes they're real, real important to what Duesberg is saying. Like if there's no source for all people who die of AIDS are taking antivirals and he's just lying, that's a big deal!! Thats effecting his hypothesis unlike if EJ died in May or August.
REally FULL PROFESSOR DRAIN BWORN dude do you think Duesberg's gonna say like oh woops I missed those fifty major errors on that paper like Tara said oh, you're right Jeanne, I'll try to get that SINGLE minor error corrected?
Yes, the journal was already informed a month ago as Adele mentions. However, since it doesn't change the nature of any of our arguments, they won't be changing it.
Chris said:
"No. You picked out only the estimates that agreed with your preconceived idea of a flat line. You represent this as the official data when it is clear from reading the very papers that you cite that nobody believes in this imaginary flat line. You also completely omit any mention of the errors in the estimates."
Fine. SO PROVE ME WRONG. If I really "picked out only the estimates that agreed with [my] preconceived idea of a flat line", then come up with a similar list of papers and numbers that show that my "preconception" is erroneous. Come up with a similar list of papers and numbers from 1986-2005 that show an increase in prevalence, or just anything that could possibly be interpreted as anything other than constant.
I keep asking. I keep waiting. I get a lot of noise and deflection about 1985 and Curran and back-calculation (which Adele seems to think is superior to direct numbers or direct estimates??...) and so on and so on... but nothing substantive.
"What are you saying then? You aren't being coherent. HIV exploded into homsexual populations in San Francisco but somehow the total prevalence was absolutely flat?"
Judas Priest, Chris, are you listening to a word I'm saying? If the HIV tests aren't detecting a sexually transmitted microbe, then the statement "HIV exploded into homosexual populations in San Francisco" has no meaning. A more accurate statement would be "The prevalence rate of male homosexuals testing positive on HIV antibody tests within a few select cohorts exploded." That is something completely different.
And there is NO inherent contradiction between the prevalence of positive HIV antibody test results exploding in a particular very specific, very small subpopulation, or a few select cohorts, and the total prevalence for the entire population remaining constant, if the tests are just a non-specific marker for various health risks or physiological stressors. No contradiction at all.
Why is this so hard for you to understand?
"You can take your cheap shots of racism and stick them where you pulled your epidemiology from."
It's not a cheap shot, Chris:
"The first plausible explanation for the origin of AIDS by cross-species transfer is due to Noireau in 1987. He referred to a book published by Anicent Kashamura, a member of the Idjwi tribe of the Lake Kivu region in East Zaire. Kashamura deals with the sexual habits of the people of the large African lakes. Noireau quotes the following sentence: 'To stimulate a man or a woman and induce them to intense sexual activity, male monkey blood for a man or she-monkey blood for a woman is directly inoculated in the pubic area and also into the thighs and back.' Such practices would constitute an efficient means of trans-species transmission and could be responsible for the emergence of SIV infections of man and thus AIDS." (Karpas, A., 1990. "Origin and spread of AIDS", Nature, 348: 578.)
"Monkeys are often hunted for food in Africa. It may be that a hunting accident of some sort, or an accident in preparation for cooking, brought people in contact with infected blood. Once caught, monkeys are often kept in huts for some time before they are eaten. Dead monkeys are sometimes used as toys by African children." (J. Green and D. Miller, AIDS: The Story of a Disease, London 1986)
"Seroprevalence was substantially higher among blacks than among whites in nearly every serosurveillance population... In the Western states, HIV seroprevalence was similar among Hispanics and whites, while in states along the Atlantic Coast, seroprevalence was higher among Hispanics than among whites. The marked racial and ethnic differences in HIV prevalence, even among persons treated in the same clinic, suggests that both behavioural norms and complex social mixing patterns within racial and ethnic groups are important determinants of HIV transmission risk." (CDC, 1992)
"Your data 'regularities' [in particular, with respect to race] appear to be true, and we agree that they are not 'artifacts'." (CDC, 2005)
"The 'characteristic differentiation by race' that you note is compatible with a behavioural explanation." (CDC, 2005)
"Have you actually looked up statistics for STI's like gonorrhea? The prevalence in African american populations is several times higher than for whites."
Nice strawman version of my original point. The whole point is NOT simply that the prevalence in blacks is several times the prevalence in whites. The point is that this prevalence difference is INDEPENDENT of other factors such as time, gender, age, geographic location, and population density. Gonorrhea has periodic outbreaks at different places over time -- and the prevalence is affected by factors such as geographic location, age, gender, and "risk group". Gonorrhea prevalence and incidence are NOT independently influenced by race, age, geographic location, gender, and population density.
It's really quite ironic that you choose gonorrhea as you're "counterpoint", since gonorrhea infection rates more than tripled between 1960 and 1980 and then declined to the original level by 2000. Funny... why can't you do that for "HIV"?
All someone has to do is go to the CDC website and in moments they can find data showing gonorrhea doesn't exhibit the astounding regularities that "HIV" does and in fact does depend upon specific factors:
PREVALENCE RATES IN INDUSTRIALIZED NATIONS:
"The reported gonorrhea rate in the United States remains the highest of any industrialized country and is roughly 50 times that of Sweden and eight times that of Canada."
Whereas the prevalence rates of HIV in the various industrialized nations are all of at least the same order of magnitude, certainly not differing by a factor of 50. And this holds for low-risk groups, as well.
GEOGRAPHIC DISTRIBUTION:
"As in previous years, in 2005 the South had the highest gonorrhea rate among the four regions of the country. However, the gonorrhea rate in the South has declined by 17.6% from a rate of 174.6 per 100,000 population in 2001 to 143.9 in 2005. Rates in the Northeast have also declined 23.1% from 2001 to 2005 (from 97.2 to 74.7). In contrast, the gonorrhea rate in the West has increased by 35.4% from 60.2 cases per 100,000 population in 2001 to 81.5 in 2005. The rate in the Midwest (142.5 in 2001 and 139.1 in 2005) has shown minimal change since 2001. Of note, however, is that gonorrhea rates in both the Midwest and the South increased slightly (4.0% and 1.6% respectively) from 2004 to 2005."
"From 2001 to 2005, gonorrhea rates among women increased 41.4% in the West, and decreased 23.0% in the Northeast and 15.0% in the South. Over the same time period, gonorrhea rates among men increased 30.7% in the West, and decreased 23.2% in the Northeast and 20.4% in the South. Rates among both women and men in the Midwest remained relatively unchanged over this time period."
Whereas the geographic distribution of HIV prevalence has remained virtually unchanged over 20 years.
HIGH CONCENTRATION IN SMALL NUMBER OF AREAS:
"In 2005, 50% of reported gonorrhea cases occurred in just 66 counties or independent cities."
Whereas HIV is present everywhere in the United States, in every group tested, even in the lowest-risk groups, such as repeat blood donors, ALWAYS. HIV prevalence is not highly concentrated in a small number of counties.
MALE/FEMALE RATIO VARIES WITH TIME:
"Prior to 1996, rates of gonorrhea among men were higher than rates among women. For the fifth straight year, however, gonorrhea rates in women are slightly higher than in men. In 2005 the gonorrhea rate among women was 119.1 and the rate among men was 111.5 cases per 100,000 population."
Whereas males in the US have always tested positive more often than females, with a factor somewhere between 2 and 2.5, and this has not changed appreciably in over 20 years.
DIFFERENT RACIAL/ETHNIC GROUPS CHANGES IN INCIDENCE DIFFER:
"Changes in gonorrhea rates from 2001 through 2005 differed by racial/ethnic group. Gonorrhea rates decreased by 17.8% during this time period for African Americans from 762.0 to 626.4 cases per 100,000 population. In contrast, rates in other racial/ethnic groups have increased.... From 2001 to 2005 the overall rate in African-American men decreased 19.4% from 826.8 per 100,000 population to 666.0. Decreases were seen in all age groups of African-American men over this time period. However, the overall rate in white males increased 18.9% from 23.3 per 100,000 population in 2001 to 27.7 in 2005."
Whereas whenever changes in HIV prevalence are observed among a particular group, the same changes in prevalence are observed for ALL racial/ethnic groups, you never see one go up while the others go down, or vice versa.
darin
Dear Darin,
You wrote:
"the tests are just a non-specific marker for various health risks or physiological stressors."
What that means? i.e. are the tests measuring HIV existing in the blood of the patients or no? I would be grateful if you could develop your point.
Thanks in advance for your clarifications
Brain-Drain said
If I really "picked out only the estimates that agreed with [my] preconceived idea of a flat line", then come up with a similar list of papers and numbers that show that my "preconception" is erroneous.
I already did Drain or do you need Chris to say it? I know you don't read much except virus myth but you should of read my comment up there. I said about estimates from 1986
Brookmeyer, 560-800,000
Hay, 460-560,000
Hyman, 480-510,000
Rosenberg, 660,000
You can't get a million out of any of those excpet if your using the New Draino Math. Thats where after five cups of draino you know theres only one number in the world and its one million.
Really FULL PROFESSOR!! Don't you have ANY teaching duties this semester? What was that comment like 1500 words? Damn! Very impressive sort of like Duesberg make it lots of pages and no one will read it and see the errors?
Darin, You do realise that if Duesberg could hear your "statistics", he would arrive at the conclusion that gonnorhea is NOT sexually transmitted, and that HIV is.
Are you a Duesbergian devil's advocate?
Do you actually read any of the CDC studies that you cited? The estimates of HIV prevalence that you cite were initially calculated by looking at the HIV prevalence in particluar subpopulations in particular homosexual men and injecting drug users. The prevalence in these subpopulations were between 10-70% depending on the location. The estimates for the entire population was then calculated by projecting these prevalences onto the estimated size of these subpopulations. The size of these subpopulations was not known. The errors in the figures were large. But without these the data from these subpopulations there would have been no "1 million" prevalence figures. You can't take the estimate and ignore the data that produced it (well you can but then you'd be an idiot).
Where data is available such as the SFCCC the prevalence in these groups is seen to increase from zero in the 1970s into a peak in the 1980s. The higherst incidence of HIV infection was in this period. There are also stored blood samples that demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt that HIV is a new infection in the US.
In the 1990s it was recognised that the early estimates of HIV prevalence that were based on small numbers of HIV tests and projection onto unknown population sizes were overestimates. HIV infection was not reported by any states until the 1990s and data was simply not available. In contrast, AIDS was reported and the numbers for AIDS cases are known more accurately. We also have data from cohorts such as SFCC and SFMHC that yield accurate estimates of the median time from HIV infection to AIDS. Using these figures and the AIDS incidence it is possible to obtain far better estimates of HIV prevalence (and incidence) for the early part of the epidemic than the early serology surveys.
Contrary to the misconception of the Denialists, the scientific community does not devote itself to the vain attempt of convincing Denialists of everything. The estimates of HIV prevalence for the entire US were not made in order to "prove" that HIV causes AIDS. This was already abundantly clear from the data from cohorts such as the SFCCC. The estimates were meant to be used for planning for the large number of AIDS cases that did follow.
I'll say it again. Nobody in 2007 believes that there were 1 million people infected with HIV in 1985. Nobody. The CDC does not believe it. Denialists don't belive it. Nobody. You can repeat this as much as you like but it won't change this fact.
Give the racism card a rest. There is nothing racist in the understanding that people in different countries eat the animals that are locally available. Come to Australia and try some.
This is where you lose all traces of consistency. The estimates of HIV prevalence from the 1980s that you cite are as I have stated formed from taking the prevalence from surveys of homosexual men and projecting that onto the the estimated total number of homosexual men in the US. Without this there would be no "1 million". The estimates explicitly model in an extremely high male-to-female ratio. You can't take the final number of "1 million" and then deny the male-to-female ratio which was an intgegral part of the estimate. OK, you can but then that would make you an idiot.
Over time the male-to-female ratio for new HIV infections has dropped to about 2:1. The demographics of HIV infection have markedly changed over the last 20 years.
You completely fail to produce a coherent explanation. You pull estimates from here and there and ignore the data that is explicitly part of the estimates. You make up ridiculous ad hoc theories about physiological stressors. You contradict Duesberg and other Denialists. Try again.
Darin used the racism card again by citing a letter to the editor by A Karpas that itself cites another letter published in Lancet that cites a book by an African who was apparently trying to shock his Western readers.
If Darin had bothered to read the literature he would find that this letter has zero relevance to the science.
I quote William Haseltine:
Apart from that ...
Darin, your attempt to brand everyone that accepts the evidence that HIV causes AIDS as racists is cheap and pathetic. Ultimately it demonstrates more about you than about me or anybody else.
All supporters of the HIV=AIDS lie are recists and homophobes.
NO GAY SUPPORT FOR HIV & AIDS.
NO HIV & AIDS!!!
WE are waking up. No more poisoning of Gay men.
AIDS is RACISM.
AIDS IS HOMOPHOBIA...DRESSED AS SCIENCE.
NO GAY SUPPORT FOR HIV & AIDS.
NO HIV & AIDS!!!
AIDS is RACISM.
AIDS IS HOMOPHOBIA
Closing the thread dwon will not get you off the hook Tara.
Explain to us why you want all gay men to die in chemo-Auschwitz Tara.
Explain to us why we should trust you when you Tara. Explain to us with what criteria you now think you are a champion of the gay cause Tara.
Explain to us on what grounds you are crying and using the accusation of homophobia even against other gay men like me Tara.
Explain to us why you are so keen on having us all be sick Tara.
We are still here and all ears Tara.
And remeber:
NO GAY SUPPORT FOR HIV & AIDS=NO HIV & AIDS.
So get it right Tara...
Show me where I claim a single one of those things, Manu.
You fanatical and unrelenting support of the deadly voodoo you call HIV infection makes you guilty of RACISM AND HOMOPHOBIA.
You are constanly pushing POISON of gay men and dark skinned people and calling it LIFE SAVING treatment.
You also are trying to project yourself as some champoin or defender of gay people and throwing accusation of homophobia at others. Such as this one here:
"No Mad Dog those ones are way too mainstream for the AIDS denialists they've teamed up with the "homosexuality as an aberration or illness" and the Loch Ness Monster groups. Check out "Henry Bauer" if you don't believe me."
You accuse other gay men of homophobia. How dare you!!
I ACCUSE YOU OF HOMOPHOBIA. YOU ARE THE ONE PUSHIONG POISOIN ON GAY MEN. AND A RACIST AS WELL FOR PUSHING POISON ON ALL OF AFRICA.
You are just an AIDS Inc thug Tara.
You are no defender of my rights.
I would not trust you with my dog.
AIDS IS HOMOPHOBIA
AIDS IS RACISM
NO GAY SUPPORT FOR HIV & AIDS=NO HIV & AIDS
GAY MEN ARE WAKING UP!!
NO MORE HIV LIES. DOWN WITH AIDS HOMOPHOBIA!!!
DOWN WITH TARA AND HER LOT!!
Funny, Manu gave carter friendly advice to stay away from here August 28 Now Manu's hooked too. Too bad Manu and carter combined can't say anything worth while defense about Duesbergs exagerations and bad writing.
Here's manu talking to carter,
What are you doing here still? get a grip. Sorry i have to come tell you here to do it, but as you were doing some good somewhere else and you don't even come anymore to stay here going round in circles i thought you might apppreciate being told that you seem to have fallen into the trap.You will probably hate me for it but I don't give a rats tutu. Here yopu do no good at all arueing with this band of twats. get a grip. You can be of much more real use in another place. This is Dantesque...get out of the AIDS zone now!!! What are you doing there?
Twenty years and people like Manu still don't get it their still saying gay men are "waking up" and the "group fantasy" is ending and its just drugs are killing everyone. A few people listen to them and just the ones who are lucky and have the right genes or whatever survive. Tip to MAnu you can't keep a group going even a denial group when your ideas kills off most people you recruit.
Funny, Manu gave carter friendly advice to stay away from here August 28 Now Manu's hooked too. Too bad Manu and carter combined can't say anything worth while defense about Duesbergs exagerations and bad writing.
Here's manu talking to carter,
What are you doing here still? get a grip. Sorry i have to come tell you here to do it, but as you were doing some good somewhere else and you don't even come anymore to stay here going round in circles i thought you might apppreciate being told that you seem to have fallen into the trap.You will probably hate me for it but I don't give a rats tutu. Here yopu do no good at all arueing with this band of twats. get a grip. You can be of much more real use in another place. This is Dantesque...get out of the AIDS zone now!!! What are you doing there?
Twenty years and people like Manu still don't get it their still saying gay men are "waking up" and the "group fantasy" is ending and its just drugs are killing everyone. A few people listen to them and just the ones who are lucky and have the right genes or whatever survive. Tip to MAnu you can't keep a group going even a denial group when your ideas kills off most people you recruit.
You fanatical and unrelenting support of the deadly voodoo you call HIV infection makes you guilty of RACISM AND HOMOPHOBIA.
You are constanly pushing POISON of gay men and dark skinned people and calling it LIFE SAVING treatment.
You also are trying to project yourself as some champoin or defender of gay people and throwing accusation of homophobia at others. Such as this one here:
"No Mad Dog those ones are way too mainstream for the AIDS denialists they've teamed up with the "homosexuality as an aberration or illness" and the Loch Ness Monster groups. Check out "Henry Bauer" if you don't believe me."
You accuse other gay men of homophobia. How dare you!!
I ACCUSE YOU OF HOMOPHOBIA. YOU ARE THE ONE PUSHIONG POISOIN ON GAY MEN. AND A RACIST AS WELL FOR PUSHING POISON ON ALL OF AFRICA.
You are just an AIDS Inc thug Tara.
You are no defender of my rights.
I would not trust you with my dog.
AIDS IS HOMOPHOBIA
AIDS IS RACISM
NO GAY SUPPORT FOR HIV & AIDS=NO HIV & AIDS
GAY MEN ARE WAKING UP!!
NO MORE HIV LIES. DOWN WITH AIDS HOMOPHOBIA!!!
DOWN WITH TARA AND HER LOT!!
You fanatical and unrelenting support of the deadly voodoo you call HIV infection makes you guilty of RACISM AND HOMOPHOBIA.
You are constanly pushing POISON of gay men and dark skinned people and calling it LIFE SAVING treatment.
You also are trying to project yourself as some champoin or defender of gay people and throwing accusation of homophobia at others. Such as this one here:
"No Mad Dog those ones are way too mainstream for the AIDS denialists they've teamed up with the "homosexuality as an aberration or illness" and the Loch Ness Monster groups. Check out "Henry Bauer" if you don't believe me."
You accuse other gay men of homophobia. How dare you!!
I ACCUSE YOU OF HOMOPHOBIA.
YOU ARE THE ONE PUSHIONG POISOIN ON GAY MEN.
You are just an AIDS Inc thug Tara.
You are no defender of my rights.
I would not trust you with my dog.
AIDS IS HOMOPHOBIA
AIDS IS RACISM
NO GAY SUPPORT FOR HIV & AIDS=NO HIV & AIDS
GAY MEN ARE WAKING UP!!
DOWN WITH AIDS RACISM & HOMOPHOBIA!!!
Tip to MAnu you can't keep a group going even a denial group when your ideas kills off most people you recruit.
Dear, sweet Adele is dabbling in some world-class projection!
I do love some of the monikers used here at Terror Smith's AIDS propaganda blog...
"Adele": somebody's sweet little grandma. I suppose it has a nicer ring to it than Mildred or Agnes. Good choice, Jeanne.
"Robster": got the Leave it to Beaver thing going for it.
Manu,
Tara didn't say this I did. Tara is not Adele. Adele is not Tara
No Mad Dog those ones are way too mainstream for the AIDS denialists they've teamed up with the "homosexuality as an aberration or illness" and the Loch Ness Monster groups. Check out "Henry Bauer" if you don't believe me
That was me Manu. So yell at me not Tara.
What you said about it was
You accuse other gay men of homophobia
No I don't. I just think there's like a small group of delusional gay people like you who put up with crazy wild homophobia from ultra nutcase conservatives and other kinds a homophobes just because they agree on your ignorant ideas about AIDS.
What the hell do you think you would be saying right now if Tara had written this, really HENRY BAEUR wrote this look at aidstruth if you don't believe it,
I regard homosexuality as an aberration or illness, not as an "equally valid life-style" or whatever the current euphemism may be.
or maybe
I don't approve of proselytizing by gays; and I think it's very difficult to draw a line between free speech about civil rights for gays and the tendency for the life-style to be presented as something that it would be perfectly all right for anyone to choose
The dude actually talked about taking away free speech or civil rights for gays like it was a possible option!!
You think if Tara said that youd accept a little one line apology for that? call her a great person like Michael Geiger on Baeur?
No you guys got no proof Tara is homophobe but people who wrote about their homophobia, those are people you'll work with if they agree with you.
No you guys got no proof Tara is homophobe
"Adele",
as long as Tara promotes the HIV/AIDS hypothesis, with it's built-in homophobia, then, well, it certainly looks like Tara's a homophobe.
Unless, of course, she can sit down with me, Manu and Michael Geiger and explain in detail why we should believe in HIV/AIDS.
C'mon, Tara! Rise to the challenge! Explain to the homos why we should believe in HIV/AIDS. We'll have lots of questions for you, so you'll have to be patient and answer them respectfully.
I don't think you're up to the task of explaining to us gay guys why we should belive in HIV/AIDS and answer our questions respectfully. You've shown through your use of the holocaust word "denialist" that you can't even treat us like human beings.
Well, I'd still like to see you rise to this occasion, Tara. Perhaps you can start a new thread. You can be the teacher, and Michael, Manu and I can be the class. How about it?
Dont be fooled. I am not hooked here. I am dedicating some time today do my denialist work wehich i take more seriously with every repetition i read of that pathetic word which intends to compare me to a holocaust denier, and alternate posts here and entertain my hundreds of gay friend on other sites where i hold quite a court.
I post them links to here so they can come see and read what all those who speak in their names, accuse others of homophobia including other gay men, but really want to kill them with chemo poison are up to.
I only come here when ot serves a purpose for me.
ALL HIV=AIDS SUPPORTERS ARE HOMOPHOBES AND RACISTS.
AIDS IS HOMOPHOBIA
AIDS IS REACISM
Manu, I will repeat, that is not my quote. I had an email conversation with Michael Geiger previously on this topic. Perhaps, Manu, you can discuss this in good faith, and explain Duesberg's misstatements on infectious disease epidemiology that I noted earlier in this thread, rather than throw around insults?
Dan,
There's some irony, after just calling me a "homophobe" amid all the other name-calling.
Duesberg?
You really don't understand do you. I don't worship any doctors wherever they satnd here. All I can say about Duesberg is that he seems a lot more honorable than anyone you are promoting.
HIV is a lie.
It need no science to explain it.
It nedds to be exposed.
Just look at the tests. Thats more than enough. Any moron can see that they are a fruad. I don't need Duesberg or anyone to see or explain that. They have been used to hand out death sentences to gay men. You say they are vaild. I say they are a FRAUD pushed especially on gay men. All AIDS medication is poison and you are pushing that on gay men too.
YOU PUSH THE IDEA HIV=AIDS
YOU PUSH THE IDEA THE TESTS ARE VALID
YOU PUSH TOXIC POISON AND CALL IT LIFE-SAVING
YOU DO ALL THIS TO GAY MEN. SO, TO SAY YOU WERE HOMOPHOBIC WOULD BE FAIR GAME.
You support it so you are a HOMOPHOBE in my books.
Just like in your books i am comparable to a HOLOCAUST denier.
ALL HIV=AIDS Supporters are HOMOPHOBES and RACISTS.
All's fair in LOVE and WAR.
And your tactics have been those of all out war no?
War on gay men in this case.
You expect gay men to thank you for all this?
Are you hopping mad?
We are now waking up and we are challenging you and those like you.
Don't speak in my name. I can speak for myslef. I especially don't need you to defend me as your motivations are far from clear here. I know homophobia when i see it. It's not so much on the streets anymore. it is more sophisticated now.
Your darling AIDS theory is the best example of that.
Sorry if it upsets you that an ever-growing number of gay men don't want to fund your crusaid anymore with their lives.
YOU SHOULD STOP PUSHING VOODOO TOXIC POISON AND DEATH.
THATS ALL YOU DO.
YOU, AND ALL YOUR SUPPORTERS HERE.
How do you defend yourdself against these accusations?
And dont give me Duesberg again.
If this is your position, why do you bother to bring up the HIV tests? Do you not realize that an examination of their validity (or lack of it, as you claim) is based on *science*?
It is a FRAUD.
It works by detecting NOTHING specific to HIV.
That is used to give SPECIFIC HIV diagnosis.
Only you would call that SCIENCE.
Sounds more like an insult to science to me.
Sience Fiction more like...
And what about you pushing voodoo toxic poison and a hypothesis that is a lie on gay men?
What about the HOMOPHOBIA?
That's what I want to hear about really...
Everyone know the test is a fruad...all you have to do is show poeple the diclaimers on the kits themselves.
Manu says
All I can say about Duesberg is that he seems a lot more honorable than anyone you are promoting.
"Honorable"?? Ever hear about Mr. Lombardo? He was a gay man he told Duesberg he never abused drugs or had antivrials. Duesberg put him in his book! Promoted him like proof he was right, drugs cause AIDS!
Thing is, Mr. Lombardo died in a year. So Duesberg decides he died, he must have lied. So he goes around saying Mr. Lombardo is a liar he was really a big druggie. He even told his FAMILY that. Instead of acting like a scientist saying wow maybe I was wrong heres evidence maybe HIV can cause AIDS even if you don't take any drugs he attacks the reputation of a dead man.
Honorable manu??
Yes still honourable.
Doctors by nature kill. That's what they do best.
If what you say is true then one death compared with hundreds of thousands if not millions killed off by the science you are promoting still makes him an honorable man as according to your story he did nothing for personal profit which could not be said of the doctors who promote this scam.
Science kills people all the time to prove points. look at you lot you will stop at nothing.
There's some irony, after just calling me a "homophobe"
You are an ardent defender and promoter of HIV/AIDS.
As such, you support the poisoning of gay men...euphemistically called "life-saving drugs".
As a promoter of HIV/AIDS, you invariably support the belief system that gay men are "at risk". From my perspective, "at risk" is nothing more than a nice way to say homophobia.
My sexual preference is no more "risky" than any other sexual preference. The only "risk" is that I fall into a belief system that tells me my sexual preference somehow leads to swallowing body-deforming, liver-destroying drugs.
That's all you've got to work with, Tara. A belief system, and a veritable mountain of bad science, also known as the "overwhelming evidence" you and your ilk will try to shove down gay mens' throats in addition to the poisons (see: "life-saving drugs" above).
It's a belief system, Tara. And you're positioning yourself as one of it's staunchest defenders. In doing so, you perpetuate the unnecessary poisoning of gay men. Somehow, that seems to be at least a wee bit homophobic to me.
Love the use of the word wee Dan LOL very Scottish.
Though she be not "wee" but more like "awfy" homophobic...
Love the use of the word wee Dan LOL very Scottish.
Though she be not "wee" but more like "awfy" homophobic...
Someone asks for evidence these drugs kill more people than they help and all you have is Duesberg and duesbergs copycats. Who lie and lie and exagerate and whatever else. Like we gave examples for up there, Duesberg was wrong AND he lied about studies to "prove" his crap idea.
We can give you any number of ones that DO prove the antiviral drugs work and help people save lives. Problem is, you won't read them or believe them so howbout a personal note.
Do you know any doctors Dan? I know some doctors I work with some of them they see HIV positive people and AIDS patients everyday. I've talked to them about drugs and toxic effects.
Every one of these doctors says, yes there can be side effects. They all want better drugs less toxic. But their not so bad their killing most people who take them!!
All these doctors also says, I see what happenes when people don't take the drugs or stop taking them and I see how people who are dying start taking drugs and they're out of bed again or they're back to work in a few weeks.
Are these doctors lying to me? Are they all murdering psychos and I just don't notice? Do they get so much money from Big Pharma they kill their patients? Their all racists homophobes including the gay doctors I know and the African-American doctors I know some of them who went to med school because they wanted to help AIDS patients? Sure guys.
Are these doctors lying to me? Are they all murdering psychos and I just don't notice? Do they get so much money from Big Pharma they kill their patients? Their all racists homophobes including the gay doctors I know and the African-American doctors I know some of them who went to med school because they wanted to help AIDS patients? Sure guys.
That's a pretty good Rumsfeld impersonation there, Adele.
Looks like I hit a nerve.
I say tomato (poisons), you say tomahto ("life-saving drugs").
Anyway, Adele-y-poo,
murderous doctors? Not intentionally, I bet. Stupid, rule-following (see: standard of "care") automatons? You betcha!
Adel Homophobe henchwoman stand in for Tara.
Yes the one who are doing this are. Just like all SS offiecers killed Jews and all soldiers shoot guns and all fanatics stick to their fanaticism and all priests beleive in God and all catholics in the Virgin mary and all peotestants thet she is not holy and all rocker in elvis and all lovvies in the power of the theatre.
Yes Adel Yes!!
Now stop pushing your voodoo on all the rest of us.
AIDS IS HOMOPHOBIA
AIDS IS RACISM
AIDS IS A POGROM (I love that word such a great ring to it)
Yes its always a nerve with me when ignorant people pretend they know stuff and then people die because of it. Like EJ a child or like Mr. Lombardo a gay man. That does piss me off a lot.
I got nothing more to say to Dan and Manu they live in a fantasy world where
Doctors by nature kill. That's what they do best.
Adel is a RACIST HOMOPHOBIC hag form hell too just like Tara.
ADIS IS HOMOPHOBIA
AIDS IS RACISM
We arE not taking it anymore.
These two hags are promoting death to gay men!
W e will fight back.
AIDS IS HOMOPHOBIA
Tara and Adel are HOMOPHOBES
They KILL GAY MEN TO PROTECT THEIR DOCOTR FANTASIES.
THEY ARE VOODOO PUSHERS
POISON PUSHERS
TARA AND ADEL ARE PROMOTING DEATH FOR GAY MEN.
This blog is a HATE Blog not a scienbce blog.
Love the use of the word wee Dan LOL very Scottish.
Though she be not "wee" but more like "awfy" homophobic...
Manu is some kind of strange. Dan remains the lesser of the two. It is like arguing with a pre-psychotic homeless person. Wait, I take that back. I didn't mean to denigrate that group.
I remember in the 80s and 90s various organizations like ACT-UP saying the same thing but in reverse. That is, ignoring AIDS and HIV is homophobia. How times have changed.
I wonder who pays them to post their silly thoughts? Probably some anti-gay group.
It is also clear from their posts that they must be very jealous of Tara.
D
Thanks, "D",
you gave me a little laugh.
Normally that's Adele's job.
Thanks for taking up the slack.
Funny how you, Tara and the goon squad here don't equate poisoning gay men with homophobia.
Dan,
Odd how you equate antiretroviral therapy with "poisoning gay men" when study after study shows that HAART prolongs survival.
Here is a study from Denmark of European HIV-infected patients. Note how figure 2a shows that mortality decreases as HAART usage increases.
Do you have any evidence to back up your claims, or are you limited to lame insults?
FRANKLIN and TARA While you prance around in your HAART land of Bogus $cientific Studies the GOVERNMNENT BLACK BOX WARNINGS hold a HUGE LAUNDRY LIST of HUNCH BACK GROTESQUE ILLNESSES Never mind the Big Pharma "Side effects" crap!
Site all the Studies you want! post them on your arse for any valid Scientific purpose you want but you HIV goons cannnot and will not escape the fact that the Old and Current HIV Drugs are deadly Poisons.
Innocent newborn babies and you are Guilty of Murder all of you!
Manu is Correct there is no HIVAIDS Science anymore and everytime Moore of you Propagandists scream and whine Denialist another damned False Positive has been established and all of the Church of HIV say Amen.
news flash for you ..The TRUTH is ripping the gates of hell wide open...
one more thing Tara get another job.
this is not that complicated. to sell lots of "anti-virals," you have to gin up fear about an infectious disease. you have to scare the public.
it's no different than mccarthy scaring the public about the red menace, it's no different than bull connor scaring white folks in the south about black men impregnating their daughters and taking their jobs. that's how you retain power. fear.
the more fear, the more drugs to sell, the more government money to spend. that simple.
Franklin, you said, "Odd how you equate antiretroviral therapy with "poisoning gay men" when study after study shows that HAART prolongs survival.
BULL SHIT!
AT WHAT COST THOUGH? Death from liver failure? Dealing and suffering from "Toxic Overload?" How about the Acute Anemia and Neuropathy?
Ok.. so, give then to people who are deathly ill as a last resort but to give them to people with no other than a surrogate marker of a low CD4 count and instill/perpetuate fear of an early demise is simply f__king insane? Especially when more people live longer without your damn interventions.
Manu is calling it like it is. Until you idiots start over and do something right instead of perpetuating failed theories of immune suppression over and over and over, you are killing and sending to bad health many upon many gay men. You're oblivious to the homophobia and you're got to hold onto HIV, because to you its business, to hold onto your funding.
Tell me Franklin you got into the business of HIV because you cared about "GRID" in the beginning and/or prior to 1984? You really cared that 100's of gay men that were dying then? I'd bet you jumped on board as soon as pal Gallo started his grandious theory? Maybe you saw the lucrative funding? Come on now you can tell us the truth. Please, don't tip toe around my questions like you love to do.
Manu,
May I suggest you return to this page in a month's time and re-read your comments. I suspect that Tara lets your comments stand not just because she agrees with Voltaire on free speech, but also because of the frightening glimpse they afford of the mindset of one of those who claim that HIV/AIDS is all a vast homophobic conspiracy.
Carter man you gotta work on your story
Tell me Franklin you got into the business of HIV because you cared about "GRID" in the beginning and/or prior to 1984? You really cared that 100's of gay men that were dying then?
So your saying these people who died then these people all got secret AZT or what before anyone was making it? If not howd they die?
I'd bet you jumped on board as soon as pal Gallo started his grandious theory
But I thought Gallo stole everything according to denialists it wasn't his theory ever.
Get back to us guys when you got a consistant story, sheesh.
Adele: You got to stop using your imagination! Im not offering an explanation as to death from HIV or AIDS prior to 1984, although I have my own thoughts. I'm calling into question the killing and harming of people, gay men in particular, with toxic chemo prescribed indefinitely even when no illnesses are present, which supports a notion that Manu has is right. I'd like to think there are exceptions to his rule, but apparently here in Tara's world there is not.
THIS JUST IN !
For Peter Barber
Re Tara Voltaire and free speech.
She stopped believing in free speech yesterday I am now banned form this
site. However, I am not the only one who says AIDS is Homophobia and
Racism. All people who see this scam for what it tis agree on that.
Re: conspiracies.
A conspiracy is the word given to anything that is much closer to the
truth than any official consensus or version of truth. It has the same
purpose as the use of the word "denial" in that it conditions not only
those who hear it or read it to distrust those expressing it but also to
fear them. It then goes on to legitimize outbursts of hatred towards
those who express the belief that rocks the very foundations of those
with vested interests in maintaining the "status quo", or just those who
simply need to live in fantasy.
This is nothing more than cheap and overused manipulation tactic to try
and silence.
I could tell you that AIDS is Eugenics.
Are you happier with that?
When I return here I always love to read my way-out posts and slogans.
That's all I post here, and I do it for a laugh to alleviate the chronic
boredom one feels when reading the same obtuse techobabble over and over
again regarding the AIDS lie that you all claim is science when in fact
its tosh.
My favorite so far is this one:
NO GAY SUPPORT FOR HIV & AIDS=NO HIV & AIDS
I think it rings so much better and true than just:
AIDS IS HOMOPHOBIA.
Manu."
You're banned from this forum?
Yes apy I'm banned too and so are you. Tara banned herself to I hear.
See all you have to do is SAY it and that makes it TRUE especially when you use ALL CAPS.
I guess from his last comment Manu has this need to live in fantasy and hes got vested interests in maintaining his fantasy beliefs so he'll legitimize outbursts of hatred towards people like Tara whose blog rocks the very foundations of his denialism.
Simple really doncha think?
Hello Tara and all of you HIV promoting Terrorists,
You are certainly most welcome to continue in your insanity and total disreguard for the fact that belief and emotions and stress and fear and anxiety and feeling helpless and hopelessness, etc, that ALL AIDS patients have in common and that you imbeciles believe have nothing to do with the immune system or the collapse of such, but:
NEW EVIDENCE NOW SHOWS THAT LONELINESS CAUSES AIDS:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070913081048.htm
Science Daily -- Changes in the immune system may explain why social factors like loneliness are linked to an increased risk of heart disease, viral infections and cancer.
It's already known that a person's social environment can affect their health, with those who are socially isolated--that is, lonely suffering from higher mortality than people who are not.
Now, in the first study of its kind, published in the current issue of the journal Genome Biology, UCLA researchers have identified a distinct pattern of gene expression in immune cells from people who experience chronically high levels of loneliness. The findings suggest that feelings of social isolation are linked to alterations in the activity of genes that drive inflammation, the first response of the immune system. The study provides a molecular framework for understanding why social factors are linked to an increased risk of heart disease, viral infections and cancer.
Having previously established that lonely people suffer from higher mortality than people who are not, researchers are now trying to determine whether that risk is a result of reduced social resources, such as physical or economic assistance, or from the biological impact of social isolation on the function of the human body.
"What this study shows is that the biological impact of social isolation reaches down into some of our most basic internal processes the activity of our genes." said Steve Cole, an associate professor of medicine in the division of Hematology-Oncology at the David Geffen School of Medicine, and a member of the UCLA Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology
You are all more than welcome to continue to BRAND people with your VIRAL DEATH INCURABLE VIRUS branding, by continuing to promote and uphold the labeling of people as HIV or as AIDS, but every time you do, you yourself are contributing to their death.
For all any of you know-it-all idiots truly know, the cellular changes due to extreme emotional and its corresponding physical distress may very well even be what causes HIV tests to show as positive in the first place.
...but every time you do, you yourself are contributing to their death.
Except for those fortunate soles who are smart enough not to believe and subject themselves to the religion of HIV=AIDS=Death, smart enough to treat the individual disease if and when they manifest (if ever) and strong enough to question the validity of the very essence of the science behind it.
"Bone Pointing" only works on the ones who believe.
Tara's camp can't even begin to fathom they could be wrong, and therefore have absolutely no interest in the sociology/psychology aspects whatsoever, preferring to rely on crap-shoot, roll the dice medical science as the be-all, one and only explanation.
Tara may not be the one pointing the Bone, but her undeniable support and propagation of HIV=AIDS=Death paradigm is what's keeping their business alive whilst promoting death and ill health by drug regimes for nothing but some antibodies and correlation.
Wait, so AIDS and the pharmacologic treatment of AIDS is a conspiracy to poison gay men.
What about the hemophiliacs? What about the female partners of folks with AIDS?
Sorry Tara, that I'm just popping up like this, but you know love that I need to get my ramblings out from time to time. I just love to display the latest things I don't understand to those in this wonderful gathering.
And the impulse cannot be resisted when I see my good friend Chris back in action, so obviously demonstrating that Darin is a mathematician who can't count. Count what you ask? Oh, those transmissions of a deadly virus that were directly measured from 1978 to 1985. What, no one seems to be able to produce those particular epidemiological papers? Oh right, something called "science" demonstrates an ascending rather than a "flat" curve. I get it.
Yes Tara, I'd love to stay and chat with all your amazing friends, especially "Franklin", but it really would be boring to just chase around in the same old circles. But not to worry, that signpost up ahead, the one that says "cliff at the end of this road": you and I both know that's just more denialists propaganda.
And Franklin, I'm interested; some say you're a great scientist and a professor at a prestigious Ivy League school to boot! Since I'm a fanboy of those who are so superior to ordinary people, how about a face-to face where you can dazzle me while turning my incomprehension of matters biological to the one true way.
Some even say you're in the vicinity of NYC. You can come to the HEAL meeting and explain to everyone why HAART drugs are life-saving, stopping the denialists in their tracks so-to-speak. Dan and Manu have made terrible charges that you must refute.
You know, I've heard that toxic sludge is good for you, so we can even have an interesting discussion about those OTHER stupid denialists who believe it is deadly.
And Chris, what can I say, you're always a barrel of laughs. I love your material on common sense ...
You think this is bad?
Try editing the Wikipedia article on AIDS.
Ahh, the good old pre-AIDs days when no one was lonely, stressed or otherwise mentally out of sorts. It must be all of that snake-oil medicine they sold back.
D
carter:
You guys tell us you're standing up for the queer community in a life-or-death battle against the supposedly homophobic establishment and their alleged HIV/AIDS conspiracy. You rail against the lack of seriousness we accord to your views... and then we read this:
Assuming you're not Manu, why on Earth did you agree to relay this to the blog comments? You might as well be an agent provocateur for our Evil Homophobic Conspiracy.
Thank goodness there are campaigners on HIV and AIDS out there. In my experience, notably Patrick Harvie, who worked for a gay men's sexual health charity, campaigned for the repeal of Section 28 in Scotland, and is a member of Stonewall. I (along with many other straight people) helped out on his election campaign for the Scottish Parliament in 2003, and he is now an excellent MSP.
You, on the other hand, are a puerile twit.
Peter, you certainly do not encourage or elevate the debate yourself: "You, on the other hand, are a puerile twit."
have you heard of John Lauritsen? Ian Young? they too are Stonewall members but unlike your Harvie bloke decided not to build a carrer on the corpses of so many gay men.
What new about what you are saying. I can give you a much longer list of people who have done what My. Harvie has done and they too have made carrers on that same pile of corpses.
Manu gay peole have participated in this deal with the left which has consisted of keeping the corpses coming in and in exchange we support your power drive and ambition.
Nothing new here...thank for forwarding his name so he can be added to the list of traitors for blood money.
Manu, give me one reason why I should not call this comment puerile:
You post accusations of complicity in mass murder, in a debate on the deadly serious subject of HIV and AIDS - "for a laugh"?
Wow.
Well dissidents, as an neutral (more or less) observer, your communication style doesnt add to your reputation. While aids surely is an issue loaded with emotion, discussions like these are of no use.
Also Michael: your headline 'LONELINESS CAUSES AIDS' is misleading. I am a psychologist, and i have yet to see any clinical study that would prove that people with on or the other mental disease, even severe ones like schizophrenia, would frequently develop symptoms relatable to aids.
While i second the article's findings, that Psychological factors may have a greater impact on bodily functions than we thought, nowhere does this article warrant the interpretation you ascribed to it.
Dr. LaFleur is performing a study at VA hospitals about non-compliance of HIV drugs. My records could be a part of her study. However, the study is sponsored by the ASHP Foundation and the money is coming from Abbott. She assured me that she only answers to the foundation and that she has no dealings with the drug company with respect to this project. Here is the real kicker, "I plan to publish my findings no matter what the results are (that is, if the journal editors will accept the paper-they usually reject papers with negative results)."
So, there are numerous studies being done but how many are not being published due to the outcome of the studies. In fact, we may not be getting the true picture of what is really happening, similar to the bias of the news media for not reporting that there is dissension in the ranks.
To Peter Barber
"Puerile twits" seems more suitable to describe your camp's detrimental and serious campaign to continue to poison a vast multitude of gay men and blacks with useless life long prescription meds for having non-specific antibodies to an alleged virus, which is down right ludicrous ... Your dumbed down mentality cant comprehend some of us more than others are completely feed up with the vast inconstancies, made up stories hand in hand with diehard apologists and AIDS pundits claiming how fucking right they are, which when broken down and looked at objectively is in all actuality complete bull shit.
I do not and will not claim conspiracy theory.. it's is however business as usual. As in the last 25 years with nothing to show for billions of dollars spent except for poisonous drug regimes killing more than who would otherwise be perfectly fine without you damn clinical interventions.
Hey Carter,
You continue to accuse physicians of poisoning gay men but offer no evidence.
You've had two-and--half weeks to ponder why death rates go down as HAART usage increases, and still all you have to offer is the same lame insults.
There is no better illustration of the intellectual bankruptcy of your position.
Franklin, What are you? fucking blind?
"The incidence of mortality decreased over time in HIV-infected patients, although it has remained approximately five times higher than that for the age-matched general population. AIDS-related events were the most common cause of death (n=95; 40%), although they significantly decreased over time, whereas liver diseases and non-AIDS-defining infections significantly increased over time. Infections in general (33 times higher), liver diseases (11 times higher) and non-Hodgkin lymphoma (5 times higher) were overrepresented as causes of death in the HIV-infected cohort compared with the age-matched general population."
Martinez E et al. Incidence and causes of death in HIV-infected persons receiving highly active antiretroviral therapy compared with estimates for the general population of similar age and from the same geographical area. HIV Med. 2007 May;8(4):251-8
medscape.com/viewarticle/556501_print.
"[Harold] Jaffe said AIDS mortality rates in the United States are "twice that of any nation in the European Union and are 10 times that of the United Kingdom." "We have known for a long time that the rates in the United States are higher than those in Europe," Robert Janssen, director of HIV/AIDS prevention at the CDC, told United Press International. "There are major differences between the epidemics in the U.S. and in Europe, so it is difficult to understand why there are such differences." [like more aggressive AIDS drug promotion in the U.S.?]"
Susman E. Analysis: Troubling trends in AIDS cases. UPI. 2007 Feb 27.
"Of the 1735 patients who initiated HAART, 186 patients died and 37 were lost to follow-up during 1955 person years of follow-up. Out of these patients, 103 (46.1%) died within 3 months after HAART initiation."
Madec Y et al. Response to highly active antiretroviral therapy among severely immuno-compromised HIV-infected patients in Cambodia. AIDS. 2007 Jan 30;21(3):351-359.
"Within a community-based programme in Cape Town, the mortality rate among referred individuals eligible to start ART is extremely high, exceeding 30 deaths per 100 person-years. Moreover, during 3 years follow-up of this cohort, 87% of mortality occurred in the interval just before treatment initiation or during the first 16 weeks of ART. Collectively, these data indicate that patients are arriving with disease that is too far advanced [or maybe the drugs are killing them]"
Lawn SD, Wood R. National adult antiretroviral therapy guidelines in South Africa: concordance with 2003 WHO guidelines?. AIDS. 2007 Jan 2;21(1):121-122.
"Between 1999 and 2004, the percentage of deaths due to non-HIV-related causes increased by 32.8% (from 19.8% to 26.3%). The age-adjusted mortality rate decreased by 49.6 deaths per 10 000 persons with AIDS annually for HIV-related causes but only by 7.5 deaths per 10 000 persons with AIDS annually for non-HIV-related causes. Of deaths due to non-HIV-related causes, 76% could be attributed to substance abuse, cardiovascular disease [which can be caused by AIDS drugs], or a non-AIDS-defining type of cancer [which can be caused by AIDS drugs]. Compared with men who have sex with men, injection drug users had a statistically significantly increased risk for death due to HIV-related causes [implying that 'HIV-related causes' are really 'drug-related causes'] and non-HIV-related causes."
Sackoff JE et al. Causes of death among persons with AIDS in the era of highly active antiretroviral therapy: New York City. Ann Intern Med. 2006 Sep 19;145(6):397-406.
"The results of this collaborative study, which involved...over 20 000 patients with HIV-1 from Europe and North America, show that the virological response after starting HAART has improved steadily since 1996. However, there was no corresponding decrease in the rates of AIDS, or death, up to 1 year of follow-up. Conversely, there was some evidence for an increase in the rate of AIDS in the most recent period."
May MT et al. HIV treatment response and prognosis in Europe and North America in the first decade of highly active antiretroviral therapy: a collaborative analysis. Lancet. 2006 Aug 5;368(9534):451-8.
"There are no study results demonstrating the effect of APTIVUS [tipranavir]/ritonavir on clinical progression of HIV-1."
Aptivus (tipranavir) prescribing information. Boehringer Ingelheim. 2006 Jun 27.
"The results [of the introduction of antiretroviral drugs] have been exciting with improvement in the quality of life for many. In a randomly selected sample of 100 patients, 88% had undetectable viral load...the CD4+ cell counts went up in most patients...We decided to analyse the cause of death in those patients who died while on treatment...We analysed data from the first 15 months of ARV's...55 died (documented deaths) [approximately] 5% of total no. of patients. 40 patients were lost to follow up...[Leading cause of death was] Advanced RVD [Retroviral disease] (27%)...Median time on ARV's (1 month). Could have been immune reconstitution inflammatory syndrome [i.e. caused by the drugs]...TB (22%) [also often a result of initiating AIDS therapy]...Chronic diarrhoea (12%) [also a result of some AIDS drugs]...Lactic acidosis - Four of the patients [also a drug side effect]"
An analysis of the cause of death in patients on ART in Dr. George Mukhari hospital, Pretoria. Medunsa. 2006.
"That skeletal fellow reading a magazine, skin pulled taut over his skull, folds of denim covering his wasted legs, is actually one of our big successes. He is perfectly well, at least as far as his H.I.V. infection goes. Ten years ago he was dying of AIDS; now he is living with it -- or, more accurately, living almost without it, his immune system normal, no trace of virus detectable in his blood. It is the lifesaving drugs that have transformed his appearance like this, leaching the fat from his body even as they clear the virus from his blood...we have patients scattered at every possible point: men and women who cruise on their medications with no problems at all, and those who never stabilize on them and die of AIDS; those who never take them properly and slowly deteriorate and those who never take them properly and still do fine; those who refuse them until it is too late, and those who never need them at all; those who leave AIDS far behind only to die from lung cancer or breast cancer or liver failure, and those few who are killed by the medications themselves...It is all too cold, too mathematical, too scary to dump on the head of a sick, frightened person. So we simplify. "We have good treatments now," we say. "You should do fine.""
Zuger A. AIDS, at 25, offers no easy answers. NY Times. 2006 Jun 6.
"Clinical research has shown beyond doubt that well-administered ARV [antiretroviral drug] treatment drastically cuts the mortality rate associated with AIDS. And yet, if all the people of Nomvalo [Transkei, South Africa] have to go by is the empirical evidence embodied in the health of their neighbours, they may not see this. The young women who all tested positive one Saturday in March [2006] may be years away from getting sick. The ones on ARVs, in contrast, have all been ill, are all at various stages on a slow and uneven path to recovery, and are probably more likely to fall ill in the next while than those in whom the virus is still latent"
Steinberg J. Tragic illusions in a village split over the treatment of HIV/AIDS. Business Day. 2006 Jun 5.
"Health officials say they are trying to improve nutrition amongst AIDS patients [meaning that stories of dramatic improvements among people being prescribed antiretroviral drugs in third world countries may at least partly be due to improved nutrition]"
Mulama J. Using ARVs to fill empty stomachs. Inter Press Service. 2006 Jun 2.
"Highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) started shortly after birth resulted in reversion of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) plasma viremia, proviral DNA in PBMC, viral culture, and serum HIV antibodies to negative. Discontinuation of HAART 2 years after apparent HIV eradication, however, was followed by virus replication, CD4 decline, and destruction of HIV-specific lymphocytes, epitomizing the impossibility of HIV eradication."
Vigano A et al. Failure to eradicate HIV despite fully successful HAART initiated in the first days of life. J Pediatr. 2006 Mar;148(3):389-91.
"We conducted a pilot study to assess the effect of atorvastatin [a statin believed to have anti-viral activity] on HIV replication...Paradoxically, baseline serum cholesterol, but not atorvastatin, influenced viral rebound at week 4."
Negredo E et al. The effect of atorvastatin treatment on HIV-1-infected patients interrupting antiretroviral therapy. AIDS. 2006 Feb 28;20(4):619-21.
"Between September 2002 and February 2005, 758 individuals were referred for ART...Following referral to the ART service, the standard schedule of visits was as follows: screening visit (week 0), blood tests for plasma HIV load and blood CD4 lymphocyte count (week 2), treatment initiation (week 4) and treatment follow up (weeks 8, 12 and 20, and 16-weekly thereafter). At the screening visit, a treatment readiness evaluation was completed and a 4-week supply of co-trimoxazole was dispensed, with pill counts at 14 and 28 days to assess adherence....68 (9.5%) patients died following enrolment into the programme, with an all-cause mortality rate of 12.1 deaths/100 person-years. The baseline pretreatment mortality rate (during the first 30 days of entry to the programme) was very high but the overall rate decreased markedly during follow up. 44 (65%) of the deaths occurred within the first 90 days from enrolment. Among those who received ART, the mortality rate during the first month of treatment was 2.03-fold lower than the baseline rate. The mortality rate continued to decrease during ART, and after 6-9 months the rate was 13.2-fold lower than the baseline rate. The survival probability among treated patients at 1 year was 0.929. Deaths among patients who did not start ART was very high and 31 patients died before they were able to start ART. [Note that the decision to not start AIDS drugs was not made randomly and could have been associated with much more severe illness. Deaths in the first month could have been associated with co-trimoxazole therapy and declining death rates could be associated with declining adherence]"
Lawn SD et al. Early mortality among adults accessing a community-based antiretroviral service in South Africa: implications for programme design. AIDS. 2005 Dec 2;19(18):2141-8.
"The persistence of latently infected, resting CD4+ T cells is considered to be a major obstacle in preventing the eradication of HIV-1 even in patients who have received effective antiviral therapy for an average duration of 5 years...Here, we demonstrate the persistence of replication-competent virus in CD4+ T cells in a cohort of patients who had received uninterrupted antiviral therapy for up to 9.1 years that rendered them consistently aviremic throughout that time [i.e. the virus may be undetected in the serum, but it's present in the immune cells]"
Chun T-W et al. HIV-infected individuals receiving effective antiviral therapy for extended periods of time continually replenish their viral reservoir. J Clin Invest. 2005 Nov 1;115:3250-5.
"the cumulative risk of acquiring an AIDS defining event does not increase if HAART is postponed until a CD4T lymphocyte cell count of 200 million/l is reached."
Moerman F et al. Highly active antiretroviral therapy. BMJ. 2005 Jun 11;330(7504):1341-1342
"The majority of children [in a chart review at Tygerberg Academic Hospital, South Africa] were in stage B [mild symptoms, such as anemia, diarrhea, heart problems, hepatitis or persistent fever] at the beginning and end of the period of observation. Clinical progression from N [no symptoms] and A [mild symptoms] to B [moderate symptoms] and from B to C [AIDS] occurred within the follow-up period [despite the use of AIDS monotherapy and dual therapy and, rarely, HAART]." van Kooten Niekerk NK et al. The First 5 Years of the Family Clinic for HIV at Tygerberg Hospital: Family Demographics, Survival of Children and Early Impact of Antiretroviral Therapy. J Trop Pediatr. 2005 Jun 9.
"As the HAART era progressed the holes in the HAART armor because more apparent. Although patients were not having as many opportunistic infections, there was still a relatively high incidence of certain HIV associated malignancies...deaths related to end stage liver disease [almost certainly caused by the drugs] were more common than deaths from opportunistic infections...Hospitalizations for lactic acidosis, reconstitution syndromes [which are opportunistic infections occurring shortly after starting AIDS drugs] and late stage complications related to HAART were becoming more apparent. Some authors also noted an increase in mortality and hospital admission rate as the HAART era progressed."
Pulvirenti JJ. Inpatient care of the HIV infected patient in the highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) era. Curr HIV Res. 2005 Apr;3(2):133-45.
"the lives of some HIV-positive teens have not improved with HAART. Lightfoot and colleagues found that the post-HAART group was in worse health, more likely to have been sexually abused and to be clinically distressed than the pre-HAART group."
Ham B. Youth with HIV take more risks after new meds introduced. Health Behavior News Service. 2005 Feb 28
"No trials exist which directly demonstrate the clinical benefit of regimens containing commonly used drugs such as efavirenz, abacavir and nelfinavir, because they have been licensed after changes in the drug approval process, which meant that evidence from trials with clinical endpoints was no longer required. Indeed, even for d4T, approved before 1997, there is no such clinical evidence. We therefore conducted an analysis to test the assumption which is implicitly made in both clinical and research settings, namely that the risk of a clinical AIDS event or death for a patient on CART [combination anti-retroviral therapy] with a given HIV RNA ['viral load'] and CD4 cell count is the same, regardless of which specific drugs are being used in the current regimen...Reassuringly, we found that rates of disease and death for a given latest (i.e. the most recent measurement) HIV RNA/CD4 cell count do not appear to differ between drugs for which there is some direct evidence of clinical efficacy (zidovudine, didanosine, lamivudine, indinavir, ritonavir, saquinavir), and those newer drugs which are currently widely used, for which there is no such evidence...It has been suggested that antiretroviral drugs might have adverse or perhaps even positive effects on risk of AIDS and/or death, which are not mediated by the effect of the drugs on HIV-RNA and CD4 cell count...However, our results suggest that for a given CD4 cell count, HIV-RNA and time from start of the drug (plus the other factors that we adjusted for in our model) the risk of AIDS or death is the same, regardless of the specific antiretroviral drug being used. It is important to note that these results do not suggest that the regimens assessed have equal clinical efficacy. Several published randomized clinical trials have shown that different regimens have different capacities to decrease the HIV-RNA and raise the CD4 cell count and this will lead to a difference in clinical efficacy for different drug regimens. Complete reliance on the ability of surrogate endpoints to evaluate treatment effect has led to adverse clinical outcome in other disease areas; one example being antiarrhythmia drugs. Therefore it is imperative to revisit and validate historical assumptions on a regular basis, especially in the case of new drug regimens. To be an ideal surrogate, two basic conditions should be satisfied, namely that the surrogate marker is a correlate of the clinical outcome being the only causal pathway of the disease process, and that the intervention's entire effect on the clinical outcome is mediated through its effect on the surrogate...However, the above-mentioned references suggest that also in the field of HIV, it is necessary to validate surrogate markers against effect markers regularly to evaluate the true treatment effect of drugs and the predictive ability of surrogate markers on clinical progression. The relevance of these type of analyses is evident, knowing that complete reliance have been made on the virologic and immunologic markers to measure treatment effect of drugs released after 1997, even though the relative proportion of non-AIDS-related death has increased during the period of combination and highly active antiretroviral therapy, and treatment effects and regimens have changed dramatically since the release of these newer drugs"
Olsen CH et al. Risk of AIDS and death at given HIV-RNA and CD4 cell count, in relation to specific antiretroviral drugs in the regimen. AIDS. 2005 Feb 18;19(3):319-330.
"Whether treatment of acute HIV infection results in long-term virologic [decreased 'viral load'], immunologic [increased CD4 cell counts], or clinical benefit is unknown"
Panel on Clinical Practices for Treatment of HIV Infection. Guidelines for the Use of Antiretroviral Agents in HIV-1-Infected Adults and Adolescents. DHHS. 2004 Oct 29.
""A 33-year-old man was diagnosed with HIV-1 infection after a suicide attempt. This infection was acquired through homosexual contact. 3 years later he started therapy with zidovudine, lamivudine, and saquinavir because of falling CD4-positive cell counts, but he opted to discontinue treatment after a few months. A year later, he developed skin nodules on his left thigh and was diagnosed with Kaposi's sarcoma, an AIDS-defining illness. His CD4-positive cell count was 389 cells per µL. He refused treatment for both his HIV infection and skin lesions. After 5 years, the Kaposi's sarcoma progressed to include most of the upper left leg in a circumferential manner, with large nodules and infiltrated plaques, and prominent lymphoedema. Antiretroviral treatment was resumed with lamivudine, zidovudine, and nevirapine. Despite declining and eventually undetectable viral load measurements (<50 copies per mL) and a CD4-positive cell count of around 700 cells per µL the skin tumours progressed. He received six cycles of chemotherapy with doxorubicin (15 mg/m2) and three cycles of the liposomal preparation (20 mg/m2), without benefit. Radiotherapy with 10 MV photons (total dose of 22 Gy in 11 fractions) resulted in moderate perianal and groin radiodermatitis and proctitis. Further treatment with thalidomide or paclitaxel is currently being considered."
Sanders CJ et al. Kaposi's sarcoma. Lancet. 2004 Oct 23; 364(9444): 1549-52."
"To date, no reported study has compared the mortality rate in HIV-seropositive persons receiving HAART to that in HIV-seronegative persons who were in the same risk category (e.g., injection drug use). The purpose of such a comparison would be to demonstrate the degree to which survival rates in persons receiving HAART approximate uninfected populations with similar background mortality rates...[In this study] Survival of HIV-seropositive participants receiving HAART approximated that of HIV-seronegative participants only when therapy was given at CD4 cell counts >350 cells/microliter. These data, restricted to IDUs [injection drug users], suggest initiating or switching to HAART at higher CD4 cell levels than are currently recommended [or that HAART can be tolerated by the healthy, but not by the sick]"
Wang C et al. Mortality in HIV-Seropositive versus -Seronegative Persons in the Era of Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy: Implications for When to Initiate Therapy. J Infect Dis. 2004 Sep 15;190(6):1046-54.
"Logistic regression analysis showed that CD4+ cell percentage and viral load were independently associated with the risk of hospitalization, even after adjusting for HAART use, PCP prophylaxis, year, site, sex, and ethnicity. Linear regression showed that use of HAART, CD4+ cell percentage, year, and PCP [pneumocystis carinii pneumonia] prophylaxis were independently associated with viral load."
Viani RM et al. Decrease in Hospitalization and Mortality Rates among Children with Perinatally Acquired HIV Type 1 Infection Receiving Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy. Clin Infect Dis. 2004 Sep 1;39(5):725-81.
"The primary end point was the proportion achieving an HIV RNA level of less than 400 copies/mL at week 48 [i.e. the trial did not show that health was improved]"
Gallant JE et al. Efficacy and safety of tenofovir DF vs stavudine in combination therapy in antiretroviral-naive patients: a 3-year randomized trial. JAMA. 2004 Jul 14;292(2):191-201.
"A total of 426 HIV-related admissions [to an intensive care unit in Paris from January 1995 through June 1999] were included. Sepsis increased from 16.3% to 22.6% from the pre- to the post-HAART era, whereas AIDS-related admissions decreased from 57.7% to 37%. No significant difference in ICU utilization was found...In-ICU mortality was 23%, without significant difference between the study periods. By multivariate analysis...long-term survival [was significantly associated] with admission in the HAART era [but not actual usage of HAART] and AIDS at ICU admission."
Casalino E et al. Impact of HAART advent on admission patterns and survival in HIV-infected patients admitted to an intensive care unit. AIDS. 2004 Jul 2;18(10):1429-33.
"the cumulative proportion of persistent undetectable HIV viral load below 500 copies/ml was significantly higher in the antiretroviral naive patients [those who had never taken AIDS drugs before] than in the non-naive ones...In multivariate analysis, being naive of antiretroviral treatment and having a low viral load, at the time of HAART introduction, were significantly correlated with a sustained undetectable HIV viral load."
Piroth L et al. Clinical, immunological and virological evolution in patients with CD4 T-cell count above 500/mm3: is there a benefit to treat with highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART)?. Eur J Epidemiol. 2004;19(6):597-604.
"28 patients (52%) received HAART at some time before admission to the ICU. Of the 25 patients who never received HAART, 15 patients (60%) fulfilled the criteria for receiving this treatment (CD4+ lymphocyte count <200 cells/microliter) or fulfilled the criteria for AIDS-defining illness. In comparison, in 1991 to 1992 only 22 patients had received any antiretroviral therapy, and 15 patients received anti-PCP treatment. There was no difference in the outcomes of patients receiving these medications and those who were not...[when conceiving this study] We speculated that the reduced incidence of progression to AIDS and opportunistic infections in the general population would be reflected in the reduced utilization of ICU services, that patients who were admitted to the ICU were likely either to not know their HIV serostatus or to not have used HAART, and that the reasons for ICU admission would be similar to those from earlier in the AIDS epidemic. In this analysis, all of these hypotheses were shown to be incorrect. In fact, intensive care utilization increased over the 10 years, all patients knew they were HIV seropositive, most had used HAART, and the types of disorders they developed and their outcomes were quite different than those seen earlier in the epidemic...We also found that two thirds of our ICU admissions were for non- AIDS-associated diagnoses. This reflects surveys indicating that these diagnoses (especially complications of hepatitis C) are now the most common causes of death in HIV-infected persons...As in other studies, we found that survival was not influenced by demographic characteristics or CD4 lymphocyte count. In addition, patients with non-AIDS-associated diagnoses were equally likely to survive. In contrast with the SFGH [San Francisco General Hospital] investigators, who found that patients receiving HAART had better ICU outcomes than those who did not, we found no survival advantage in patients using HAART. However, it was not possible to reliably assess adherence to treatment, so we cannot assess the impact of HAART on survival with certainty."
Narasimhan M et al. Intensive Care in Patients With HIV Infection in the Era of Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy. Chest. 2004 May 01;125(5):1800-1804.
"Treatment failure occurred in 96 (43.6%) of 220 patients assigned nevirapine once daily, 169 (43.7%) of 387 assigned nevirapine twice daily, 151 (37.8%) of 400 assigned efavirenz, and 111 (53.1%) of 209 assigned nevirapine plus efavirenz."
van Leth F et al. Comparison of first-line antiretroviral therapy with regimens including nevirapine, efavirenz, or both drugs, plus stavudine and lamivudine: a randomised open-label trial, the 2NN Study. Lancet. 2004 Apr 17;363(9417):1253-63.
"there is currently no evidence from these studies to suggest that therapy during PHI [Primary HIV Infection - the flu-like illness and/or rash that is believed to occur shortly after HIV infection] results in a reduction in clinical progression compared with use of effective therapy in later disease, nor are there comparative data to suggest that short-term use of HAART during PHI can alter future disease progression."
Smith DE et al. Is antiretroviral treatment of primary HIV infection clinically justified on the basis of current evidence?. AIDS. 2004 Mar 26;18(5):709-18.
"Compared with HAART-naive women, those using HAART had a [1.38 times] higher probability of more than three primary care visits per 6 months, a lower probability of more than one emergency room visit per 6 months, and a lower probability of more than one hospitalization per 6 months. Compared with HAART-naive women, women who had discontinued HAART had a higher frequency of primary care visits but did not demonstrate a significant change in emergency room or hospital use [note that because this was an observational study, there were significant differences among the groups. Non-HAART users who were HIV+ without AIDS were less likely to be employed, more likely to be black and had higher CD4 cell counts and lower viral load. There is no information on IV drug use or other health risk factors, no on how many of the emergency room visits were HIV/AIDS related, how many were health risk related (e.g. IV-drug related problems) and how many were for other reasons entirely (e.g. bone fractures)]"
Palacio H et al. Healthcare use by varied highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) strata: HAART use, discontinuation, and naivety. AIDS. 2004 Mar 5;18(4):621-30.
"A significant decrease in CD4 and CD8 and in total lymphocyte counts was only seen in subjects receiving ddI standard dose + TDF[Tenofovir]-containing regimens, despite the maintenance of viral suppression. More than 50% of these patients showed a decline of more than 100 CD4 cells at 48 weeks."
Negredo E et al. Unexpected CD4 cell count decline in patients receiving didanosine and tenofovir-based regimens despite undetectable viral load. AIDS. 2004 Feb 20;18(3):459-63.
"Extending the model to include current antiretroviral status suggested that use of combination therapy [rather than no therapy or monotherapy] was associated with high [!] rates of disease progression (hazard ratios compared with treatment naive: 1.54 for AIDS, 1.14 for death), confirming the presence of treatment indication bias [i.e. sicker people are treated] [but, hold on, this data is also compatible with the therapy causing AIDS and death!]"
HIV Paediatric Prognostic Markers Collaborative Study Group. Short-term risk of disease progression in HIV-1-infected children receiving no antiretroviral therapy or zidovudine monotherapy: a meta-analysis. Lancet. 2003 Nov 15;362(9396)
"For pre-treated patients [those who were taking anti-retroviral therapy for more than a year before the study] the risk of progression to AIDS was 1.91 times larger than for patients who had no or less than 1 year of previous treatment [and the risk of death was 2.18 times larger]...Non-HIV-related mortality was 2 to 3 times higher than in the general population. Part of this excess can be explained by the 7 proven and approximately 25 possibly-related causes of death"
van Sighem AI et al. Mortality and progression to AIDS after starting highly active antiretroviral therapy. AIDS. 2003 Oct 17;17(15):2227-36.
"The incidence of OI [opportunistic infections (e.g. AIDS-defining conditions)] after the initiation of HAART in advanced AIDS patients with very low CD4 cell counts is high. Tuberculosis is the most common OI in an area with a high prevalence of tuberculosis"
Sungkanuparph S et al. Opportunistic infections after the initiation of highly active antiretroviral therapy in advanced AIDS patients in an area with a high prevalence of tuberculosis. AIDS. 2003 Sep 26;17(14):2129-31.
"By contrast with the pre-HAART era, when most deaths were associated with recent AIDS-defining events, the situation has become more complex in the era of HAART. The current definition of AIDS is no longer a near-complete marker for overall progression. Infectious complications such as sepsis, pneumonia, or meningitis, and cancers such as Hodgkin's disease are not included in the definition of AIDS. Unfortunately, these conditions and adverse events associated with antiretroviral therapy are not recorded in a standardised fashion. There is a need for complete and standardised information on all events that affect patients infected with HIV-1, and on causes of death, whether or not they are directly related to HIV-1 infection [or, presumably, to the therapy]"
Egger M et al. Prognostic importance of initial response in HIV-1 infected patients starting potent antiretroviral therapy: analysis of prospective studies. Lancet. 2003 Aug 30;362(9385):679-86.
"Baseline CD4 count was the strongest predictor of subsequent clinical progression [i.e. a woman's immune status is more important than taking drugs]...By the end of the study, only 52% of the participants were on highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART)...Despite underutilization of HAART in this multicenter cohort of urban women, opportunistic infections were uncommon, despite CD4 declines...As with changes in CD4, treatment effect was more pronounced for those with lower baseline CD4 counts. For those with baseline CD4 counts between 200-500 cells/cubic-mm, the OR associated with ART versus no therapy was 0.66, a 34% reduction in odds of progression; for HAART, the OR was 0.42, a 58% reduction [but the authors omit to quote the data (shown in Table 6 of the paper) for those with baseline CD4 over 500. This shows a 1.84 times greater risk of progression to AIDS with ART and a 1.58 times greater risk with HAART]...Women who were on ART at the start of this study had increased rates of disease progression, which may reflect confounding by indication; i.e., anti-HIV medication was prescribed because the women were ill [or perhaps the use of ART really did make the women sicker, not healthier]"
Mayer KH et al. Clinical and immunologic progression in HIV-infected US women before and after the introduction of highly active antiretroviral therapy. J Acquir Immune Defic Syndr. 2003 Aug 15;33(5):614-24.
"Several patterns of response after initiation of highly active antiretroviral treatment (HAART) have been observed in persons with HIV infection. Apart from treatment success and failure a minority of patients will present a so-called 'paradoxical response', defined as a discrepancy between the plasma viral load (pVL) and the CD4 count. The first situation occurs in 7-15% of the patients. The CD4 count rises despite a persistently detectable pVL, which might be explained by the selection of mutant virus with decreased fitness compared with wild-type virus. Furthermore, protease inhibitors (PI) seem to inhibit lymphocyte apoptosis independently of their antiviral effect. The second type of paradoxical response is where the CD4 count does not rise despite a fully suppressed viral growth has been far less studied. This phenomenon seems to occur in 5-15% of the patients treated with HAART."
Florence E et al. Factors associated with a reduced CD4 lymphocyte count response to HAART despite full viral suppression in the EuroSIDA study. HIV Med. 2003 Jul;4(3):255-62.
"a minority of patients will present a so-called 'paradoxical response', defined as a discrepancy between the plasma viral load (pVL) and the CD4 count. The first situation occurs in 7-15% of the patients. The CD4 count rises despite a persistently detectable pVL...The second type of paradoxical response is where the CD4 count does not rise despite a fully suppressed viral growth...This phenomenon seems to occur in 5-15% of the patients treated with HAART...[In this study] A low CD4 count response [i.e. only a small increase in CD4 count numbers] was observed in 225 persons (29%)."
Florence E et al. Factors associated with a reduced CD4 lymphocyte count response to HAART despite full viral suppression in the EuroSIDA study. HIV Med. 2003 Jul;4(3):255-62.
"Although the feasibility of prophylaxis [AIDS drugs] after non-occupational exposure to HIV has been demonstrated, there are no data measuring the efficacy or effectiveness of PEP in the nonoccupational setting, although this therapy is being offered in various communities...the cost of prophylaxis after nonoccupational exposures is high, and adverse effects are relatively common and can rarely be fatal."
Havens PL. Postexposure prophylaxis in children and adolescents for nonoccupational exposure to human immunodeficiency virus. Pediatrics. 2003 Jun;111(6 Pt 1):1475-89.
"During the study period, mean HAART exposure increased from 39.3 to 50.9 months and the number of HIV-infected children with clinical lipodystrophy (LD) increased from 6 to 8, whereas mean BMI [body mass index], CD4 percentage, and percentage of HIV-infected children with HIV RNA <50 copies/mL did not change [but, these last two measurements should have improved if the therapy was being effective]."
Vigano A et al. Increased lipodystrophy is associated with increased exposure to highly active antiretroviral therapy in HIV-infected children. J Acquir Immune Defic Syndr. 2003 Apr 15;32(5):482-9.
"After 1997, six (18.2%) patients died of liver failure. Two died of antiretroviral drug hepatotoxity, one of whom was coinfected with HCV [Hepatitis C Virus]. Four patients died due to a complication of cirrhosis...The frequency of deaths due to liver failure increased significantly after 1997. The frequency of other causes of death [i.e. not AIDS or liver failure] decreased after January 1997 [this means that the benefits of antiretroviral therapy do not explain all the reduction of mortality. In fact, some of the 'AIDS' death reduction may also be due to other causes, such as the trend since 1993 to diagnose healthy people with AIDS. Healthier people will obviously tolerate antiretroviral therapy longer, and naturally the risk of them dying from AIDS would be lower, even if antiretroviral drugs were completely ineffective.]"
Macias J et al. Mortality due to Liver Failure and Impact on Survival of Hepatitis Virus Infections in HIV-Infected Patients Receiving Potent Antiretroviral Therapy. Eur J Clin Microbiol Infect Dis. 2002 Nov;21(11):775-81.
"From April 1996 through December 2000, a total of 501 antiretroviral-naive [never taken AIDS drugs] HIV-seropositive patients who initiated HAART were recruited...at the Hospital Ramón y Cajal [Madrid, Spain]...After 24 months of follow-up, 42 (16.5%) of 255 patients were considered to have a discordant immune response [low CD4 cell counts with low viral load or high CD4 cell counts with high viral load]...Clinical progression of HIV disease was uncommon among the patients included in the analysis. Overall, 4 patients (1.6%) died of HIV infection-related complications, and 44 patients (17.3%) developed HIV infection-related clinical events...Most events (29 [65%] of 44 events) occurred within the first year after initiation of HAART. Overall, clinical events were not more frequent among patients with a discordant immune response than among patients with a good immunologic response."
Dronda F et al. Long-term outcomes among antiretroviral-naive human immunodeficiency virus-infected patients with small increases in CD4+ cell counts after successful virologic suppression. Clin Infect Dis. 2002 Oct 15;35(8):1005-9.
"those who initiate treatment at a later stage had an unmeasured survival benefit before HAART was started [i.e. it could be that the longer you wait before starting HAART the better, implying that if you never start, you would live the longest]...Of the 25 deaths in women without AIDS at HAART initiation, 14 (56.0%) were unrelated to AIDS [in this group with high recreational drug use, quite possibly illicit- or AIDS-drug related]...A history of no exposure to antiretroviral treatment before HAART initiation was not significantly associated with death in the women who were AIDS free (RH, 0.78)...at HAART initiation. [actually, this means that women were only 78% as likely to die if they had never taken any antiretroviral drugs before starting HAART]"
Anastos K et al. Risk of Progression to AIDS and Death in Women Infected With HIV-1 Initiating Highly Active Antiretroviral Treatment at Different Stages of Disease. Arch Intern Med. 2002 Sep 23;162(17):1973-80.
"[The objective of this study was to] determine the incidence of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL) and Hodgkin's disease (HD) in the UK haemophilia population during the 22 year period 1978-1999...89 cases of lymphoma were identified. 72 cases (81%) occurred in HIV-positive patients (67 NHL, 5 HD), and 17 cases (19%) in HIV-negative patients (9 NHL, 8 HD). The incidence of NHL in the HIV-positive cohort was significantly increased [by a factor of 84 over the general population] in the period 1985-1996. The ratio reduced to 42.15 during the period 1997-1999, presumably as a consequence of the introduction of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) [the authors do not consider the possibility that nucleoside analogs are the cause, and that HAART merely reduced the amount of these drugs and their side effects, in favour of more Protease Inhibitors and their different side effects, such as lipodystrophy, heart disease etc.]"
Wilde JT et al. The incidence of lymphoma in the UK haemophilia population between 1978 and 1999. AIDS. 2002 Sep 6;16(13):1803-7.
"The proportion of patients who have died following an AIDS diagnosis has declined from 93% in the first period [1994-5] to 73% in the last period [1998-2001]...by the last period, 93% of patients who died had used 3 or more antiretroviral drugs...[among non-HIV related deaths there was] an increase in the proportion of deaths due to liver related problems (hepatitis, liver cancer and liver failure) [almost certainly due to AIDS drugs]. This increased from 12 (19%) of the other causes in 1994 to 16 (25%) in 2000/2001...In recent years the most common other causes of death were complications to hepatitis and myocardial infarctions [haart attacks], these groups contained 11 (17%) and 7 (11%) of the 65 subjects who died from other causes since January 2000."
Mocroft A et al. Changes in the cause of death among HIV positive subjects across Europe: results from the EuroSIDA study. AIDS. 2002 Aug 16;16(12):1663-71.
"We report a patient in whom HAART made TB treatment very difficult, and discuss whether...it would be wiser to treat TB first and defer HAART...The paradoxical worsening of TB is not a new entity, but since the introduction of HAART it has turned into a common clinical problem...As a general rule there is a closer temporal relationship with the beginning of HAART than with the beginning of TB treatment...In our patient the diagnosis of the paradoxical worsening of TB was clear. HAART was started twice, and both times a paradoxical worsening of TB could only be controlled by the discontinuation of HAART...We think that HAART poses many more problems than it can resolve for TB patients. Clinicians are aware of this, and in spite of the guidelines, they seldom begin both treatments simultaneously."
Boix V, Merino E, Portilla J. Highly active antiretroviral therapy for patients with tuberculosis: the solution or the problem?. AIDS. 2002 Jul 5;16(10):1436-7.
"We found that interruptions of HAART did not significantly increase the risk of HIV-associated morbidity and mortality, except for a statistically marginally increased risk for a CDC stage C event after the first interruption."
Taffé P et al. Impact of occasional short interruptions of HAART on the progression of HIV infection: results from a cohort study. AIDS. 2002;16:747-55.
"We found that in vitro treatment of PBMC [peripheral blood mononuclear cells] from healthy donors with either IDV [Protease inhibitor Indinavir] or SQV [Protease inhibitor Saquinavir] is associated with a loss in mitochondrial membrane potential. However, the mechanisms by which SQV and IDV induced mitochondrial damage remain to be clarified. We also noted that in vitro treatment of healthy donor PBMC with the combination of IDV (5 mcM; cell death, 15.7%) and SQV (5 mcM; cell death, 13.9%) is additive and induced cell death in 36.8% of the cells, which was similar to that observed with 10 mcM drugs used individually. Thus, the concentrations used in vitro to assess toxicity in this study reflect pharmacologic concentrations [in other words, at realistic concentrations, protease inhibitors can kill the cells that HIV supposedly targets]"
Estaquier J et al. Effects of antiretroviral drugs on human immunodeficiency virus type 1-induced CD4(+) T-cell death. J Virol. 2002 Jun;76(12):5966-73.
"HIV-1 DNA [HIV 'integrated' into cell nuclei] in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) was quantified in 31 children who received efavirenz, nelfinavir, and 1 or 2 nucleoside reverse-transcriptase inhibitors for 2 years and in whom undetectable plasma HIV-1 RNA [believed to be the genetic material found in HIV particles outside cells] levels (<50 copies/mL) were sustained...despite prolonged maintenance of undetectable levels of plasma HIV-1 RNA, HIV-1 DNA remains detectable in PBMC of children"
Saitoh A et al. Persistence of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) Type 1 DNA in Peripheral Blood Despite Prolonged Suppression of Plasma HIV-1 RNA in Children. J Infect Dis. 2002;185(10):1409-16.
"a subset of non-T cells with NK [Natural Killer] markers are persistently infected [even after 1-2 years of HAART]"
Valentin A et al. Persistent HIV-1 infection of natural killer cells in patients receiving highly active antiretroviral therapy. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2002 May 14;99(10):7015-20.
"where highly active antiretroviral therapy is available its combination with the treatment of active tuberculosis is difficult for several reasons: overlapping toxicity profiles of some antituberculosis and antiretroviral drugs, drug interactions, and non-adherence to complicated [as well as painful and debilitating, if not fatal] treatment regimens. An important problem is the possibility of paradoxical reactions. Such reactions include the transient worsening or appearance of new signs, symptoms, or radiographic manifestations of tuberculosis within days to weeks after starting antiretroviral treatment. These reactions may be particularly severe when highly active antiretroviral therapy is started soon after the start of treatment for active tuberculosis. The explanation for these reactions is probably the restoration of the immunity towards mycobacterial antigens [in other words, we only get sick because we have an immune system]. Even in patients with low CD4+ lymphocyte counts, it is recommended to delay highly active antiretroviral therapy until the first two months of treatment for tuberculosis have been completed."
Colebunders R, Lambert MI. Management of co-infection with HIV and TB. BMJ. 2002 Apr 6;324:802-3.
"These results indicate that HAART has little effect on ASIL [Anal Squamous Intraepithelial Lesions] or HPV [Human Papillomavirus] in the first 6 months after HAART initiation"
Palefsky JM et al. Effect of highly active antiretroviral therapy on the natural history of anal squamous intraepithelial lesions and anal human papillomavirus infection. J Acquir Immune Defic Syndr. 2001 Dec 15;28(5):422-8
"Conclusions: The data support an independent reduction in mortality and opportunistic events attributable to HAART, even in patients with very advanced HIV disease [but, is this strong conclusion warranted?]...The Viral Activation Transfusion Study (VATS) was a multicenter, randomized, double-blind clinical trial of leukoreduced versus non-leukoreduced red blood cell transfusion in HIV-infected patients [note that this was not a trial of HAART versus placebo] who required a first transfusion for anemia [quite possibly due as a side effect of prior use of AZT and similar agents]...patients who started HAART during the study contributed observation time to both the post-HAART and pre-HAART categories, in effect serving as their own controls. Patients who began HAART before study entry and those who never began HAART during the study period contributed only post-HAART or pre-HAART observation time, respectively [i.e. the study was turned into a HAART versus non-HAART study after the fact, and the actual use of HAART drugs was not monitored]...The proportion of patients receiving HAART changed significantly over the course of VATS...In January 1996, only 1% of 83 active patients were taking HAART. This proportion increased to 52% on 1 January 1997, 69% on 1 January 1998, and 79% on 1 January 1999. At the time of enrollment, 31% of patients were taking no antiretroviral medication, 44% were taking antiretroviral medication other than HAART, and 24% were taking HAART. Most of the HAART regimens contained an HIV protease inhibitor...There were 110 deaths during 466.2 post-HAART person-years (mortality rate, 0.24 case/person-year) and 179 deaths during 202.4 pre-HAART person-years (mortality rate, 0.88 case/person-year), for a crude mortality rate ratio of 0.26 [0.30 after adjustments]"
Murphy EL et al. Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy Decreases Mortality and Morbidity in Patients with Advanced HIV Disease. Ann Intern Med. 2001 Jul 3;135(1):17-26.
"The drugs are imperfect: Experts say they only extend life, on average, 1.8 years for people with AIDS, and have many severe side effects. Some people live longer, others shorter, on the drugs. About 10 percent of AIDS deaths now are due to protease inhibitor-induced heart disease...Half the people who try the medications do not respond to them and the side effects, such increased cholesterol levels and diabetes, may be so severe that the risk of taking the drug outweighs their benefits."
Eisner R. AIDS Medications Extend Lives But Side Effects Are a Serious Problem. ABC News. 2001 Jun 4
"in 28 patients treated for up to 2-1/2 years with indinavir, zidovudine [AZT], and lamivudine...HIV RNA and DNA remained detectable in all lymph nodes. In contrast, HIV RNA was not detected in 20 of 23 genital secretions or in any of 13 CSF [cerebrospinal fluid] samples after 2 years of treatment"
Gunthard HF et al. Residual human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) type 1 RNA and DNA in lymph nodes and HIV RNA in genital secretions and in cerebrospinal fluid after suppression of viremia for 2 years. J Infect Dis. 2001 May 1;183(9):1318-27.
"Of some concern, however, is the observation that despite increased pharmaceutical usage, the total mortality has not decreased since the first quarter of FY1997. Furthermore, we found an upward tendency of per-patient costs over the last 12 months of this study...The virological failure of up to 60% of treatment-experienced patients and the increased recognition of the toxicities of antiretroviral therapy suggests that substantial additional medical costs may eventually accrue in the care of these patients"
Goetz MB et al. Effect of highly active antiretroviral therapy on outcomes in Veterans Affairs Medical Centers. AIDS. 2001 Mar 9;15(4):530-2.
"One of the first studies to look at the success of HIV treatment in inner-city patients from the time of diagnosis reveals a dire situation, a doctor working in Atlanta, Georgia, said here on Tuesday at the 8th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections. His study found that only 1 in 10 patients newly diagnosed with HIV achieved a reduction in virus in blood to ''undetectable'' levels--a major goal of treatment...One year after being diagnosed, 24 patients (18%) had died, del Rio reported. Of the 103 eligible to attend an outpatient clinic, the majority discontinued treatment after a few months. Only 55 patients (53%) ever went to the outpatient clinic and 40% of these dropped out within 1 year. Of the 55 patients seen at the outpatient clinic, 30 were prescribed antiretroviral therapy. One year from diagnosis, only 23 were still on therapy and 12 (of the original 135 patients) had undetectable levels of virus in their blood."
In U.S. cities, successful HIV treatment rare. Reuters. 2001 Feb 7.
"There's no hope for a cure for AIDS with current drugs, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) said at the 13th International AIDS Conference. ''Eradication is not possible,'' Anthony Fauci said."
Smith M. Current drugs no match for AIDS epidemic: Fauci. Biotechnology Newswatch. 2000 Jul 17;1.
"If therapy is started too early, cumulative side-effects of the drugs used and the development of multidrug resistance may outweigh the net benefits of the lengthening of life. If therapy is started too late, increases in disease progression and mortality outweigh the risk of adverse events."
Harrington M, Carpenter CCJ. Hit HIV-1 hard, but only when necessary. Lancet. 2000 Jun 17;355(9221):2147-52.
"We studied the HIV aspartyl PIs [Protease Inhibitors] indinavir, ritonavir, nelfinavir and saquinavir, at clinically achievable concentrations, for their ability to inhibit P. carinii [causative factor of AIDS-defining pneumonia PCP]...We found a partial, dose-dependent antipneumocystis effect [i.e. perhaps the benefits of this therapy that are sometimes found are because they directly target PCP, and not HIV]"
Atzori C et al. In Vitro Activity of Human Immunodeficiency Virus Protease Inhibitors against Pneumocystis carinii. J Infect Dis. 2000 May;181(5):1629-34.
"Amanda Mocroft (Royal Free Centre for HIV Medicine, London, UK) reported that rates of treatment failure in the EuroSIDA cohort were 50%, 70%, and 80% after first, second, and third courses, respectively. Results from several trials confirmed the poor response (about 30%) to salvage regimens in patients who had already taken a protease inhibitor. Previous use of non-nucleoside reverse-transcriptase inhibitors lowered the response rate further (to about 15%)...Over the past year, the development of several promising drugs has been put on hold or stopped because of toxicity, unfavourable pharmacokinetics, and inadequate potency"
Mellors J, Montaner J. Salvage therapy for HIV-1 infection - the challenge grows. Lancet. 2000 Apr 22;355(9213):1435.
"current potent regimens do not completely inhibit HIV replication in most patients...resistance develops during ongoing HIV replication in the presence of anti-HIV drugs...in most patients...Although it may seem reasonable to believe that use of potent therapy could delay or prevent the evolution of more virulent strains of the virus, few data support that argument...cure with current potent therapy may be possible after 10 years of therapy, 60 to 115 years of therapy, or never [depending on the research cited]...it is safe to conclude that a cure is extremely unlikely with the current approach to treatment...There is growing concern about the long-term toxicity and adverse effects of therapy, including liver damage and mitochondrial toxicity caused by nucleosides, the most studied anti-HIV drugs. After drugs are approved, fewer organized efforts are made to monitor them for long-term toxicities...the quest for HIV treatment is fueled by the expensive, technologically oriented approach used in wealthy countries. Current research is not directed toward simple long-term survival...The fastest-growing treatment category in my clinic [Regions Hospital, Minnesota] is no treatment or delayed treatment."
Henry K. The case for more cautious, patient-focused antiretroviral therapy. Ann Intern Med. 2000 Feb 15;132(4):306-311.
"The existence of a reservoir of resting CD4+ T cells harboring latent replication-competent HIV has been demonstrated in patients on prolonged highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART). Latently infected tissue macrophages may constitute a second HIV reservoir...These results demonstrate the long-term persistence of infectious virus in cells of the monocyte-macrophage lineage in patients receiving HAART."
Lambotte O et al. Detection of infectious HIV in circulating monocytes from patients on prolonged highly active antiretroviral therapy. J Acquir Immune Defic Syndr. 2000 Feb 1;23(2):114-9.
"Our results show that immune responses are potent in antiretroviral-naive [i.e. not taking antiretroviral therapy] but significantly reduced in HAART-treated patients with undetectable viraemia (< 500 copies/ml)...T-cell proliferation to HIV-specific and HIV-unrelated antigens is potent in antiretroviral-naive but suppressed in HAART-treated individuals...because of the side effects associated with HAART and of the known compliance problems of the therapeutic regimens, initiation of therapy might be delayed in those cases where a powerful immune response is detected."
Clerici M et al. Different immunologic profiles characterize HIV infection in highly active antiretroviral therapy-treated and antiretroviral-naive patients with undetectable viraemia. AIDS. 2000 Jan 28;14(2):109-116.
"These data suggest that a large pool of infectious virus is established soon after infection [as early as 2-4 days] and that initiation of antiretroviral therapy when symptoms of primary HIV infection are recognized is unlikely to prevent substantial accumulation of virus in the FDC network...The FDC pool of virus is established by the time symptoms associated with primary HIV infection are recognized, based on these data. We observed 7-8 log10 copies of HIV-1 RNA/g of LT sampled within a few days of symptom onset [mostly mild symptoms and, in 6 patients, no symptoms were observed, so HIV antibodies were declared to by a 'symptom'], similar to levels associated with late-stage disease. The fact that this tissue was both axillary and from patients with rectal exposure illustrates the speed at which systemic dissemination occurs after mucosal transmission...This finding was a surprise to us, because it has been reported that accumulation of virus into this pool is gradual...Collectively, these findings on the early accumulation of virus into the FDC pool make it unlikely that antiretroviral therapy initiated as soon as symptoms are recognized will necessarily prevent deposition of large enough quantities of virus in the FDC pool or the FDC network."
Shacker T et al. Rapid Accumulation of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) in Lymphatic Tissue Reservoirs during Acute and Early HIV Infection: Implications for Timing of Antiretroviral Therapy. J Infect Dis. 2000 Jan;181(1):354-7.
"This study shows that virologic failure [rises in 'viral load'] during the Trilege trial maintenance phase was not associated with key zidovudine or indinavir resistance mutations. No such mutations were found at viral rebound or baseline, consistent with the patients' antiretroviral naive status."
Descamps D et al. Mechanisms of Virologic Failure in Previously Untreated HIV-Infected Patients From a Trial of Induction-Maintenance Therapy. JAMA. 2000 Jan 12;283(2):205-11.
"HIV-infected injecting drug users and those with lower levels of educational attainment start HAART later than other patient groups. The deferred initiation of therapy in these patients does not, however, appear to translate into an increased risk of clinical disease progression."
Junghans C, Low N, Chan P et al. Uniform risk of clinical progression despite differences in utilization of highly active antiretroviral therapy:Swiss HIV Cohort Study. AIDS. 1999 Dec 24;13(18):2547-54.
"Infection was propagated not only in activated and proliferating T cells but also, surprisingly, in resting T cells. The infected proliferating cells correspond to the short-lived population that produces the bulk of HIV-1. Most of the HIV-1-infected resting T cells persisted after antiretroviral therapy."
Zhang Z-Q et al. Sexual Transmission and Propagation of SIV and HIV in Resting and Activated CD4+ T Cells. Science. 1999 Nov 12;286(5443):1353-7.
""This virus is a really smart actor," said Dr. Ann Collier, director of the AIDS Clinical Trial Unit at Harborview's Madison Clinic. Collier said about one-third of patients are resistant to the drugs within six months of starting treatment, and the proportion increases over time. Patients are often switched to new combinations of drugs, but their conditions often gradually deteriorate, she said."
Seattle Times. 1999 Nov 10;B1.
"in a cohort of patients with undetectable viral RNA for between 5 months and several years while taking HAART and with fewer than 50 copies/mL of viral RNA in peripheral blood plasma at the time of these analyses, all subjects had low but detectable levels of HIV-1 RNA in blood plasma. This was surprising in that these data demonstrated that viral expression could not only be shown by viral replication in selected cell types within patients taking suppressive HAART but by actual virion production within blood plasma...Our study...demonstrates that some cell-free virion production may be quite common in patients taking suppressive HAART [although it is not clear how viruses can possibly replicate outside a cell]"
Dornadula G et al. Residual HIV-1 RNA in blood plasma of patients taking suppressive highly active antiretroviral therapy. JAMA. 1999 Nov 3;282(17):1627-32.
"The current study demonstrates that, in a cohort of patients with undetectable viral RNA for between 5 months and several years while taking HAART and with fewer than 50 copies/mL of viral RNA in peripheral blood plasma at the time of the analyses, all subjects had low but detectable levels of HIV-1 RNA in blood plasma."
Dornadula G et al. Residual HIV-1 RNA in blood plasma of patients taking suppressive highly active antiretroviral therapy. JAMA. 1999 Nov 3;282(17):1627-32.
"All treated PHI [Primary HIV Infection] subjects had detectable HIV-1 DNA in peripheral blood at week 52. No significant difference in the number of copies per microgram PBMC [peripheral blood mononuclear cell] DNA was observed between treated and untreated PHI patients at baseline or at weeks 8, 24, or 52"
Zaunders JJ et al. Potent antiretroviral therapy of primary human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) infection: partial normalization of T lymphocyte subsets and limited reduction of HIV-1 DNA despite clearance of plasma viremia. J Infect Dis. 1999 Aug;180(2):320-9.
"the proportion of patients who experience virologic suppression during HAART in the clinic setting was substantially lower than that in clinical trials...only 23% experienced viral suppression in all three time periods"
Lucas G et al. Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy in a Large Urban Clinic: Risk Factors for Virologic Failure and Adverse Drug Reactions. Ann Intern Med. 1999 Jul 24;131(1):81-7.
"According to the study, [published in 7/20/99 Annals of Internal Medicine] 37 percent of the Johns Hopkins patients getting the cocktail treatment had undetectable HIV levels one year after starting therapy. Only 23 percent suppressed the virus in all three time periods studied - 1-90 days, 3-7 months and 7-14 months. Clinical trials using similar drugs show suppression rates twice as high as those numbers."
Loviglio J. Study looks at HIV 'Cocktail'. Associated Press. 1999 Jul 19.
"our findings suggest that 48 weeks of HAART does not significantly reduce the integrated HIV-1 proviral DNA load in the latently infected CD4 T cell reservoir"
Ibanez A et al. Quantification of integrated and total HIV-1 DNA after long-term highly active antiretroviral therapy in HIV-1-infected patients. AIDS. 1999 Jun 18;13(9):1045-9.
"As the ADARC group suggested, immediate attention should focus on the reasons why three- and four-drug potent anti-retroviral therapy does not completely suppress virus replication. Based on their data, it is unlikely that anatomical sanctuaries are protecting cells from drugs; instead, the positive cells seem to be readily circulating through the body, as suggested by the presence of many of the HIV-expressing cells in lymphoid sinuses."
Saag MS, Kilby JM. HIV-1 and HAART: A time to cure, a time to kill. Nat Med. 1999 Jun;5(6):609-11.
"the ultimate therapeutic goal of virus eradication does not seem to be achievable in a period of time compatible with the management of problems such as complexity, toxicity and costs."
Lillo FB et al. Viral load and burden modification following early antiretroviral therapy of primary HIV-1 infection. AIDS. 1999;13:791-6.
"The researchers concluded that, while combination antiretroviral therapies effectively suppress HIV-1 replication in some patients, the benefit to others may not be as great. Considering the half-life of latently infected CD4 lymphocytes, researchers conclude that efficacious antiretroviral therapy may take years to eliminate such sources of HIV-1...The continued replication of HIV-1 in two patients seems to be due to the presence of drug-sensitive viruses within lymphoid tissues. We are unable, however, to explain why drug-sensitive HIV-1 is capable of replicating at low levels during treatment with three or four drugs. But it is essential to the therapeutic effort that the answer, be it pharmacokinetic or cellular in nature, be obtained promptly."
Zhang L et al. Quantifying Residual HIV-1 Replication in Patients Receiving Combination Antiretroviral Therapy. N Engl J Med. 1999 May 27;340(21):1605-13.
"Potent antiretroviral therapy seems unable to eradicate latent HIV-1 reservoirs in CD4+ T cells."
Furtado M et al. Persistence of HIV-1 Transcription in Peripheral-Blood Mononuclear Cells in Patients Receiving Potent Antiretroviral Therapy. N Engl J Med. 1999 May 27;340(21):1614-22.
"The results obtained for patients with a broad range of plasma viral loads before and after antiretroviral therapy reveal a constant mean viral (v)RNA copy number (3.6 log10 copies) per infected cell, regardless of plasma virus load or treatment status."
Hockett RD et al. Constant Mean Viral Copy Number per Infected Cell in Tissues Regardless of High, Low, or Undetectable Plasma HIV RNA. J Exp Med. 1999 May 17;189(10):1545-54.
"The efficacy of HIV chemoprophylaxis [AIDS drugs] following consensual or nonconsensual sexual exposure [rape] is unknown."
Bamberger JD et al. Postexposure prophylaxis for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection following sexual assault. Am J Med. 1999 Mar;106(3):323-6.
"Antiretroviral therapy may be initiated early during antituberculosis therapy in HIV-infected patients with tuberculosis. After initial clinical improvement, paradoxical worsening of disease developed in up to 36% of these patients, characterized by fever, worsening chest infiltrates on radiograph, and peripheral and mediastinal lymphadenopathy...In contrast, only 7% of patients who received antituberculosis therapy but not antiretroviral therapy had paradoxical reactions."
Havlir DV, Barnes PF. Tuberculosis in patients with human immunodeficiency virus infection. N Engl J Med. 1999 Feb 4;340(5):367-73.
"As the evanescent blush of success with so-called highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) regimens begins to recede into the darkness, we have increasingly come to appreciate the importance of the host immune response. As with pharmacotherapy of other infectious diseases, the drugs are not very effective without substantial help from the immune system. [note that AZT, by damaging or destroying bone marrow, damages the immune system]"
O'Brien WA. The most potent antiretroviral weapon - cellular immunity. 6th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections. 1999 Feb 2.
"In 3 of the 5 patients, the percentage of productively infected cells increased while on therapy"
Patterson BK et al. Monitoring HIV-1 treatment in immune-cell subsets with ultrasensitive fluorescence-in-situ hybridisation. Lancet. 1999 Jan 16;353(9148):211-2.
"The main kinetic difference in the HAART [ritonavir/saquinavir plus one or more nucleoside analogs] group was therefore higher production rates of circulating T cells and shorter (not longer) half lives...This analysis confirms that the rate of removal of CD4+ T cells is indeed elevated and the half-life is indeed shortened in the HAART group"
Hellerstein M et al. Directly measured kinetics of circulating T lymphocytes in normal and HIV-1 infected humans. Nat Med. 1999 Jan;5(1):83-9.
"We collected peripheral-blood and semen sample
Carter, cutting and pasting quotations from the aras website is intellectually bankrupt.
You haven't read the papers that are cited. None of them support the position that antiretrovirals cause AIDS. Most of them provide evidence for the opposite, that ARVs reduce mortality and morbidity.
Carter,
Thank you for bringing the following paper to our attention:
Martinez E et al. Incidence and causes of death in HIV-infected persons receiving highly active antiretroviral therapy compared with estimates for the general population of similar age and from the same geographical area. HIV Med. 2007 May;8(4):251-8.
This paper shows that as the use of HAART has become widesread in Catalonia, the death rate for HIV-infected adults has dropped from ~5 per 100 person-years to ~1 per 100 person-years.
When compared to the mortality of the general population, the mortality of HIV-infected patients dropped from ~25 times greater than the general population to ~5 times greater than the general population.
Thank you for calling this paper to our attention. It takes a big person to point us to evidence that disproves your claim that HAART is "poisoning" HIV-infected patients.
Assuming that you didn't just blindly cut and paste this from the aras website can you tell me exactly what you were trying to demonstrate with this citation?
HAART causes sexual abuse and clinical distress?
Studies can be misleading and differ in opinions. Some studies have found coffee to be harmful while others state that it is good for one, so who are we to believe? Sometimes, we the patient, have to go on our personal experience. Some tolerate the meds while others have many of the side effects. Personally, my lab reports and liver enzymes didn't become normal until I stopped the meds. To me this proves that the "disease" was not causing the abnormal results as the doctor stated but it was caused by the toxicity of the drugs. Life is about taking risks and the risks involved with the antiretrovirals was not worth it to me.
Franklin,
There is no indication of deaths due to liver failure in the Ole Kirk paper that you referred.
Is it because the authors only report deaths due to AIDS and not of side-effects/ or others causes?
I can remember a previous post from Michael indicating that Dr. Amy Justice was reporting that some deaths in AIDS patients were due to liver failure.
Noreen explicitly indicated liver enzymes as a major problem with HAART that she managed to solve by switching therapies to LDN. .
How much is the number of deaths due to side-effects/ or to liver diseases in aids patients ? Could you provide some data?
My understanding, reading the posts in this blog, is that the (perceived or real) question of the safety of drugs is the major reason for the existence of "denialist/rethinking" patients. If the question could be solved the "denialist/rethinking" movement in the US/EU would be more or less inexistent.
This aspect was missing in the Tara/PLOS paper.
Thanks for answering me,
Braganza, good observation. Many HIV+'s are concerned about the side effects of the AIDS drugs, whether we believe in HIV or Not. The new LDN study should shed more light on this wonder drug. If LDN were a new drug used for AIDS, it would be heavily marketed and the price increased. However, the drug companies will not do so now as this would be shooting themselves in the foot and they will not do that.
All I can add is that is does work and many will testify to that, including all types of immune deficient diseases. Yahoo has numerous, LDN support groups for various diseases. Check out some of these sites and see what "actual" users of this drug have to say. There is a book, which was written about LDN and how it helped a MS patient called, "Up The Creek With A Paddle."
Noreen,
I think that if scientific groups and drugs companies agree that there is a major problem with pre-existing drugs toxicity, and that LDN may provide some solutions, they would do more research in the field, and, in the future, would provide things more efficient than LDN, that may work in the same pathway, (which I dont know what it is).
Braganza thank you for defending me yesterday and you are right I sometimes get "strong" with people and the reason is things like Noreen Carter Michael talking about Amy Justice without reading anything from her. We go throw this every month on here about liver disease.
Please scroll up this thread to August 8 you can read what I said to Noreen about Amy Justice. Its too bad how they put words in her mouth bc she doesn't say any of this stuff.
Every doctor with AIDS patients can tell you some people have toxicity problems. They all know this they all check for it they try to get people on drugs they can take without problems. No one denies it no one sweeps it under the rug.
Alll drugs are toxic. Drugs get broken up in the liver. Lots of drugs are toxic enough they take blood now and then and check out your enzyme levels. This isn't just antivirals its lots of other rx drugs too. Also abuse drugs. Lots of people who get infected HIV abused drugs some time. The drugs don't cause HIV infection or AIDS but if your injecting with other people you can get HIV or Hep. Some people take drugs and get in risky sex situations and you get infections that way too.
A person who abuses alcohol and injection drugs and gets hepatitis, their hurting their liver lots of ways already. Most AIDS patients who die of liver disease have hepatitis some times more than one Hep and most also did drugs or alcohol. So you can't just take someone who dies of liver disease and say oh look they had a protease inhibitor, THAT's what killed them.
Foreign stuff isn't good for your liver. That's why some liver enzymes go up when you take a new drug. On antivirals if that happens it goes for a few weeks then goes down again usually. There's exceptions like it sounds like Noreen is when levels stay up. Then the doctor try a new drug to keep the problems down.
Denialists like Duesberg always ask where's the drug-free AIDS cases? Of course there's millions of them, so you don't need drugs for AIDS.
I want to ask where's the drug alcohol and hepatitis free cases of liver poisoning by protease inhibitors? Is there any?
Antivirals stop deaths, like the study Franklin said about where it goes down 80% on HAART. Same thing every where you look. They can cause problems too but most doctors find a way around it and you have to weigh that against this great cut of deaths and sickness.
Braganza,
What Ole Kirk paper?
All drugs are toxic.
OKAAAAAYYYYY !!
Now, that said, why don't you think a little further?
I mean, for instance the thought that our "modern" civilisation didn't get any further yet than trying to heal people, who feel bad because their own body hurts itself, with poison: ain't that something to consider? I mean, modern science and all that, and we've only got that far? Man, one single step of an intellectual dwarf should have got us way beyond where we are today!
Braganza,
I see. You mean this study.
The mortality figures are for death from all causes, AIDS-related and non-AIDS-realted, and the reults are impressive:
The mortality rate dropped from 18.8 per 100 person-years before HAART to 1.4 per 100 person-years after widespread use of HAART across Europe. That includes AIDS-related deaths and deaths due to other causes, including liver failure.
Braganza,
The first paper that Carter brought to our attention also discusses the risk factors for liver disease in HIV-infected patients treated with HAART.
Martinez E et al. Incidence and causes of death in HIV-infected persons receiving highly active antiretroviral therapy compared with estimates for the general population of similar age and from the same geographical area. HIV Med. 2007 May;8(4):251-8
medscape.com/viewarticle/556501_print.
This study not only showed an approximately 5-fold reduction in the mortality rate during the course of the study, but also looked at specific causes of deaths.
During the period of the study, 53 patients died of late-stage liver disease. Of these, 42 were Hepatitis C virus-related, 6 were Hepatitis B virus-related, 3 were Hepatitis C and B virus-related, and 2 were due to nonviral cirrhosis.
So the risk of death from liver failure is mostly due to the effects of Hepatitis C virus infection.
Carter, thank you again for calling our attention to this paper that disproves your claim that HAART is equivalent to "poisoning" HIV-infected patients.
This has also been shown in a prospective cohort study of Danish patients (Weis et al. (2006) Impact of hepatitis C virus coinfection on response to highly active antiretroviral therapy and outcome in HIV-infected individuals: a nationwide cohort study. Clin Infect Dis. 42:1481-7.) In this study, HCV infected patients were 16 times more likely to die of liver disease than HCV-negative patients.
Dear Adele,
Not all drugs are very toxic, and expectation of many is that anti-AIDS drugs will be less toxic in the future.
This is possible, look for an example to the Noreen case, if sustainable this looks to me to be a proof, look also to this other research in China, (abstract in Pubmed, Miao B, Li J, Fu X, Gan L, Xin X, Geng M. Mol Pharmacol. 2005 Dec;68(6):1716-27.) where a polysaccharide is reported to have entered in the phase II clinical trial as the first anti-AIDS drug candidate in China. The drug, which inhibits T cell apoptosis, protect the liver as it reduce damage to the mitochondria. I just wrote them to have more data. As you know I have interest in mushrooms, and these are rich in polysaccharides.
I also just have asked some guys in Cambridge who are develloping anti-oxidants drugs candidates that would protect mitonchondria, and they also told me that they where thinking to look to AIDS as one of their target diseases.
Carter,
Thanks for bringing this paper tour attention:
This paper examined mortality of AIDS patients who intitated treatment with HAART between July 2001 through April 2005, at a single hospital in Cambodia. The overall mortality rate was 13%.
Multivariate analysis revealed several factors that were independently associated with death. Four of these factors were baseline characteristics of the patients:
The other characteristic associated with death was discontinuation of HAART for greater than 1 month.
Factors protecting against death included prophylactic medications given to prevent opportunistic infections when the CD4 cell count fell below certain levels.
The relationship between CD4 T-cell count at entry and subsequent death was particularly striking, with the following mortality rates observed at different CD4 T-cell counts:
The benefit of HAART documented in this study is emphasized when we compare this data to the situation reported at the same Cambodian Hospital prior to the availability of HAART:
This study reported a mortality rate greater than 40% for a population of 381 AIDS patients treated between December 1999 and May 2000, before HAART was available at the Cambodian hospital.
CD4 T-cell counts were available for 173 of these patients, and the median CD4 cell count was 15 cells/microliter--that is 50% of the patients had CD4 cell counts below 15. 134 patients (77.5%) had CD4 counts below 50, 15 patients (8.7%) had CD4 counts between 50 and 100, and 24 patients (13.9%) had counts greater than 100.
So, when the patients were treated with HAART, the overall mortality was 13%, but in the pre-HAART era the overall mortality at the same hospital was greater than 40%.
In the HAART era, even the patients with CD4 counts below 20 had a mortality rate of 24.7%, much lower than the 40% mortality rate of the pre-HAART era--even though the figure from the pre-HAART era includes all of the HIV-infected patients, even those with CD4 counts above 100.
Again, Carter, thank you for drawing our attention to this data. It takes a big person to bring up evidence that disproves your claim that HAART therapy is equivalent to "poisoning" AIDS patients.
Carter,
Thanks for bringing the following correspondence to our attention:
Based upon their previously published data (Lawn SD et al. (2006) Clinical Infectious Diseases 43:770-776), these authors argue that South African policy leads to the initiation of HAART at such a late stage that its effectiveness is compromised.
In their earlier paper, they studied 1235 patients who were referred for anti-retroviral therapy (ART). 121 patients died, and of these 56 occurred before ART was started. These 56 patients received no ART.
49 deaths occurred during the first four months of ART, and 16 deaths occurred after four months of ART.
The death rates were as follows:
Before Starting ART: 33.3 Deaths per 100 person-years
FIrst Four Months ART: 19.1 Deaths per 100 person-years
After Four Months ART: 2.9 Deaths per 100 person-years
Once again, thank you for bringing this information to our attention. It takes a big person to bring up data that disproves your claim that antiretroviral therapy is equivalent to poisoning AIDS patients.
Where did carter go? Acccording to him he monitors this blog 24/7.
Why can't he explain why he copied and pasted a webpage from aras with excerpts from papers that demonstrate the exact opposite of his claim that HAART is poison?
Hey you bumbling idiots, some people have real jobs, not the kind like some of you fine fellows with paid positions to quell dissident viewpoints.
You think how dead on accurate you believe your sacred studies seem to perform and purport mainstream orthodox medicine and HIV to be the cause of AIDS. The fact of the matter is when you get right down to it, when looking at those rambling orthodox papers objectively and outside the mainstream AIDS Zone many come to a different conclusion.. You have absolutely no problem with saying NO NO NO.. But you seemingly do-goodr's don't get you all say the same thing and based on one conclusion of presumed HIV virus. Everything from Team Virus is set up to look for the same results, predestined on further perpetuating disease and dying from HIV.
The ARAS lists these and other studies for people to compare and make up their own mind. If the HIV=AIDS camp sees it as substantiating their views, so be it. If others see it as an astounding failure of mainstream thought, which I do, then it is up to the disbelievers of HIV mainstream dogma to let others see the other side of the coin. Questing you and pointing out that there are flaws obviously does little good because you have only limited thoughts and beliefs based on one idea.
There are several problems with this.
1) You haven't read the studies that you cite. You are ignorant about the details of the studies. The only reason that you cite them is because they appear on the aras website.
2) When somebody actually reads the studies and shows that they in fact demolish your contention that HAART is of no benefit and is poison then you runaway. You aren't interested in the actual science.
3) It is possible to interpret data in a number of ways but science is not postmodernism. Some interpretations are simply wrong. You can't ignore the bulk of a study and take one bit out of context to draw a conclusion that is completely opposite to that of the actual data.
The plethora of info I'm allowed to copy, pasted above in all it's glory, collectively demonstrates ineffectiveness or lack of proof of effectiveness, often combined with toxicity..
"HAART is still often described as having miraculous effects. Not surprisingly, proponents of these drugs are less anxious to discuss the times when the drugs simply don't seem to do what they are supposed to." Aras.ab.ca
I dont need you to tell me any different because surely I completely understand you have a one sided belief and a repetitious distaste for anyone who will disagree with you.
I look at it this way; All the long winded hyperbole often found throughout these studies are summarized and end pointed, which are quoted and sited on Aras.ab.ca. Take for example this one:
-bold face for commentary by aras-
"After 1997, six (18.2%) patients died of liver failure. Two died of antiretroviral drug hepatotoxity, one of whom was coinfected with HCV [Hepatitis C Virus]. Four patients died due to a complication of cirrhosis...The frequency of deaths due to liver failure increased significantly after 1997. The frequency of other causes of death [i.e. not AIDS or liver failure]decreased after January 1997 [this means that the benefits of antiretroviral therapy do not explain all the reduction of mortality. In fact, some of the 'AIDS' death reduction may also be due to other causes, such as the trend since 1993 to diagnose healthy people with AIDS. Healthier people will obviously tolerate antiretroviral therapy longer, and naturally the risk of them dying from AIDS would be lower, even if antiretroviral drugs were completely ineffective.]"
Macias J et al. Mortality due to Liver Failure and Impact on Survival of Hepatitis Virus Infections in HIV-Infected Patients Receiving Potent Antiretroviral Therapy. Eur J Clin Microbiol Infect Dis. 2002 Nov;21(11):775-81.
From what standpoint of logic do you think this commentary arose? logically or illogically? You'll call it illogical wont you?
See Noble, it doesn't take someone versed in the same ability to debate science as you possess to see the alternative viewpoint to be far from what you think it is, as demonstrated by your general statement, "Some interpretations are simply wrong." How do you, the king of all HIV apologists, determine what interpretations are wrong and are not?
It helps if you actually read the study ratherr than the predigested sniippets that you get from reading the aras website.
Here are some bits that aras omits. Presumably this omission is to free you and other readers from the cognitive dissonance caused by having to deal with inconvenient results.
The paper provides strong evidence that HAART reduces AIDS related mortality in people with and without HCV co-infection. The paper also describes the real risk of liver failure due to antiretroviral toxicity. However, most of the liver failure was attributable to HCV coinfection and alcohol abuse. Deaths from liver failure were still a minority despite the high rate of HCV coinfection.
The aras commentary is not supported by the paper. Most of it is simply ad hoc excuses that vainly attempt to explain away the dramatic benefits seen in HAART.
The aras commentaries do not accurately summarise the studies. They selectively pull out details that are then used to falsely support the preconceived dogmatic assertion that HAART is not beneficial. They blatantly ignore the vast amount of data that is not consistent with this claim. It is simply lying by omission.
"They blatantly ignore the vast amount of data that is not consistent with this claim."
you who believe HIV=AIDS are big pharm hacks who have been bought out and perform experiments to prove what they already think is right. you don't have the ability to think as in depth or as critically as we do mycoplasma incogitus kills all animals inoculate and therefore causes all human disease project daylily google it. you are a loser get a life. Kochs postulates blah blah blahh LDN is a wonder drug JUST LOOK AT ME I am healthy and therefore all HIV research is crap. how do we know the PCR and antibody tests arent measuring factors that are only foind when people are under high stress adn bad emotions. HIV has never been purified blah blah blah
Nobel, don't you know you've already lost the debate?
Trust me that I have never said HAART has absolutely no benefit, but there are many reasons why we see reduced mortality and not just because of these cocktail interventions, like in Martinez E et al. they show that the death rate dropped until 2000 and then started rising again. In other words, the death rate dropped from 1997 through 2000, which was precisely when monotherapy or double-therapy with massive doses of nucleoside analogs was being substituted by triple therapy with much smaller doses of AZT. See, this is but one example, the watering down and combination of the chemo so now the study becomes self fulfilling and a clever way to keep funds flowing.
I'm going to go out on a limb and add my own theory to the pot. Why we're seeing reduced rates nowadays is; after people receive some benefit and possibly recovered from near death collapse the regimes get stopped, by either the patients choice or by their doctor because of intolerable side effects, therefore allowing bettr health and not becoming an Aids death statistic. Mortality decreasing not because of drugs but because there's a movement by Team Virus to stop what David Ho started In 1996 "It's the virus, stupid" which began hit hard and early strategy, to now don't start if at all, which is demonstrated buy this post at thebody.com
"I'm not happy. I have been asking my doctor for ages if I can go on some kind of HIV drug therapy and I keep getting stalled. I've been pos for 8 years and over time my energy levels have gone down and down, my body is just fighting this virus as it would any other virus, but it seems that my blood counts are still in the 'normal' range, but they keep referring to the numbers like it's a bible or something. "Oh, you're fine right now, your CD4 counts are so and so and your viral load is so and so...... you're fine, let's just wait and see." Yeah right. Let's just wait and see me fall apart and get really sick, and THEN you might start acting on it and giving me something to fight this infection. Look. I've always had a robust immune system. I fight this fight really well, and my body copes with the onslaught. But it gets TIRED. Freaking tired. I'm at the stage now where I'm getting up out of bed and then after a few hours I just collapse immediately and have to go back to sleep. My life is on hold. I can't work. I'm getting old before my time. Just because my blood levels stay at an acceptable level does that mean that this disease is not taking it's toll on me? All it means is that while my body is effectively warding off this infection, other things it should be doing are being ignored. My blood counts might be nice, but the way I feel is definitely not nice. Like my normal healing and my normal energy levels. I scratch myself and the mark on my skin stays for weeks now. It used to be days. I get colds at the drop of a hat where I never was sick before. I feel weak and old every single day and I can't work or do anything. And I go to the doctor for help and all they do is take my blood and tell me to come back in three months. My body is doing the best it can and because it is doing an OK job, the doctor tells me that no medication is necessary. Well today I quit. Today I made a decision. I'm taking my health back into my own hands. Just like if I had the flu, or a cold, or any other infection, I'm hitting it on the head and stamping it out. I don't have to be nearly half dead to deserve something to get rid of it. I don't have to be falling apart and have my immune system destroyed beyond repair for me to be able to ask politely "please can I have something to make me well again?" My "numbers" might look normal, but I've been in this body for 44 years and I know how I fight a fight. I go and go and go and go and go, and I show amazing strength and tenacity, and then after ages and ages of punching and fighting and not giving in, I suddenly collapse. I can't go on anymore and I fall down. Well myself and my body are one and the same thing. Why should the way I fight infection be any different from the way I fight a fight? My immune system is simply an aspect of myself. It's one and the same as far as I am concerned. And I can see it now. I'm alive, I'm existing, I'm fighting. Then all of a sudden "boom". My body gives up and I go downhill VERY FAST. No. Give me drugs now, let me hit it on the head and get rid of it while I'm still alive. Give my body a rest and some breathing space. It's no different in my mind to any other infection I might have. If I had the flu or a cold, I would ask for something to get rid of it and let me heal. Why is this any different? The way this clinic is letting me suffer the virus and not do anything to stop it makes me feel like I'm in some kind of 'control group', letting it go it's natural course to see how it goes compared to others who are on meds. All that matters in my mind is that there are medical capabilities out there which enable me to deal with this infection and I'm not being offered them. Isn't that malpractice? If I had tetanus in my foot surely they wouldn't just observe it to see if it 'went away' or 'stabalised'. I'm given constant drugs to keep my herpes at bay FFS, THAT won't kill me, but the HIV will. Why are they so slow to knock THIS virus on it's head? Research?!? I am going to MAKE my doctor give me something to kill off this virus. I don't care if he thinks my "numbers" are fine or not, I want my energy back, I want my life back, I want my vitality back, I want to do things, to go places, to be able to get up out of bed and know without doubt that I will be able to commit to being up for more than 8 hours and not collapse in a heap afterwards. And if he doesn't help me I'll report him and go somewhere else. I tried for 8 years to follow protocol and trust in what very respected Melbourne clinics had to tell me. I have decided that they don't know squat. They have their "recipe", but they really don't know what to think at the end of the day. Only I know my own body and how it feels, and only I know what I should do for it's survival now.
I feel sorry for this poor sap thinking HIV has something to do with being tired, but I congratulate the doctor for not allowing or advocating therapy and the poisoning by cocktails.
http://www.ourcivilisation.com/aids/not/intro.htm
This link provides some interesting info of how one developed AIDS after taking 60mg of prednisone and after 4 clinical trial, HIV- converted to HIV+ after taking AZT.
So patients who were given an immunosuppresent developed a suppressed immune system? That is mind boggling. Thank goodness the AIDS dissdents are here to tell us this.
I see that you didn't bother to comment about hiv-persons becoming HIV+ after taking AZT.
Oh so it's only OK for you to ignore parts of my posts?
I did see it and I don't know enough about the cases to comment on them or else I would have. Given the premise of the page seems to be based around surprise that an immunosuppresent weakens ones immune system I had trouble taking most of it seriously.
I'm swamped today and haven't had a chance to look up the studies he cites yet, but note he's requiring viral isolation or other means to call them "HIV+"--not the antibody test:
He doesn't even note, though, if they were retested at the end to call them then "HIV+" by Al-Bayati's terms. Would he accept the antibody test then? (Probably so, if he could say that AZT "caused" them to become HIV+).
It's incredibly dishonest of him, to say the least. Not that I'd expect anything less....
I've been through this many, many times before. I read the studies. Each of them include a positive test on a HIV antibody test in the entry criteria. Every single person in the study was HIV+. Al-Bayati is simply lying.
I emailed Al-Bayati several years ago in 2002 to point this out to him. His response was "I am the expert and I can defend my interpretation and the facts presented in a court of law concerning this matter". Expert? He's an expert in lying.
All patients in these trials were HIV+. The papers themselves make it very clear.
Al-Bayati's lies have been exposed since 2002 and yet the same crap keeps on coming up 5 years later. There is no excuse for this dishonesty.
Noreen, you said:
I hoped you might pass comment on what you think of Al-Bayati's claims now you know exactly what the truth is concerning these cases/studies.
(1) Do you think Al-Bayati is honestly representing these studies?
(2) Does realisation that he has lied make you reconsider his other claims on the subject of HIV?
You accused Apy of failing to comment on this, so I hope you will now live up to your own expected standards in this regard, and give us a clear, appropriate, and to the point response.
Carter,
Thank you for bringing the following paper to our attention:
Sackoff JE et al. Causes of death among persons with AIDS in the era of highly active antiretroviral therapy: New York City. Ann Intern Med. 2006 Sep 19;145(6):397-406.
This study of a large populaion of people with AIDS living in New York City between 1999 and 2004 drew from a group of 68,669 persons with AIDS who were at least 13 years of age.
Between 1999 and 2004, the overall death rate in this population declined from 578 deaths per 10,000 persons with AIDS to 285 deaths per 10,000 persons with AIDS--a decrease of 51%.
The rate of HIV-related deaths decreased by 55% (from 458 deaths per 10,000 persons with AIDS to 206 deaths per 10,000 persons with AIDS).
The rate of non-HIV-related deaths decreased by 34% (from 120 deaths per 10 000 persons with AIDS to 79 deaths per 10 000 persons with AIDS).
As the authors point out, these dramatic decreases in the death rates from HIV-related and non-HIV-related causes continue the trends first noticed after the introduction of HAART in the mid-1990's.
Again, thank for for calling our attention to this paper. It takes a big person to bring up data that disproves your claim that HAART is equivalent to poisoning AIDS patients.
Thank you for bringing the following paper to our attention
Franklin, I don't know who "we" are except it's probably Legion, but before you tout this study on AIDStruthy, tell me, apart from the headline, where do you find support in the text that HAARTs are directly responsible for the decline in mortality? Getting people off AZT was undoubtedly a good thing, but doesn't really qualify as a direct positive effect of HAARTs. Twentyfive years of experience with treating OIs like PCP is also valuable. But come on now, we all know the naming magic trick from the very first HIV studies.
http://www.reviewingaids.org/awiki/index.php/Document:Fast_Food_Etiology
So Franklin, What would happen to your neat little inference if I were to wave my wand and rename the paper thusly?
Pope et al. Causes of death among persons with AIDS in the era of highly significant non-compliance with active antiretroviral therapy
Pope,
I dont understand (I may be a little bit slow) why you say that HAART dont reduce mortality of HIV patients.
If we compare mortality of HIV HAART naive people with low CD4, and HAART treated people, it looks to me clear cut that HAART reduce mortality over no treatment.
Braganza,
I was commenting on a specific study is that where you found this info?
Pope,
Carter cited Sackof et al. (2006) as evidence that HAART is equivalent to poisoning AIDS patients. This study examines the mortality rate and the causes of death of adults living with AIDS in New York City from 1999 to 2004. This is a period in which the use of HAART became widespread, and Carter selectively quoted short passages from the study.
I cited the results of the study in greater detail, namely that the overall death rate declined by 51%, the death rate due to HIV-related causes declined by 55%, and the death rate due to non-HIV-related causes declined by 34%. These results provide no support for Carter's claim that HAART is equivalent to poisoning AIDS patients.
In fact, the authors point out that the decline in mortality continues the dramatic trend that started when HAART was introduced in the mid-1990's. Although the authors of the paper Carter cited were unable to track down the medication history of the AIDS patients who died, they do refer to previous work that did make this connection.
For example, Palella et al. (1998) performed a detailed analysis of the relationship between mortality and variables including demographic characteristics, disease manifestations, and types of therapy for a large population of AIDS patients treated in the US between 1994 and 1997. They found that the overall death rate for patients with at least one CD4+ T-cell count below 100 cells/microliter decreased from 29.4 per 100 person-years in 1995 to 16.7 per 100 person-years in 1996 and to 8.8 per 100 person-years in the second quarter of 1997.
Of interest to your claim that "getting people off AZT was undoubtedly a good thing," the authors compared the mortality rates for patients receiving no antiretroviral therapy, nucleoside analogue monotherapy, nucleoside analogue combination therapy, and combination therapy including a protease inhibitor.
The death rates are highest for no therapy, decrease with nucleoside analogue monotherapy, decrease further with nucleoside analogue combination therapy, and decrease even further with combination therapy including a protease inhibitor. Compared to nucleoside analogue monotherapy, patients receiving no antiretroviral therapy had a 1.5-fold increased risk of death, and compared to combination therapy including a protease inhibitor, patients receiving no antiretroviral therapy had a 4.5-fold increased risk of death.
So the paper that Carter brought to our attention provides no support for his claim that HAART is equivalent to poison, and the earlier work cited by this paper shows that even monotherapy was better than no treatment in this large population of AIDS patients.
If you weren't so intent on burying your head in the sand, you would already know this information.
Elisa was courageously defending Duesberg's bizarre interpretation of Palella et al without even reading the study.
The data presented in Tables 1 and 2 totally destroy Duesberg's nonsense.
Franklin, you are correct that Sackof et al. do not seem to justify Cartere's claim; neither does it justify yours.
Palella et al. has, as Dr. Noble says, already been discussed - although as usual he is freely inventing stories about who has read what. I do not accept the therapy free group as proper controls, and neither should you. Otherwise you would have to explain why there is a marked decline '96-'97 in the No Therapy category as well.
Nobody is claiming that this represents a double blind prospective study. Nevertheless the data clearly supports the argument that HAART reduces mortality and morbidity. You need to be stupid or dishonest to argue as Duesberg does that the data supports the argument that HAART is poison.
Can you come up with a plausible argument as to why the mortality rate when people are not taking any drugs is significantly higher than when they are taking antiretrovirals? Go for it.
Antiretrovirals were given preferentially to those who were more ill. This effect would lead to the observed mortality in the non-therapy group being reduced and the mortality in the treatment groups being increased.
Antiretrovirals were given preferentially to those who were more ill
I take it by "more ill" you mean "advanced stage AIDS", which is your usual definition for when drug treatment is commenced. See it'salltheselittle insidedetailson the studies that you have access to and I don't, which makes it difficult for me to come up with plausible explanations for anything. All I can see is that there's a marked decline in the No Treatment category mortality and the Monotherapy group seems to have been cured entirely.
Pope,
I'm not sure why you conclude that there is a "marked decline in the No Treatment category mortality" nor why you think the "Monotherapy group seems to have been cured."
It doesn't take any "inside information" to see that these interpretations are unjustified by the data.
The main difference in the No Treatment and Monotherapy groups in 1997, is the decline in the number of patients in these groups.
In 1994-1995, the No Treatment group contained from 74 to 183 persons in each calendar quarter, and the corresponding mortality rates ranged from 38 to 66 deaths per 100 person-years.
In contrast, in the first quarter of 1997, only 46 patients are in the No Treatment group and in the second quarter of 1997, only 37 patients are in this group.
These small sample sizes lead to larger errors in determining the death rates for the respective calendar quarter.
In the first calendar quarter, 1 death in the No Treatment group leads to a death rate of 16.1 deaths per 100-person-years, whereas in the second quarter, 3 deaths lead to a death rate of 51.6 deaths per 100 person-years. Only 2 more people died in the second quarter compared to the first quarter, but the death rate jumped from 16.1 to 51.6 deaths per 100 person-years. A smaller group size, unsurprisingly, leads to noisier data.
Have you ever taken an introductory statistics course?
In contrast, in the second quarter of 1997, the overall death rate for the entire group of 574 patients is only 8.8 deaths per 100 person-years. Of these 574 patients, 460 are in the group receiving combined treatment including a proteinase inhibitor, with a death rate of 7.8 deaths per 100 person-years.
What is clear from reviewing these data is that as more and more patients were shifted into the group receiving combined treatment including a proteinase inhibitor, the death rate progressively declined.
This evidence is inconsistent with Carter's claim that giving patients HAART is equivalent to poisoning them.
Dear John (Moore),
So good to hear from you indirectly again (I get all of my mail from you forwarded through my deans and chairmen), so it really is a distinct honor to see you are still thinking about my questions (but continue to refuse the 25 G to go to Christine's invitation to sunny California for a simple, and courteous debate. Maybe you should think about her offer before you get up before the next international AIDS conference and make an absolute fool of yourself by stating that AIDS is a disease of too many lympycytes, as in the case of Eliza Jane, and that her mother, who never tested consistently positive is a menace to the world. For shame! I'm quite confident, that if you did engage Christine, or any of us, that you would perhaps be surprised to find that many of the questions we ask are legitimate, and deserve discussion.
To briefly address your slanderous allegations against me, it was the result of merely quoting over the years, at least 8 pieces of documentation regarding the Bethesda-Pasteur collaboration that had been written by others such as Crewdson and Dingell and others. Dr. Gallo corrected this confusing 5 year Dingell-HSS history, for all the good it did in convincing even the AIDS apologists at my institution that there was in fact no wrong doing. After Dr. Gallo sent me the material, and after numerous conversations, I apologized to him sincerely, and maintain his version of the correct facts. Since then, I have been reviewing the nature of the molecular signature found in his 48 of out 119 subjects, but that is another story you might soon hear about.
Despite my in earnest attempts to discuss AIDS science with you more than a year or two ago, only to receive your typical response that AIDS denialists aren't worthy of a response to an email, etc., when will you come clean and admit that your "HAIL MARY" experiments in which you described smearing microbicides on monkey genitals and inseminating them 3-5 times is nothing more than a complete waste of time and money? Moreover, through your research, you continue of course to exploit poor people who tend to be African Americans, or Africans, with your microbicide campaigns, and as Altman rightly recently pointed out, increase the rates of "infection" in those to whom your genital microbicides are applied. How did you come down on the Tripoli 6, Dr. Moore? Do you agree with Montagnier and want to blame the 426 "infections" on blacks from "subsaharan Africa as well?"
"It was completely clear scientifically since 2002 that they (the Tripoli 6) were not guilty," said Vittorio Colizzi, a renowned AIDS expert who was invited by the Qaddafi family to study the hospital in Benghazi where the infections took place and was given wide access to wards and medical records. "But the nurses suffered for years from the incapacity of diplomacy and politics to free them in a timely manner."
"He and another expert, Dr. Luc Montagnier, the French virologist whose team discovered HIV, concluded that the AIDS virus was present in the hospital before the nurses arrived, probably brought to Libya by guest workers from countries in sub-Saharan Africa. (In other words, it the fault of the blacks, if this quote from Montagnier is accurate)."
We really aren't in a time warp, Dr. Moore, as you claim-the negative reports about the toxicity of medications continue to appear in mainstream journals, and the irresponsible, I'd say criminal wholesale human experimentation your ilk continues to foist on unsuspecting persons continues. For example, your statements about the lack of toxicity about the CCR5 and other so-called "HIV" inhibitors are countered by recent reports in business magazines that report:
"Some experts said they were a bit cautious about maraviroc, in part because it blocks a human protein instead of a viral one, with possible unknown long-term effects. One CCR5 inhibitor that was being developed by GlaxoSmithKline was dropped because it caused liver toxicity, and a second being developed by Schering-Plough appeared to possibly raise the risk of blood cancers."
Before criticising others for asking questions, you might try to swallow your pride a bit, and explain the failure of the Merck vaccine announced a week or two ago. That brings the failure(s) into the several dozens as far as I'm aware and which is documented on the Congressional Records I have obtained, of completed and reported and completely failed "HIV" vaccine trials that all have failed to evoke humoral, cellular, mucosal immunity, not to mention a failure to activate T-cells because the wrong toxic adjuvants continue to be used. What was so disgustingly downplayed, of course about the recent Merck failure, was not that the control group actually had less seroconversions than the vaccinated group (which is what was reported), but that there was a failure to show seroconversion in the vaccinated group (unless you want to claim of couse that the 21 out of 741 represents seroconversion due to the vaccine and not that it failed to protect more people in the vaccinated group.
What it all means, Dr. Moore, is that although the template for the molecular signatures of "HIV" may derive from common endogenous DNA sequences whose proteins are expressed by normal uninfected yeast, insects, cows, goats, dogs, rhesus monkeys, chimps, and humans, neither "HIV's proposed 9,150 bp molecular sequence, or its proteins have been isolated or identified without contaminating cellular components. For instance, it has been repeatedly shown more than 30 times in "HIV" vaccine trials that antibodies against "HIV" proteins aren't evoked even when the so-called unique and diagnostic "HIV'" antigens are injected directly into the bloodstream of healthy humans (according to "experts," no molecular entity associated with "HIV" sequences, proteins, or glycoproteins such as GP120, has been shown to be immunogenic in humans, perhaps because it is a case of self being challenged by self), and the Merck "HIV" vaccine was only the last utter complete and disappointing failure, not only in preventing acquisition of "HIV," but in the failure to evoke anti-"HIV" antibodies in the 741 volunteers:
"In a major setback, one of the leading experimental AIDS vaccines not only failed to prevent test subjects from becoming infected with HIV, but it didn't offer any indication it might delay the onset of full-blown AIDS, which had been a key hope."
"24 of 741 volunteers who got the vaccine in one segment of the experiment later became infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. In a comparison group of volunteers who got dummy shots, 21 of 762 participants also became infected."
"The ultimate fear among researchers is that the whole theory underlying the Merck vaccine might be flawed, which, if true, could doom an entire class of experimental vaccines."
It may be more appropriate to say that the whole theory of "HIV=AIDS" is flawed, because there is no evidence that an exogenous "AIDS virus" has been isolated, and shown to evoke an antibody response in vaccine recipients or cause disease in either an animal model or a human being. Again, I strees that unless one would like to make unfounded assumptions that the 24 of the 741 volunteers that "became infected" in this last of more than 30 failed "HIV" trials actually represents an extremely low rate of seroconversion due to exposure of isolated "HIV" components to the human immune system (24/741), and that these 24 individuals are now immunized against "HIV" instead of having acquired an "HIV" infection, the similar rate of seroconversion in the control group (21/762) suggests that this cannot be the case, and it is more likely, that seroconversion in both groups represents mere testing artifacts.
Hail Mary indeed!
Cheers,
andy
Assitant Research Professor
Director of the Greek Mafia
Special Secret Agent and
Black Helicopter pilot,
Holocaust Denialist,
and Flat Earther
Hey Dr. maniotis,
Really liked the interview on edge tv, keep up the good work. John moore has joined us on the other thread,"they dont remember" and Ive taken him to school, come join in the fun!
Hey Dr. mantious,
Really loved your interview on edge tv except you weren't on Edge TV were you google it youtube it. Do you have a Gears of War clan bc I wanna join it I love you I'm good at the torque bow shoot em they blow up COOL. Like in Orwells Russia Hitlers 1984 Satlins Germany google it youtube it.
John moore joined us on the other thread I took him to the top schools I know hundreds of people at, Harvard and my high school. Project daylily google it youtube it. Mycoplamsa.
1) The vaccine was primarily intended to generate a cellular immune response rather than antibodies.
2) Infection with HIV was not determined by antibody tests. Incredible as it may seem the people that do the research are aware that HIV antibodies may be generated and therefore use other techniques such as nucleic acid testing to confirm HIV infection.
These small sample sizes lead to larger errors in determining the death rates for the respective calendar quarter.
Bingo!
Andrew,
You posted the following explanation for your recent apologies to Dr. Gallo:
However, on this very thread, you admitted to telling the following lie:
Although you fail to provide the citation for "the work" to which you refer, you seem to be referring to a series of four papers published by Dr. Gallo in Science on May 4, 1984.
Do you really expect anyone to believe that you were misled by Crewdson, Dingell or anyone else about whether or not these four papers were peer reviewed prior to publication in Science?
Just in case you have never actually read these papers, I want to let you know that each of them states that they were received by Science on 30 March 1984, and accepted for publication on 19 April 1984.
The press conference to which you refer occured on April 23, 1984, four days after the papers had been accepted by Science and less than two weeks before they were published.
Your need to apologize for mistating such simple facts proves, once again, that when it comes to AIDS you "really don't understand what is going on."
I really don't understand what is going on.
--Andrew Maniotis July 6, 2007
Franklin. Who exactly were the "peers" that reviewed Gallo's papers anyway? Does anyone know? Did any of them have a clue at that point of what his papers said or what they meant?
None of the four papers evidenced HTLV-III as the sure cause of AIDS. Nothing was up at that point except calling it a possible cause. Even if the peers were completely ignorant, anything at that point could have been called the possible cause.
The first that HTLV-III was actually called THE CAUSE, seems to have happened quite mysteriously in a communication from the NIH a short 3 months later, wherein Gallo's find was actually and officially called "THE CAUSE" of AIDS, without any proof whatsoever.
So just what's up here Franklin? How did it go from 36% in the four "peer reviewed" papers of April 84, and from only being a "possible" cause of AIDS, to being called by the NIH top brass 3 months later as "THE CAUSE" of AIDS. There was no papers or evidence to back that statement up that came out over the next 3 months!
Can you explain to us how 36% mysteriously proved that HTLV-III was the cause of AIDS???
Did any of these peers believe or agree that the measly 36% of Gallo's AIDS cases who were showing evidence of RT that was assumed to be due to HTLV-III was sufficient to place HTLV-III as the cause of AIDS?
Were any of these "peers" some of the same top brass at the NIH who were involved 3 months later in calling it "THE CAUSE"?
Or did they actually and simply agree that such findings of only finding possible evidence of it in only 36% of 72 AIDS cases showed ONLY A POSSIBILITY that HTLVIII was the causative factor for AIDS?
Did any of the "peers" actually know anything at all about retroviruses or about RT? Extremely few knew anything about RT as well at that time. Very very few people knew anything at all about retrovirae such back then.
The paper itself was quite obviously fatally flawed in that Gallo had the supposed critter identified as being in his HTLV family, which it turned out it was not even ever related to such.
Can you explain how that happened Franklin?
How much pull did Gallo have with these peers and over at "Science" to get printed what he wanted printed at science?
I am aware, according to discussions among researchers, that the upper levels of science at that point and time were pretty much of a "good ole boys" network of "I'll approve of your work if you approve of mine".
Did any such thing happen with Gallo's work? Did any of the "peers" owe Gallo a favor and a backscratching or two?
Do tell, Franklin, just who were these presumed peers whose opinions you so wholeheartedly accept, how connected to Gallo were they, did they allow the paper only as a possible cause, and how did the claim go from possible to probable at the news conference, to ABSOLUTE a mere 3 months later in the communications from the director of the NIH?
Inquiring minds would like to know!
Here is the paper Franklin. It shows perfectly well, in black and white, that evidence of HTLVIII was found in ONLY 26 of 72 adults and juveniles with AIDS. Furthermore it says, and I quote, HTLViii "MAY BE" the cause of AIDS. It does not even say probably!!!:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed&uid=6200936&cmd=show…
Science. 1984 May 4;224(4648):500-3 Frequent detection and isolation of cytopathic retroviruses (HTLV-III) from patients with AIDS and at risk for AIDS.Gallo RC, Salahuddin SZ, Popovic M, Shearer GM, Kaplan M, Haynes BF, Palker TJ, Redfield R, Oleske J, Safai B
We are patiently waiting for your full explanation Franklin for how HTLViii went in three months from a "maybe" in the paper itself, to an absolute fact in internal NIH communications 3 months later from Gallo's superior, Sam Broder, at the NIH!
Hey Franklin.
Why does Sam Broder, Gallo's boss at the NIH, say, and I quote:
"AZT laid the foundation for almost every other product because the failure of AZT would have had very dramatic effects on future drug research".
This is a direct quote right from the mouth of Sam Broder, right on the NIH website: "In their own words/NIH Researchers recall the early years of AIDS."
http://history.nih.gov/nihinownwords/docs/page_09.html
This statement alone CLEARLY SHOWS that it was of PURELY FUTURE FINANCIAL INTEREST, not HEALTH INTEREST, that got AZT approved in 4 short months of shabby research, that was subsequently and ignorantly used to poison hundreds of thousands of mostly gay men.
Franklin, care to explain to a gay man why you willingly promote the murder and iatrogenic poisoning of gay men?
But Michael,
Does Haart reduce mortality of low CD4 HIV+ over non-treated HIV+ or no ?
If it reduce mortality there is a strong link between "anti-retroviral" and improving health, therefore between retrovirus and reversing AIDS.
So if the link HIV-AIDS was not very clear in 1984, as you clearly show, BUT it is now, could you agree that Gallo was an intuitive genious ?
Treatment systems and drugs, AZT in particular, may not have been perfect, but this is another question that dont preclude the fact that both treatments and drugs may be improved, they have been between 1984 and 2007, and would surely be in the future.
Michael,
You ask:
Well, Michael, I don't see any mention of financial interests in the quote you provided. Perhaps if we look at the full quote (on page 15 of the interview) we will find some support for your claim:
So it seems that Dr. Broder was referring to the dramatic intellectual effects that a failure of AZT would have had, stifling research into antiretroviral drugs because of the perceived difficulty of the research area. He took a risk by focusing his career an important health problem for which there was no guarantee of success. Had he not been successful in identifying an effective therapy for AIDS, his career might have sufferred tremendously.
Fortunately, Dr. Broder didn't follow your preferred strategy for dealing with AIDS. He refused to bury his head in the sand and started testing drugs for their in vitro activity to inhibit replication of HIV. He identified AZT, and pioneered the era of effective antiretroviral therapy.
On the other hand, you feel that you can forestall the effects of your lover's HIV infection by making false claims about the scientific work of others. Good luck with that approach.
So if the link HIV-AIDS was not very clear in 1984, as you clearly show, BUT it is now, could you agree that Gallo was an intuitive genious?
Gallo was the reincarnated f-ing Nostradamus, and thanks for the clarification of proper scientific method. Only one caveat, you forgot a capitalized "IF" after the capitalized "BUT" Mr. man in the middle.
HAART-HIV TREATMENT RESPONSE AND PROGNOSIS IN EUROPE AND NORTH AMERICA IN THE FIRST DECADE OF HIGHLY ACTIVE ANTIRETROVIRAL THERAPY: A COLLABORATIVE ANALYSIS:
Methods: We analyzed data from 22217 treatment-naïve HIV-1-infected adults who had started HAART and were followed in one of 12 cohort studies. The probablility of reaching 500 or less HIV-1 RNA copies per mL by 6 months, and the change in CD4 cell counts, were analyzed for patients starting HAART in 1995-96, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, and 2002-03. The primary endpoints were the hazard ratios for AIDS and for death from all causes in the first year of HAART, which were estimated using Cox regression.
Interpretation: Virological response after starting HAART improved over calander years, but such improvement has not translated into a decrease in mortality.[The Antiretroviral Therapy (ART) cohort Collaboration-www.thelancet.com Vol 368, 451-58, August 5, 2006],
Dear Pope,
In the paper that you cite the authors are giving a range of reasons why virological reponse has not been translated in mortality decrease... Novel patients have lower CD4, and have been in contact with more dangerous strains of mycobacteria tuberculosis...
So you are not proving anything, just putting your own finger in your eye...
Even ARAS agrees that HAART works...
Dear Pope,
In the paper that you cite the authors are giving a range of reasons why virological reponse has not been translated in mortality decrease... Novel patients have lower CD4, and have been in contact with more dangerous strains of mycobacteria tuberculosis...
So you are not proving anything, just putting your own finger in your eye...
Even ARAS agrees that HAART works...
Braganza, it's not my job to prove anything, it's yours.
There are very, very, very, very etc. few papers out there
where less flattering results are not explained (away). because the fundamental premise is that HIV causes AIDS and that the drugs work. I asked you before to please familiarize yourself with the dissident perspective if you want to engage with us - you don't have to agree with it, but at least grasp it intellectually. Once more, All HIV/AIDS research is based on fundamental premises from which every result, positive or negative, is explained. It's called "bias".
The fact remains, such improvement has not translated into a decrease in mortality
Ok no, let me try this a different way with you.
Of course you can pull out study upon study which supports, or at least appears to support, your position. That is a given, otherwise you would be the dissident and we wouldn't be having this argument. Do you understand that this is the starting position: the "overwhelming evidence" is on the surface in your favour. All HIV scientists' interpretations of their own work wil be in your favour? That no dissident can argue with you about - per definition of the term "dissident". What we can do is dig and look for the crags and faults in the whole structure as such; places where things don't quite fit.
So again, if that is not enough for you, please consider yourself the "winner" and us nutcases and be on your merry way. Good riddance to both sides.
Dear Pope,
Thanks for proposing to engage a friendly discussion.
Could you tell me why do you consider yourself as a "rethinker"?
On Robert Gallo, my opinion he is extraordinarily intelligent, and opposite to others contributors to this blog that I am not going to name, he is a MAN OF VISION.
Not only because he managed, (fact that is now confirmed by labs around the world) to predict that HIV was related to AIDS without isolating it in all patients, but also because he is enough flexible to understand that despite the fact that "HAART is more efficient than monotherapie, it still on the long term will lead to toxicity, especially in the bone marrow. Long term cytotoxic therapy would also lead to the suppression of CD8 cells which are essential to control HIV, via killer cells activities and release of suppressive factors."
He is therefore just developing a system of treatment using a NATURAL PRODUCT, that is NOT TOXIC as HAART, human Chorionic Gonadotropin. It is true system is still in development, but results in vitro where quite interesting and in vivo he has been also using it as a monotherapie (see patient PH-VE table 1 of his US patent 6699656) managing to decrease the viral load from log5 to undetectable and constant CD4+.
Now what is going to happen when the non- toxic non-HAART treatment is going to be public, supported by the NIH and others public health institutions ? The so-called "denialist" movment is going to be finished, because patients like Noreen, or Michael friend would not any more have any fear of using it, and I am sorry to tell you that , theories like Duesberg'ones and Perth's group would go to the "bin of history" by lack not only of proof, but also of supporters.
He is not a SUPER-GENIOUS ? He knows where to go.
With friendship,
Braganza,
I appreciate that you are impressed with Dr. Gallo. You are certainly not the only one. What rethinkers
are saying is that Gallo's vision has always been that retrovirues cause disease in humans. Duesberg's vision was the same - even before Gallo, if we are to believe Dr. Trrll. However, Duesberg found that his "vision" didn't correspond with reality. Duesberg left that path, Gallo didn't. Maybe Gallo was right and Duesberg wrong, who knows? You seem to know already, since you have already consigned Duesberg and the Perth Group to the trash bin. I'd say that makes you something of a visionary yourself...
I happen to think that science does not work by retrospective verification - especially not in matters as grave as HIV. If Gallo happened to be right about HIV/AIDS, this would be clever guesswork, not science, in my opinion. You may have read that Dr. Trrll calls Dr. Gallo "ancient history", which he doesn' even want to discuss. Scientifically speaking that makes Dr. Gallo a scientific fortune teller - with emphasis on fortune - again in my opinion.
I welcome a non-toxic HIV drug, But as you well know there are very few non-toxic medicines in Western allopathic arsenal, depending on dose. A cheap, non-toxic medicine that truly works not only against "HIV" but also against AIDS (beneficial effect on surrogate (CD4) markers is not enough as demonstrated by the study I linked above) would make Duesberg and Perth Group redundant; it would however, not necessarily prove them wrong.
Pope,
Thanks for answering my mail.
I have in fact a major admiration for Dr. Gallo.
I have been in Perth Group web page, and I thought that they were too much fixed in the past. They may have had a point on the isolation of HIV in 1984, but not in the age of molecular biology and cloning, mainly when experiments are done by different independent labs, and could prove the existence of both HIV-1 and HIV-2. This position is a joke, and I cannot understand why Prof. Maniotis is defending it.
So HIV exist, and we can answer now the question that Perth Group have on Montagnier/ Oxidative stress/ AIDS and HIV.
I don't have read all Duesberg papers in detail (I am sorry), but his paper with Koehnlein and Rasnick 2003 The chemical bases of the various AIDS epidemics: recreational drugs, has been analysed in this blog, and a minutious comparison with his references has been performed (Palella paper in particular).
I could not find any wrong in the analysis which look to me as a major rebuttal to Duesberg theories.
If you want to check by yourself you can download Palella paper from Mathias Rath (http://www.dr-rath-foundation.org.za/pdf-files/2007/affidavit-mr/Palell…) and Duesberg paper from his web page and make your own deductions.
It was so clear, that I thought to suggest Prof. Moore to ask ElkMountainMan/ and A.Noble to write a rebuttal of Duesberg papers with references available on-line for download in his AIDSTRUTH page. This would have been better than all the discussion in AIDSTRUTH about Duesberg personality/ hate of gays that we cannot check.
At the end I didn't because Prof. Moore is a politician, and it is unclear (to me) for and against whom he is developing his political struggle.
Some non- retroviral based treatments for AIDS conditions exist in the US. The main problem is that they don't have gone yet to the testing requirements that are advocated by people like Franklin/ or ElkMountainMan, guaranties that they work are slimmer, based on limited published bio-chemical information and/ or limited trials.
As an example, in this blog, Noreen has been introducing us to LDN, Low Dose Naltrexone and to Cordiceps.
Noreen suggested that using LDN, AIDS could be controlled without looking to viral load, which I thought was revolutionary. See more at http://www.lowdosenaltrexone.org/
There is the work from Toni Gradl ( a friend of Dr Kremer, but who thinks that viral load is very important, for some difficult to grasp concepts that ElkMontainMan has explained above)
www.immun-therapie.net/nahrungserg-bei-aids.pdf
who shows a drop of viral load and a major increase in CD4 using some herbal treatment. There are however no details on what was used making the experiment difficult to reproduce independently.
I don't know what is the herbal but Kremer ideas can be traced to Hassig and Hassig MH paper give some clues of what could be chosen as neutraceutical, only major changes could be the fact that Gradl used nano-carrier.
There are many patents with non-retroviral treatments to AIDS related conditions, from known scientists like Hertzenberg to unknown fellows.
One that impressed me was the one from Knox Van Dyke.
Prof. Knox Van Dyke is a Professor of Biochemistry at West Virginia University. He has a good professional reputation, as he developped new malaria compounds (recently licenced to Millenia).
He wrote a chapter in the textbook "Modern Pharmacology With Clinical Applications" - Charles R. Craig, Robert E. Stitzel - 2003, on treatment of HIV, explaining HAART, so he would know a lot about HAART, and subtilities of why using a particular combination of antiretrovirals,
BUT
He also presented a method to control AIDS using nutritional supplements and an anti-inflammatory steroid, or a plant extract, glycyrrhizic acid (from licorice root).
You can read the details of his method in the US 5686436, that you can download free of charge in extenso from the US Patent database at http://www.uspto.gov/patft/
You can find non ARV treatments that have been tested in clinical trials at :
Prof. H.Foster web page. www.hdfoster.com/. His method is very cheap.
The results of the clinical trial in Africa may have been overlooked because the journal where he published them is not abstracted in PubMed.
In sum, the fact that persons (in this blog) claim that there is NO EVIDENCE that non-HAART approaches could work against AIDS, look to me, ON THE BASIS OF AVAILABLE PUBLIC INFORMATION that they are also "IN DENIAL" of a reality that is going to catch them anyway.
I'd say it's game over for AIDS Truth in the EJ case.
Since I am a card carrying member of Alive&Well.org I hereby summarize for all you die hard supporters of AIDS Inc. the discussion on EJ Scovill,
AIDS Truthies have failed to respond to the following facts and challenges:
There is absolutely no evidence of pneumonia in EJ's lung tissue slides which were
prepared by the LA County Coroner's office;
EJ's lung tissue slides have been used in two different legal cases as
evidence of negative controls for pneumonia;
The coroner in EJ's case is under investigation by the California Medical
Board for gross negligence after charges of gross negligence were dropped
against EJ's pediatrician;
The year before EJ died, the coroner in her case twice accused innocent
parents of killing their children by starvation only to later admit he was
wrong in both instances;
The same coroner was responsible for the wrongful conviction and
incarceration of a mentally retarded homeless man, David Allen Jones, who
was proved innocent of murder and released from prison earlier this year on
appeal;
Given a chance to prove the coroner is right in EJ's case and do so in an
all expense paid trip to Los Angeles, Prof Moore, Bennett,
Bergmann and other AIDS Truthies run from the opportunity to
put forth their or any evidence in a public forum.
Hey Carter,
Scroll up and you will see a discussion of the extensive publicly available evidence for pneumonia in Eliza Jane Scovill's Autopsy.
http://scienceblogs.com/aetiology/2007/06/introduction_to_hiv_and_hiv_d…
This is hardly a fact.
The coroner's report states:
and
The paramedics who treated EJ diagnosed pneumonia. One of the doctors that saw EJ prior to this also suspected pneumonia but failed to diagnose it.
Al-Bayati is being economical with the truth. He certainly has not been using the slide of Eliza Jane's lungs that was stained with Gomori methenamine silver showing the presence of PC in the characteristic pink foamy casts that are diagnostic for PCP.
Doh! I should have looked before I went and read the coroner's report again.
This shows typical Denialist behaviour. Make a claim. Ignore a thorough response to the claim. Repeat the same claim again a few months later pretending that nobody has responded to it.
Hey fraklin,
apparently there is money for your discovery
yes and you to Chris. Cash in!!!
Everybody is being economical with the truth when we take the coroners report at face value...eh chris.
Do you have a point?
When Al-Bayati says there was no evidence for PC pneumonia he is flat out lying.
Why isn't Al-Bayati using the slide stained with GMS that shows PC in the foamy casts?
Al-Bayati's "differential diagnosis" included infection with Human Parvovirus B19 despite the complete and utter lack of evidence. Why should I believe anything that he says?
Any evidence for this "fact"?
The man was convicted because he confessed to having had sex with the victims and fighting with them. The discrepancy between Jones' blood type and the samples from the rape kits was presented to the jury.
Where do you get your "facts" from Carter?
Any evidence for this 'fact'?
Apart from this letter from an anonymous "Health Advocate" is there any evidence that Ribe is actually under investigation? The standard form letter response saying that they will look into the complaint as soon as they deal with other real problems doesn't count.
The anonymous "Health Advocate" appears to be somewhat fact challenged as they allege that the FDA has not approved any tests for the daignosis of HIV infection. The "Health Advocate" appears to get their information from Denialist websites rather than FDA websites.
Braganza, yes LDN and other non-invasive appoaches to treating terminal diseases are revoluntary, that's the problem. Using radiation to treat cancer has been the practice for well over fifty years. Like antiretroviral medications for full-blown AIDS, one can make the point that it works. However, check with the patient down the road and see what the side effects are to this approach.
Many herbs(plants), bio-electric treatments and now LDN have successfully cured cancer but the powers that be don't like it when this happens as this approch cuts into their profit margins so the patient is the one who is suffering in more than one way. I would recommend that anyone with a terminal disease to seek out alternative doctors in this country or else go outside of the country to Mexico or other nations, where many American doctors now practice so that they are not harrased by the system. Check the internet and see how many doctors have been arrested and placed in jail for successfully treating cancer without chemo, radiation and surgery. It's tragic.
The CDC needs to re-evaluate it's definition of what constitutes AIDS, if they insist on this new diagnosis. Viral loads and CD4's are flawed yardsticks. I would recommend to them that if a patient has say five or more AIDS defining diseases at the same time and abnormal lab work, then call it AIDS, whether HIV+ or not. However, I certainly would not use a viral load or CD4 measurement to seal their coffin for the rest of their life. If the patient recovers by whatever means, after a period of time, then like cancer, they should be in remission but God forbid we ever use the word "cured" for any disease!
Noreen,
You keep touting LDN as a cure for cancer.
Previously you reported on the exciting new results from the LDN Conference:
But how can you be so sure it was the LDN that cured the cancer reported in the conference?
Maybe it was cured by the beneficial effect of removing sugar from the diet and the LDN was completely irrelevant.
How can you distinguish between these possibilities?
Franklin, I believe that the combination of both certainly would make more sense. I have never heard of a case of cancer being cured simply by removing sugar, it would be great if this was enough, but I don't believe so. I have listened to the doctors and talked to enough patients with various immune diseases and believe that LDN plays a major part in their recovery. Nevertheless, it take a holistic approach with eating right, exercising and other good, health habits to affect a cure.
But no real evidence?
After all, "starving the cancer" sounds like it should be an effective approach.
Doctors had the conference had "real" evidence. They each presented their case histories, slides with PET scans of the cancer prior and after treatment. These patients who had weeks to a few months to live are alive and well. I don't know what is better evidence than that. Also, I was lucky enough to get to speak and having a full-blown AIDS person alive without antiretroviral medicine is quite remarkable too.
But how did they distinguish between the effects of removing sugar from the diet and the effects of LDN?
If sugar "feeds" the cancer, removing sugar from the diet may have more biological plausibility as a cancer therapy than Low Dose Naltrexone.
Maybe the cures are due to removing sugar and have nothing to do with LDN.
How can you be so sure that the cures are due to LDN?
To Chris Noble:
As an expert on the matter of my daughter's death, I invite you to Los Angeles to meet with me in a public forum and show me the pneumonia in EJ's lung tissue slides. Once you've confirmed your attendance, I will alert the coroner's office to this important event.
After the forum, we'll go to the local office of the Medical Board so you can report Dr. Al-Bayati for "flat out lying" in his report on EJ's case. The MBC needs to know about this so they can halt their investigation into the LA County Coroner's office and save further time and tax payers' dollars from being squandered on the claims of an alleged liar.
Your visit to the Medical Board would be especially timely since they have accepted Dr. Al-Bayati's review of another case involving gross negligence and scheduled a revocation of license hearing of a medical doctor based on his report If Dr. Al-Bayati is lying in his report on EJ, the MBC needs to know as they are taking his work seriously.
Once we've straightened out those two situations, we should fly to Canada to meet with prosecutors there who failed to convict Maureen Burke of killing her daughter because of Dr. Al-Bayati. In this case, Dr. A refuted the assertions of more than a dozen expert witnesses for the prosecution ranging from medical doctors to pathologists and toxicologists. Somehow his lies escaped the attention of everyone involved.
We'll then head to Texas where EJ's lung tissue slides are being used as evidence for negative controls for pneumonia in the case of a young father facing life in prison for the alleged murder of his daughter. I'm sure prosecutors there would be very interested in your refutation of evidence for his defense.
Chris, I hope to hear from you soon to confirm your involvement in these important matters.
To whomever responded to Carter's recent post:
We need to talk. Please contact me immediately at 818-780-1875 so we can compare records. You say that the EMT report states EJ had pneumonia but the one we have from the LA County Fire Department does not mention pneumonia, just cardiac arrest.
We also need to talk about the hospital records you cite. You say they state that EJ had pneumonia but the records we gave to the Medical Board of California and our attorneys do not make this assertion.
We must also go over the medical records you have for my daughter which you claim indicate that one of her three pediatricians suspected she had pneumonia. Our records show that none contain any remarks on suspected pneumonia, and that Dr. Jay Gordon--who was not charged by the medical board with negligence--actually ruled out pneumonia.
If you have information showing that Dr. Gordon or any other doctor failed to report suspected pneumonia, I think the MBC would be very interested in your testimony. Maybe you and Chris can both come here to straighten out these important matters.
Please contact me soon!
Thanks,
Christine
Urgent message to fellow rethinkers
Did you catch what JP moore said about Harvey bialy?
"(at least since Harvey Bialy wandered off the scene to die of his kidney cancer)" JOhn moore
Its in the "denialism they dont remember thread"
HEs a professor and hes mocking people while they are dying of cancer! THis quote shows what a sick madman he is! IF we make public this disgusting statement he made it would show the world what a deranged man he is!
Does Tara have the courage to condemn this statement? Is it ok to mock people while they might be dying of cancer?
Cornell should not tolerate intentionally mocking those who are possibly dying of Cancer, here is JP moores full disgusting post.
Here is his disgusting post, filled with ad hominem attacks as usual, but mocking people who are dying or possibly dying of Cancer?............
OK, now I'm really confused..... Pat, who its been obvious for days now is Christine Maggiore writing under a pseudonym, is attacked by fellow AIDS denialist Claus Jensen, writing as Molecular Entry Claw (why and why?), then admits in a fit of temper that she (Pat) is indeed Christine Maggiore, but next Molecular Entry Claw (Jensen) denies it was him who attacked her/Pat/Christine Maggiore, and then Christine Maggiore (writing under her own name or, as ElkMountainMan suggests, perhaps someone else pretending to be Christine Maggiore) denies being Pat after all, and also denies admitting that she (Pat?) admitted to being Christine Maggiore (have I missed any link in the bizarre chain of events?).
But then, thinking about, what else should one expect from AIDS denialists? They've never been known for clarity of expression, telling the truth, integrity, logic, etc. So the above events are entirely within their standard modus operandi, and no doubt they either see some perverse logic to it all, or else it's another manifestation of the internecine splits within the ranks of denialism that occur now and then, to the amusement of the rest of us (e.g., Perth Group vs Duesberg).
I'm also still confused about cooler, who appears to occupy this site principally to boast about his alleged sexual conquests, which presumably explains why his typing appears to be carried out using only one hand. But is cooler really a sophisticated plant, a parody of an AIDS denialist, created by AIDS professionals to make the world of denialism look worse than it already is, as has been suggested earlier on this string? It's an interesting theory. But to invent cooler would be overkill, as Jan Spreen is the living embodiment of the AIDS denialist parody, the arch conspiracy theorist and nihilist who already serves as AIDS science's best exemplar of the madness of AIDS denialism (at least since Harvey Bialy wandered off the scene to die of his kidney cancer). So, with Spreen already posting on this Blog, would anyone actually NEED to invent cooler? I doubt it, so cooler probably is real; sad, lonely, foolish, mono-dimensional, Dr.Lo-obsessed but real.
And who the heck is BuffaloValleyWoman?
Ah well, it's all too puzzling, and rather a waste of time, so I don't think I'll bother looking at this thread again. But do take a look at AIDS Truth's next posting, on how the denialists use fake identities and commit cybercrimes, to get some insights into just who some of these various people truly are, and how they operate on the internet.
John Moore (aka Moore, John; John P. Moore)
Posted by: John Moore | November 3, 2007 1:38 AM
To Chris Noble:
I don't know about Carter, but the evidence for my references to Ribe's twice changed autopsy conclusions in the case of David Allen Jones come from trial transcripts obtained through the office of his appeal attorney, Gigi Gordon. You can look her up at the CA Bar Association web site and contact her yourself if you're interested in going beyond LA Times coverage and reviewing the facts in the case.
With regard to the Medical Board of CA investigation into Dr. Ribe, are you suggesting that the notice of the investigation on MBC letterhead that appears at the JusticeForEJ web site is a forgery? If so, should that not be reported immediately to the state attorney general's office?
As per my last message, I hope you will come here and reveal how fake lab evidence and lying pathologists (and now fake documents) are involved in a case under investigation by various governmental agencies.
Christine
To Chris Noble:
As an expert on the matter of my daughter's death, I invite you to Los Angeles to meet with me in a public forum and show me the pneumonia in EJ's lung tissue slides. Once you've confirmed your attendance, I will alert the coroner's office to this important event.
After the forum, we'll go to the local office of the Medical Board so you can report Dr. Al-Bayati for "flat out lying" in his report on EJ's case. The MBC needs to know about this so they can halt their investigation into the LA County Coroner's office and save further time and tax payers' dollars from being squandered on the claims of an alleged liar.
Your visit to the Medical Board would be especially timely since they have accepted Dr. Al-Bayati's review of another case involving gross negligence and scheduled a revocation of license hearing of a medical doctor based on his report If Dr. Al-Bayati is lying in his report on EJ, the MBC needs to know as they are taking his work seriously.
Once we've straightened out those two situations, we should fly to Canada to meet with prosecutors there who failed to convict Maureen Burke of killing her daughter because of Dr. Al-Bayati. In this case, Dr. A refuted the assertions of more than a dozen expert witnesses for the prosecution ranging from medical doctors to pathologists and toxicologists. Somehow his lies escaped the attention of everyone involved.
We'll then head to Texas where EJ's lung tissue slides are being used as evidence for negative controls for pneumonia in the case of a young father facing life in prison for the alleged murder of his daughter. I'm sure prosecutors there would be very interested in your refutation of evidence for his defense.
Chris, I hope to hear from you soon to confirm your involvement in these important matters.
To whomever responded to Carter's recent post:
We need to talk. Please contact me immediately at 818-780-1875 so we can compare records. You say that the EMT report states EJ had pneumonia but the one we have from the LA County Fire Department does not mention pneumonia, just cardiac arrest.
We also need to talk about the hospital records you cite. You say they state that EJ had pneumonia but the records we gave to the Medical Board of California and our attorneys do not make this assertion.
We must also go over the medical records you have for my daughter which you claim indicate that one of her three pediatricians suspected she had pneumonia. Our records show that none contain any remarks on suspected pneumonia, and that Dr. Jay Gordon--who was not charged by the medical board with negligence--actually ruled out pneumonia.
If you have information showing that Dr. Gordon or any other doctor failed to report suspected pneumonia, I think the MBC would be very interested in your testimony. Maybe you and Chris can both come here to straighten out these important matters.
Please contact me soon!
Thanks,
Christine
Christine,
Do you remember seeing the photomicographs of your daughter's pneumonia when you were being interviewed for a national television broadcast on PrimeTime?
I copied and pasted a message from the thread about forgetful Deniers, closed certainly because it contains too many black eyes for the Scientific Community. I think the message is very important and thus cannot get around writing a point to point answer.
Such a function exists already. You can call the Edit menu of your browser and go for a search for any string on the page actually displayed. If you type "jspreen" and the hit the enter key, even an AIDSTruther should be able to scroll through all my messages.
ALL my comment are worthy of archiving. Here's what you should do: Paste and copy all my comments and other writings you can find on the web into a Word document and within some decades you'll be sitting on a gold mine.
Well, I must admit, that was a very clumsy phrase. I really should take more time to properly check each of my contributions before I hit the "Post" button. The above phrase should have read: As said, lung TB is the healing phase of lung cancer..
Of course, now everything becomes crystal clear to all.
That's a very friendly advise.
Now, if that's really the case, I don't understand your reaction. If you don't want to discuss, all you have to do is to keep quiet. No kidding, I swear, it works, really. All the time.
Too bad for me you can't help me. But I can help you. With a hint. Anytime you have some time left, Google the name "Ryke Geerd Hamer" and try to understand what you read. And if you don't understand, ask family and friends. I assure you, his findings are about the most fascinating of the 20th century. But then again, of course you don't have to try to become informed and everyone is free to hang on to the classic ideas about cancer etc. and stick to chemo and Scientific Community doctors.
Dear "pat" and "apt" and "MEC" and "Christine Maggiore,"
Whoever you are, you know that the real Christine Maggiore has recently filed suit against Dr. James Ribe and the Office of the Coroner of Los Angeles. The subjects you raise will be discussed and debated in a courtroom, the public forum you are so intent on.
Dear cooler,
I don't recall which person here called you various anti-gay slurs, even in Spanish. I don't remember who posted your picture for all to see, replacing your head with that of a monkey. And I don't seem to remember who threatened to beat you up physically. Harvey Bialy did all these things and more to John P. Moore. I have never met Moore, but I know his rivalry with Bialy is bitter, something you don't seem to understand.
Cooler, you seem to have difficulty being sensitive with anyone who challenges you even on a scientific point. You have also ridiculed the physical conditions of other people on this blog. You are in no place to point fingers at John Moore based on your interpretation of one sentence he wrote.
Bialy did those things after Moore called him a charlatan and a fraud for having a different view on the Cause of AIDS and wanting to have a honest ad hominem free debate. Moore responded by calling him a fraud and a charlatan etc.
What, Moore cant take a taste of his own medicine? Moore is the one that started name calling, even to the point where professor Pollack said his insults had no place in science.
After being called a nutcase, denialist, ronpaulboy etc I respond a trade back insults with some people here, its no big deal, I call people fat and ugly in response, they respond, its all good fun I guess.
When someone who hasnt posted on this blog for months is possibly dying of cancer, and someone else takes joy in seeing someone slowly die, especially being a professor at Cornell, is just sickening. It goes way beyond any of the name calling ever seen before on this blog.
You may well be correct. I'm just skeptical because it appears that the reason that he was convicted was because me made false confessions (probably lead by police) not because of any forensic evidence.
There is a difference between a letter acknowledging a complaint and a full scale investigation into Dr Ribe.
The "health advocate" claims among other things that there are no HIV tests approved by the FDA for daignostic purposes. Have they looked at the FDA list of approved HIV tests?
Are you claiming that the GMS stained slide is fake? I don't think anybody is claiming that the slides displayed by Al-Bayati are fake but they aren't the GMS stained slide that shows PC in the foamy casts. Why doesn't Al-Bayati put the GMS stained slide in any of the "Medical Veritas" papers?
Christine,
on the alive and well website you say
Prior to beginning AZT treatment, Kimberly was not seriously ill. She had a yeast infection-a common occurrence possibly caused in her case by antibiotics taken after dental work, and pneumonia. Some 30,000 HIV negative Americans die each year from pneumonia-pneumonia happens and is not uncommon among college age people like Kimberly who often "burn the candle at both endsà through study, work, partying, lack of adequate sleep and nutrition.
This is contradicted by the public record.
AIDS From A Healer, Scorn From Others
Kimberly Bergalis suffered from weight loss, hair loss, systemic candidiasis and PCP before she was diagnosed with AIDS and before she ever took AZT. PCP is not at all common in women in their twenties. It is extremely rare. According to her medical records she had a CD4+ count of 46 before she started AZT. It is totally inaccurate to say she was not seriously ill before she took AZT
"Kimberly Bergalis suffered from weight loss, hair loss, systemic candidiasis and PCP before she was diagnosed with AIDS and before she ever took AZT.",
Yes, but she was diagnosed as being HIV positive, which back then a 2 year life expectancy was told to everybody who registered a positive result. Fear of loss of life from an incurable virus is enough to manifest all those conditions and then some.
Illness and conditions like those aren't from an HIV virus but from the death and dying cult you're automatically indoctrinated into.
Some people are sick and they have the correlation of being HIV+ just as another group can have the same sicknesses and be HIV-. One cannot discount the fear and anxiety factor that most will suffer when given an incurable disease status. I was lucky in one regard to having a history of cancer as I did not have a fear of AIDS but just the opposite. I was relieved to have a diagnosis and I knew that incurable diseases are very survivable. Nevertheless, the mind is the key to all of this as being negative or fearful is counterproductive to being well. One has to be one or the other and having the medical profession dangling the threat of death over one's head if they don't comply with the antiretrovirals if a very powerful deterent to most.
If Harvey has cancer, then all of my best to him and he too should remember that he can beat this! More than half the battle is in one's brain. No one should take hope away for another as some of you have given up on him have him half-buried, which I find most distasteful and showing a lack of compassion and caring for another human being, whether you agree with him or not.
You are dishonestly shifting the claims. The claims made by Duesberg and repeated by Maggiore is that Kimberly Bergalis was not seriously ill before she started AZT. Duesberg pointed to weight loss and hair loss as being symptoms of AZT toxicity. However Bergalis was suffering from these symptoms before she was diagnosed with AIDS let alone given AZT.
Despite Duesberg's obfuscations Bergalis didn't just have a transient pneumonia she had PCP. You can look at the placebo arm of the Fischl et al AZT trial to see what happened to HIV infected people with PCP as an opportunistic infection. 19 out of 137 died. This corresponded an estimated 22% mortality for the full 24 week period. This wasn't a common or minor illness.
It should also be pointed out that Bergalis became severely ill without knowing or even suspecting that she was infected with HIV. The only reason that she was tested for HIV was because she had severe immune suppression in the first place. You can't twist this around to saying that the diagnosis caused the immunesuppression that already occurred unless you want to believe in time travel.
I am not familiar with the time-frame of this case but could she have been immune comprised before the meds and then the high levels of AZT, that was the standard practice then, hastened her demise? I find it ironic that the early cases of AIDS, those who look like death warmed over were on AZT. Those on the current meds at much lower doses don't appear to look like concentration victims. Maybe someone who believes in antiretrovirals for asymptomatic persons, can explain why they believe that patients should basically stay on them forever, even without symptoms. Wouldn't a more conservative approach be better or a safer drug such as LDN, supplements and more holistic treatment approaches?
Carter says about Kimberly Bergalis:
Kimberly Bergalis developed Pneumocystis pneumonia before she was diagnosed as being HIV positive.
Her life threatening health problems antedated not only the AZT therapy but also the diagnosis of HIV infection.
Carter knows this but chooses to bury his head in the sand.
This is the previous message referred to above which I tried several times to post earlier today with no success...
To Chris Nobel:
As an expert on the matter of my daughter's death, I invite you to Los Angeles to meet with me in a public forum and show me the pneumonia in EJ's lung tissue slides.
After the forum, we'll go to the local office of the Medical Board so you can report Dr. Al-Bayati for "flat out lying" in his report on EJ's case. The MBC needs to know about this so they can halt their investigation into the LA County Coroner's office and save further time and tax payers' dollars from being squandered on the claims of an alleged liar.
Your visit to the Medical Board would be especially timely since they have accepted Dr. Al-Bayati's review of another case involving gross negligence and scheduled a revocation of license hearing of a medical doctor based on his report If Dr. Al-Bayati is lying in his report on EJ, the MBC needs to know as they are taking his work seriously.
Once we've straightened out those two situations, we should fly to Canada to meet with prosecutors there who failed to convict Maureen Burke of killing her daughter because of Dr. Al-Bayati. In this case, Dr. A refuted the assertions of more than a dozen expert witnesses for the prosecution ranging from medical doctors to pathologists and toxicologists. Somehow his lies escaped the attention of everyone involved.
We'll then head to Texas where EJ's lung tissue slides are being used as evidence for negative controls for pneumonia in the case of a young father facing life in prison for the alleged murder of his daughter. I'm sure prosecutors there would be very interested in your refutation of evidence for his defense.
Chris, I hope to hear from you soon to confirm your involvement in these important matters.
To whomever responded to Carter's recent post claiming to have information from my daughter's medical and hospital records:
We need to talk. Please contact me immediately so we can compare records. You say that the EMT report states EJ had pneumonia but the one we have from the LA County Fire Department does not mention pneumonia, just cardiac arrest.
We also need to talk about the hospital records you cite. You say they state that EJ had pneumonia but the records we gave to the Medical Board of California and our attorneys do not make this assertion.
We must also go over the medical records you have for my daughter which you claim indicate that one of her three pediatricians suspected she had pneumonia. Our records show that none contain any remarks on suspected pneumonia, and that Dr. Jay Gordon--who was not charged by the medical board with negligence--actually ruled out pneumonia.
If you have information showing that Dr. Gordon or any other doctor failed to report suspected pneumonia, I think the MBC would be very interested in your testimony. Maybe you and Chris can both come here to straighten out these important matters.
Please contact me soon!
Thanks,
Christine
What exactly are you claiming Franklin? Are you claiming that HIV is the cause of PCP?
The FACT is that the only thing she had before being totally panicked and freaked out of her mind by an ignorant doctor diagnosing her as HIV, was a simple case of common thrush!
She came down with thrush during her panic to pass her college finals. AND, we have no idea of her diet or illicit drug usage or any other emotional factors that contributed to her being run down while taking her finals!
After her diagnosis, she was very soon given AZT and who knows what all. THAT IS WHEN SHE CAME DOWN WITH PCP!
She is just one more blatant case of people LIKE YOU FRANKLIN, scaring people to panic, depression, sickness and iatrogenic death contributed to by her doctor!
By the way, Frankie, I have asked you about 100 times now over the last several months to state your conflicts of interest to the HIV/AIDS discussion.
Until you answer, we will just assume that you are somewhere in the six $ or seven $ digits range of conflicts of interest, just like JP Mooron.
Wow. If you write FACT with capitals it makes it true? Did you read the article? She got PCP, not just any pneumonia, before the diagnosis of AIDS and before she was tested for HIV.
Only when the crisis passed and tests revealed that she had pneumocystis pneumonia, typical of AIDS patients, did the doctors treating her suggest she be tested for HIV infection.
What exactly is it that you fail to understand in the above words?
Hey, let's make up stories about Kimberly Bergalis being a crack whore. She isn't around to contradict you.
Christine informs this particular post is prevented from posting here. I hereby take the liberty to post it for her.
from Christine Maggiore:
I don't know why this is not going up:
To Chris Noble:
As an expert on the matter of my daughter's death, I invite you to Los
Angeles to meet with me in a public forum and show me the pneumonia in EJ's
lung tissue slides. Once you've confirmed your attendance, I will alert the
coroner's office to this important event.
After the forum, we'll go to the local office of the Medical Board so you
can report Dr. Al-Bayati for "flat out lying" in his report on EJ's case.
The MBC needs to know about this so they can halt their investigation into
the LA County Coroner's office and save further time and tax payers' dollars
from being squandered on the claims of an alleged liar.
Your visit to the Medical Board would be especially timely since they have
accepted Dr. Al-Bayati's review of another case involving gross negligence
and scheduled a revocation of license hearing of a medical doctor based on
his report If Dr. Al-Bayati is lying in his report on EJ, the MBC needs to
know as they are taking his work seriously.
Once we've straightened out those two situations, we should fly to Canada to
meet with prosecutors there who failed to convict Maureen Burke of killing
her daughter because of Dr. Al-Bayati. In this case, Dr. A refuted the
assertions of more than a dozen expert witnesses for the prosecution ranging
from medical doctors to pathologists and toxicologists. Somehow his lies
escaped the attention of everyone involved.
We'll then head to Texas where EJ's lung tissue slides are being used as
evidence for negative controls for pneumonia in the case of a young father
facing life in prison for the alleged murder of his daughter. I'm sure
prosecutors there would be very interested in your refutation of evidence
for his defense.
Chris, I hope to hear from you soon to confirm your involvement in these
important matters.
To whomever responded to Carter's recent post:
We need to talk. Please contact me immediately at eight one eight, seven eight o, eighteen seventy five
so we can
compare records. You say that the EMT report states EJ had pneumonia but the
one we have from the LA County Fire Department does not mention pneumonia,
just cardiac arrest.
We also need to talk about the hospital records you cite. You say they state
that EJ had pneumonia but the records we gave to the Medical Board of
California and our attorneys do not make this assertion.
We must also go over the medical records you have for my daughter which you
claim indicate that one of her three pediatricians suspected she had
pneumonia. Our records show that none contain any remarks on suspected
pneumonia, and that Dr. Jay Gordon--who was not charged by the medical board
with negligence--actually ruled out pneumonia.
If you have information showing that Dr. Gordon or any other doctor failed
to report suspected pneumonia, I think the MBC would be very interested in
your testimony. Maybe you and Chris can both come here to straighten out
these important matters.
Please contact me soon!
Thanks,
Christine
Christine Maggiore
Quite often the faithful believers in HIV show us all that they are psychopaths. They most definitely do dance on peoples graves as "dose of reality" said, and they hurrah and sing about every person who has ever died just because they think it proves their belief.
Chris has been caught lying time and again, such as he just did in saying that Kim Bergalis had PCP prior to her diagnosis of HIV. Doesn't matter that we just went over the New York Times original article a couple of weeks ago that explicity showed the only thing she presented with prior to diagnosis was thrush. Chris will say anything over and over even though he has been shown to be completely lying about it, but Chris will never admit to being mistaken about anything.
JP Moore and Bergman and Chris and Franklin and other HIV posters all trumpet and sing and dance over the deaths of children and college students who they think prove HIV causes AIDS, and in each case they present, they have been proven wrong and shown other indisputable facts about the cases. But like true psychopaths, presenting truths does not deter these mental cases from their obsessions for even a moment.
Moore gets excited and turned on by Dr. Bialy having cancer.
Almost all of them also have massive conflicts of interest in the discussion. All of them have massive egoic investment in the discussion. None are unbiased nor are they open minded to anything that might prove them wrong.
And like all other psychopaths, they themselves are completely unable to see that they are indeed psychopaths.
But what can you expect? The first psychopath involved in HIV was its "inventor", Robert Gallo. This guy has had more lawyers than lab assistants throughout his illustrious career. Naturally, his most devoted followers are all just as psychopathological as he was, if not even more so.
You are very good at accusing people of lying but very poor at providing evidence.
What exactly do you fail to understand in these words from the NYT article?
Only when the crisis passed and tests revealed that she had pneumocystis pneumonia, typical of AIDS patients, did the doctors treating her suggest she be tested for HIV infection.
The reason why she was tested for HIV infection was because she had PCP.
Nobody is dancing on the graves of the dead.
I am disgusted and repelled by the way that Duesberg and others treat people that have died from AIDS. Duesberg made up stories about Raphael Lombardo lying about not taking drugs. Maggiore makes up stories about Rex Poindexter. I am not happy about the deaths of these people. I am disgusted by the people that lie about their deaths.
Before you diagnose other people as psychopaths look at yourself.
Christine,
There is a slide showing EJ's lungs stained with GMS. This apparently is the slide that was shown on PrimeTime. This is not the slide that Al-Bayati has been using in court cases.
If Al-Bayati is claiming that there is no evidence of pneumonia then yes he is lying.
Carter,
Thanks for relaying the message from Ms. Maggiore.
Please ask her if she remembers seeing the photomicrographs of her daughter's Pneumocystis pneumonia when she was being interviewed for a nationally televised segment of Prime Time.
Great post Micheal.
I totally agree, what Ive found is that the defenders of the orthodoxy are totally out of touch with reality. When I talk to normal intelligent guys and guys that are educated at good universities Like CAL and Stanford etc they realize that the government doesnt always tell the truth about hiv etc.
A large group of normal intelligent college kids at the University of Arizona have been exposed to the dissident views and have started a large group on Facebook. This is the normal reaction that intelligent people have to learning about Duesberg bc the dissidents have superior arguments, and the defenders of the orthodoxy have to resort to censorship and mocking people while they die from cancer, instead of debating science. What new insults does JP moore have for these bright young kids from the U OF Arizona? can't wait for his redundant pathetic sanctimonious attempts at psychoanyalsis.
Once exposed to the dissident argument normal people quickly change their views. We have now come to witness just how low these people will stoop, like JP moore insulting a man dying from Cancer, and no one including Tara has said anything to condemn this sadistic psychotic behavior. The 3-4 or people that defend the orthodoxy on this blog are no different than the nazis who felt it was impossible for Hitler to tell a lie.
After reading Darin Browns brilliant post, and the idiotic reactions to it I can see why he doesnt want anything to do with this blog. I'm coming to the realization that associating with intelligent normal people in real life is a much better path than endlessly debating people who are so brainwashed and do not represent the average intelligent American. Debating these same "defend the orthodoxy at all costs" morons is a waste of time.
Even Duesberg admits that the pneumonia occurred before the diagnosis of AIDS. Except that Duesberg dishonestly characterised an almost fatal bout of PCP as "a brief pneumonia".
PCP is extremely rare in people her age and is seen almost exclusively in people with sever immune suppression. The doctor didn't just decide out of the blue to test for HIV. It was because she had PCP.
We did go over this a few weeks ago. The only question is why you are still clinging to your lies.
When she saw a doctor for the infection in her mouth, he said it was peculiar; it looked like thrush.
"Are you a diabetic?" he asked.
"No," she said.
"Are you on antibiotics?"
"No."
"That's funny. Usually, you only get thrush when you're a newborn, a diabetic, on antibiotics. Or if YOU HAVE AIDS."
-----------------------------------------------------
Funny Chris, very funny. She went to a doctor for a simple case of thrush and was told she had AIDS, ASSHOLE!
What part of being freaked out of her mind and "SCARED TO DEATH" and being scared even sicker after her first doctor visit don't you understand?
And this was months BEFORE her immune system took a dump, and her hair fell out and she had PCP.
Show us ANY OTHER AIDS PATIENT who had their HAIR FALL OUT, you dolt!
Just because your own head is disconnected from the rest of you Chris, does not mean that her head was disconnected from her body. There is an ancient saying Chris: "Where the mind goes, the body follows".
As far as whether or not she TRULY had PCP before or after AZT is anyones guess. But it is certainly no wonder her immune system took a huge dump after her doctor freaked her young impressionable mind out and told her she had AIDS in 1989 when it was a DEATH SENTENCE!
But the fact remains that she was SCARED SHITLESS by her first doctor visit when he told her she must have AIDS cause she was not pregnant, was not taking antibiotics, and was not a diabetic.
Hey Chris, perhaps you could explain to us how the well known placebo effect works.
Do you suppose people can also make themselves sick by believing they will be?
Perhaps you can explain how it is that some very devout believers in Jesus have succeeded in manifesting bleeding palms?
Was this a manifestation of spirit, or was it perfect evidence of the power of the mind?
Is there some strange reason Chris, other than being a complete psychopath and HIV/germaphobe, that you are unable to understand the mind/body connection as it relates to sickness and health?
But do tell us Chris, what happened to Dr. Accer's other five patients who also tested positive. We know one old lady died of heart failure. But how about the other four? Are they still alive and well. Did any of them even ever get sick? Did any of them freak out and take AZT or did they die of AZT?
What happened to the other FOUR CHRIS? Did they cash in on million dollar settlement checks like Bergalis? You know what happened to them Chris?
NOTHING!
"Maybe someone who believes in antiretrovirals for asymptomatic persons, can explain why they believe that patients should basically stay on them forever, even without symptoms."
Do you even bother reading other people's posts? There isn't even a horse left to beat on this topic. One last time Noreen, try reading it twice this time: Numerous studies (see above) have shown that death rates increase for HIV patients that jump on and off the meds. Why? Because even though a patient is asymptomatic, that doesn't not mean the virus is latent and not undergoing replication. You seem to be under the false impression that asymptomatic=lack of viral replication.
"Wouldn't a more conservative approach be better or a safer drug such as LDN, supplements and more holistic treatment approaches?"
Talking to these people is worse than talking to a wall.
What is your problem Michael?
Why can't you admit that she had PCP before she was diagnosed with AIDS and before she was given AZT?
Ironically you accused me of never admitting to be wrong.
Did it ever cross your mind to go to pubmed and type in "alopecia" and "AIDS"? There are several articles going back to 1986.
"Almost all of them also have massive conflicts of interest in the discussion. All of them have massive egoic investment in the discussion. None are unbiased nor are they open minded to anything that might prove them wrong."
If I remember correctly, doesn't your interest in HIV denialism stem from the fact your partner is HIV+? Is that not a "massive conflict of interest" in the discussion? Does that not bias you towards the side you have chosen?
That's an easy one. Sharp objects.
"But like true psychopaths, presenting truths does not deter these mental cases from their obsessions for even a moment."
Oh the irony of this is just awesome. This coming from a guy arguing a distorted version of a story linked (multiple times!) above to fit his view that runs contrary to 20 years of research by thousands of individuals.
Franklin,
You wrote :
"Noreen,
You keep touting LDN as a cure for cancer.
Previously you reported on the exciting new results from the LDN Conference:
At the LDN Conference, the physicians who had the success stories of curing terminal, cancer patients did so by eliminating all sugar from the patients' diets (sugar feeds the cancer), changed thier diets to eating more vegetables, gave them supplements and low doses of LDN.
But how can you be so sure it was the LDN that cured the cancer reported in the conference?
Maybe it was cured by the beneficial effect of removing sugar from the diet and the LDN was completely irrelevant.
How can you distinguish between these possibilities?"
So what do you want ?
1) A review on the anti-cancer mechanisms of LDN, published in PUBMED abstracted journals, or
2) Details of the experimentals of the trials reported at the LDN conference.
If it is 1) you can obtain data in the LDN web page.
Many non-progressors and HIV+ have stopped the drugs or never takem them. I can assure you that we are still here. Defenders of the paridigm don't want to listen to us because we burst a hole in their balloon, thus eliminating the need for their medicines. If the truth came out today about AIDS, how many people would lose their funding? An ass!
Braganza,
I am looking for the evidence that has convinced Noreen that LDN cures cancer.
Speakers at the LDN conference, who are medical doctors, from this country and abroad provided the evidence. Order the video from the LDN website in a couple of months and hear and see PET scans for yourself. Also, on the LDN website is information about past cases. In fact, cancers survivors were in the room who only took LDN and I don't think that they dreamed this up.
Noreen,
When a cancer patient is asymptomatic and feels completely healthy, diagnostic tests might still be able to demonstrate cancer. Sometimes these tests might take the form of feeling a lump in the breast or prostate. Or they may involve imaging studies, such as CAT scans or MRI scans. Other times they might entail PCR studies for genetic mutations specific for the malignant cells. Often there is a biopsy that shows cancer, even though the patient feels healthy.
In such cases, even though the patient is asymptomatic, the physician will often recommend treatment for the cancer--maybe surgery, maybe chemotherapy, maybe radiation, maybe even the complete elimination of all sugar from the diet.
In AIDS, even though a patient is asymptomatic, viral load tests are able to detect replication of the virus that is the underlying cause of the immune dysfunction, and tests for CD4 T-cells serve as a guide to the patient's relative degree of immunossuppression.
Both of these tests can help predict an AIDS patient's risk of developing a fatal complication of AIDS, such as an opportunistic infection or lymphoma, and like detecting cancer in an asymptomatic patient, these tests help identify AIDS patients who are likely to benefit from antiretroviral therapy.
So Franklin according to you I am very immunosuppressed yet, I haven't any AIDS defining diseases. Yes, the math really adds up doesn't it? Some need to realize that LDN is much better to helping to restore one's immune system and is non-toxic over the long haul something that is not so with antiretrovirals. How are "viral loads" the underlying cause of immune suppression? It's correlation not proof but then you folks have to have something to try to cement your cause. Franklin, my viral load is greater than 100,000 too, which according to your theories this is trouble. I THINK NOT!
To Chris Noble and Franklin,
The slides in our possession were ordered by our attorneys from the coroner's office and the report by Dr. Al-Bayati containing the photos of these lung tissue slides cites a reference number assigned to the slides by the LA County coroner's office. Photos of the slides with reference numbers were submitted to the MCB and the LA County Superior Court as evidence and published in the medical journal where Al-Bayati's report appears.
If you want verification of what slides were presented on TV as belonging to my daughter, you need to contact the coroner's office and/or ABC News and ask them.
It's hard to imagine that scientists and doctors would give more credence to pictures on a TV show than to evidence submitted to various government agencies and published in a peer reviewed medical journal.
It's even harder to imagine that you guys actually think our attorneys, the coroner's office, LA County counsel, the MBC and the state attorney general's office are all so stupid as to allow us to put forth fake evidence in the form of counterfeit slides.
If you want to cry "Fake" and "Liar," come up with something better than your own apparent inability to admit that you may be wrong about what you think you saw on TV.
But rather than address the slide issue directly, you now call me a liar over something else you have not bothered to verify, that is my remarks on my friend Rex Poindexter that were posted at AIDSMythExposed.
I don't know what about my post at AIDSMythExposed got Rex's boyfriend John upset because after I called John and invited him to email me with his concerns, he did not get back in touch with me.
What I offered at AIDSMyth in response to a specific question was my first hand knowledge of Rex's health problems from my conversations with Rex who was a friend for many years, and boils down to this: Rex told me he had a lump under his ribcage for more than a year before he sought treatment for what was ultimately diagnosed as stomach cancer, and that the diagnosis came after the pain became so intense, he was taken by ambulance to a hospital. I would gladly submit to a lie detector test on what Rex shared with me (so long as someone else foots the bill for that indulgence).
So, Chris, are you coming to Los Angeles to meet me in a public forum to discuss this or will you continue to lob false accusations and name call from the safety and anonymity of the internet? Will you stand in public and point to the pneumonia in the lung tissue slides that come from the LA County Coroner's office and contain the reference number that verifies their origin? Will you come here, stand before me and call me a liar?
Christine
If LDN is boosting your immune system, then why is your viral load so high? Shouldn't your boosted immune system be fighting it?
First, as stated by someone else, I can't take credit for that, it's a viral load of crap! It's misleading to the public because when one hears 100,000 of anything, one immediately believes that it is just what it states, 100,000. This is not true with HIV, which is much, much lower depending upon whose reference one believes. This 100,000 is totally based upon a math formula, which makes it sound so much worse. In reality, there isn't HIV in any HIV+'s blood or saliva, if there was, then the PCR would not have to be used to find a needle in a haystack.
I think that even you mainstreamers, if honest, must say what is wrong with this picture. My situation and there are many others, go against what we have all been taught. Yet, this is reality!
Nobody could dream of a better definition of modern medicine. You think you felt better? Wrong. Come back, shut up and take this chemo. Who's feeling better now, huh?
Kimberly Bergalis, Ariella and Elizabeth Glazer, and Arthur Ashe all died of AZT toxicity. This is very obvious to everyone except for the HIV drug shills.
Muscle wasting and muscle weakeness are signs of mitochondrial toxicity from AZT, not opportunistic infections.
Right, feeling good must all be in the patient's head. There isn't any money to be made from a cured patient so the same old way of doing things goes on and on. Wake up before you are the next victim.
"In reality, there isn't HIV in any HIV+'s blood or saliva, if there was, then the PCR would not have to be used to find a needle in a haystack."
I'm not sure of the numbers for normal DNA content in plasma, but even if it is high in HIV- individuals, the fact there is measurable HIV in the blood of HIV+ individuals indicates the virus is present, no matter how little the amount is.
"My situation and there are many others, go against what we have all been taught. Yet, this is reality!"
No, Noreen, your situation (and the many others you claim) go along with what you want to believe, not against what is taught. As I mentioned above, you seem to have this impression that asymptomatic=no viral replication, which is patently false. Also, if LDN is boosting your immune system, why has your CD4 count tanked and viral load gone through the roof?
My viral load is the same prior to med and after stopping. What you folks are failing to see is that the viral load and the CD4 is useless in regards to one's health. If you were so right, then I would at least have one AIDS-defining disease, which I haven't in almost two years. So much for your viral load and CD4 theories!
"why has your CD4 count tanked and viral load gone through the roof?"
Who knows what this means.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/5380646.stm
Jim and Franklin,
Can you clarify if yes or no
1) you consider plausible that IFN alpha is a marker to AIDS and death.
2) you agree that LDN can control IFN alpha.
3) you know that LDN is too cheap to provide the same return on investment as would provide others enzymes inhibitors to any major sponsor of major HIV/AIDS trials, and therefore it is likely that less research money would be available.
This is a common case in many areas not only in drug development, no money means less research and therefore less results.
4) you know that even with HAART, CD4 may tank (this is only for Jim, who may even not know that).
"Proof is is in the pudding"
Noreen is one example of proof from Rodreguez et al and Dolan et al. that can't explain the 85% black hole of non-correlation of PCR vs. CD4s. Plain and simple. Coming up with explanations of a different sort, to it explain it all away, will only go to further demonstrate not matter how much AIDS science fails you won't and cannot give up HIV.
Dear Jim & Franklin,
To help you to answer my previous post, I suggest you to read a recent paper from Shearer (Herbeuval JP, Shearer GM., HIV-1 immunopathogenesis: how good interferon turns bad. Clin Immunol. 2007 May;123(2):121-8.) where I found the following conclusion :
"(...)reducing HIV-induced IFN-α (...) production might be an effective therapeutic strategy for patients progressing to AIDS. (...)It is our opinion that this relatively new AIDS therapeutic strategy offers the unique advantages of (..) blocking the HIV-1-induced immunopathogenesis (...)."
Authors indicate the technique as a NEW THERAPEUTIC STRATEGY that would BLOCK the HIV-INDUCED IMMUNO-DYSREGULATION.
I also suggest you to have a re-read of the first paper on HIV and low dose naltrexone, available free of charge in the Web at: http://www.lowdosenaltrexone.org/ldn_aids_1988.pdf , having in mind that the concentration of the drug that Noreen is using is a bit higher than the one used in this first study.
You can then recognize that you were not aware of these new approaches to treat AIDS, and just post "thanks Noreen for the new knowledge that you provided us".
I suggest you also to look to Robert Gallo patent on non-HAART treatment to reflect on how AIDS treatment may change in the future.
Braganza,
I read your questions and the paper by Herbeuval and Shearer, and I remain unconvinced that LDN has beneficial effects on AIDS patients.
Your questions:
My answers:
1. I think that elevation of Interferon-alpha may be a plausible marker for immune activation in AIDS patients, and therefore may correlate with risk of progression and death.
2. I know of no convincing evidence that LDN is effective at lowering IFN-alpha in AIDS patients nor that LDN is of any benefit to AIDS patients, whatsoever.
3. I am not aware of any well-designed studies into the possible use of LDN as an AIDS therapy that have been denied funding. I am not aware that any well-designed studies have been proposed for this purpose. Were a well-designed study proposed to an appropriate funding agency, I think that the study would stand a reasonable chance of getting funded.
As for the paper by Herbeuval and Shearer, It seems contrary to Noreen's deeply held and deeply flawed views of AIDS pathogenesis. The main point of the paper seems to be to find a new approach to prevent the HIV-induced killing of CD4 T-cells, a feature of AIDS pathogenesis that Noreen considers unimportant. I don't think Noreen would appreciate being credited with endorsing an approach to AIDS treatment that considers the preservation of CD4 T-cells to be an important goal.
Christine,
I take it from your response that you do recall that while being interviewed for a nationally televised installment of Prime Time you viewed photomicrographs of the Pneumocystis pneumonia present in the autopsy slides of your daughter's lungs. If so, I do not understand how you can make this statement:
That you have viewed the evidence for your daughter's fatal pneumonia was televised nationally, yet you claim that "her lungs show no pneumonia of any kind."
Think about that contradiction the next time you wonder why other people beleive that you are "in denial" or "deluded."
You have pointed out that the lung tissue slides in your possession and photographed by Dr. Al-Bayati were provided by the Coroner's Office and have a reference number that indicates that they are from your daughter's autopsy, and you claim that we have failed to "address the slide issue directly."
You seem to have missed my post from August 11, 2007, when I directly confronted the issue of the photomicrographs that you have posted of your daughter's autopsy slides. As I already pointed out back then (just scroll up), the pictures posted on your web site provide no reason to doubt the Coroner's diagnosis of Pneumocystis pneumonia:
I'm not saying that the pictures are fake, all I am saying is that I have no reason to beleive that they represent the relevant portion of the microscope slides.
I must admit that it seems odd to me that you claim to want to know the cause of your daughter's death but you apparently have not had the slides reviewed by an Anatomic Pathologist, a physician trained in the interpretation of the pathologic changes in human tissue sections.
I suspect that if you took the very same slides that Dr. Al-Bayati reviewed to any competent Anatomic Pathologist, he or she would be able to easily demonstrate to you the Pneumocystis pneumonia. I also suspect that you beleive the same, and that is why you haven't brought the slides to an Anatomic Pathologist.
The reporters for PrimeTime showed your daughter's slides to independent pathologists who confirmed the Coroner's diagnosis.
The amazing thing is that you have already been shown on national TV reviewing the evidence for your daughter's pneumonia--photomicrographs representative of the lesions present in your daughter's lungs at death--and yet you pretend that you have never seen these pictures.
"The main point of the paper seems to be to find a new approach to prevent the HIV-induced killing of CD4 T-cells,..."
The fact that no one knows how HIV-"induces" the killing of CD4 T-cells is absolutely irrelevant to the science of finding new approaches to prevent the HIV-"induced" killing of CD4 T-cells.
If the high viral loads were an indication of blood plasma teeming with virus, then there should be electron microscopic pictures to confirm this, they are none, seems as though this is another act of hiv woo.
If this is true then why do Denialists feel the need to make up stories about Kimberly Bergalis not being seriously ill before she was given AZT.
Weight loss, hair loss, candidiasis and PCP occurred before diagnosis with AIDS and before she was given AZT.
I meant to write this:
"The main point of the paper seems to be to find a new approach to prevent the HIV-induced killing of CD4 T-cells,..."
The fact that no one knows how HIV "induces" the killing of CD4 T-cells is absolutely irrelevant to the science of finding new approaches to prevent the "HIV-induced" killing of CD4 T-cells."
According to the coroner's report there are slides stained with GMS. These show PC in the foamy casts that are diagnostic for PCP. These are the slides that Ribe showed on Primetime.
Nobody is claiming that the slides that Al-Bayati has been using are fake. The one that he has used in his "Medical Veritas" articles have been H&E stained.
It is not a question of fake slides but rather being deceptively selective with the evidence.
Why doesn't Al-Bayati use the GMS stained slides?
Braganza,
Sorry for the late reply. I read the papers you recommended and got lost following the trail of citations from the IFNa review (which I thought was excellent and extremely interesting. Thanks for pointing it out). Ironically I'm presenting a paper this friday to my department on TRAIL/TRAILR expression/apoptosis in HIV infected macrophages so it was extremely good background reading.
Your questions:
1) you consider plausible that IFN alpha is a marker to AIDS and death.
No. I see it as yet another marker of chronic immune activation, which fits with the bigger picture as I know it. I've posted papers here before on T cell exhaustion and levels of PD-1 expression on CD8 and CD4 T cells corresponding to viral load and CD4 counts. See
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&T…
The paper you cite and the one linked above are extremely problematic for denialists as they blow the whole "too few T cells are infected to cause AIDS" argument out of the water.
2) you agree that LDN can control IFN alpha.
It appears that LDN modulates IFNa expression, I wouldn't say control as it may be an indirect effect.
3) you know that LDN is too cheap to provide the same return on investment as would provide others enzymes inhibitors to any major sponsor of major HIV/AIDS trials, and therefore it is likely that less research money would be available.
This is a common case in many areas not only in drug development, no money means less research and therefore less results.
If LDN was extremely affective, I'm sure the drug companies would have no trouble designing a drug that would mimic the activity, thus allowing them to patent it. To be honest, I don't blame them though for not investing. The background research doesn't appear to be there (only 52 papers in PubMed search, most not lab reports), althought there are a few that look interesting.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&T…
4) you know that even with HAART, CD4 may tank (this is only for Jim, who may even not know that).
No I didn't. Although I have looked up a few papers and will read up on the topic. If you have any specific citations to recommend they'd be greatly appreciated.
"You can then recognize that you were not aware of these new approaches to treat AIDS, and just post "thanks Noreen for the new knowledge that you provided us"."
As of now LDN is not a new approach to treat AIDS. If it is found to be effective and is as benign as Noreen says it is, I hope it catches on.
"I suggest you also to look to Robert Gallo patent on non-HAART treatment to reflect on how AIDS treatment may change in the future."
Doesn't surprise me. Manipulating the bodies natural defense system to fight a specific disease is not a new idea, it's just not as easy as it sounds.
"If LDN was extremely affective, I'm sure the drug companies would have no trouble designing a drug that would mimic the activity, thus allowing them to patent it."
I can't make sense of this. If they can find a drug that mimics a drug they can patent it?
In the NY times story narrative, Bergalis has thrush and the doctors tells her it could be from AIDS. Thrush is not a serious illness, and the exact time frame when Bergalis received AZT is not documented in the citations listed. We don't know exactly when she was started on AZT, whether before or after this or that symptom that she might have had. And we don't know what her T cell count was. Unless someone here has access to her medical records, that information is confidential and not open to the public. We do know, as it is obvious from her symptoms of mitochondrial toxicity, that Bergalis died from AZT toxicity. She is another example of a person who trusted in the medical system and was killed by it, like thousands of others killed by AZT during that decade.
How do we know HIV is a harmless passenger virus and its best to avoid the deadly HIV drugs? People like Noreen give testimony right here on this blog to this fact. Listen to her and take her testimony to heart. There are many more like her on other sites who are alive and well without toxic drugs. Talk to them and learn.
Dear Braganza,
Concerning the nutrition study in the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine: my objections include and are based upon those given earlier by trrll and adele. Did you read their comments about the statistics in the article and the lack of good analysis?
I'm sorry to hear that the authors had problems finding a publication for their study. The answer in such situations is not to use a non-Medline-abstracted journal (there are, after all, reasons for why NLM accepts and rejects journals), but to collect more data, do better analyses, and publish in a respected journal. If I'm not mistaken, the senior author of this study is a well-known HIV/AIDS "dissident," and he is also the Associate Editor of the journal. Many of his recent papers appear in his own journal. When I see conflict of interest like this, I wonder how hard he really tried to get his paper published elsewhere. When I see mistakes of the sort trrll and adele mentioned, I wonder what sort of "peer review" the paper had.
On the interferon discussion, please let me stress again that attempts to hard-boil immunology concepts into simple phrases usually leave us with egg on the face! Take IFN-alpha as an example. There is no single IFN-alpha. Twelve or thirteen different genes encode functional IFN-alphas ("subtypes"). Post-translational modifications such as glycosylation may alter biological activity of some subtypes. The subtypes are produced at different levels and may have different effects. For example, read Hilkens, C, et al., J Immunol. 2003 Nov 15;171(10):5255-63. "Differential responses to IFN-alpha subtypes in human T cells and dendritic cells."
If LDN does affect interferon alpha, which one(s)? For how long? What are the downstream effects? Are receptors up or down regulated in LDN treatment? There are many questions. And the ultimate question: does an IFN-alpha modulating activity of LDN (if confirmed) have anything to do with its reported effects on disease?
On the other hand, if LDN works for AIDS patients, do we really need to know how it works?
The still only vaguely understood complexities of the host immune system make the virus itself, a relatively simple system, a much more attractive drug target.
Where are trrll and Adele posts ?
I have been searching using EDIT, FIND "ADELE"/ or FIND "TRRLL", and have been looking to her/his posts in this tread, but cannot locate the ones that you refer...
When you wrote this before I was thinking that you were speaking of some old discussion that you may have in this or other blog.
I dont understand why the author of the nutrition study in the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicineshould be a "denialist" as he recognise that HIV is the etiologic agent for AIDS.
The theoretical basis of his unorthodox approach is to look to eventual proteins that would be encoded by HIV enzymes and, assuming that HIV compete with the human host, provide them as supplement.
He assumes that the lack of these proteins are critical in the HIV-1-induced immunopathogenesis, and this can be confirmed in the case of gluthathione by a range of independent studies.
It is therefore clear that he assumes that HIV lead to AIDS.
In relation with the others main nutrients that he suggested I found some references- not writen by him, indicating that selenium is a predictor to AIDS, glutamine/ cysteine are involved in the glutathione cycle, and tryptophan catabolism is a characteristic of HIV+ disease. So I agree that these HIV+ may be defiencients in these nutrients.
This for me looks in conformity with standard HIV-AIDS science.
On the IFNa some answers should be found in the experimental details of Bihari paper that I have refered.
I believe that it is useful to know how LDN works, as this would allow not only the clinical control of LDN users, but also develloping others products that would have similar effects.
"...if LDN eworks... do we really need to know how it works?'
Thats only an appeal to a post hoc/false cause. After all, thats what's commonly said about toxic haart drug regimes.
Braganza here's what I said http://scienceblogs.com/aetiology/2007/10/denialism_they_dont_remember…
Trrll is right above it then your question.
Foster says AIDS is because your malnourished. He says you don't get HIV infected when you have selenium. He says you don't get AIDS if your infected and you get selenium. There's a lot of references from Foster!!
Cooler I looked at your Facebook group in Arizona and the one where they talk about Stop Experimenting on Children: The Guinea Pig Kids
The same guys are in them.
Did you see the part where the first Arizona guy Seth said
experimenting on children is sometimes funny
and the second guy Rob said
Yeah, I guess it can be a little funny...like when the kids are Jews..
hardy har har
Nice friends you have cooler!!
Um, yeah, hair loss is associated with AIDS, not just with lifesaving drugs.
Carter Says:
Wrong, Carter. The medications used in HAART were selected because of their specific actions as inhibitors of specific proteins encoded by HIV. When resistance develops to these medications, it results from mutations in HIV that prevent the inhibitory effects.
We know in great detail how HAART works.
Michael and Mitochondrial Toxicity:
Here is the NY Times quote in context:
From that story it is obvious that she developed Pneumocystis pneumonia before she was diagnosed with HIV infection or AIDS.
Since the only reason for treating her with AZT was because of her HIV/AIDS diagnosis, it is also clear that the pneumocystis pneumonia, weight loss, hair loss, and general deterioration in her health preceded the treatment with AZT.
That you are unable to recognize these facts is due to your habit of burying your head in the sand.
That Professor Duesberg needs to distort this tragic story in order to support his discredited theories of AIDS pathogenesis exemplifies why he has lost the respect of his academic peers.
The suggestion seemed absurd. But over the summer she became upset about the deterioration in her health, the weight loss, the hair that fell out in clumps so large it clogged the vacuum cleaner. She saw doctors and got a grab-bag of tentative diagnoses: hepatitis, flu, bone-marrow cancer, hysteria, diabetes.
Not until she came home at Thanksgiving 1989, drawn and coughing, did her parents begin to worry. A week later, after going back to Gainesville, she was in the hospital with a life-threatening bout of pneumonia. Only when the crisis passed and tests revealed that she had pneumocystis pneumonia, typical of AIDS patients, did the doctors treating her suggest she be tested for HIV infection. The first test was tentatively positive.
The above story says Kimberly had diabetes, cancer, hepatitis and flu as AIDS defining illness. None of which are in fact AIDS defining illnesses. The Bergalis NY Times above story is simply that, a story in the newspaper which may or may not be factually correct, intentionally or unintentionally falsified, exaggerated and designed to stimulate readers with sensationalism to sell advertising space.
There is no attempt to have the facts straight. No where is there any mention of AZT, when it was started, stopped, restarted, dosage, or any other treatment. A newspaper story is NOT a factual medical record unless you happen to be an AIDS apologist drug company shill.
One thing is clear. Kimberly Bergalis was killed by AZT toxicity, same as Ariella Glazer and Elizabeth Glazer. Where are the other 5 compatriots of Kimberly ? The other 5 HIV positives under the care of the dentist ACER? Alive and well after many years with no drugs? Or dead from PCP pneumonia and Kaposi's sarcoma? Where are the New York Times stories on the other HIV positives? Let the AIDS apologists answer this one.
Sorry Franklin, This is where I believe that statement of knowing a great deal how Haart work is a lie, (outside the benefit of some therapy if one happens to be on their deathbed). Why do I believe so? It's because your own orthodoxy cant explain the 85 to 90%, that black hole, of unexplained non-correlation with PCR and CD4 counting. Why pray tell would anyone want to believe they must and by all means consume toxic chemo drugs indefinitely when the measuring of viral load/CD4 can account to somewhere between a 6 to 9% in relationship to progression to something within a collection of 30 illnesses each with their own therapy and cures? Shouldn't those percentages be reversed? But they're not. Such little correlation % means you're still barking up the wrong tree and Haart is completely useless.
No, the story says no such thing. It says those were tentative diagnoses. For example, weight loss could be explained by cancer or diabetes, hence a tentative diagnosis (pending tests). Or you go into a physician's office with a sore throat, fever and malaise; he gives you a tentative diagnosis of streptococcal pharyngitis, pending tests. Obviously in Bergalis' case those initial diagnoses were incorrect, but they're certainly reasonable places to start looking.
Carter asks:
Gee Carter, scroll up and you will be reminded that Palella et al. found that in a large populations of AIDS patients treated in NYC, the risk of death among untreated AIDS patients was 4.5 times greater than for AIDS patients receiving combination antiretroviral therapy including a protease inhibitor.
Seeing as you brought up the topic last month, you would already know this information if not for your habit of burying your head in the sand.
"The above story says Kimberly had diabetes, cancer, hepatitis and flu as AIDS defining illness."
No, the story says that only after Bergalis was found to have Pneumocystis pneumonia did her physicians perform testing for HIV infection. The story makes abundantly clear that her AIDS-defining illness was Pneumocystis pneumonia, an infection that was diagnosed prior to the diagnosis of her HIV infection.
Only when she was found to have an opportunistic infection that indicated severe immunosuppression did her physicians test her for HIV.
I know it must be hard for you to read with your head buried in the sand.
Franklin, Im not talking about AIDS patients, Im talking someone diagnosed HIV from the surrogate markers of Eliza/WB.
So I take it Carter agrees that AIDS patients benefit from HAART.
http://archives.record-eagle.com/2001/jun/aids1.htm
One of six Acer patients still alive:
Patient E: Lisa Shoemaker is 43. Shoemaker now lives in Empire, Mich., with her three cats
"For most people living with HIV/AIDS, drug side effects have surpassed actual AIDS symptoms as the most difficult part of the disease."
"It's like a blessing and a curse together," added Shoemaker. "You could stay alive for 60 years, but the drugs are killing us."
After the death of Acer and Bergalis, a review showed that ACER did NOT in fact transmit HIV to any of his patients. Some of the HIV positives on the ACER list were drug addicts and homosexuals.
Here comes into play western medicine. One doesn't have to disbelieve in therapy designed to reverse illness if proven to do so. Therefore as its been said and/or demonstrated that because certain aspects of Antiretrovirals and protease inhibitors have anti-microbial and anti-oxidant effects, which are effective in any number of AIDs defining illnesses. However, to believe that these toxic therapies are beneficial at all and now prescribed indefinitely to combat some vague virus theory is fucking ludicrous. Your own studies show they have no effect. Lancet, 368(9534): 451-8.
A question for the hiv vaccine people.
The usual method of testing if a vaccine is working is to test for antibodies to the vaccine.
How does this work for HIV when presence of antibodies means infection, indicating and the vaccine has NOT conferred protection.
How does one test an HIV vaccine? By the absence of antibodies? If so, why is this different for all other vaccines?
Hey MitochondrialToxicity,
Got a reference for that factoid.
Huh? The story says that Kimberly's doctors were trying to make sense of some of the symptoms that she had. They considered cancer, and diabetes but none explained her case. Oral candidiasis is consistent with AIDS but nobody suspected that she had AIDS at that point. Eventually after she came down with PCP her doctor's tested her for HIV and she was found to be infected. PCP is an AIDS defining illness.
If you go through Duesberg's accounts of Kimberly Bergalis he also cites articles from the NYT for his information but curiously not this one. Duesberg did not see Bergalis' medical records. His speculations and lies are not formed from any actual knowledge of the case.
Just to make this clear I am not relying on this one case as "proof" that HIV causes AIDS. I am using it as a demonstration of how Duesberg and other Denialists lie and distort.
Duesberg and other Denialist's refer to PCP as a "brief pneumonia" or something lese that sound innocuous. It wasn't it was a life threatening case of PCP.
Duesberg and other Denialists try to pretend that she was not seriously ill before she took AZT. The fact is that she was. She had numerous symptoms including weight loss, hair loss, candidiasis and PCP before she was diagnosed with HIV let alone given AZT.
Why do the Denialists go to such lengths to lie about something that is in the public record?
Duesberg's book in which he lies about Kimberly Bergalis was published in 1996. The NYT article was published in 1991. Duesberg has no excuse for lying. Maggiore has no excuse for repeating these lies in 2007.
The first part of the question is to test whether the vaccine generates an immune response. This will be HIV specific antibodies and HIV specific T-cells. An effective vaccine will generate one of both of these.
The second part would be to see whether the vaccine protects against exposure to the virus. In animal tests the animals are exposed to a SHIV. The animals are monitored with nucleic acid tests to see whether they become infected with the virus.
In addition vaccines typically include only a subset of the viral proteins. The vaccines will then only generate antibodies to a few antigens. This means that antibody tests can to some degree distinguish between actual infection and vaccination.
In practise, people that have been vaccinated will be tested with nucleic acid tests and viral culture tests (that look for the actual virus) before they would be diagnosed as being infected with HIV.
Carter,
Your last post is a little vague on the details, but I take it you feel that antiretrovirals are of benefit to AIDS patients but only because the antiretrovirals have anti-oxidant effects:
However, your model predicts that the effectiveness of antiretroviral therapies should correlate with their "anti-oxidant" effect.
In contrast, the mainstream view predicts that the effectiveness of antiretroviral therapies should correlate with their ability to specifically inhibit the enzymatic activity of proteins encoded by HIV.
Which of these predictions is borne out by empirical observation?
Hmmmmmmm???
"In contrast, the mainstream view predicts that the effectiveness of antiretroviral therapies should correlate with their ability to specifically inhibit the enzymatic activity of proteins encoded by HIV."
But it doesn't predict nor correlate as per Rodreguez & Dolan! and proof of by improvements have not translated into a decrease in mortality!
So I take it you agree that the model that the effectiveness of antiretroviral therapy is related to their "anti-oxidant effects" is not consistent with clinical and experimental experience?
Carter,
Have you ever read Rodriguez (2006)? If so, did you understand even a tiny bit?
Rodriguez looked at the relationship between the level of HIV RNA in plasma at the start of the study and the rate at which CD4 cells declined in the peripheral blood of patients who were not receiving anti-retroviral medications.
Their results are not relevant to the mechanism underlying the beneficial effects of antiretroviral medications for AIDS patients, beneficial effects that you have already conceded.
Dont try and spin this to something that it's not Franklin. I can accept the fact that antiretrovirals have a positive clinical outcome if someone is dying of any one of or a combination of the AIDS defining illnesses. I draw the line there because otherwise they're a complete waste. Why? because plain as day there's no solid reason why they should be prescribed indefinitely for merely registering antibodies purported to be HIV. This is because it's more than evident, there is nothing other than a mere 6 to 9 % correlation that CD4 vs Viral load essays mean something whatsoever for haart naive people.
I dont play games with you, why should you play games with me? I am referring to HIV (mis)diagnosed persons because Rodriguez/Dolan's results ARE extremely relevant. "Presenting HIV RNA level predicts the rate of CD4 cell decline only minimally in untreated persons."
Come down off your AIDS pulpit for one minute Franklin and think like someone who's logical (I think that might be hard for you).
So let say someone goes off and gets a WB done and registers positive (whatever that means)... And the results from PCR and CD4 essays reveal some numbers of concern to the clinic's staff and the person is not ill. What in the world would make someone truly believe they must soon consume the likes of Truvada, Susteva or equal toxic therapy when if fact as you state above, "Rodriguez looked at the relationship between the level of HIV RNA in plasma at the start of the study and the rate at which CD4 cells declined in the peripheral blood of patients who were not receiving anti-retroviral medications," which concludes by saying, "Presenting HIV RNA level predicts the rate of CD4 cell decline only minimally in untreated persons."?
Would you 100% support the drug therapy and toxic consumption of chemo resulting in an induced state of liver failure, all on the likelihood that 6- to 9% you're right? You would seriously support telling someone, "You're viral load numbers cant predict the rate of decline in CD4 and this is somewhere in the neighborhood of 90% true. But we have new fangled pills you can start taking." .. Is that right Franklin? is that right? Toxic drugs all based on 6%?
Bullshit Carter.
You copied and pasted a bunch of citations from aras that you claimed demonstrated that HAART is not only not beneficial but also poison.
You did this without even bothering to read the papers in question. Franklin did read them and demonstrated that they showed the exact opposite of what you claimed.
The study by Palella et al is a good example. You naively copied and pasted some text from Duesberg's article that made the the incredible claim that the Palella studied showed that HAART was not beneficial and that it actually caused AIDS. The actual study shows the complete opposite.
Whenever anybody attempts to discuss the actual results rather than Denialist spin you backtrack or change the topic.
You keep on talikng about the Rodriguez et al paper but you give absolutely no indication that you have either read or understood the contents of the paper.
The only thing you do is play these silly denialist games.
Not true Noble, anything you just said. Read what I said and answer the question.
Furthermore, what is there not to understand, "Presenting HIV RNA level predicts the rate of CD4 cell decline only minimally in untreated persons."?
What our work means
The single factor that predicts the depletion of CD4+ cells is HIV infection. All patients in the study by Rodriguez et al were infected with HIV. None of them were on ARVs. There is no way that you can twist the study to argue that HIV does not cause AIDS or that antiretroviral treatment is not effective.
You are playing a very silly game. You just keep on repeating your claims again and again. You cite studies that you belive support your claims but you show no indication that you have read the studies or are capable of understanding them.
It should be a clue when the authors of the study rebut the misinterpretations of the paper. Perhaps you don't understand the paper.
franklin asked for references to the statement made earlier that later investigation showed that Acer did not in fact transmit HIV to his dental patients. Except for the ACER case which was later shown to be false, HIV is not transmissable from dentist to patient. Bergalis did not get HIV from ACER, she was given AZT and died from AZT toxicity. Symptoms in the NYT article describing hair loss, diabetes, weight loss, bone marrow suppression are all symptoms of AZT toxicity. The article was not only wrong about the transmission of HIV from ACER , it was also wrong in chronology of symptoms in relation to diagnosis and treatment.
PERSPECTIVE The 1990 Florida Dental Investigation: Is the Case Really Closed? Stephen Barr, MA 15 January 1996 | Volume 124 Issue 2 | Pages 250-254
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
J Am Dent Assoc, Vol 124, No 1, 38-44.
Lack of evidence for patient-to-patient transmission of HIV in a dental practice
B Gooch, D Marianos, C Ciesielski, R Dumbaugh, A Lasch, H Jaffe, W Bond, S Lockwood, and J Cleveland Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, Ga 30333.
AIDS Policy Law. 1995 Feb 10;10(2):6.
J Can Dent Assoc. 1996 Jun;62(6):485-91.Links
Continuing investigation and controversy regarding risk of transmission of infection via dental handpieces.Epstein JB, Rea G, Sherlock CH, Mathias RG.
Department of Dentistry, Vancouver Hospital and Health Sciences Centre, B.C., Canada.
DENTISTS DO NOT GET OCCUPATIONAL AIDS: AN OPEN LETTER TO THE PROFESSION AN EVIDENCE-BASED STUDY ON THE AIDS EPIDEMIC IN DENTISTRY By E. J. Neiburger DDS Director- Center for Dental AIDS Research
Dear Adele/ElkMountain Man/ TRRLL,
When I first contacted him, I asked Foster why he didnot have a control group, and he wrote that the ethical comity from Uganda wouldn't allow the trial with a placebo group.
My guess is that Formula A was the control of Formula B. The fact that there is no major difference of output between the 2 shows that Foster theoretical approach is at the end wrong, but it also shows that nutrients have a powerfull effect not well recognised.
I think Foster has merit to show his theory wrong, allowing us to understand that there are still researched questions in the nutrition versus AIDS question not well investigated, and that may be useful to control a pandemic.
The error on the p=0.000 is a minor error that can be easily corrected and would not change any major conclusion of the paper, i.e. that in some cases nutrition can reverse CD4 decline.
I have asked another question to Foster but dont have had any answer, "what would be the glutathione peroxidase level that would unsure CD4 decline reversal ?".
Do you have some ideas about this?
Dear Braganza,
I hope you will forgive me if I was overly hasty in calling Foster a "denialist" based on his name being on David Crowe's list of "rethinkers" (along with that of his associate, Dr. Hoffer). Now I wonder if they actually signed the petition or if Crowe added their names on his own, without their knowledge.
It seems to me that neither Foster nor Hoffer denies a role for HIV in AIDS. Their theories are simply at one end of a sliding scale of opinion on what, beyond the virus strain itself, influences susceptibility to infection and progression to AIDS. At one end, there are those who feel genetic factors (a polymorphism in the promoter of a gene, or a splice variant of another, or deletions) explain the differences. At the other end, Foster, Hoffer, and others suggest that other factors (such as nutrition or other diseases) are the answers.
I still think that Foster's study was poorly written and reviewed. The same p-value mistake, repeated many times, is on its own a minor issue. But it indicates that the authors didn't take a good look at their own manuscript, that editors didn't catch mistakes, and that reviewers (if there were any) failed to give the article proper scrutiny. I understand Foster's attachment to the journal and his sense that it has been treated unfairly by the mainstream, but publishing his own papers without good review and editing is not going to help the journal (or his own work's reception).
I am also puzzled that Uganda wouldn't allow a placebo arm of the trial. If supplements A and B had never been proven to help HIV patients, how would a placebo arm be unethical or objectionable?
Dear Jim,
On the question that even with HAART CD4 may "tank", I found that CD4 (of HAART treated HIV+) is reported to have a ceiling, which is lower than normal CD4 values of HIV-.
http://www.aidsmap.com/en/news/53495CD7-EF2A-4522-A9E5-CA7FAB076D4B.asp
However persons who may treat HIV+ with HAART, and who are writing in this blog, may have more interesting and accurate information than the readings that I have.
Mitochondrial Toxicity,
Thank you for providing references for your assertion that "Acer did not in fact transmit HIV to his dental patients:"
One of the references you cited (B. Gooch, D Marianos, C Ciesielski, R Dumbaugh, A Lasch, H Jaffe, W Bond, S Lockwood, and J Cleveland (1993). J Am Dent Assoc, Vol 124, No 1, 38-44.) deals only with the issue of patient-to-patient transmission of HIV in Dr. Acer's practice and concludes that patient-to-patient transmission did not occur
The same research group concluded that the transmission was from the dentist (Acer) to his patients. Their conclusions can be found in a paper that is freely available through the web: Carol A. Ciesielski; Donald W. Marianos; Gerald Schochetman; John J. Witte; and Harold W. Jaffe (1996). The 1990 Florida Dental Investigation: The Press and the Science. Ann Intern Med. 121:886-888
Ciesielski et al. deal directly with the evidence you cited, namely the reporting of Stephen Barr (whose Annals of Internal Medicine paper you cite) and with the sequencing data of Dr. Lionel Resnick (which you cite via Wikipedia):
So Barr's work simply turned up additional sexual contacts of the infected patients, but none of these sexual contacts were shown to be HIV-infected. In addition, neither Barr's work nor Resnick's work invalidates the molecular epidemiology linking the patients' viral strains to the viral strain identified in the dentist (with the possible exception of patient G). In fact, Resnick's sequences strengthen the case that Acer tranmitted the virus to Bergalis (patient A).
The conclusions after all of these investigations are best summed up by D. Brown (1996) The 1990 Florida Dental Investigation: Theory and Fact. Ann Int Med 124: 255-256
None of these demonstrate that Acer did not infect Bergalis. The molecular evidence is probalistic. Nevertheless, the similarity between Bergalis's and Acer's strain strongly suggest that Acer infected Bergalis.
Even if she did acquire HIV through sexual transmission it hardly supports the Denialist standpoint. I thought Denialists thought that sexual transmission was impossible. Why are you arguing that she got HIV through sex?
And you wonder why people call you a Denialist. Even Duesberg agreed that she had a "brief pneumonia", really a life threatening case of PCP, before she was diagnosed with AIDS. Insisting that she must have had the weight loss and hair loss after she was given AZT despite the public record is simply circular logic.
As has been demonstrated to you above weight loss and hair loss are seen in people with AIDS that have not been given antiretrovirals.
You appear to be so deep in denial that any evidence that contradicts your dogmatic beliefs will simply be rejected.
Carter,
You keep quoting Rodriguez et al.:
Somehow, you seem to think that Rodriguez et al.'s statement is equivalent to your statement that:
Think about what you are claiming. You just said that because HIV viral load at presentation only accounts for 6% of the variability in the rate of CD4 cell loss, the viral load assay is not meaningful for AIDS patients. Your claim can be true only if predicting the rate of CD4 cell loss is the only important variable for AIDS patients.
You don't believe that, do you?
Don't you think that predicting the likelihood of death or of an opportunistic infection would be of greater importance to an AIDS patient that predicting the rate of CD4 cell loss?
Well, I do.
And the level of HIV RNA in the plasma is a very good predictor of the likelhood of death or of an opportunistic infection in AIDS patients. And when the level of HIV RNA in the plasma is combined with the number of circulating CD4 T-cells, we can make an even beter assessment of the likelihood of these important clinical outcomes.
That's why the viral load assays are important.
Mellors JW, Muñoz A, Giorgi JV, Margolick JB, Tassoni CJ, Gupta P, Kingsley LA, Todd JA, Saah AJ, Detels R, Phair JP, Rinaldo CR Jr. (1997). Plasma viral load and CD4+ lymphocytes as prognostic markers of HIV-1 infection. Ann Intern Med. 126:946-54.
School of Public Health, University of Pittsburgh, PA 15261, USA.
Palumbo PE, Raskino C, Fiscus S, Pahwa S, Fowler MG, Spector SA, Englund JA, Baker CJ. 1998. Predictive value of quantitative plasma HIV RNA and CD4+ lymphocyte count in HIV-infected infants and children. JAMA 279:756-61.
Department of Pediatrics, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, Newark 07103, USA. ppalumbo@daiid.umdnj.edu
Ruiz L, Romeu J, Clotet B, Balagué M, Cabrera C, Sirera G, Ibáñez A, MartÃnez-Picado J, Raventós A, Tural C, Segura A, Foz M. (1996). Quantitative HIV-1 RNA as a marker of clinical stability and survival in a cohort of 302 patients with a mean CD4 cell count of 300 x 10(6)/l. AIDS. 10:F39-44.
Retrovirology Laboratory, Institut de Recerca de la SIDA-Caixa, Spain.
TO: Tara C. Smith
Dear Tara,
Can you give a logical explanation as to why you might be banning certain people, by nixing their IP address, from posting on your fabulous web blog. You know some people have more whit then others and that's what makes such fine reading here. Or is it that you're getting way to serious and have decided censorship is more to your liking?
First of all, I really wanted to hear from Braganza, who seemed like a voice of reason on this blog. I can't understand how you people throw the word "denalist" around. Am I a denalist just because my health is fine by quitting the antiretrovirals 21 months ago? I don't think it's written in stone that we should have one-size-fits all in medicine. Perhaps, the antiretrovirals work for some people, that's fine. But they don't work for me - other than to cause pain, symptoms, abnormal labs and discomfort.
As for antibodies, I always thought that when measles, mump, hepatitis, etc. has come and gone, odds were that I would never have them again, only the anttbodies. Also, low CD4's seem to be meaningless. I would think that you would concede this point as myself and many others are living this truth. Again, regardless of test results, I am doing remarkable well. I'm not too keen on changing my routines. Maybe you would admit that there is something to LDN, a cheap drug, which is helping to modulate the immune system. My blood and liver enzymes are now normal after stopping the AIDS drugs. How do you explain this?
As for John's offer to refer me to the top so-called AIDS specialist, you know I am more than willing to accept. I'll talk to anyone about this. I'm pretty open-minded. But I would like an AIDS doctor to explain why my health is good inspite of all these terrible numbers. John says I'm in grave danger during the coming year but they've been saying that for a couple of years and I'm fine. So is my husband, who is HIV negative.
I still would like to hear from Braganza and his opinion.
I think you meant to post this in the other thread, Noreen.
Franklin,
In your above post you repeat "AIDS Patient" 3 times. However Rodriguez et al's objectives ["To estimate the proportion of variability in rate of CD4 cell loss predicted by presenting plasma HIV RNA levels in untreated HIV-infected persons;"] and throughout their findings there's no mention or implications as to "AIDS patients" or people with Aids defining illnesses. ["PARTICIPANTS: Antiretroviral treatment-naive, chronically HIV-infected persons."]
You're using subterfuge and skirting around the issue. The bottom line is you and the establishment are dead wrong about the hard as a rock correlation between these markers after all this time using them and your own orthodox studies prove this. Maybe you should take a good hard look at why Merck's V520 vaccine failed too because this furthermore proves you have nothing.
Noble said,"There is no way that you can twist the study to argue that HIV does not cause AIDS or that antiretroviral treatment is not effective." Well Chris, I'd say the study is not designed to disprove the theory and its completely meaningless to try and make that point.
Both you mainstream orthodoxy defenders cannot answer my question which I will repeat for you. Would you 100% support the drug therapy and toxic consumption of chemo resulting in an induced state of liver failure, all on the likelihood that 6- to 9% you're right? And we're talking HIV diagnosis NOT AIDS patients, the same as Rodriguez. Minimally correlated he finds, so how do you tell someone the guessing game is 90% non-correlated or unknown? Or don't you and go right one saying you all so clearly understand how one should be on a lifetime of toxic liver destroying drugs, even though it's now proven that there is no real correlation to speak of?
Carter,
6% - 9% of what?
The proportion of CD4 cell loss variability explained by presenting plasma HIV RNA level. (the 4%-6% as Rodriguez reports, and restricting it to participants with high HIV RNA levels was 9%)
Ruiz L, 1996
Palumbo PE, 1998
Mellors JW 1997
All are superseded by Rodriguez et al's study 2006
AND
Matthew J. Dolan et al. 2007
DOI: 10.1038/ni1521
"found that in HIV-infected subjects, viral load contributed only 9 percent to the variability in rate of progression to AIDS; variations in CCR5 and CCL3L1 combined accounted for 6 percent variability in AIDS progression rates."
AND
Henry WK et al. 2006
JAMA. 2006 Sep 27;296(12):1523-5.
"90% of CD4 cell depletion remains enigmatic"
You always say Rethinkers don't pay attention to newer studies, yet you fail to do the same and then to top it off argue that you still have it all explained that HIV causes AIDS. But as clear as day you have a big black hole enigma of 90%....
So then I take it you believe that the most important variable for HIV-infected persons is the rate of CD4 T-cell loss, and since presenting viral load only accounts for 6% of the variability, in this rate you have decided vral load is of no importance.
Why do you place so much weight on the rate of CD4 T-cell loss?
Why don't you place more weight on the risk of death than on the rate of CD4 T-cell loss?
It's the studies that have decided viral load is of no importance or less than 10 % important.
I dont place weight on CD4 loss rate, because one does not need HIV to explain this. There could be dozens of other answers, not on some devastating, mutating, whirly, hiding and vague theory all supposedly supported only on just finding surrogate markers.
I place more weight on the risk of death and chronic ill health on the toxic daily consumption of 20 something useless meds than on the rate of CD4 T-cell loss.
Again Franklin, Please step down off your almighty AIDS pulpit and answer my question.
Carter says:
If that is true, then it seems that you should be very interested in markers to help predict the risk of death. Scroll above and look up the three papers cited above that show that:
Mellors JW et al.: Plasma viral load was the single best predictor of progression to AIDS and death
Palumbo PE et al.: Two key laboratory markers--plasma RNA and CD4+ lymphocyte count-are independent predictors of clinical course among HIV-infected infants and children.
Ruiz L et al.: Relative risk (RR) of progression related to the group with VL less than 35,000 was: 10.4 when CD4 > or = 250 x 10(6)/l and VL > or = 35,000 (P = 0.001); and 45.3 when CD4 less than 250 x 10(6)/l and VL > or = 35,000 (P less than 0.0001).
Viral load is the best predictor of death and ill health (disease progression), yet you feel that this is less important than the inability of the presenting viral load to account for more than 6% of the variability in the rate of decline of CD4 T-Cells.
So which do you feel is more importnat for HIV-infected people: predicting the rate of decline of their CD4 T-Cells or predicting their risk of dying?
Franklin when you compare CD4 counts with viral load, you are inevitably going to end up finding one of them "the best predictor of death".
Wen you meaure AZT against protease inhibitors you are also going to find that one of them is the best predictor of death. That doesn't mean arsenic wouldn't be an even better predictor. Now do the rest of the analogy yourself.
MEC says:
I know it must be hard with your head buried so far in the sand, but maybe you should try reading a little further:
HIV Viral Load 500 copies/ml or less: 6 Year Mortality=0.9%
HIV Viral Load 501 to 3000 copies/ml: 6 Year Mortality=6.3%
HIV Viral Load 3001 to 10,000 copies/ml: 6 Year Mortality=18.1%
HIV Viral Load 10,001 to 30000 copies/ml: 6 Year Mortality=34.9%
HIV Viral Load more than 30000 copies/ml: 6 Year Mortality=69.5%
Now, that seems like pretty important information to pass on to an HIV-infected patient.
Do you have any evidence for a better predictor of mortality in HIV-infected patients?
Franklin,
Plasma viral load determines when and at which levels people are drugged, and/or how well the drugs are tolerated How about that?!
In the case of the Guinea Pig Kids up to 7 different black box labelled drugs because, since they weren't reacting well with the drugs in the first place, you might as well load up on them.
Can I come up with a better marker? mmm... how about buffalo humps? Or at least lipodystrophy and/or wasting according to the keywords in the box.
Despite accumulating data in adults, little information is available regarding the effects of HIV infection and antiretroviral therapy on body composition in children. Preliminary information indicates that lean body mass is lost in preference to fat mass in HIV-infected children, supporting the theory that failure to thrive in HIV infection is often cytokine mediated. It can be hypothesized that changes in body composition (lean body mass) may predict changes in weight growth velocity and may give an early clinical indication of treatment failure.
See that? loss of appetite, vomitting, diarrhea, wasting aren't AZT mediated at all. It's the cytokines stupid!
http://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct/show/NCT00006064?order=4*
I'm feel sorry for you, MEC. It's so hard for you to read with your head buried so deeply in the sand.
We're talking about predicting mortality in HIV-infected patients.
Thanks for bringing up the drugs used to treat HIV infection, because those drugs hve been shown to decrease mortality.
Scroll up to read what Palella et al. found when they compared the mortality rates for patients receiving no antiretroviral therapy, nucleoside analogue monotherapy, nucleoside analogue combination therapy, and combination therapy including a protease inhibitor.
They found the highest death rate in the patients receiving no therapy. The death rate declined with nucleoside analogue monotherapy, decreased further with nucleoside analogue combination therapy, and decreased even further with combination therapy including a protease inhibitor.
Compared to nucleoside analogue monotherapy, patients receiving no antiretroviral therapy had a 1.5-fold increased risk of death, and compared to combination therapy including a protease inhibitor, patients receiving no antiretroviral therapy had a 4.5-fold increased risk of death.
Hmmm, those comparative death rates seem like important information to pass on to HIV-infected patients.
"those comparative death rates seem like important information to pass on to HIV-infected patients."
and dont ever tell em about the studies that say there's a 90% black hole enigma, a guessing game, 90% non-correlated or unknown? --"found that in HIV-infected subjects, viral load contributed only 9 percent to the variability in rate of progression to AIDS; variations in CCR5 and CCL3L1 combined accounted for 6 percent variability in AIDS progression rates."
because that would be bad for business, God forbid we have them questioning the very essence of Aids science.
So you feel that rate of progression to AIDS is of greater significance than mortality rate.
To Chris Noble:
I've looked through recent past posts hoping to find your reply to a question I've asked several times: Will you come to Los Angeles (all expenses paid) to meet with me in a public forum and discuss your ideas about my daughter's alleged pneumonia?
With the various shifts in topics on this blog, perhaps I've missed your response. If so, I apologize and ask that you please estate your reply. If in fact you still haven't responded, will you please accept or deny my invitation for direct public dialogue so we can be done with this?
As I mentioned previously, my invitation includes a trip to the Medical Board of California where you can register your complaint that the lung tissue slides we submitted as evidence for their investigation into the coroner's office are not the ones from the TV show, and that the TV show slides prove my daughter died of PCP. You can show them and me how Dr. Al-Bayati is "flat out lying," a matter of particular concern to the MBC since his report weighed heavily in their decision to drop charges of gross negligence against Dr. Fleiss,
Since I last invited you to meet with me, there's another reason to come forward with your allegations about the slides: On Friday, the Medical Board of Colorado dropped their investigation into Dr. Incao, the third pediatrician to diagnose EJ with an ear infection and clear lungs, and their decision is also based in good part on Dr. Al-Bayati's report.
If, as you claim, the slides used in the report are misleading, were purposely selected to support a false conclusion and there are other slides that prove my daughter actually had pneumonia and that Al-Bayati is lying, shouldn't you should bring this to the attention of at least one of the two medical boards? Why go on about Dr. Al-Bayati on this blog where nothing comes of your statements when you could report your opinions to government agencies that can actually do something about it and stop him?
If you won't come to Los Angeles and face off with me in public will you at least say what action you plan to take with the medical boards of California or Colorado with regard to your position that the evidence they have accepted from Dr. Al-Bayati is misleading and incorrect?
Thank you,
Christine
Christine,
If you are so interested in understanding the cause of your daughter's death, why don't you hire a licensed physician trained in Anatomic Pathology to review the autopsy slides?
If you wanted a second opinion on your car's transmission, would you bring the car to a bike shop?
Christine, I very much doubt that I or anyone will be able to change your opinion in this matter. Science does not work by public forum's. I would not agree to debate Ted Haggard about evolution nor would I agree to a public debate with somebody that denies that HIV causes AIDS.
What I and others can do is challenge some of the misinformation that you have put out on the internet. If you have the right to spread misinformation on the internet then we have the right to counter this misinformation.
The report produced by Al-Bayati is deeply misleading and dishonest. The "differential diagnosis" of parvovirus infection is completely pulled out of thin air. Al-Bayati provides no reason for ignoring the GMS stained slides that show PC organisms in the diagnostic pink foamy casts.
I notice from your conversation with Peter Flegg that you do not have the GMS stained slides.
We have all the lung tissue slides and the brain tissue slides but not the special stained slides. From what I understand, these are more or less close ups of what the regular slides show and don't offer much in the way of new evidence to consider. Do you think these special stains might reveal something not found in the regular slides? If so, could you please explain?
Don't you think you should get the GMS stained slides? If "what I understand" is dependent on what Al-Bayati tells you then I would advise getting a second opinion from somebody not on the advisory board of Alive and Well.
As Franklin suggests, show the slides, including those stained with GMS, to an idependent anatomical pathologist and ask them what they mean.
Is that the physician who prescribed the amoxicillin that you claim led to your daughter's death?
"Christine, I very much doubt that I or anyone will be able to change your opinion in this matter."
this is either because you think poorly of your persuasion skills or you think poorly of your facts. Now it may or may not be the latter but it certainly is the former. Let me explain why:
"Science does not work by public forum's."
Maybe not science but what you "do" does work by public forums. This is why I am so puzzled by your next declaration:
"I would not agree to debate Ted Haggard about evolution nor would I agree to a public debate with somebody that denies that HIV causes AIDS"
Why? Slam dunk I say! But, OK, so you will?...
"What I and others can do is challenge some of the misinformation that you have put out on the internet. If you have the right to spread misinformation on the internet then we have the right to counter this misinformation."
Fair enough but why are you, or anyone for that matter, not countering the misinformation live? That is also a public Forum. A far more powerful tool of delivery too and you are not there. I don't understand. Well, I understand why you are not there because I understand why I am not there.
If they have the right to spread misinformation in all the public forums then we have the right to counter this, no? Why not? this total abandonment of the battlefield is, is, is inexplicable. Chris, there is a "war" out there "thrust upon you" by "pseudoscience and evil".
you shall fight on the beaches,
you shall fight on the landing grounds,
you shall fight in the fields and in the streets,
you shall fight in the hills;
you shall never surrender.
This was a reference by J.P. "Winston Churchill" Moore to the fight against the DENIALAZIS.
I don't understand why he said "we shall fight on the beaches" when he won't even go see the mother, father and brother of EJ. And you won't either. Why only on cyber beaches. Is it a Second Life beach?
A "real" general would talk of "battlefield interdiction"
(for Adele, that means "Gefechtsfeldabriegelung")and send in his guys and ...basically deny the enemy access to the battlefield. Some smart cookies in Military Intelligence sometimes. The trick to it working though, is getting there in a very big and CONVINCING way. "battlefield denial" is a strategy where the trick lies in NOT showing up for battle and thus denying the enemy any legitimate claims of victory. Tricky dicks these military guys too. I can already hear some folks explaining in a few years that "Iraq was not lost because the US didn't stay till the end; "cuz ifwe'ad, 'ewould'ave KICKED ALLYER BUTTS!". We already went throught it with Vietnam.."Militarliy we would have won...if it were'nt for them pesky politicians". (the "Dolchstoss", Adele). But I digress. Why are scientists (not you) abandoning the field of public education? I don't know and I don't think I should care really either anymore. If they don't want to be "heard" then that probably means that I don't have to "listen" to them either.
Denialist soundbites such as "antibodies mean that you have cleared the virus and are now immune" are unfortunately often more successful at convincing lay audiences than the actual science which is more complicated. Noreen is still repeating this misconception despite it being debunked time and time again.
Science is not about constructing rhetorical arguments to convince lay-audiences. Science is about scientists convincing other scientists that their theories better explain all of the evidence. This has occurred through the normal scientific mechanisms of peer-reviewed journal publications and conference presentations.
Read about the Gish gallop to understand why public debates are poor mechanisms for exploring science.
"Science is not about constructing rhetorical arguments to convince lay-audiences. Science is about scientists convincing other scientists that their theories better explain all of the evidence. This has occurred through the normal scientific mechanisms of peer-reviewed journal publications and conference presentations."
cleaver use of a thought-terminating cliche. No one argues with you there. You don't DO science though, you disseminate it. More accurately, you try not to disseminate it too much. So does JP. He went to "war" instead. Of all things he could do, he chooses to go for "war" with a fictional "leadership" and on the internet of all places.
Here's an aphorism for you: "Many of those who tried to enlighten were hanged from the lampposts."
before Adele hops in with a charge of plagiarism...
"Many of those who tried to enlighten were hanged from the lampposts."- stanislav Jerzy lec
"Many of those who tried to enlighten were hanged from the lampposts"...with ethernet cables.
There is nothing thought-terminating about it. Duesberg should turn his energies to convincing the scientific community rather than attracting a lay audience that end up dying like Raphael Lombardo.
While Duesberg may not be the official leader of the Denialist movement it is clear that without him there would be no movement. The few scientists that continue to promote denialism to popular audiences are responsible for the longevity of the "debate". The HIV+ members of the movement like Huw Christie, David Pasquarelli, Jody Wells and many others that are not so prominent come and go while the HIV- "scientists" remain.
No, I simply recognise that Christine is unlikely to be persuaded that HIV causes AIDS because to acknowledge this she would have to confront the possibility that she indirectly caused the death of her child.
No, I simply recognise that Christine is unlikely to be persuaded that HIV causes AIDS because to acknowledge this she would have to confront the possibility that she indirectly caused the death of her child.
You are of course talking about the man in the mirror and bnot Chrsitine Maggiore, whom you don't know, Dr. Noble.
"While Duesberg may not be the official leader of the Denialist movement it is clear that without him there would be no movement."
All that machinery for one man. What an honour to him and disgrace to your argumention skills. You froget that it is laymen who make policy.
"No, I simply recognise that Christine is unlikely to be persuaded that HIV causes AIDS because to acknowledge this she would have to confront the possibility that she indirectly caused the death of her child."
Spoken like a true asshole not even aware of his own "make believe" sensitisation campaigns. When will you wake up and realise that DISEASE did the work one way or another. You blame her for the death of the child but you fail to realise that not no one, not Maggiore not Bergman nor Moore had a clue about her status until AFTER EJ's passing and still there are incosistencies as is pointed out in the letters you think you so cleverly linked to. How could she be responsible? Either you are paid to say the garbage you do or indeed you are an asshole with way too much time on his hands because you do this same thing prolifically on every corner of the web. Why you shouldn't care to inform the authorities that they are working with fake or missing slides only tells me one of two things: you are indeed a passive-agressive coward or there is no basis for your BS.
""While Duesberg may not be the official leader of the Denialist movement it is clear that without him there would be no movement"
We're getting somewhere here. Who is the official leader and where is this "compound"?
ps answer on the next thread about Mbeki...if you care. I will no longer open this insanely long thread as it makes my computer choke.
So Chris you folks waste our tax dollars for a vaccine that is supposed to create antibodies, which from your own mouth will not prevent us from being immune from HIV, so what's the use of it in the first place. It's sounds like to me that it has to "look" like something is being done when in fact we HIV+s are taking control of the situation ourselves by cleaning up our health act and by not taking your drugs. Now, this really sticks in your crawl because the so-called scientists don't have much common sense about this whole affair.
The following cures with honey and cinnamon for viral diseases couldn't be any worse than a failed HIV vaccine and a microbicidal creme that increases the problem. But since millions of dollars have not been spent on a "new" drug and studies, no one would push it. Nevertheless, many may benefit from its use. Mother nature is wise in her natural remedies.
Facts on honey and cinnamon:
It is found that mixture of honey and cinnamon cures most of the diseases. Honey is produced in most of the countries of the world. Scientists of today also accept honey as a "Ram Ban" (very effective) medicine for all kinds of diseases. Honey can be used without any side effects for any kind of diseases. Today's science says that even though honey is sweet, if taken in the right dosage as a medicine, it does not harm diabetic patients.
Weekly World News, a magazine in Canada, on its issue dated 17 January, 1995 has given the following list of diseases that can be cured by honey and cinnamon as researched by western scientists.
HEART DISEASES: Make a paste of honey and cinnamon powder, apply on bread, chappati, or other bread, instead of jelly and jam and eat it regularly for breakfast. It reduces the cholesterol in the arteries and saves the patient from heart attack. Also those who already had an attack, if they do this process daily, are kept miles away from the next attack.
Regular use of the above process relieves loss of breath and strengthens the heart beat. In America and Canada, various nursing homes have treated patients successfully and have found that as you age, the arteries and veins lose their flexibility and get clogged; honey and cinnamon revitalizes the arteries and veins.
ARTHRITIS: Arthritis patients may take daily, morning and night, one cup of hot water with two teaspoons of honey and one teaspoon of cinnamon powder. If taken regularly, even chronic arthritis can be cured.
In a recent research conducted at the Copenhagen University, it was found that when the doctors treated their patients with a mixture of one tablespoon honey and half teaspoon cinnamon powder before breakfast, they found that within a week, of the 200 people so treated practically 73 patients were totally relieved of pain and within a month, mostly all the patients who could not walk or move around because of arthritis started walking without pain.
BLADDER INFECTIONS: Take two tablespoons of cinnamon powder and one teaspoon of honey in a glass of lukewarm water and drink it. It destroys the germs in the bladder.
TOOTHACHE: Make a paste of one teaspoon of cinnamon powder and five teaspoons of honey and apply on the aching tooth. This may be applied three times a day until the tooth stops aching.
CHOLESTEROL: Two tablespoons of honey and three teaspoons of cinnamon powder mixed in 16 ounces of tea water, given to a cholesterol patient, was found to reduce the level of cholesterol in the blood by 10% within 2 hours. As mentioned for arthritic patients, if taken 3 times a day, any chronic cholesterol is cured. As per information received in the said journal, pure honey taken with food daily relieves complaints of cholesterol.
COLDS: Those suffering from common or severe colds should take one tablespoon lukewarm honey with 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon powder daily for 3 days. This process will cure most chronic cough, cold and clear the sinuses.
UPSET STOMACH: Honey taken with cinnamon powder cures stomach ache and also clears stomach ulcers from the root.
GAS: According to the studies done in India & Japan, it is revealed that if honey is taken with cinnamon powder the stomach is relieved of gas.
IMMUNE SYSTEM: Daily use of honey and cinnamon powder strengthens the immune system and protects the body from bacteria and viral attacks. Scientists have found that honey has various vitamins and iron in large amounts. Constant use of honey strengthens the white blood corpuscles to fight bacteria and viral diseases.
INDIGESTION: Cinnamon powder sprinkled on two tablespoons of honey taken before food, relieves acidity and digests the heaviest of meals.
INFLUENZA: A scientist in Spain has proved that honey contains a natural ingredient which kills the influenza germs and saves the patient from flu.
LONGEVITY: Tea made with honey and cinnamon powder, when taken regularly, arrests the ravages of old age. Take 4 teaspoons of honey, 1 teaspoon of cinnamon powder and 3 cups of water and boil to make like tea. Drink 1/4 cup, 3 to 4 times a day. It keeps the skin fresh and soft and arrests old age.
PIMPLES: Mix three tablespoons of honey and one teaspoon of cinnamon to make a powder paste. Apply this paste on the pimples before sleeping and wash it next morning with warm water. If done daily for two weeks, it removes pimples from the root.
SKIN INFECTIONS: Apply honey and cinnamon powder in equal parts on the affected parts to cure eczema, ringworm and all types of skin infections.
WEIGHT LOSS: Daily in the morning 1/2 hour before breakfast on an empty stomach and at night before sleeping, drink honey and cinnamon powder boiled in one cup water. If taken regularly, it reduces the weight of even the most obese person.
Also, drinking this mixture regularly does not allow the fat to accumulate in the body even though the person may eat a high calorie diet.
CANCER: Recent research in Japan and Australia has revealed that advanced cancer of the stomach and bones have been cured successfully. Patients suffering from these kinds of cancer should daily take one tablespoon of honey with one teaspoon of cinnamon powder for one month 3 times a day.
FATIGUE: Recent studies have shown that the sugar content of honey is more helpful rather than being detrimental to the strength of the body. Senior citizens who take honey and cinnamon power in equal parts are more alert and flexible.
Dr. Milton who has done research says that a half tablespoon honey taken in a glass of water and sprinkled with cinnamon powder, taken daily after brushing your teeth and in the afternoon at about 3:00 p.m. when the vitality of the body starts to decrease increases the vitality of the body within a week.
BAD BREATH: People of South America first thing in the morning gargle with one teaspoon of honey and cinnamon powder mixed in hot water, so their breath stays fresh throughout the day.
If Christine had not portrayed herself and her children as evidence that HIV does not cause AIDS then none of this would be happening.
The idea that it's OK to have a photograph of yourself with a No AZT symbol on your stomach while carrying a baby and all of a sudden it's not OK to ask questions about the death of Eliza Jane is ridiculous.
It was OK for Duesberg to hold up Raphael Lombardo as proof that HIV doesn't cause AIDS but it's supposedly not OK to point out that he died one year later from AIDS.
You can take your false morals and stick them back where you found them.
This story about fake slides is baffling. Nobody is claiming that the slides that Al-Bayati is printing in his articles are fake. They are not the same ones that were presented by Ribe on Primetime. The ones that Ribe prsented on Primetime were stained with GMS and showed PC organisms in Eliza Janes lungs.
It seems for some unknown reason that Christine Maggiore does not have these slides but this is no reason to ignore them. They are clearly described in the coroner's report and any "rebuttal" to the coroner's report should deal with them. Al-Bayati's dubious use of the H&E stained slides as "negative controls" only demonstrates his own incompetence.
The evidence clearly supports the coroner's conclusion that Eliza Jane died from PCP caused by HIV disease.
Dr. Noble, was an HIV test run on this innocent child or was only the mother's HIV status taken into consideration?
And if the autorities know the answer, why has it not been released?
The coroner's report showed that brain tissue was tested for HIV p24 proteins and was found to be positive. Despite various protestations controls with uninfected tissue were also done and HIV p24 antigen testing is sufficient to diagnose HIV infection.
Christine has also been given Western blot slides. I have no idea about whether Elisa tests were done and whether they were positive, negative or indeterminate.
It should also be pointed out that Christine failed to tell the ER doctors and the coroner's office that she was HIV+.
I thought no one really knows her status, she has been diagnosed neg, pos and unknown.
And didn't Bergman state that Christine is definitely neg.
So in essence you are saying that an HIV test wasn't run. Isn't it true that P24 proteins are not specific to HIV. I don't see the revelence of the mother's status being divulged. If my husband went to the hospital and was sick, there would be no need for me to tell the physician of my status as he is the patient not me.
No. I don't know whether or not HIV Elisa tests were done. It seems that Western blot tests were. I am afraid you are mistaken about P24 proteins. There are amny proteins that have a molecular weight of 24 kiloDaltons. HIV p24 antigen tests look for a specific HIV p24. There may be some cross reaction with other related proteins however the tests have high specificity. The negative controls that were performed demonstrate that the test was specific.
The HIV status of Christine and the possible HIV status of Eliza Jane were highly important in quickly determining what the likely cause of the childs illness was.
It's like turning up in the emergency room and failing to tell the doctors that you've just come back from a trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo. That information would of course alter the doctors' range of disgnoses.
For a long time Christine held herself up as proof that HIV doesn't cause AIDS.
This was wrong because she might have
A) been a false positive
B) been a long term non-progressor
C) been slowly progressing
With the death of her daughter option A appears to be very unlikely.
So I gather when I take my husband to the hospital that it is imperative that I tell the doctors that I am HIV+. They would look at me and say AND, what does that have to do with the problem at hand? There again, this is correlation. One doesn't have anything to do with the other. Your analogy doesn't hold water,just because one person is labeled HIV+ in the family doesn't automatically make the rest of the family. Maybe I should tell my vet that I HIV+ the next time I take one of my animals in for a check-up. He too would look at me like I'm crazy if I did. Really, you folks are grasping for straws.
The probability of perinatal transmission of HIV is about 50% when no precautions are taken. Obviously the relatively high probability that Eliza Jane was infected with HIV is extremely relevant to any diagnosis that she might have gotten.
PCP is extremely rare in people not infected with HIV. It is not something that the doctors would have looked for in a child that was presumed to be HIV-. It seems that the ER doctors suspected Haemophilus pneumonia instead which considering that Eliza Jane was not vaccinated was a definite risk.
Chris,
I wondering what your spin will be if it is proven that Eliza Jane did not die of PCP and was not HIV+.
Again why don't you contact Christine direct.
"The probability of perinatal transmission of HIV is about 50% when no precautions are taken. Obviously the relatively high probability that Eliza Jane was infected with HIV is extremely relevant to any diagnosis that she might have gotten."
That is BS. Major fat heads argued amongst themselves for years weather or not Maggiore was infected. Her own test results were contradictory, The reason that Maggiore is now considered HIV+ is that EJ was allegedly "diagnosed" as having died of an aids related pneumonia and thus confirming Maggiore's status. It is EJ' autopsy that confirmed Maggiore's status, the reverse cannot be argued.
"ER doctors suspected Haemophilus pneumonia". The coroner didn't seem to have a clue either until much later into the chain of events and after having learned of Maggiore's suspected status.
The GMS stained slides of Eliza Jane's lungs provide extremely strong evidence that she died from PCP. If new evidence is presented that she did not have PCP then I would change my opinion.
Likewise the HIV p24 detected in her brain tissue provides strong evidence that she was infected with HIV.
Christine has been challenging various people with credentials and qualifications much greater than my own to a public debate. They have all declined for very good reasons. The best reason is one that I have already outlined. It is extremely unlikely that Christine will ever accept evidence that HIV exists and causes AIDS because to do so she would have to face the possibility that she indirectly caused the death of her own child. I don't think it is possible to convince Christine of anything. A public debate centered on convincing Christine that HIV exists and causes AIDS would be a fool's errand.
Chris, I agree:
A public debate centered on convincing Christine that HIV exists and causes AIDS would be a fool's errand.
Maggiore and her friends want a public debate because a public debate confers legitimacy. As we have witnessed on this 'blog, Maggiore and many of her supporters are not legitimate debaters; they refuse to consider any evidence that contradicts their beliefs, which they accept in turn without evidence.
In my opinion, debating Maggiore and thereby implicitly conferring legitimacy on her position would be unethical. Maggiore has herself refused and encourages others to refuse the medical interventions that have reduced mother-to-child transmission of HIV from 25-50% down to almost zero in many countries: medication, C-section delivery, formula feeding. Maggiore's own daughter apparently was infected with HIV and died because of this. Even if her daughter did not die of AIDS, and Maggiore was instead a victim of a vast conspiracy hundreds strong, how many children have been and will be infected by HIV as a result of Alive and Well's outreach, counseling, "support?"
Maggiore presents a particularly tragic case of denialism. Many people in denial about HIV/AIDS, when faced with real health consequences or death, acknowledge that their honey-and-cinammon treatments didn't work, that HIV is real, with real health issues to be faced, and that they or their loved ones need(ed) to consider proven methods of treatment. For some, at that point of recognition it is sadly too late; others can recover some of their former health. Since the tragic death of her daughter, Maggiore has recognized nothing but has instead become retrenched in her denial. She has made it her mission to help other mothers do what she did: ignore HIV and deny that health decisions sometimes have health consequences.
Debating Maggiore would not change any of this; it would only give her another platform, one she desperately wants, to spread her beliefs.
" A public debate centered on convincing Christine that HIV exists and causes AIDS would be a fool's errand."
A public debate is primarily focused on convincing the audience. That you fail to grasp that is now plain as daylight.
"Maggiore and her friends want a public debate because a public debate confers legitimacy"
Legitimacy is confered on those that show up, not on those that don't. 90% of life is showing up, remember?
"The GMS stained slides of Eliza Jane's lungs provide extremely strong evidence that she died from PCP."
but you don't feel the need to inform the authorities that they are working with fake or missing slides. It sounds like you are witholding evidence crucial to an ongoing investigation.
"Debating Maggiore would not change any of this; it would only give her another platform, one she desperately wants, to spread her beliefs."
No one has to GIVE her a soap box for her to stand on one.
These public debates are usually framed as "does evolution explain life on Earth" or "does HIV cause AIDS". As Michael Behe would explain there is asymmetry in the explanatory filters. The onus is implicitly on the the side of the scientists to "prove" that HIV causes AIDS etc. All the oppositions has to do is say "nahh that's not evidence" and provide semiplausible excuses for not accepting the evidence. The creationists don't have to provide an alternate explanation other than God did it and the HIV denialists don't have to provide an alternate thoery of AIDS that is supported by the same weight and quality of evidence that supports the HIV causes AIDS theory.
If at the end of the debate the opposition is still not convinced that HIV causes AIDS then they can declare themselves to be the winners of the debate. If as is often the case the audience is mostly fellow deniers then the audience will normally agree.
I really have trouble understanding what the hell you are talking about. Ribe and the coroner's office obviously have the GMS stained slides. I don't know what I could possibly inform them of that they don't know already.
On the other hand Christine appears to be oblivious to their existence and importance. I can't tell whether this is willful denial or just ignorance. What fake slides are you atlking about. The H&E stained slides that Al-Bayati aren't fake. They aren't the GMS stained slides that clearly show PC organisms.
Braganza, I want to pass on to you some exciting news about LDN and Hepatitis B. This report comes from a LDN support group of a child who contracted Hepatitis, while the family was in China. She was scheduled for a study involving Entecavir. The parents knew that LDN boosts the immune system and had heard of the work of Dr. McCandless successfully treating autism with LDN. Before the study began, the child was given 1mg of LDN at bedtime. Her liver enzymes have since returned to normal (from a high of 200 down to 25/36 range) and her viral load has gone down from 59.2 million to 29,000 (over a 1000% decrease).
The parents called the gastro doctor and he responded that this is great news. LDN appears to have similar responses to other viral drugs. LDN isn't an antiviral drug but rather her own immune system is fighting the virus, thus eliminating the worry about antiviral resistance.
At this point the parents are continuing to monitor her lab results until the child sero-converts. Now, the child does not qualify for the John Hopkins study because of her rapidly improving condition!
"If as is often the case the audience is mostly fellow deniers then the audience will normally agree."
does this mean the denialists usually win the crowd?
"Ribe and the coroner's office obviously have the GMS stained slides."
You say this because you saw it on TV at a resolution of 720/480. I saw mobile bioweapons labs on TV in Iraq, that didn't mean they existed. The coroners office has yet to turn them over.
Pat, when you state that the coroner has "yet" to turn them over. Are you saying that Christine does not have access to this? If so, why not and can it legally be withheld?
"For a long time Christine held herself up as proof that HIV doesn't cause AIDS.
"This was wrong because she might have
A) been a false positive
B) been a long term non-progressor
C) been slowly progressing
With the death of her daughter option A appears to be very unlikely.
Posted by: Chris Noble | November 12, 2007 8:45 PM"
Nice example of reverse diagnosis. Until her daughter died Moore and Bergmman were only too happy to drag her through the mud and accuse her of being a HIV+ poseur for profit. Now that this "scientificly based slander has been falsified, they change their tune but maintain she is a profiteur. And you think you're being reasonable.
Le plus ça change, le plus c'est la meme chose...
"Pat, when you state that the coroner has "yet" to turn them over. Are you saying that Christine does not have access to this? If so, why not and can it legally be withheld?"
This is what Maggiore says. She appears not to be in possession of the TV slides nor the HIV test of EJ. Maggiore is entitled to access all the evidence presented against her. It cannot be "legally" witheld (guantanamo excepted). The phenomena is called "footdragging"
How is she or anyone profiting from having the label of HIV+? I know that I am not. If anything, it is a terrible label to place on someone. Because we think for ourselves and listen to the beat of a different drummer, we are now considered "outcasts." In the future, rethinkers will be vindicated and will be known for being ahead of their time.
I believe that if there was any "real" evidence in this case, that the family would have been in real, legal issues by now. I don't see this happening so there mustn't be any evidence against Christine, just a lot of BS on the blogs.
How does LDN "successfully treat" autism noreen?
"For a long time Christine held herself up as proof that HIV doesn't cause AIDS.
"This was wrong because she might have
A) been a false positive
B) been a long term non-progressor
C) been slowly progressing
And you don't think, Dr. Noble B and C taken to its extreme is grounds reevaluating the theory? "HIV causes AIDS except when it doesn't".
MEC, TB also can progress slowly, or not cause any disease at all in those who've been infected for years and years. Do we also "reevaluate that theory?" You're not arguing against HIV causation of AIDS, you're arguing against the germ theory of disease wholesale.
"How is she or anyone profiting from having the label of HIV+? I know that I am not."
That is indeed a very relevant question. All the accusations of profiteering are the easiest to dismiss because no one has ever demonstrated how Maggiore profits from this, or you for that matter. Yet this doesn't stop the rumour mill which leads me to believe the vicious personal attacks are meant to distract our attention away from the fictile nature of the "evidence".
Yes Tara, we do evaluate those theories as well if everybody in which a possibly disease causing microbe is found was automatically given a death sentence and put on chemotherapy.
You know as well as the next run off the mill epidemiologist that terrain or "cofactors" is often more significant than the presence of a particular germ.
Dr. Noble where is the reference for 50% perinatal transmissibility of HIV? I thought your party piece argument against Duesberg (excepting Ascher et al of course)was that perinatal transmission of HIV is much less than 50%, which supposedly makes it a mainly sexually, as opposed to perinatally, transmitted microbe?
Apy, Dr. McCandless has done work with LDN and autism. She spoke at last years conference. Google her and LDN for more info. Am attaching one article for her:
http://www.starvingbrains.com/DesktopDefault.aspx?tabindex=4&tabid=2
"I believe that if there was any "real" evidence in this case, that the family would have been in real, legal issues by now. I don't see this happening so there mustn't be any evidence against Christine, just a lot of BS on the blogs."
Not necessarily. Wether EJ died of Aids-related pneunonia or not, the law is quite clear on what constitutes "neglect" and in the case of Maggiore, the investigation was dropped because there was ample evidence to refute a charge of child neglect. The reason for that is that Maggiore's HIV status cannot be legally established beyond reasonable doubt and she did everything a responsible parent is expected and required to do under the law. This has been established throught medical records and eyewitness testimony. People who still bang the drum of criminal neglect are ignoring the courts findings and maliciously prologning a smear campaign against a mother who has lost a child to disease.
MEC,
I don't know that I'd say "more significant" than the presence of a germ, but I'm hesitant to get into more discussion of "necessary" versus "sufficient" factors for disease development because I'll probably be quote-mined. Suffice it to say that HIV and M. tuberculosis are certainly necessary for the development of AIDS or tuberculosis disease, though as you note, other factors play a role in pathogenesis as well. So why do you dismiss these factors, which scientists readily acknowledge and actively research, and instead call for a "reevaluation" of the AIDS science?
And y'know, while HIV infection can certainly be fatal, researchers and physicians acknowledge it doesn't have to be a "death sentence." Just like other potentially terminal diseases (including TB and cancer), yes, patients are offered medicines or medical procedures that can curtail the progression of disease. Again, why this is controversial with HIV but not other diseases mystifies me.
I know that very few people today can listen to this, but one day it will be common knowledge that TB does not exist without a preceding cancer. That day the "potentially terminal" adjective will cease to be cast upon the millions by the armies of almighty yet totally ignorant medical doctors. Which day might that be? Easy! It will be the day when Dr Ryke Geerd Hamer's New Medicine has finally reached the masses.
- Oh come on Jan, cut it out! Don't you understand that you're becoming one of the topmost trolls on the Internet?
- Yeah, I know. So what? Some people very much appreciate what I write and I have good hope that others will become curious little by little, start to read here and there and finally come to understand what Hamer's New Medicine has to offer.
- You're an incurable optimist! Nobody ever changed his mind on those Web logs and Internet forums. Just look at the everlasting discussions raging here.
- I don't care a shit about big mouthed empty headed scientists and their yahoo lackeys who have nothing to do but do some herd-keeping on the Internet. I address the silent readers, the ones who are big enough to make up their own mind about what they read.
- (sigh)
She did not appear to show any desire to obtain the GMS slides. This in itself is unfathomable.
Debating Denialists is like trying to nail jelly to a tree. Different Denialists (and sometimes the same ones) use mutually exclusive arguments. Some of them argue that HIV doesn't fulfil Koch's postulates and then the next minute another is arguing that Koch got it all wrong and bacteria do not cause disease.
Part of Duesberg's argument is that HIV is spread primarily through perinatal transmission. Other Denialists go to great lengths to deny this in both general terms and in the case of EJ Scovill.
So Pat why don't you try to convince Duesberg that HIV is not spread perinatally and he can try to convince you that it is. Come back when you've worked out your differences.
"So Pat why don't you try to convince Duesberg that HIV is not spread perinatally and he can try to convince you that it is. Come back when you've worked out your differences."
Why should I do this? Did I say anything about parinatal transmission? You, Noble geek, are again confusing your "denialists".
"And y'know, while HIV infection can certainly be fatal, researchers and physicians acknowledge it doesn't have to be a "death sentence." Just like other potentially terminal diseases (including TB and cancer), yes, patients are offered medicines or medical procedures that can curtail the progression of disease. Again, why this is controversial with HIV but not other diseases mystifies me."
I think most of the controvercy surrounds the difference in length of treatment. Correct me if I a wrong but cancer treatment isn't proposed as life long chemotherapy, Aids treatment on the other hand is and it's a daily dose.
You're correct. It was "MEC" that made the comment I responded to.
To Franklin:
Thank you for the condolences and your offer to interpret my daughter's chest x-rays.
Rather than carry out an analysis and debate on this blog, I invite you to come to Los Angeles where we can meet face to face in a public forum and record the event in such a way as to share this learning experience with a wider audience. I offer round trip airfare and accommodations, and to assist with your preparations, I will provide you with my daughter's complete hospital records and medical charts. We can also review my own medical records showing the positive, negative and indeterminate test results that John Moore recently questioned.
In the meanwhile, here is a brief reply to your post:
As you certainly know, I disagree with the conclusion that Eliza Jane died of AIDS for a variety of reasons including her record of excellent health and school participation (despite being unvaccinated and in the constant company of children and adults), her higher than normal lymphocyte count at time of death, the lack of inflammation and damage to the lungs found at autopsy, and the missing pathological signs of oxygen deprivation consistent with fatal pneumonia. Further, we still lack lab evidence establishing her HIV status or a so-called viral load. There are other very serious questions about testing protocols that pertain to our legal case which I cannot reveal at this time. However, if, after a public event you wish to speak in private about the specifics, I can see about hiring you as an expert through our attorneys. We have hired "hostile" experts in the past, including two nationally recognized MD pathologists, in order to test the merits of our case and I have learned a lot from these discussions.
Regarding the chest x-rays, there were two, not one, as suggested by the wording you cite from the autopsy report and the hospital records do not state that these revealed pneumonia. Rather, they show slight opacity upon admission, and hours later show much more which is consistent with the accumulation of fluid in her lungs due to toxic reaction. If fluid had been present only in her lungs, this would indicate a localized rather than systemic problem. Instead, al her bodily cavities were filled with fluid, consistent with a systemic issue and the toxic reaction described in Dr. Al-Bayati's report.
I believe GMS stained slides are irrelevant to the case given that the lungs show no evidence of inflammation or damage consistent with pneumonia and the fact that they were ordered speaks to the lengths to which the coroner's office went to try to prove something that was not medically or scientifically justifiable by normal, ethical means. As a rule, GMS will allow one to see minute quantities of stuff like bacteria or fungus but little bits of stuff that can cause inflammation and damage do not explain disease in the absence of inflammation and damage. This is especially relevant in my daughter's case as her lymphocyte count clearly indicates the capacity for normal inflammatory response. However, if you want to review and talk about these slides, we can also do that in person.
Please note the offer for a polite public discussion of my daughter's case and matters relating to HIV and AIDS has been extended to Nicholas Bennet, John Moore, David "Orac" Gorsky and remains open to them, you or anyone with expertise in science, medicine and/or pathology and an interest in open public dialogue.
I find the bitter, hateful tone at this blog counterproductive to the goal of honest understanding of this and other issues related to HIV and AIDS, and am sorry that in the past few weeks I've participated in anger-fueled exchanges. I want to work toward meaningful dialogue and get away from the mean spirited back and forth that goes on here. I feel that the anonymity of this forum leads to a lack of integrity.
If you or anyone else would like to work toward the goal of understanding through open dialogue in a public forum where we can be seen and heard, please contact me directly through Alive & Well by phone so we can arrange to meet and speak in person.
Thank you,
Christine
To Christine:
You wrote:
I am afraid that I do not know that.
While I think that it may be true that you do not believe that your daughter died of AIDS, I do not believe that any of the reasons you cite are related to *why* you believe what you do.
If, in fact, you do not believe that your daughter died of AIDS, in my opinion, it is because you refuse to face the reality underlying her tragic death.
You say that:
When I scroll up in this thread, I see that on August 10th you wrote that:
Did you make that statement before or after you consulted with the "two nationally recognized MD pathologists"?
Did the "two nationally recognized MD pathologists" confirm that your daughter's lungs "show no pneumonia of any kind," as you claim to "understand"?
Did they agree with Dr. Al-Bayati's diagnosis that her death was caused by a reaction to amoxicillin?
Or, by chance, did they confirm that her death was caused by Pneumocystis pneumonia and AIDS?
By the way, Christine, what would make you characterize "two nationally recognized MD pathologists,"--hired as experts by you--as "hostile" experts?
According to the transcript of your appearance on PrimeTime (available on the ABC web page):
If "you want to know the truth", why would you consider "two nationally recognized MD pathologists,"--pathologists whom you hired as experts--as "hostile" experts?
I can think of no better way for you to learn the truth about your daughter's death than to have her autopsy slides reviewed by competent anatomic pathologists, so I cannot understand why you consider such experts to be "hostile".
Is "hostile expert" simply shorthand for a properly trained individual who refuses to indulge your delusion?
If the "two nationally recognized MD pathologists" agree with Dr. Al-Bayati's conclusions, why haven't you publicized their findings--and why do you consider them "hostile"?
If, on the other hand, the "two nationally recognized MD pathologists" have confirmed that your daughter died of Pneumocystis pneumonia, why do you state that:
So sir Franklin Chickenshit,
are you going to say anything relevant or othertwise take Christine Maggiore up on on her offer?
"are you going to say anything relevant or othertwise take Christine Maggiore up on on her offer?"
molecular,
Christine Maggiore has been advailable since at least 2004 to express her views one or many on the internet re: HIV/AIDS forums and blog sites.
The notion that she NEEDS a public debate in her forum of choice is simply---warmed over bialy/hyperbole/bilge.
there is no positive test elisa/wb etc, so that is strange in itself. After all if eliza did die of AIDS shoulndt christine be dead by now since she was positive in 1992, what ad hoc excuse do you boneheads have for that?
McKiernan, you are yourself the best example of why everybody NEEDS a forum of his/her choice. If not, one has no choice but to suffer nonsensical statements from ill-informed morons like you.
Thanks, harvey or substitute bobbing rubber ducky of choice.
Think about it harvey, this thread has been running since June 2007 and the first comment I've ever made was November 27 last, re: Christine Maggiore who now seems to be in absentia.
And you or your substitute bobbing rubber ducky of choice replies:
"McKiernan, you are yourself the best example of why everybody NEEDS a forum of his/her choice. If not, one has no choice but to suffer nonsensical statements from ill-informed morons like you."
Now think about how stupid your reply is/was.
McK,
I've thought deeply about it and concluded your last Comment was as thoroughly irrelevant and nonsensical as the first.
Thanks, harvey/substitute bobbing rubber ducky of choice.
Ms. Maggiore,
You wrote:
Did the "two nationally recognized MD pathologists" who you say you hired to review your daughter's case agree with your assessment of the relevance of the GMS-stained slides to your daughter's diagnosis?
Did the "two nationally recognized MD pathologists" who you say you hired to review your daughter's case agree with your assessment of the relevance of the GMS-stained slides to your daughter's diagnosis?
Franklin,
I'm in a fix here, please help me out: Which one of Biolad, Dale and yourself has gotten furthest memorizing the English alfabet? If there are parts of it you are still not familiar with let me know.
As you yourself has beaten to death above, Christine Maggiore said she had hired "hostile experts" to test her case. Now that either means these experts were known in advance to be hostile, just like you, or their role was to act hostile, that is, disagree with Al-Bayati.
In either case your cunning line of questioning is rendered meaningless by the definition of the term
"hostile".
Even in the extremely unlikely third scenario, which you so cleverly suggest, that the experts were simply hired without previous thought having been given to their likely opinion or assigned role in Christine Maggiore's and Al-Bayati's preparations, your question would still be rendered meaningless by the definition of the word
"hostile".
Now how many times would I have to give you the definition of the word "chickenshit" before you realize you epitomize it? If you are sure of yourself chickenshit ass over there and prove it, or at least have the decency to stop your embarrasingly clumsy attempts at innuendo on this chickenshit forum.
MEC,
Despite your speculations about Ms. Maggiore's reasons for referring to "hostile experts," Ms. Maggiore has not explained why she considers the "two nationally recognized MD pathologists" that she claims to have hired to be "hostile experts".
If, as quoted by PrimeTime, Ms. Maggiore wants "to know the truth," it seems to me that she should hire "nationally recognized MD pathologists" to explain the autopsy findings to her.
Perhaps she considers the "two nationally recognized MD pathologists" to be "hostile experts" simply because after their expert review they may have agreed with the Coroner's interpretation.
If they agreed with Al-Bayati's interpretation, why would she refer to them as "hostile"?
If they provided Ms Maggiore with an independent interpretation of the autopsy findings--an interpretation based on their review of the autopsy slides and their training and experience in pathology--why would she consider this information to be "hostile"?
That would seem to be exactly the sort of information that she would want in order to "know the truth."
Perhaps Ms. Maggiore might find any expert who agreed with the Coroner's interpretation to be "hostile".
Yes, Franklin, that is the third scenario I gave above. You repeating it over and over doesn't make it any less speculative, as you so rightly remark.
I am happy even you have figured out that,
"If they agreed with Al-Bayati's interpretation, why would she refer to them as "hostile"?"
So perhaps we could dispense with a 4th Comment from you arguing ever so shrewdly that the hostile experts in all probability didn't agree with Al-Bayati?
I know you are using this to avoid taking up the direct challenge to deal with Maggiore and Al-Bayati face to face, which is fine, nobody says you have to be a hero. All I'm requesting is you might have the decency to admit you won't come out of hiding and consequently stop your own silly, anonymous speculations and innuendo from the cover of Tara's Chickenshitology Blog
MEC,
The important characteristic of these consultants is that they are "two nationally recognized MD pathologists" hired by Ms. Maggiore's legal team.
Independent qualified pathologists hired by Ms Maggiore's legal team.
To review the autopsy findings from her daughter.
And for some reason she considers their opinion to be "hostile".
And for some reason, on her "Justice for EJ" site, rather than explain the opinions of the "two nationally recognized MD pathologists" whom she claims to have consulted, Ms Maggiore chooses to publicize the opinions of an individual who has never practiced medicine, much less Anatomic Pathololgy.
Someone who apparently understands as little about the pathology of PCP as you do!
But apparently she doesn't consider his opinion "hostile".
I wonder why that is?
Franklin, I see it's a forlorn hope that you will ever stop repeating over and over what everybody has long understood and agreed on, namely the definition of "hostile" and now "friendly".
I can only assume you have nothing of substance to say, so allow me to repeat myself in return: Of all the lilly-livered AIDStruth chickenshits here you may well take the bisquit, which is no mean feat. But if you still feel lucky, punk, get your chickenshit ass to LA and tell Al-Bayati face to face that he knows nothing about pathology.
Go on, Frankie, we'll make you famous.
get your chickenshit ass to LA and tell Al-Bayati face to face that he knows nothing about pathology.
????
You got a simple chalenge from me last month and its called the DOUBLE HONEYBUN VIRAL SIGNATURE CHALLENGE.
Let me check. Oh weird!!. The honeybuns are still here!!
On
My
Desk.
Why go to LA and fight with ignoramus deniosaurs, why not do something positive. Like contribute to science or save people from disease or malpractice. Like in the DOUBLE HONEYBUN VIRAL SIGNATURE CHALLENGE.
Go on, Frankie, we'll make you famous.
Really, well not as famous as you get if you do the very simple DOUBLE HONEYBUN VIRAL SIGNATURE CHALLENGE, you prove HIV is a hoax if you do it!! Then your the most famous scientis alive!! So why aren't you doing it, just calling Franklin names on the internet.
It is currently accepted that a positive Western blot (WB) HIV antibody test is synonymous with HIV infection and the attendant risk of developing and dying from AIDS. The available evidence indicates that: (I) the antibody tests are not standardised; (II) the antibody tests are not reproducible; (III) the WB proteins (bands) which are considered to be coded by the HIV genome and to be specific to HIV may not be coded by the HIV genome and may in fact represent normal cellular proteins; (IV) even if the proteins are specific to HIV, because no gold standard has been used and may not even exist to determine specificity, a positive WB may represent nothing more than cross-reactivity with the many non-HIV antibodies present in AIDS patients and those at risk, and thus be unrelated to the presence of HIV. Therefore, it can be concluded that the use of the HIV antibody tests as a diagnostic and epidemiological tool for HIV infection needs to be completely thrown out and dismissed.
To all the doctors on this forum:
Those who deny the HIV-AIDS connection do not believe what they are saying. They are saying it for two reasons:
1. They are angry.
2. They are invoking the Separation of Church and State.
Ethics is a legality, not a science. You are required ethically to provide ARVs to AIDS patients, despite the risk of them dying from side effects. You cannot afford to challenge this law. However, thanks to the U.S. Constitution, the patients can challenge it for free. They profess a denial of the HIV-AIDS connection. And they parrot the behavior of real denialists, so as to qualify for legal purposes as making a religious objection. Then, according to the Separation of Church and State, they have the right to seek alternative treatment.
So will you continue to argue with a claim that was never meant to be taken seriously? Or will you treat these patients as what they are: a chance to express your personal conscience regarding the side effects of ARVs, and the only available entries in tests of the effectiveness of non-ARV treatment.