I know many of the HIV threads here get very tedious and repetitive, but occasionally interesting things come out of them. Believe it or not, I've learned a lot about HIV denial over the past year and a half or so. I've long been familiar with Duesberg's objections, but it wasn't until more recently that I realized there still were active denial groups around, and even wholesale germ theory deniers. So to me, the threads aren't all wasted.
Anyway, in one of the ongoing threads, there was discussion of one commenter's "natural" remedies, and her claim that "Germs cannot get a strong-hold in a healthy environment."
I noted that wasn't true, and that healthy people came down with illness every day, giving the example of the role a robust immune system played in the 1918 influenza pandemic.
Pope then asked if it had ever occurred to me "that people might be more than what you call the 'immune system'?"
Of course, regular readers know that certainly, I realize this. I've talked about disease resulting from the intersection of not only host and microbial factors, but as a result of the interaction of these with the environment (both within the host and externally) as well. However, while I've spent a lot of time discussing disease, I don't remember a post specifically defining "health." More on that after the jump.
As I mentioned later in that thread, during my time at the University of Michigan, the school of public health had a mural when you entered the building. I can't find it online at the moment, but it was something along the lines of "health is more than the absence of disease: it is a state of complete physical and mental well-being." There is a similar sentiment in the public health corridor here in Iowa. Health isn't simply the default state when one is disease-free; it's also being emotionally well, and of having rights and liberties in a free society.
However, many of these more holistic versions of "health" are quite difficult to quantitate biomedically. How does one measure "complete physical and mental well-being?" It's very difficult--therefore, we typically employ a more reductionist view to measure different variables. For example, we have surveys that can be suggestive of one's emotional well-being. We have many measurements and biomarkers that can give us an idea of one's physical well-being, such as weight, BMI, heart rate, cholesterol levels, and yes, a number of markers related to the immune system. So therefore, in the literature, "health" does tend to get broken up into discrete numbers or characterizations that can be more easily examined, even though most of us do realize that "health" goes far beyond these numerical measurements (and far beyond the immune system), many times reductionism is a useful tool to get at one piece of the puzzle.
The key, to me, is to *realize* that this is a reductionist view, and that "health" encompasses much more. The challenge for folks like the commenter I mentioned, however, is that if they argue that we must always use a more holistic view of health in our research, that they give us a workable way to define and quantitate this for our studies.
It is clearly true that the various "systems" of the human body interact with one another.
The central nervous system certainly does interact with the immune system and the circulatory system, for example.
A trivial example of this is the action of the adrenal glands. If you frighten someone (a CNS reaction), their adrenal glands may well secrete additional corticosteroids (which are immunosuppressant and anti-inflammatory) and epinephrine (which acts strongly on the circulatory system and may have some anti-inflammatory activity). Obviously I'm simplifying, but not in a deceptive way.
There is evidence that depression and other stressful states may have surprisingly strong negative impact on physical well-being.
Obviously malnutrition, sedentary lifestyle, exhaustion, etc, increase the risk for many infections.
Unfortunately, life isn't magic. The fact that bad things can hurt you doesn't mean that healthy diet, positive thinking, exercise, and so on, will make you immune to infection.
Many microbes are opportunistic to one degree or another. Others seem to have evolved to take advantage of the people who otherwise seem the healthiest.
Healthy living is good. It's not a substitute for public sanitation, public health measures, and direct treatment of pathogenic microbes (including HIV) where indicated.
Healthy living is synergistic with modern medicine. The idea that you should choose one or the other is a false dichotomy.
The quotation you were searching for comes from the constitution of WHO which infamously asserts that "Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity." This is echoed in George Engel's biopsychosocial model of health and illness. Constructing definitions of 'health' and 'disease' is a virtual cottage industry in the philosophy of medicine.
Physical, spiritual and emotional well-being were the primary components I was taught at med school. The balance between these factors is important too.
Thinking about what Noreen has said, I feel that she places unrealistic expectations upon the ability of non-physical factors to influence overall health. Her holistic philosophy is understandable and I can sympathise with it, but at the end of the day it is just too much wishful thinking for my liking. Her beliefs have swung her too far away from biological determinants of disease which are the most crucial factor. She may be correct in that these are the things we tend to focus on, but forgets there are good reasons for this (namely that the biological model conforms to core determinants of the scientific method, and that by using this model, beneficial interventions have emerged that result in improved overall health).
One final point which should take our thoughts back to their evolutionary biology roots- humans (and other creatures) have evolved in conjunction with and in competition with others, and the end result of "health" in terms of maintenance of a reasonable status quo depends upon other organisms, both externally and internally. We'd struggle a bit without our gut flora, for example.
Actually, it may be rather difficult to fault Noreen. Her experiences have lead her to trust her instincts and her
health has seemingly followed from them.
Health, the definition thereof is kind of like defining goodness. You really don't know what it is until you find yourself knee deep in its opposite.
That seems to be where all the ladders start, well except for prescription writers that know better.
Actually, it may be rather difficult to fault Noreen. Her experiences have lead her to trust her instincts and her health has seemingly followed from them.
I certainly don't fault Noreen. I hope she is correct.
However, I think most people would agree that it would be foolhardy to ignore high blood pressure simply because you feel fine.
Pope then asked if it had ever occurred to me "that people might be more than what you call the 'immune system'?"
This is ironic considering that HIV "rethinkers" appear to be incapable of understanding the difference bewteen subsets of lymphocytes and the difference between cellular and humoral immunity.
As I mentioned later in that thread, during my time at the University of Michigan, the school of public health had a mural when you entered the building. I can't find it online at the moment, but it was something along the lines of "health is more than the absence of disease: it is a state of complete physical and mental well-being." There is a similar sentiment in the public health corridor here in Iowa. Health isn't simply the default state when one is disease-free; it's also being emotionally well, and of having rights and liberties in a free society.
I much prefer the reductionist definition of health as the absence of disease. Otherwise, "health" just comes to mean "the good life", leading to the medicalization of ordinary mental states and the current social obsession with maintaining "optimal" health. While social and emotional factors affect health (physical and mental), they should be thought of separately. Otherwise, the traditional wish for "health and happiness" becomes redundant!
After getting my master's in biology, I came to the realization that there are no hard lines between life and death or self and other. The concept of health is similar.
We're just systems of chemical compounds. Depending on our environment and internal state, these systems may be self-perpetuating, change, or opt for a more solitary existence (typically known as death). People with sickle cell anemia might be considered healthy if everyone else is dying of malaria.
I realize it feels terribly mechanistic, but it also seems true. Science is all about getting to the nature of things, even if they're not particularly pleasant.
"This is echoed in George Engel's biopsychosocial model of health and illness."
Engels never actually put forward a specific concrete model capable of predictive empirical testing. He argued in abstract that one was needed.
IMHO, the word and concept 'biopsychosocial' is one of the most glib and empty invoked in medicine, comparable to the fads in management speak that infect business schools. It remains a convenient rhetorical label to cover sloppy theorising, methodologically weak experiments, and poor clinical results.
(And yes, I am well acquainted with the literature.)
McKiernan, I have to a great extent, trusted my "instincts" especially in regards to taking the antiretrovirals. Add the fact that I do not believe that diseases are incurable has certainly gone far to push me down the highway of life. I live what I believe to be true, it matters not if you folks agree with me as I have taken charge and am in control of my destiny, as much is possible.
I would like to repost this here as it was inadvertently posted on the wrong section:
In the early 1800's, the Botanic Theory of Health was popular. Those who supported it believed that health is a perfectly sound mind in a perfectly sound body - mens sana in corpore sano; a state of health is said to exist when different organs are performing in an easy and regular manner.
Dr. Samuel Thomson founded the American Branch to this theory of health. He stated that our bodies were composed of four elements, earth, air, fire and water. He believed that a healthy state consisted in the proper balance of these elements and disease occured in their disarrangement. He also felt that whatever supported the internal heat and directed the determining power to the surface, would expel the disease and save the patient.
He use plants that could restore and repair the waste and decay within the body; by opeing obstructions, promoting perspiration and restoring the digestive organs by exciting and maintaining a degree of heat and action throughout the system. He found this method to be successful in treating every form of disease.
He believed, as did others, that the first condition in health is to have suitable food; food being the fuel by which heat is generated and forms new cells and repairs worn out tissues. This theory of health claimed that no one thing was as important to perfect health than the quality and quantity of food.
Obdulantist - I agree that Engel's model isn't "empirically testable," but I don't think it was ever intended as an empirical hypothesis. It does, however, "echo" the WHO definition of health. I prefer a more traditional view of health, framed in terms of natural functional capacities rather than nebulous "well being."
"Dr. Samuel Thomson founded the American Branch to this theory of health. He stated that our bodies were composed of four elements, earth, air, fire and water."
Pseudo-reductionism: That's the sort of "woo" or questionable generalization that gets one into trouble. May as well call it "chi" or "morphic fields". It's really just word salad in the end.
What we consider to be "health", is a dynamic state and that resposes in that state can be "healthy", even though the response might kill you. For example anaphylaxis. A "healthy" person, injected with enough lipopolysaccharide from the right bacteria will go into anaphylaxis and die. Anahylaxis is a "healthy" response (crank up the immune system to the max), to a life-threatening situation (LPS in the blood stream). How many of what we consider to be symptoms of ill health are actually "healthy" responses to adverse circumstances? Fever, inflammation, cough, itching, pain, thirst, hunger, nausea, lack of hunger, diarrhea, fatigue? They may be unpleasent, but that may be the point, to be an aversive response so you don't do what ever it was that brought that on again.
The point on sickle cell anemia and malaria is very well taken. Nothing in physiology can be looked at in isolation. It is all coupled.
Adam -
I agree that living beings can be conceptualized as boundaried biochemical systems.
But personally, I'd get rid of the word "just". It may work for you, but it is a purely subjective judgment.
You could equally write "It's wonderful that these chemical systems have given rise to art, music, science, ethics, philosophy, romance, curiousity, and the wonderful diversity of life on earth!" :-). And that would be equally accurate.
True enough, and some things are inherently unpleasant to any sensitive, rational person.
But our reaction to scientific reality is subjective.
For me, learning about evolution, for example, was a very positive experience. The reality that all of life is inter-related, and that things like disease and predation can be explained scientifically, has never struck me as upsetting, nor even especially incompatible with "spiritual" enlightenment.
That's an excellent point, and at some level the fine-tuning of personal well-being clearly moves beyond the realm of medicine and health.
However, I think a somewhat more expansive definition of "health" may be indicated for several reasons.
1) To be a stickler, there is technically no such thing as "absence of disease"; it's always a question of degree.
2) Social and mental factors can have a strong impact on physical health.
3) Despite 50 years or more of worrying by science fiction authors and various "pundits", I don't see any evidence that medical science is tending in the direction of "medicalizing" more and more non-pathological mental states. If anything, it's clearly the opposite, and there has been a strong trend toward greater respect for individual autonomy and the broad range of normal variation.
Nature will have the final say in regards to health. When we trangress her natural laws by not eating healthy diets, exercising and other proper, health habits, we will pay the price with bad health. Health is based on a cause and effect. So daedalus2u is correct,symptoms are the body's way to warn us they we are violating some principle(s) of health; nature being generous and patient, she tries to save us from ourselves. It is when we ignore her warnings that we will continue on to disease and sicknesses.
There are mutant mice with knockouts in immune system related genes that show resistance to death induced by LPS injection. But they have impaired ability to fight off bacterial infections. So which mouse is more "healthy," the wild-type or the mutant? Clearly, it depends upon circumstances.
An immune response to something like bacterial LPS is a drastic reaction to what has registered on the immune system as a life-threatening crisis. Essentially, the body is doing chemotherapy on itself, and the biological mechanisms and mediators involved are every bit as dangerous as the "toxic" drugs that HIV denialists and other health extremists decry. You may succeed in fighting off the infection and die of the side effects of your body's own self-treatment. And of course if your immune system is mistaken--if the alarm bells have been triggered by some innocuous antigen that happens to resemble a marker of bacterial or viral infection, then your body's "healthy" response may kill you in the process of trying to fight off a nonexistent threat.
Noreen/Rock, since you are still here and haven't "disappeared for the next 5 months", perhaps you would give us youtr thoughts on these questions:
What the implications of having gut flora and how does this fit in with your theories on infection?
Does the existence of these potentially lethal germs indicate a failure of the healthy immune system to deal with micro-organisms?
Are we all immunodeficient?
If some of these organisms get into the wrong place and cause problems, is this a failure of the immune system also?
Have you ever had cystitis?
Do women with cystitis conform to your concept that they are immunedeficient in some way, since germs "never" cause illness in someone who is healthy?
Having a healthy "flora" in the intestines is essential to health. This can be helped along by eating yogurt, soured products and by acidophilus supplementation. Llya Metchnikoff won a Nobel Prize on his work on immunity and infectious disease. He advocating ingesting lactic-acid-forming bacteria ir bacillus Bulgarius, which he believed to be responsible for the Balkans long life.
No, germs are always with us, it is not the germ but us or our inside terrain or environment that is the problem. Yes, I have had cystitis and continue to do because of the influence of radiation, which kills good and bad cells. If I'm not mistaken cystitis is usually caused by bacteria and I do hold firm that germs do not thrive in a healthy environment.
DT, explain to me why two farmers plant the same crop, each receives the same sunshine, water, but one farmer is wise and uses fertilizer to add his soil, who do you think will have the better crop? Or when an entire family is exposed to the same germ but only a few get sick, what was the difference? It must be the immunity difference of the individuals, which brings up the question, why do you think constitutes good immunity?
Rock of Gibraltor -
Although I am a big proponent of the value of healthy habits, you really do seem to be denying germ theory, among other things.
Claims that good habits will be sufficient to guarantee "perfect health" are sometimes made by people who should know better. Sometimes this is just innocent exaggeration.
If we didn't live in a place and time with extensive public health regulation, no-one would have the luxury of making such claims.
Good habits reduce risks. But they certainly don't make us perfectly immune to infection, or many other types of diseases.
No species on earth enjoys perfect health; all animals and plants have pathogens and parasites. No human population that has ever been known to exist has been free of disease, no matter how healthy their lifestyle.
We evolved an inflammatory and immune system to deal with infectious micro-organisms, parasites, and possibly some other things. The human defense system is impressive but "imperfect". It can't fight off every invader, it does damage to its own host under the best of circumstances, and it can be set off in a pathologic way.
trrll, how many other symptoms are similar? Is the hyperglycemia of the metabolic syndrome an adverse symptom, or a protective symptom?
Anybody figgured out what health is just yet ?
Oops, well maybe it is the lack of high blood pressure.
Rock,
Mammalian babies are sustained on mother's milk, yet they frequently become sick and die. Breastmilk is nature's perfect food, yet it doesn't guarantee health. Why not?
Tara, it is very nice of you, as well as quite timely, to point out that on a mural at your school, health was identified as: ""health is more than the absence of disease: it is a state of complete physical and mental well-being."
May I ask what "mental well-being" means even means to you, and how much effect you believe it does or does not play on say, a scale of 1 to 10, in the susceptibility of a human host to succumbing to illness? I have seen no acknowledgement from you whatsoever as regards the emotional or mental health of anyone affected by disease, let alone those diagnosed with the gut and emotion wrenching diagnosis of being told they are HIV postive.
It seems to me that half the message of the mural at your school was not absorbed or understood, let alone ever even acknowledged by you. Seems to be a common trait among many of the virologists I am familiar with
DT, you claim your school taught "Physical, spiritual and emotional well-being were the primary components I was taught at med school. The balance between these factors is important too". But you say you rejected it because it was not to your liking? Have you always tossed the parts of reality away that you simply do not "find to your liking"?
You do not seem to have actually learned any of the importance of the "emotional", let alone spiritual foundations of well being. Certainly have never seen you acknowledge its effects on the human immune system. Is this simply because you didn't like it or perhaps I must fault the school for not EMPHASIZING the importance of the lesson, much more than fault you, DT, for not having learned it and prematurely rejecting it.
Perhaps if DT had been properly taught the great and deleterious effects of negative emotional well being on health, then DT would realize that the immune suppression claimed to be AIDS due to HIV is a much deeper issue than simply catching a virus and the patient will end up dead unless medicated.
And Harold, who claims to be a retired physician, says:
"If you frighten someone (a CNS reaction), their adrenal glands may well secrete additional corticosteroids (which are immunosuppressant"....
Well Harold, if you are so aware of the deleterious effect of fear on the immune system, and are aware that frightening people is not healthy for them, then it would probably be really kind of you to refrain from any further scaring of the dear sweet spiritually and emotionally healthy HIV positive Noreen Martin any further for her own informed choice to not be taking any of the very toxic HIV drugs. Your implied threats of impending doom for her if she were not taking antivirals was quite obvious to many others, even if you yourself are unaware that you are projecting your own fears and fearfilled beliefs upon her. I do hope you will be more aware of this, and perhaps refrain from any more of this behavior than you already have done on the other HIV thread .
And Doctor, Please Heal Thyself to a place of your own mental and spiritual well being before unnecessary damage from fear is needlessly further inflicted on a healthy HIV diagnosed person. And trust me, you are far from the only doctor who has projected fear of impending illness or death upon patients.
Yet, the negative effects of stress, and fear, and shame and guilt and hopelessness and emotional upset and feeling like a leper that everyone diagnosed as HIV positives routinely suffers from seems to continuously be handwaved away by the scientific minded AIDS advocates. Also ignored are their mental and emotional states before becoming ill.
And at what expense? The expense of the health of those affected by a diagnosis.
Cancer patients often suffer the same projections of worsening health as well. Many are told by their ignorant doctors how many months of life they can expect before they will die.
This is not science or medicine. This behavior is sheer emotionally driven voodoo practiced by those who should know better, yet they ignore the very basics and substance of what they themselves were taught in school.
The entirety of this part of the equation is routinely overlooked by nearly ALL of the HIV advocates. I have yet to read in Jefferies, Nobles, Dr. Moores, DT's posts, or even Tara's for that matter, where any have even acknowledged, let alone realized the importance of the damage done by the paranoia and fear and stress involved with a diagnosis of HIV or AIDS. All have also been completely unwilling to look at how they themselves add to human consciousness their own fear based projections of HIV and AIDS.
None of the advocates and no HIV doctors that I know of, and certainly no HIV researchers that I am aware of seem even the least bit willing to understand how crucial this mental and emotional aspect in the health of HIV positives actually is.
Shame on all of you!
Grandmother:
I'm going to step up for a moment and be a total asshole. I haven't commented here for months, it was absorbing far too much of time, but while I was commenting I got to know the thinking of far too many people like you to be kind or generous in speaking to you.
I can say several things about you without knowing you at all. First, you are not a licensed, practicing physician. You are not an oncologist, cancer researcher, AIDS researcher, virologist, biologist, bioinformatician, dietician, or nurse. Your knowledge of biology is paltry to the point of non-existence. You know almost nothing about cell biology, certainly nothing that is more than a five minute search on the internet away, and what you do know, you don't understand.
Yet, like so many other people, you feel like you have some special insight into the human psyche that "ignorant doctors" don't. That somehow, the experience of dealing with cancer patients for decades--diagnosing them, treating them, advising them on their chances, fighting a terrifying and awful disease with them, and watching them live or die--has given your average oncologist less insight into the psychology of cancer patients than you have. And why? Have you worked hard to learn about cancer? Have you studied it closeley? No. Do you read the journals? No. Basically, your certainty is based on nothing but your own belief that you are special and wise.
Well, I have news for you, gran. You aren't special. You don't know anything more about humans beings than anyone else, and less about biology or medicine than anyone you are critiquing. You didn't work hard for knowledge, like a scientist does. You didn't sacrifice for it. You were never willing to put your beliefs in the crucible. You've never cared enough about the truth to really find out whether you were full of shit or not.
Ultimately, all you have is your own hubris. Why don't you come back after you've done (or at least read) a five year study of cancer survival rates among patients who have and have not been given a life expectancy, and hit us with some facts, instead of your unsupported opinions?
"Grandmother" -
My conscience was moved by Noreen's situation, and that's why I bothered to comment.
Fear is not a positive thing in most circumstances, but if some can see that I'm about to be hit by a truck, I hope that they speak up and scare me into moving, rather than staying silent.
When I first saw a discussion board full of what can only be described, in many cases, as negative, angry, delusional, self-destructive HIV- and science-denial, my instinct was to ignore it and move on to things that are a more profitable use of my time.
But I realized that there was an HIV-positive person, and I had to make some effort, if there was even a small chance of reaching them.
Noreen's posts are also much more positive and less attacking than those of the other denialists, and contain a lot of (partial) truth, and that's a happy coincidence, but I would have spoken up even to try to reach someone less pleasant.
My knowledge comes from the hard, honest work of applying my intelligent, enlightened and skeptical mind to years of study and learning. Where did you get yours?
Noreen -
You mention radiation.
It sounds as if you have experienced some major issues and had to deal with some of the tougher aspects of medicine.
I can easily see how that would lead anyone to wish for a better way.
I think that you are right that good food, exercise, a positive attitude, good priorities, and supportive relationships are extremely valuable.
Nevertheless, we live in an imperfect physical world, and it is still my advice that people combine those things with mainstream medicine, especially when dealing with serious, potentially life-threatening problems.
Michael Geiger/"grandmother" (don't you ever get tired of the new pseudonyms?),
This isn't true. We had an email discussion--what, a year ago now?--and I agreed that mental outlook could certainly play a role in health. However, all kinds of people get these terrible diagnoses every day--terminal cancer, debilitating diseases of the nervous system, diseases such as Alzheimer's that will slowly rob them of their mind. These are all "gut and emotion wrenching," yet only in AIDS do we see the symptoms of immunocompromise that we do. It's a terrible diagnosis to be sure, but so are the others, and you can't simply write the symptoms off to stress.
Hey Seth, now now now, no need to be so disrespectful to a little old harmless lady.
You said: "I'm going to step up for a moment and be a total asshole".
I agree with your statement 100 percent, there young whippersnapper!
You said: "Why don't you come back after you've done (or at least read) a five year study of cancer survival rates among patients who have and have not been given a life expectancy, and hit us with some facts, instead of your unsupported opinions"?
Is there such a study Seth? If so, please share it with us. The results should be ever so fascinating.
And please share with us another study to compare it with, where patients with the same cancers and to the same degree, were all told they could recover full health and have complete remission.
And also be sure both of these studies have taken a full emotional inventory and history before and after of the affected.
Until you do, Seth, you may certainly take your own hubris which you attribute to me, and politely step up again, to place it right up where it belongs, and where the sun don't shine!
Yours with love,
Grandmama
Seth,
Experts are hacks. They usually just parrot what the government says. IF Margret Heckler said AIDS was caused by a fungus, we's all think that now. The influence of politics and propaganda in science has always been huge.
Thats why so many "experts" belived in Stalin and Maos crazy policies, thats what they do, there is too much at stake for them to oppose the governments line, and only a few are intelligent enough to think for themselves.
Like these Aids scientists know what they are talking about, first HIV was killing the cells, now that hiv is known to only infect a small fraction of cells, its a "diffuse immune response" thats responsible. LOL
The window period was a few months, hey lets just extend it to a 10 years!
The chimps inoculated were all supposed to die of AIDS, but they didnt, Hell well just make hiv "species Specific"
Its a big scam straight out of Orwell's 1984, If the Reagan administration didnt back Gallo, nobody would have heard of "HIV" and his partial barely detectable correlation with no animal model.
we'd
Please tell me Michael Geiger isn't all the birds from the other threads, too, in addition to Patriot Games etc. etc.
Michael once and for all could you please explain why you haven't admitted that HIV causes AIDS even though Chad Parenzee lost in Australia.
You made some promises. Were they lies like the rest of what you say?
BillyBipBip said,
Experts are hacks. They usually just parrot what the government says.
Sure Billy. That's why all the scientists I know are running around saying we need to stay the course in Iraq and we need to stop funding stem cell research and we need to start teaching creationism in school.
The washed up psuedoscientist is back again. I remember people like you in college. Total rejects that couldnt make any friends, wannabe science geeks that sat at home friday nights sucking thier thumbs because no one wanted to be around them.
To say that the scientific community was not affected by the orwellian press conference in 1984 is ridicolous. Between the funding, propaganda, the official ending of debate when it came to AIDS, it was a powerful force that turned a scientific issue into a political one.
As far as Iraq, there might be some exceptions now just because it's so glaringly obvious, with HIv there was a little more sleight of hand in the beggining.
Even though to be honest most "experts" in the beggining of the war were pretty silent, the one's on TV all supported it, and when Donahue from MSNBC wanted to bring some experts on his show in 2002 to oppose the war, he was fired, sounds a lot like HIV to me, a few experts speak out and are silenced.
"Is there such a study Seth? If so, please share it with us. The results should be ever so fascinating."
I rest my case. You have no information of value, but you insist that you know better than people WITH information of value. Pure, unmitigated, asinine, arrogant, hubris.
"Experts are hacks. They usually just parrot what the government says."
That could be the stupidest thing I've read this week. And I read the crap that Grandmother wrote. Did you bother to put this claim to a test? Are experts parroting the bush whitehouse on stem cell research? No, they aren't. What about global warming? No? Shocker. I don't know where you are getting your information from, but your sources totally suck.
Try to get this through your head: There are people who care so much about cancer research that they spend decades of their lives doing nothing else. They average 2 or 3 hours of sleep a night for weeks on end. They deal with horrible, shitty bureaucracies and petty tyrants and lousy pay and long hours and arrogant shithead undergraduates like you, just so that they can try to make a little progress in humanities understanding of cancer. They don't do this because they are altruists, they do it because it is their burning desire to understand.
You, on the other hand, are so stupidly arrogant and ignorant that you think that reading some psuedo-scientific hack piece in Mother Jones gives you superior knowledge about this disease, about biology and pharmocology, and about expertise in general. Its a pathetic claim, and you should be utterly ashamed to make it. Its as if you are claiming, on the basis of watching rec league softball, to understand what it would take to consistently pitching a perfect game at the major league level... and that the reason major league pitchers don't pitch perfect games is because they are parroting MLB.
In other words, your claim is utterly ridiculous.
It is as if, Grandma, you aren't even reading the pure garbage you are writing. You know for a fact, for an absolute fact, that at no time have you ever actually tried to find out the truth about cancer survival rates and their relationship to prognosis. You haven't even looked for studies on this, much less read them or tried to gather support for doing them. So you know beyond a shadow of a doubt, with no question at all, that you are working on your own opinion, utterly unsupported by any real investigation into the cancer population.
You know that. But STILL, you seem to think that you have some super special secret knowledge, denied to the people who actual have done some work in this area. Its sad and a little disgusting.
I said usually experts are hacks, it happened in germany, russia, and now here. Dont cite a few exceptions, the general rule is that if a big drug company/cdc/margret heckler support something, institutions that seem legitimate(unlike the Bush administration) the experts will not even bother to review the Data, they'll just go along, if they speak out they will be censored in many instances.
Were there ever any expirements done to prove disprove Gallo's hypothesis after the press conference? No, all the experiments done after 1984 were designed not to test Gallo's hypothesis, but assumed it to be true, so nobody even tried to prove/disprove what he was saying because the government supported it.
Anyways you are a complete loser, so I dont even kow why I talk to you. Another militant nerd wannabe intellectual who was a complete reject in college and high school.
"Were there ever any expirements done to prove disprove Gallo's hypothesis after the press conference? No, all the experiments done after 1984 were designed not to test Gallo's hypothesis, but assumed it to be true, so nobody even tried to prove/disprove what he was saying because the government supported it."
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What you say is total bullshit. An experiment always either confirms or denies its assumptions based on the result. But screw whether your claim is true or not... just think about what you are saying. You say this without the benefit of having actually examined a statistically relevant portion of these experiments to see what they did or did not assume, or what they did or did not confirm, and then you walk into a room of people who maybe have read or actually done some of these experiments and claim special knowledge. Its ludicrous. How can you even take yourself seriously? Are you that amazingly arrogant? Have you ever considered a little self-doubt, or are you really that stuck on how popular you were in high school?
Wrong, most experiments are designed with some specific intentions on what they seek to discover. None of the hiv experiments after the Orwellian press conference were ever designed to test gallo's claim, they assumed it to be true, for example most if not all the studies on AIDS truth were designed to monitor disease progression to AIDS in HIV positive patients, hence assuming as a premise that HIV caused AIDS.
If they did not assume HIV caused AIDS they would have matched/controlled for confounding factors etc, done many other things such as point out flaws in the hypothesis (like when Montagnier in 1990 showed in experiments that HIV didnt even kill cells)
As usual when a scientist rarely conducts experiments that actually tests the HIV hypothesis and the experiment refutes the HIV hypothesis, they get attacked, because Gallo and Heckler couldnt possibly be wrong...............right?
So, Billy, you and your 9-11 conspiracy friends can tell me why,
I've confirmed Gallo's conclusions about 500 times?
Why is it when I infect cells with HIV I get HIV out and I get cell-cell fusion and cytopathic effects?
Why is it when I infect with mutant HIV I don't see it?
Why do you keep harping on Gallo? Gallo is important but he wasn't the only one who did this work. What about Jay Levy? Who did some of this totally independently? Have you ever heard of Jay Levy. Why don't you say something about Jay Levy and how he's wrong too?
Nevertheless, we live in an imperfect physical world, and it is still my advice that people combine those things with mainstream medicine, especially when dealing with serious, potentially life-threatening problems. -- Harold
While the physical world may be naturally "imperfect" from the human perspective, human beings are responsible for a great deal of that imperfection. As Noreen as discovered, mainstream medicine is quite imperfect and getting moreso every day. Thus, it can be extremely dangerous, even more dangerous than the life-threatening problems it purports to "treat". Understanding that grim fact is the first step to safely combining mainstream treatments with so-called "alternative" treatments. However, from my experience, which is similar to Noreen's, many mainstream treatments are superfluous when holistic treatment is provided.
When I first saw a discussion board full of what can only be described, in many cases, as negative, angry, delusional, self-destructive HIV- and science-denial, my instinct was to ignore it and move on to things that are a more profitable use of my time. -- Harold
Science is in trouble, Harold, and the negativity, the delusions and the self-destructive behaviors are far more prevalent within the ranks of the scientific orthodoxy. HIV dissidents are simply requesting that honesty and integrity be returned to practice of science and to the administration of health care. Closing your eyes and ears to the glaring problems within Science will not make the problems, nor the dissidents, go away. In fact, such behavior is what got us into this predicament, in the first place.
A month or so ago, I made a book recommendation to Adele, Overdosed America, and I now make the same recommendation to you, Harold. Perhaps, you will actually read it, since you seem to be a considerate fellow. Adele supposedly read it in one evening; yet, it is not really conducive to "speed reading", for the author offers unending insights into the overwhelming problems that now dominate health care and the bastardized science that feeds those problems.
____________________________
Since Adele failed miserably at demonstrating adequate reading comprehension skills and has consistently displayed a severe lack of generalized understanding, I suppose it was foolish to think she might be influenced by a book that unequivocally criticizes the current, broken status quo. Nevertheless, I intend to offer some analysis from the book that relates to the HIV/AIDS debacle that continues to unfold.
Whether Dr. Abramson personally questions HIV as being a necessary or sufficient cause of AIDS is immaterial, for his analysis and his insights are highly applicable to assessing the HIV model of AIDS, and such an assessment should lead any reasonable person (including Dr. Abramson) to ask the same questions that dissidents have been asking for years. I, like Harold, would like to move on "to things that are a more profitable use of my time," but the incredible lack of insightful contributions on this blog suggests that this issue is perhaps more important than we all know. Lives are in the balance, and people deserve to hear both sides of this issue.
Incidentally, I disagree with the poster who stated that this issue has many sides. That is, ironically, an over-simplification, for HIV is either a necessary and sufficient cause of AIDS, or it is not. Science has failed to demonstrate that it is, and those who have called for accountability in this matter continue to be unjustly vilified. That is unacceptable. The two sides are quite clear. Review the evidence and decide for yourself.
___________________________
FOR ADELE...
Let's begin with the preface to Overdosed America, in which, Dr. Abramson writes:
...the research that I had been doing at night and on weekends was confirming my sense that much of the "scientific evidence" on which we doctors must rely to guide our clinical decisions was being commercially spun, or worse; and that many of the articles published in even the most respected journals seemed more like infomercials whose purpose was to promote their sponsor's products rather than to search for the best ways to improve people's health."
Harold's faith in the sanctity of mainstream medicine is certainly not shared by this insightful physician. This quote from Dr. Abramson echoes the frequently voiced dissident concern with the highly commercialized adverts promoting HIV medications. Of course, most of these adverts are strategically placed within the gay community. They show beautiful, healthy models climbing mountains while extolling the virtues of the latest protease inhibitor, yet in reality, those taking these drugs for any length of time certainly don't resemble these models, particularly if lipodystrophy, a common side effect of these meds, sets in, and they can barely climb in and out of bed, much less climb mountains. Such obvious examples of profiteering are far too common in mainstream medicine. Perhaps, Harold would like to comment on this matter?
Another quote from the Preface:
Many of the mechanisms that Americans trust to protect their health and resources have been dismantled by political pressure from doctors and medical lobbyists, while others have become absurdly dominated by people with financial ties to the pharmaceutical companies--a situation that no impartial observer would ever conclude was designed to represent anything other than corporate interests.
Read that italicized part again, Harold. You obviously agree with all of the lackeys on this site and firmly believe that HIV=AIDS is proven by good science, but no impartial observer can look at the facts surrounding HIV and come to such a naive position without employing a great deal of self-delusion. The intimate ties between prominent HIV doctors and the pharmaceutical industry are down-right scandalous. Anyone with an ounce of integrity would have no trouble acknowledging such obvious improprieties. For those who are interested in learning just how intimate those ties are, have a look HERE.
A book such as Overdosed America certainly provides the necessary framework for the uninitiated to understand how a colossal medical blunder such as HIV could occur, but correcting this unthinkable tragedy will require much more from all of us.
Don't you agree, Adele? How about you, Harold...still think there are more important ways to spend your time?
Kevin
Seth Dearie,
The grade of conversation seems to have been flushed down the toitie since you arrived. Don't you know drinking hard alcohol takes a toll on your liver and affects everyone around you in negative ways? I very much urge you to seek treatment for your alcolholism and the underlying emotional illness before you come down with something serious. Perhaps you should be taking your meds again. Your disagreeable hatefullness is certainly a sign of underlying emotional illness. And even worse, it drives you to drink and be obnoxious.
But enough about that. You are a big boy and must make your own decisions.
And Sethy, you know this thread is about the very important issues of the meaning of health, and is also about whether this includes emotional and mental well being. Would you care to add comments to this as to whether you think emotional health has any effect on physical health, and if not, then hush child and let the grownups speak.
And it would be nice if you would help granny out and keep trying to find us the studies that you claim must have been done on survival of cancer patients and those who both have and have not been given life expectancies. Poor ole granny can't seem to find those studies anywhere, and she's been earnestly looking for years.
Love,
Grandmama
"Wrong, most experiments are designed with some specific intentions on what they seek to discover."
No shit, moron. But if I design an experiment about anything to do with motion, it will confirm or deny gravity based on my results. ALL EXPERIMENTS, to some degree, test their core assumptions.
So not only haven't you looked at a statistically significant number of the experiments you claim to have a superior understanding of, you don't even understand what an experiment does.
In truth, you don't know anything relevant to a conversation about HIV. You don't know what experiments have been done in HIV research. YOu don't know what the assumptions of those experiments were. You don't know what the predictions were. You don't know what the results were. You aren't competent to make a judgment about the quality of the research which you haven't read or reviewed or even skimmed. Basically, you have no actual knowledge of HIV, disease, viruses, the immune system, the functions of T-cells, or anything else relevant to this discussion, and YET, you claim to be certain that NONE of the experiments done in the past 23 years provide any relevant data about the relationship between HIV and AIDS.
On what possible evidence do you take your ignorant opinion so seriously? How can you possibly think that you, a person who is almost utterly ignorant of all relevant subjects, can venture an opinion about the content of thousands and thousands of research studies?
"And it would be nice if you would help granny out and keep trying to find us the studies that you claim must have been done on survival of cancer patients and those who both have and have not been given life expectancies. Poor ole granny can't seem to find those studies anywhere, and she's been earnestly looking for years."
So, basically, you are now asserting, as a point of honor, to be positing a position that you know damn well is completely unsupported by any actual facts. Bravo.
I never claimed that said studies existed, YOU claimed extraordinary super special secret revealed knowledge about what was good for cancer patients--WITHOUT the studies. I was just pointing out that you are operating from arrogant ignorance--and as with your supposed insight into my drinking habits, you are dead wrong.
I happen to think that this conversation went straight to the toilet with your condenscending, ignorant, shameful, and insulting first post. You seem to think that it is okay to claim that your special revealed knowledge trumps decades of hard work in understanding cancer, but not okay to call you on your bullshit.
Well, think again, granny. Your arrogance is as offensive and distasteful to me as my acid tongue is to you. Get used to it.
Granny and his fellow denialists are a rag-tag but thank Phyllis Schlafly very small bunch.
There's Michael Geiger, who promised he would become an "AIDS apologist" if Chad Parenzee lost his trial.
Claus Jensen, a guy who exiled himself to Thailand for reasons he won't elaborate on probably for good reason.
Jeffrey Dach, who pretends he can't spell "Gardasil" until he cuts and pastes from his own crap.
And a few high school kids who can't spell or write but think "Evil Jews" sponsored the 9-11 attacks and scientific research should concentrate on finding Bigfoot.
Maybe Harvey Bialy the complete failure in life thrown in there somewhere pretending to be any or all of the above.
Hard to say because he's the consumate liar and he also writes pretty well if not accurately so who knows.
Hello Tara.
You said: "We had an email discussion--what, a year ago now?--and I agreed that mental outlook could certainly play a role in health".
I do agree, Tara, that you have acknowledged the role of mental health. But I truly feel that you handwaved it away as fairly meaningless. Also, I don't see any mention of emotions on affecting the body. Is there a reason for this, as you know that extreme fear of stress can cause the bodily reaction of "breaking out in a cold sweat" and heart palpitations, and as the good doctor Harold politely pointed out that frightened persons even have a lessening in immune function.
Perhaps my perception of your seeming handwaving of these factors, and your understanding of the importance or nonimportance of mental and emotional factors in health is quite mistaken. I do realize that science is quite limited at delineating or even measuring mental and emotional factors, so I am not asking for firm scientific data, just your own humble and honest opinion of the degree that these factors can play.
As such, would you be so kind as to give me a percentage of degree that you think emotional and mental well being can play in sick and healthy patients? Is it a 1% role, 10% or 30% role, or 50, or 75, or even 100% role? What role do you think mental and emotional factors play in health, healing, and disease and illness progression?
I would also love to hear from DT and Harold on this as well.
Please, Michael, ignore me if you want but answer the question.
Why the hell are you here after you promised to become an "AIDS apologist" after the Parenzee trial?
Seth -
Hang in there bro. Your toungue is not all that acid considering the circumstances.
"Cooler" -
Your statements literally cannot be distinguished from parody. You sound like a Simpsons character or something. I can just imagine Otto saying "Experts are hacks little dude! They just parrot what the government says!". Not to imply that you're a nice guy like Otto. Maybe some sleazy one-episode character.
Grandma -
That goes double for you. I had a grandmother, she was old, she was wise, and she didn't peddle phoney BS on the internet, even to the extent of hurting someone, to pump up her own ego.
What really cheeses me off is that you two probably have some basic intelligence, but you sacrifice it to the narcissistic fantasy that you know something without doing any work to actually learn something.
Hello Adele, Dearie.
If you could take a moment from lashing at all those nasty old denialists, and answer a little itty bitty question for Grandma, it would be ever so appreciated dear.
Do you have any opinions dear Adele, on what role you think emotions and mental health can have on disease progression or regression dearie?
"Do you have any opinions dear Adele, on what role you think emotions and mental health can have on disease progression or regression dearie?"
Hey Gran, why don't you explain why you think your opinion, which is based on no actual information, is worth anything at all? Because you seem to think that you know more about this subject than anyone who has actually studied it. What makes you so damn special?
It took me approximately 10 minutes to find some studies on stress in cancer patients. I found one study that shows that it seems to help in older adults with cancer when they are also treated for depression. Another study showed that social group therapy did not improve life expectancy for women with breast cancer (pubmed, search string "depression death cancer" both articles in first ten results).
It seems, from an incredibly cursory glance at the literature that this is a complicated topic. We don't know with any certainty... but the only people claiming certainty are the ones with the least actual knowledge.
This reflects a profound ignorance of the way science works. Scientists like to get a lot of bang for the buck, and they also like to get their work published. You don't get published for confirming something that somebody else has already done, so you design your experiments to confirm the original results and to find out something new as well. So innumerable researchers have confirmed (for example) that HIV damages the very immune cells that are depleted in AIDS, but they don't bother to put that in the abstract, because the main point of the paper will be something like determining what protein-protein interactions are necessary for HIV to infect a cell. The experments that confirm Gallo's hypothesis will be buried in a couple of sentences, perhaps described as controls in the methods section. But that doesn't mean that scientists wouldn't have noticed if HIV did no kill immune cells, or if more sensitive PCR tests had failed to confirm that their was ongoing HIV reproduction during the supposed latent period before development of AIDS, etc., etc.
Hiv does not infect enough cells to kill them even if it were cytopathic. Gallo admitted in 1990 that HIV only is present in one of 10,000 cells. Nevertheless montagnier in 1990 proved that petry dishes treated w/ antibiotics rendered hiv harmless. Keep in mind all these expirements are done away from the antibody protection of the host.
All the studies after the Orwellian press conference were conducted with the premise that HIV already caused AIDS and ignored data because of that. Usually if a microbe was only present in a small fraction of tcells, didnt cause disease in virtually every animal and was seemingly nuetralized by antibodies, it would certainly be a debatable to say it was just a harmless passenger virus, but because of the Governments backing, funding and brainwashing towards a certain hypothesis it became blasphemous to admit what otherwise be an obvious possibility that warranated further studies.
Hello Harold. And you as well Sethie.
Yes, certainly Sethie has every right to put an out of place old lady back in her place. Provided she actually is out of place. However, simply believing she is wrong and her being wrong may very well be two distinctly different things.
And, though I really don't know which is so, perhaps poor ole grandma here may just be suffering from senility, or perhaps the years have sharpened her instincts.
As I reflect back upon my own experiences, and the distant memories of my perception of the experiences of those I have loved along the way. I, as well as every other human being, do have a tendency to form opinions based on such. And with those reflections and opinions comes either granny's wisdom or delusions.
Be that as it may Seth. You are also but an opinion holder as well, based upon your own current perspectives, and not necessarily the keeper of all truth and wisdom. And those opinions may very well grow or change as you yourself look at things from different perspectives. And then again, they may very well not! It is all in the perspective after all.
But either way Harold dear, forgive an old marm and pray tell me more about the effects of emotions and mental well being on health. Particularly again, prey tell me more about the effect of fright and fear on the immune system and how this happens. Seems to me to be quite related to the health and well being of those poor unfortunates who are told they have HIV or AIDS, as well as cancer progression. Do tell me your thoughts on the fear and stress that you think HIV positives and cancer patients might well be going through. What is your opinion Dr. Harold?
I seek to learn from your very learned and scholarly self a wee bit more about this issue, dear doctor, before I pass on to the other side. And perhaps resurrect as a new cyber entity elsewhere.
And thank you Seth for digging up those pieces you found. You say the issue seems to be a complicated topic. I would agree. And without more science on this, we are left to our conjectures. But what is your own opinion of it all Seth? I am not looking for facts, Seth, just your own unique perspective of thought about mental and emotional wellness or illness and its effects on ill patients, especially as relates to those told they are HIV positive or those who progressed to be diagnosed with AIDS.
Surely we should be able to discuss the topic like mature adults, even though it gets more difficult for me to behave like a mature adult at my own advanced age.
Otherwise the issue just sits there, like a big pink elephant in the middle of the room.
As these threads clearly show, even the sciency types are not devoid of emotions or immune from mental disturbances of the vagaries of life. There must be some personal experience or observations or self awareness there somewhere.
I hate to think I brought the entire health blog to a complete standstill by bringing up a little discussion of mental and emotional well being as it relates to physical health!
Do such discussions of mental and emotional processes and their effects on the physical realm always bring viral and germ science to a complete standstill? What does this say about those disciplines? Surely someone must have the courage to speak up on it further besides little ole me.
While there is certainly a greater respect for individual autonomy and the range of normal variation today than there's ever been before in medicine, we make new mistakes in the same mold as yesterday's.
The tricky part about your statement is non-pathological. In most cases, "pathological" mental states are arbitrarily defined by convention and convenience. At best, all that's happening is that medicine in general is adopting the same opinions you have about what is and isn't a disease. That's great - for you. Not so much for the people who would disagree with you.
Grandmother wrote:
"I hate to think I brought the entire health blog to a complete standstill by bringing up a little discussion of mental and emotional well being as it relates to physical health!"
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I would hate to think that too. Fortunately, since Tara brought the subject up and has continued to post afterwards, that hasn't happened. Whew!
You can play the poor little old lady card all day and all night, and it doesn't change the fact that you are an arrogant old fraud who thinks that her special wisdom trumps actual knowledge. It isn't that you've studied this topic, not even a tiny bit. You just think that your unique perspective--or mine--carries some weight. Well, it doesn't matter what we think. Cancer doesn't give a fuck what I think the relationship between happiness and cancer is.
But it isn't just that you are basically wrong, as at least one study I found attests. Its that you are confidently making claims about topics that you know nothing at all about, without making any effort at all to discover anything about them for yourself. You've just decided that a decade of medical training leads to ignorance, and a lifetime of ignorant musing leads to wisdom, based solely on the criteria that you possess the latter and not the former.
Well, life doesn't work like that. You are willfully choosing to be an ignorant, sniping, stuck up prig, and there is no reason why anyone should waste any time on you except to tell you what a jerk you are.
I'm sure that in the real world, you have some value to society. But in this discussion, you bring nothing of worth, not even a true willingness to learn.
"All the studies after the Orwellian press conference were conducted with the premise that HIV already caused AIDS and ignored data because of that."
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Again, how in the world could you possibly know that? Have you read even 5% of the abstracts of these studies? Do you know what they assumed, what they tested, how they tested it, and how the results would have been different based on the truth/untruth of the AIDS hypothesis?
Of course you haven't, of course you don't. That's because you aren't actually interested in knowing the truth, only in thinking that you are special and possess the truth.
Cooler, you don't actually know anything at all about HIV. You have to actually put out some effort in order to have a reasonable opinion. For example, I found, by doing a short search on PubMed, that you are totally full of shit. It is a fact that the basic workings of HIV are a topic of much ongoing research. Those basic workings will be different for a harmless passenger virus than for a damaging virus.
Anyone that you are reading that has cherry picked only a few studies, all of them over a decade old, to criticize or trumpet, is lying to you about our current state of knowledge.
The effect of mental state on health is well established. The placebo effect is one such effect. The placebo effect is caused by neuronaly generated nitric oxide
http://daedalus2u.blogspot.com/2007/04/placebo-and-nocebo-effects.html
which switches physiology from the "fight or flight" state to the "rest and relaxation" state where resources are diverted to healing and repair.
The HIV explanation of AIDS is so well established by so many researchers so many times in so many ways that only someone who is frankly delusional could deny it. The anti-HIV meds only work because they have activity on the replication and disease progression mediated by HIV. That they work is undenyable.
The belief that AIDS is not caused by HIV may work as a placebo for some. That is the only mechanism by which it could work.
HIV Denialists -
I'm going to say some harsh words, although I will, at the end of this, reduce my tone a bit.
All you have to offer, as far as I can tell, is a combination of condescending tone, logical fallacy, and lack of real knowledge that, taken as a whole, can only be assumed to indicate narcissism.
You are also quite adept at mischaracterizing the arguments of others, overpraising your fellow crackpots, and resorting to appeals to spurious authority.
Although you wish that I had exhibited some kind of "faith" in modern medicine, in fact, it is you who make oversimplified, overgeneralized arguments.
Modern scientific medicine is vastly imperfect, and there is not one competent physician who would deny this. It is, however, the best or only option for many, many conditions that threaten life and dignity. Modern medicine should be a complement, not a substitute, to relatively healthy living (and in fact, includes preventative medicine and public health).
We might make an analogy to the fire department. It is better to prevent fires, and the fire department itself is usually the number one advocate of fire prevention. Once something is on fire, putting the fire out will often have very undesirable "side effects". Nevertheless, once the fire is started, one should call the fire department. It is a better option than passively letting one's house burn to the ground. And one should listen to them if one cares about fire prevention. None of this is any argument against "sensible", "natural" fire prevention.
"Grandmother", your posts, like those of your buddy "cooler", are indistinguishable from parody. If your obnoxious condescension is intended to make your critics look bad, it backfires.
Although you people are willing to do actual harm, as some interactions here have shown, I do concede that you probably do not do so intentionally. I have no doubt that a rigid layer of ego defenses assures that you consciously "believe" your own nonsense. (I'm sure I'll get that parroted back at me, but the difference is, I'm not preaching nonsense grounded in ignorance.) I don't put you in the same category as those who consciously do harm for personal gain or out of sadism. Though potentially harmful, your obsessions are probably compatible with an otherwise ethical values system.
I realize that ego-committed adherence to an inflexible ideology is unlikely to yield to reason. Nevertheless, I urge you to take a hard look in the mirror.
Hello daed alus!
Your first name is not "Brain" is it? I only ask because I once knew someone named Brain Daedalus, or at least that was what we called him.
Nah. Couldn't be you, because there was some insight in your post, and Brain Daedalus was completely, well, brain dead.
You said: "The anti-HIV meds only work because they have activity on the replication and disease progression mediated by HIV. That they work is undenyable".
Frankly, my boy, the very fact that you have claimed and also simply believe that the "meds work is an undeniable" fact, makes it ever so more questionable.
Good science is always open to question and being proven or falsified.
You mention the well known fact of the placebo effect, but fail to realize, or perhaps just do not know that none of the anti-HIV meds have never ever even once been placebo tested.
AZT is the only anti-HIV drug that was ever placebo tested in the United States, and only for four months and many flaws were found in that study, and death and blood transfusions were common in those receiving treatment.
A second and larger AZT study in Concorde, found more death in those receiving the drug, and it was the beginning of the end of AZT monotherapy. However, the drug is still used in the US and even as monotherapy in several countries and still found in some of the "cocktails" such as Combivir and Trizivir. So this proven toxic immune cell destroyer is still given to HIV positive diagnosed patients.
So your statement that the supposed and believed fact that they work is "undenyable"b/> is suddenly very questionable, now isn't it? After all, that belief has never been tested to find out if it was false.
Now especially when you consider that none, not even one, of the current HIV meds have ever been tested against placebo, and all have been fast tracked through the FDA processes in studies that have all been completely controlled and directed by the pharmaceutical manufacturers themselves, things suddenly become quite questionable from my perspective.
But you claim "undeniable". Ummmm, whatever you say daed, whatever you say.....
I would however, have to completely agree with your statement "The belief that AIDS is not caused by HIV may work as a placebo for some. That is the only mechanism by which it could work".
As evidence, I present that recently in Boston, one thousand long term nonprogressors were very quickly found, most of whom do not believe HIV causes AIDS, and do not, have not, and will not take the meds!
And if they quickly found one thousand that were willing to be in any study, the thousand must be evidence of many other thousands who were not willing to be in any study, as the vast majority of people decline to be in any research studies when asked.
And Daed, you made another statement that I believe is very insightful.
You said: "The belief that AIDS is not caused by HIV may work as a placebo for some. That is the only mechanism by which it could work".
Either way I look at the issue, it certainly seems to me that your final statement, as well as all the long term nonprogressors, most likely corroborates that it is much healthier for the diagnosed to believe HIV is harmless than to believe it to be a deadly death sentence.
Yours,
Grandmama
"As evidence, I present that recently in Boston, one thousand long term nonprogressors were very quickly found, most of whom do not believe HIV causes AIDS, and do not, have not, and will not take the meds!"
Your claim that not one current HIV med has ever been tested against placebo was easily found to be false (J Infect Dis. 2007 Jul 15;196(2):304-12. Epub , J Infect Dis. 2006 Dec 15;194(12):1661-71. Epub 2006, JAMA. 2006 Aug 16;296(7):769-81.,J Antimicrob Chemother. 2002 Aug;50(2):231-40. and hundreds of other studies).
So what is your source for the claim you make above? Do you have one, or is it another false claim?
Seth, now honestly, you really should read studies to see what they actually say before claiming they say something that they do not.
Now look back at those studies again. And this time try reading them, instead or looking at the titles. You will see perfectly well how ALL anti-HIV drugs are ONLY compared to other anti-HIV drugs, not compared to any placebos.
The only placebo test that has ever taken place, as DT, Chris Noble, and even Dicky Jefferies have already attested to, is the 4 month AZT and Concorde AZT studies that happened many many years ago.
And please don't tell me, as others in these threads have claimed, of how inhumane such a study would be to have such a study take place among those who volunteer for such. There are enough nonprogressors to prove such a statement of inhumanity to "withhold life saving drugs" to be false.
"Now look back at those studies again. And this time try reading them, instead or looking at the titles. You will see perfectly well how ALL anti-HIV drugs are ONLY compared to other anti-HIV drugs, not compared to any placebos."
"METHODS: This was a multicenter, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled 2-part study, with the first part using MK-0518 in 1 of 4 doses (100, 200, 400, and 600 mg) versus placebo (randomized 1:1:1:1:1) given twice daily for 10 days of monotherapy."(J Acquir Immune Defic Syndr. 2006 Dec 15;43(5):509-15.)
You are completely full of shit on this. Completely. Utterly. Totally. Provably. FULL. Of. Shit.
So, again, where did you get your information about the 500+ nonprogressing deniers in Boston?
The only people that are suffering from poor reading comprehension are the HIV Denialists.
The studies are placebo controlled.
They compare groups taking:
a) existing treatment + new drug
b) existing treatemnt + placebo
The difference between the two groups is that one takes a new drug and the other takes a placebo. The study therefore observes the difference between the drug and the placebo.
What result do the HIV Denialists predict? I asked this before and still haven't received an answer.
You obviously also don't understand the meaning of randomised. Patients do not decide which group they are assigned to. It would introduce biases and would obviously mean that the trial would not be blind.
Dr. Noble, now you've got to stop your personal drug use.
What's tested is the difference between the old drug + placebo and the new drug - just as it says. What they're interested in is how well the new drug does against the old drug, not how well it does against the placebo.
If it were new drug against placebo alone, the interest would truly focus on how well it does against the placebo. In this case, if placebo won, nothing would win and nothing would be prescribed since placebo is thought to equal nothing.
In the present set-up, placebo/nothing can never beat the new drug, only the old drug can, hence the new drug and placebo are NOT tested against each other.
What's tested is the difference between the old drug + placebo and the new drug - just as it says.
Says where?
This is where you imply that the scientists designing these placebo controlled trials are all stupid. Do you really think that they don't understand what a placebo is? Do you think they put the word placebo ther just for fun?
No I don't think it's for fun. This is where they are operating within a belief system that says the old drug was, is and always will be better than a placebo, even for asymptomatic individuals like Noreen with a viral load of 1 1/2 replication competent virion. According to this belief system, they are being ethical per definition if they drug. Within a set system, being ethical is easy, a no-brainer. From within it all makes perfect sense. But even from within the system, if they think that what's being tested against each other is placebo and the new drug, and not old drug vs. new drug, or old drug vs. the combo old + new, they are deluded. Are they going to patent and prescribe the old drug + placebo combo if that turns out to be the best of all worlds? Not likely. Placebo = nothing, so placebo is the one sure loser in this set-up, regardless of how well it does.
What's tested is the difference between the old drug + placebo and the new drug - just as it says.
Says where?
I wouldn't want to be accused of not giving a straight answer. Just as it says right here, except I left out the first part of 'a)' above, but the difference is the same as they say:
They compare groups taking:
a) existing treatment + new drug
b) existing treatemnt + placebo
Denialists -
I decided to pop back and ask a few quick questions.
1) Was penicillin, or any post-penicillin antibiotic ever tested against placebo for pneumococcal pneumonia? Why not? What is a historical control? (It is true that a drug that is known to work cannot be denied to people with a serious medical condition, and that this is a limitation on medical research; you can't kill or harm somebody by denying current therapy that works in the name of "placebo". Note that if anti-retroviral trials had included a "placebo control arm", this would have killed AIDS patients, but you would still be denying; you'd simply claim that the placebos had eaten a bad diet or some such thing.)
2) Gransy-poopsie-doopsie, if some people are resistant or partially resistant to a pathogenic microbe, does that mean that the microbe doesn't cause the disease in other people? If you hold a conference for sickle trait people, and a lot of people come, does that mean that some malaria parasites are harmless? (Note - it is possible that there are statistically more LTNPs than in realized, and some LTNPs may be overtreated if we don't find a good way to identify them - but that's a far cry from denying HIV.)
3) Although Koch's postulates have miraculously not been abused in this discussion, what major problem in medical research did Koch solve? When? Did Koch know about viruses? Are his original postulates a rigid, ideological system that cannot be modified, or are there other rigorous ways to demonstrate a relationship between a microbe and a disease?
Most of your nonsense is grounded in partial truth. You basically ignore and deny the overwhelming scientific work that doesn't fit your biases, and you blow legitimate issues out of proportion.
Before leaving for the day, I wanted to give those of you who are interested in collidal silver a site to go too. It gives a brief history of the use of silver for medical purposes and the results of some experiments, which were conducted:
http://www.silver-colloids.com/Book/SilverColloids-s.pdf
Noreen,
Is there a document that shows colloidal silver has the same effects in the human body?
http://www.colloidal-silver-about.com/benefits-colloidal-silver.html
Claims there is no such evidence.
The reason I quoted the study I quoted was to avoid the stupidity of people who can't understand that a trial in which some people get a new treatment and others get a placebo is placebo controlled regardless of whether there is an existing course that both groups are taking. MONOTHERAPY means that there is no other treatment being given. This study (J Acquir Immune Defic Syndr. 2006 Dec 15;43(5):509-15) is a placebo controlled monotherapy study. Therefore, the red herring that scum like grannie use to prop up their misinformation doesn't even apply. The study is clearly placebo controlled, it tests a drug against NOTHING. Therefore, the claim that ONLY AZT has ever had a placebo controlled trial, or even a placebo controlled monotherapy trial, is in fact a false claim.
Grannie will not back off that claim. She will not admit she is wrong. For any lurkers on the fence, this should clue you in to the quality of her arguments and her respect for the truth. You'll notice, also, that despite having had multiple requests for any way to verify her claim about 500+ long term nonprogressors who deny the HIV/AIDS hypothesis in the city of Boston, she still hasn't provided any means of verification at all. It would not be reasonable to accept her claim without such evidence. I seriously doubt she has the references to hand, or will be able to find them at all, because I think she's wrong. But granny doesn't care if she has the facts or not.
HIV deniers like granny have no desire to learn the truth. They only want to be in possession of special knowledge. The offer that they make to other people is to also be in possession (without any effort) of this special knowledge. This is a disgusting offer, a cheat. It seeks to replace verifiable truth with ugly superstition to the detriment of desperate people with terrible diseases. It is morally bankrupt and detestable in every way, and people like granny do real harm by propogating this cultish bullshit.
Seth,
You are the Hitchens of Aetiology. I'm pretty sure I like it.
Seth, it really is quite improper of you to call a little old lady "lying scum". However, I suppose you cannot help that you were raised with such low values and morals.
A drug trial that only compares the effects of one drug to another is not a placebo trial of the drug. This is a "drug interaction" trial, Sethie. Especially when you consider that the existing drug of treatment was also not tested solely against a placebo.
Now, I see you are also doubting Grannies word about 1000 long term nonprogressors, and making the absurd claim that little ole me would lie about such a thing. Well certainly, I don't expect you to just take my word for it, when you can watch and listen to an interview with the very people running drug trials. Therefore, you may see and hear for your own self, right from the horses mouth, at the following video interview with those who are involved with the anti-hiv drug trials. You can watch and listen to Christina MeGill from the Cornell Clinical Trials Unit and Mark Milano from the AIDS Community Research Initiative of America, and their very own discussion of the 1000 Boston LongTerm NonProgressors right at the following link:
http://health.scribemedia.org/2007/02/13/curing-aids/
Now Seth, aren't you sorry you have so verbally abused an old woman who is simply trying to be helpful?
Define health for all time, and I think you will have proven the grand unification theory, as well! *g*
From a nursing perspective, most of the theorists have wrestled with that concept because the stated aim of nursing is to facilitate patients in attaining, regaining and maintaining health or facilitating patients in achieving a peaceful death. Health encompasses both quantitative and qualitative attributes.
The biopsychosocial term is most frequently used as part of the definition in nursing. But I think that operational definitions of health can be equally legitimate when used in the appropriate context. One can look at the quantifiable function and viability of a microsystem, a macrosystem or multiple systems. Health is also a qualitative term by which individuals determine how well they function based on their own criteria: are they functioning within work roles, family roles, sick roles, able to perform their self-defined life work, etc. The concept of health can be applied to individuals, families, groups, communities and societies.
For research purposes, health would most likely be defined within the context of the expected outcomes. If mitochondrial viability and robustness is being studied, health would be operationalized to that end. If role function in cancer patients was being evaluated against treatment modality, health would be operationalized for activity, energy, and role participation.
Out of the lab and in practice, providers should be clear about what health means to the patient, and should also communicate what health means to the provider so that the discrepancies in definitions can be addressed and problems mitigated.
Thank you for writing this post. From the impassioned responses, health would appear to be an important concept and one which has no single and exclusive definition.
Is this thread healthy?
Oh man. These are just two species of bacteria. How many do you think you have in your gut? How could you do anything about balance with just two of them?
Some "germs" are always with us (such as Escherichia coli). Others are not (such as the Ebola virus -- or HIV). And for not too small doses of some of the pathogens that are not always with us, there is no "inside terrain or environment" that will completely keep them away. Yes, there are all sorts of influences the environment can have on the immune system, but every immune system can be overwhelmed by a sufficiently large amount of brute force.
Values? Morals? You are talking to scientists. We will not call a spade a stick or a shovel. We will call a spade a spade. If the evidence shows that you are lying, we will say so. Now be nice (to yourself) and bring us some evidence to the contrary. Show us you aren't lying.
Gee willikers Davey.
Just show us the evidence. I already did two hours ago. Don't you sciency types read well?
Sakes alive, for the second time now, just click on the link below and scientists themselves will tell you about the 1000 long term nonprogressors in Boston:
http://health.scribemedia.org/2007/02/13/curing-aids/
And just be careful there youngster, cause granny can call a spade a spade too! And I pull ears too when provoked!
Noreen -
Why do you endorse low dose naltrexone and colloidal silver, both of which are clearly drugs, with potential side effects, manufactured by commercial companies, yet not endorse drugs which have been shown to actually work?
I understand that you have been through the wringer in terms of past health and life style issues, but that doesn't mean that you should give up and put all your hopes in unproven things.
It almost seems as if you in "anything but mainstream therapy" mode.
Gransy-
I know you think I'm a baaad puddy tat, but it was a bit rude of you to ignore my question above.
Heavens to Betsy, Granny, you're almost as stubborn and irrational as that poor young whippersnapper in the white house.
Here's my question again...
Granny, do you know what "anecdotal" means? Sure, I know, it's one of them big city words, but it's relevant here.
Grandmother,
You are not a lady, in the sense of female. You are Michael Geiger, as Tara pointed out earlier. Everything about you is a lie.
If I recall correctly, you are also "lincoln," germ theory denier and supporter of the fraudulent and anti-semitic "Germanic New Medicine."
Stress and emotion do play a part in illness, but only HIV+ patients develop AIDS. If cancer patients or people with anxiety disorders developed AIDS in the absence of HIV, you might have something, but they don't, and neither do you.
Grans/Dach/patriot, you said: "The only placebo test that has ever taken place, as DT, Chris Noble, and even Dicky Jefferies have already attested to, is the 4 month AZT and Concorde AZT studies that happened many many years ago."
Neither I nor any of the others said that - In fact I specifically pointed you to 4 trials of Nevirapine versus placebo. Why do you have to lie? Is it out of habit?
Thanks for your link to the web site you said this was your reference that "one thousand long term nonprogressors were very quickly found, most of whom do not believe HIV causes AIDS, and do not, have not, and will not take the meds!"
Unfortunately for you it does NOT say most of these people do not believe HIV causes AIDS.
And none of these patients have "refused" HIV drugs - for the reason none of them actually need them yet (Doh! - they are NON-progressors, stoopid!)
Perhaps you have another source for your spurious claims?
(Nope - Didn't think so)
Oh, and while you were on that site perhaps you also looked at some of the other interviews? Such as:
http://health.scribemedia.org/2007/06/22/fighting-aids-denialism/
You know it's worth it.
Ohhhh Robster, anti-semitic Germanic New Medicine? That is certainly nothing to do with me. And just what makes you think I am not of semitic origin myself? Because I am, darling!
However germ manic and perhaps germ phobic new medicine does seem to be the topic of discussion.
And as for your mention that only hiv+ develop AIDS, well of course you are right, because it is required to be hiv+ to have a diagnosis of ones illnesses to be called AIDS.
You are so silly. Don't you even understand the requirements for being said to have AIDS is to be HIV positive sonny?
And after all of these many months where people in these threads have said this over and over.
You haven't had a self-labotomy, have you Robbie? Perhaps it is early alzheimers, cause just like you, many of my elderly friends forget simple things too, no matter how many times I tell them.
Oh, I suppose in your silliness you also thought AIDS was an actual disease, like tuberculosis or hepatitis. Well darling, its not a disease, it is a definition of someone HIV positive who is ill, or who's silly cd4 collection is below a certain number. And I am not talking about "compact discs", I am talking about certain blood cell counts that go up and down and vary widely even in HIV negative people.
But if an HIV positive person had a real disease like tuberculosis or hepatitis, then their doctor would tell them they have AIDS.
See honey, it is really quite simple to understand, if you would only try.
But as you can see the two groups are treated the same except that a takes a new drug and b takes the placebo. It is a placebo controlled trial.
The Denialist dogma appears to be that all ARVs are toxic and provide no benefit because HIV doesn't cause AIDS. It is then extremely difficult to explain why two drugs are better than one and three drugs are better than two. But Denialists don't want to understand they just simply deny that such studies exist.
Well hello DT. We haven't heard from you since you told us you didn't care for the idea of physical health being linked to emotional and spiritual well being, as your school had taught you. Well that was very interesting.
Also interesting, is that you said:
"Neither I nor any of the others said that - In fact I specifically pointed you to 4 trials of Nevirapine versus placebo".
One question Dear DT. Is that Nevirapine stuff the same stuff that the HIVnet012 study was about? Is it the same stuff where the Institute of Healths own safety officer, Dr. Fishbein, had blown the whistle and said the study was poorly done and the data was incomplete?
Well come to think of it, yes it is the same stuff! It is the same stuff where the researchers seemingly conveniently lost the log book that showed side effects. They claimed it was lost in a flood. Poor dears.
But please show us the results you claim are reliable for this drug? Where were they done? Were they done on American HIV positives for long term use of the drug?
Because the studies done on one time use of nevirapine for pregnant women were only for testing whether it was effective for preventing transmission to the unborn child. It certainly was not a placebo controlled study for any type of long term use or to see if those taking nevirapine fared better or worse than taking nothing at all.
And by the way, in the nevirapine/transmission studies against a placebo, using nothing at all proved fairly close to just as effective as taking nevirapine!
Are you trying intentionally to mislead all of the readers on this blog DT? Perhaps you think they are all too lazy to investigate your claims. And you might be right! Or, I suppose you were just testing me to verify that I am indeed up to par on your claims of supposed placebo tested anti-hiv drug information.
Don't you know that it is looking up all this stuff that you kids try to peddle off as truth that keeps my brain so sharp at my advanced age?
Whatever, Michael. You can try to play this new part if you like, but you only come off as a nut. If an AIDS patient also has hepatitis or TB, then they are an AIDS patient with hepatitis or TB.
If I recall correctly, you are also "lincoln," germ theory denier and supporter of the fraudulent and anti-semitic "Germanic New Medicine."
The New Medicine germ theory denier was Jan Spreen.
Dear Chris, and DT, and Seth, and Robster, and Harold, and Tara, and everyone who believes HIV is the cause of AIDS.
This year is a year to celebrate! It is the 50th anniversary of the landmark academic work by New York social psychologist, and dear friend, Leon Festinger, of his work titled "Theory of Cognitive Dissonance"!
In Lenny's paper, he explored how individuals confronted with facts that went against their deeply held beliefs simply disregarded those facts and went on their merry, illogical way!
He told me once that the level of cognitive dissonance in our culture, and the denial and obliviousness it yields, is simply staggering. I would have to agree, how about you?
My old friend, and I miss him so, Lenny would have been so very fascinated by all of you.
Perhaps you think they are all too lazy to investigate your claims. And you might be right!
Well, it appears that you didn't bother to read the studies that DT cited. Then again ignorance never stopped you from having an opinion before.
Unfortunately, Chrissy, I really do not know what nevirapine studies DT is referring to, which is the main reason I asked for clarification.
DT did not post any references.
What exact goshdarned studies is DT talking about?
Love and kisses and hugs,
grandmother
Alvaro - looks like this thread is exhibiting a fairly severe inflammatory response. But inasmuch as the cranks and denialists are getting appropriately spanked by reality, I would say yes, this is a healthy immune response to our trolls' pathogenic ignorance.
Yes. it is staggering.
double blind, placebo-controlled studies showing the benefits of Nevirapine
Yes inded, Alvaro and Owen.
Abuelita Nanna Bubbie is giving the little trolls all a good spankin. Their little buns must all be burning by now.
But they are such naughty and unruly children, and I don't know if the spankins from mamere helps or makes them worse. Maybe they like their little buns to be burnin, and all simply enjoy the spankins. They keep coming back for more!
Yours with much love,
Nanna Bubbala!
Thanks, Chris. With all the name changing, it can be hard to keep track of which denialist is which.
Michael, you are in a state of self delusion over your own cognitive dissonance. The evidence is solid. HIV causes AIDS. Your choice not to believe this does not make it false.
Now Chrissy.
Was DT really trying to pass these off as placebo controlled? Look at them your own self you silly clown, cause if you were here I would have to yank you by the ears until you read every word of them out loud to me!
ISS 047???
ACTG 193a????
ACTG 241????
INCAS???? (is he referring to South American Indians?)
ISS 047? ISS 047 TRIAL compared AZT+ddI VERSUS AZT+ddI+NEVIRAPINE
ACTG 193a? This trial simply presented data comparing individuals who received a three-drug cocktail of nevirapine, AZT and ddI to those who took AZT in combination with either ddI or ddC or who received AZT or ddI alone during alternate months.
ACTG 241? This again compared nevirapine, combined with AZT and ddI to AZT and ddI
INCAS? The INCAS trial was simply comparing combinations of nevirapine, didanosine, and zidovudine.
These were not comparing nevirapine to a placebo, these are drug comparison studies. They compare other drugs plus nevirapine to other drugs and no nevirapine!
Now honestly, Chris and DT, gamma's not gonna fall for this old trick! No Sireee!
Now you fools better keep right on digging until you find one single trial of any other drug compared of and on its own against a placebo to verify drug effectiveness! Such trial does not exist except for AZT 20 years ago! And it failed!
Honestly. The nerve of some people. Trying to pass those off as placebo trials proving effectiveness!
Oh Robster, honey,
You said: "The evidence is solid. HIV causes AIDS".
What solid evidence dearie? Please go look again at that evidence. Its right there under your bed right beside all of your other boogeymen and monsters, and get that big old scary solid evidence to show to nanna, and I will give you cookies and milk.
DT, darling, I think this is the placebo trial you meant to show me:
http://www.mindfully.org/Health/2006/AIDS-Medical-Corruption1mar06.htm
"A drug trial that only compares the effects of one drug to another is not a placebo trial of the drug. This is a "drug interaction" trial, Sethie. Especially when you consider that the existing drug of treatment was also not tested solely against a placebo."
Granny, I call you lying scum because you are. A monotherapy trial tests one drug against NOTHING. That's the cite I gave you, it shows that you are wrong, and you refuse to admit it, as I predicted. You are therefore as scummy and disgusting as I said you were. You are a parasite who exists only--in this context--to harm others at the benefit of your own ego.
Also, I would like a WRITTEN reference that I can check, not some other person making the same unsupported claim you did.
You know, evidence.
God, people like you make me want to vomit.
Seth. Now that really is quite enough from you. You did not present any monotherapy trial testing any single hiv drug for effectiveness. And everybody that read your cite knows it.
Your scaring gramma. You sound exactly like a real psychopath, also known as a sociopath.
And if you do not know the defintion, it is:
A person with an antisocial personality disorder, especially one manifested in perverted, criminal, or amoral behavior.
Now stop your lying sethie, and get your drunken butt back in your cage.
And what did the doctor tell you about not taking your psych meds! You know how obnoxious you get without them!
grandma
The two groups differed only in that the placebo arm received a placebo and the nevirapine arm received nevirapine. It is a placebo controlled trial. No matter how much you bullshit it won't change this fact.
None of the Denialists have ever given a straight answer to this question.
What do you predict would be the outcome of these two groups?
a) AZT + ddl + placebo
b) AZT + ddl + nevirapine
Do you think that those taking three "toxic" drugs would come out worse than those taking only two?
Michael, try pubmed for the evidence.
And before you fall back on your old canard of pop psychologist, what would you say about a guy who pretends to be an old lady, complete with embarrassing attempts at folksy euphemisms? Don't forget to add constant dishonesty to the differential.
I read the paper that Seth cited. It is exactly as Seth says. One group received MK-0518 monotherapy, the placebo arm received placebo. No other ARVs were given. The placebo arm received no ARVs.
I don't think you actually read the paper at all. I think you are lying.
Sethie dear. This is Grandma. I take it back. And I really do apologise. You were not lying. You had indeed showed us a monotherapy anti-hiv study.
But are you totally morally bankrupt dear? The study was a TEN DAY STUDY! Any moron would know that 10 days is not an effective study period!
Do you think any of us are ignorant enough to believe that a 10 day study is sufficient to find out if those taking the drug were physically healthier than those taking a placebo?
I hadn't realized that you must have fallen off of a turnip truck if you think a 10 day placebo study counts as a study of whether or not a drug is more effective than nothing at all.
Now take your meds dear. It will be alright.
Here you go Sethie. Again, I do sincerely apologise. To make up for grandma's foible, I will put up the abstract for you so everyone can see that what you said was true, but they will also see what a ridiculous attempt this was to call this a placebo controlled study of effectiveness:
Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center, The Rockefeller University, New York, NY, USA.
BACKGROUND: MK-0518 is a novel HIV-1 integrase strand transfer inhibitor with potent in vitro activity against HIV-1 (95% inhibitory concentration [IC95] = 33 nM in 50% human serum) and good bioavailability in uninfected subjects. This study explored the antiretroviral activity and safety of MK-0518 versus placebo for 10 days as monotherapy in antiretroviral therapy-naive HIV-1-infected patients with plasma HIV-1 RNA levels of at least 5000 copies/mL and CD4 T-cell counts of at least 100 cells/mm. METHODS: This was a multicenter, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled 2-part study, with the first part using MK-0518 in 1 of 4 doses (100, 200, 400, and 600 mg) versus placebo (randomized 1:1:1:1:1) given twice daily for 10 days of monotherapy. Patients were monitored for safety, pharmacokinetic parameters, and antiretroviral effect. RESULTS: Thirty-five patients were enrolled (6-8 patients per treatment group) and completed 10 days of therapy; the mean baseline log10 HIV RNA level ranged from 4.5 to 5.0 copies/mL in each group. On day 10, the mean decrease from baseline in the log10 HIV RNA level was -0.2 copies/mL for the placebo group and -1.9, -2.0, -1.7 and -2.2 log10 copies/mL for the MK-0518 100-, 200-, 400-, and 600-mg treatment groups, respectively. All dose groups had superior antiretroviral activity compared with placebo (P < 0.001 for comparison of each dose with placebo). At least 50% of patients in each MK-0518 dose group achieved an HIV RNA level <400 copies/mL by day 10. Mean trough MK-0518 concentrations at each dose exceeded the IC95 of 33 nM. Study therapy was generally well tolerated. The most common adverse experiences were headache and dizziness; these were similar between active and control groups. There were no discontinuations because of adverse experiences and no serious adverse experiences. CONCLUSIONS: MK-0518 showed potent antiretroviral activity as short-term monotherapy and was generally well tolerated at all doses. Based on these results, part 2 of the study, a dose-ranging 48-week trial of MK-0518 versus efavirenz in a combination regimen, has been initiated.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/queryd.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&l…
By the way, Sethie. Can you tell me who paid for, instituted, designed, controlled the resultant findings, and ran the trial? I can tell you! It was done by the drug company Merck.
The gang at David Ho's Aaron Diamond Center are all notoriously in the pockets of the pharmaceutical companies.
This was not an independent trial, nor did it check for any long term benefits over a placebo or safety.
10 days for a placebo trial???? Don't make me laugh so hard! I could crush a rib at my age!
It does not qualify in any way shape or form as a test of efficacy over a placebo.
It measured RNA activity only, and the drug could have interfered with RNA activity for many reasons, including interfering with the RNA testing. And there is certainly no proof that any of the RNA activity was due to HIV.
My Goodness. You boys are so silly sometimes. You would believe anything.
Cornell HIV researcher, John Moore, who was recently awarded $500,000 from a drug company, recently stated that the denialists think that all of the AIDS advocates are either in it just for the money, or are all stupid.
Well it certainly seems that he and most other so-called HIV researchers certainly are in it just for the money, but are most definitely also stupid, but as for those of you who do not make your living from it, I would most likely have to attribute stupidity to the rest of you AIDS advocates.
Yours with love,
Not a greedy granny!
DT, darling, thank you ever so much for your recommended reading. You said:
"Oh, and while you were on that site perhaps you also looked at some of the other interviews? Such as:
http://health.scribemedia.org/2007/06/22/fighting-aids-denialism/
You know it's worth it".
Well Dearie, I just read all of the comments that were left in the comments section about that video, and it certainly was well worth it. Wonderful stuff written there for comments! I absolutely agree with all of the posts!
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/324/7340/757
BMJ 2002;324:757 ( 30 March )
Systematic review and meta-analysis of evidence for increasing numbers of drugs in antiretroviral combination therapy
- including 15 placebo controlled AZT trials:
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content-nw/full/324/7340/757/F2
I don't think anyone would argue that AZT monotherapy was a great approach based on the data, but there is also no support for the argument that it was worse than placebo. I note that Michael has dodged Chris's question about why the impact on disease progression and death of two drugs is better than one, and three better than two.
The stuff about the elite controller study came up on one of the other threads. The study has nothing to do with HIV denial.
http://www.massgeneral.org/aids/hiv_elite_controllers.asp
The researchers (led by Boston-based cellular immunologist Bruce Walker) are looking to obtain blood samples from 1000 people (from anywhere in the world, not just Boston) with viral loads less than 2000 copies in the absence of treatment. Prior use of ARVs is OK as long as the person has been off for at least a year. Most donors so far have not used treatment because they've never needed to, they're not HIV deniers. Last update I heard was in March and they'd collected around 300 samples. They're not following people longitudinally so not all of the people that donate samples will necessarily be long term non progressors.
It's a standard denialist argument to suggest that avoiding ARVs causes people to become LTNPs; it's the equivalent of arguing that people who naturally maintain low cholesterol do so by avoiding statins. What research has actually shown is that LTNPs have qualitatively superior HIV-specific CD4 and CD8 T cell responses compared to people who progress to AIDS (e.g. see this study). Hardly consistent with HIV not causing AIDS. The immune responses documented in LTNPs have informed the design of the three HIV vaccines currently undergoing efficacy trials (involving 27,500 people). This rather contradicts the argument Michael was making in the other thread that LTNPs have been ignored.
Seed Magazine has a good article:Theory of How HIV Attacks Wrong:Study
Thanks Sonny! And it only took them 25 years to admit it!!!
Michael, you are confusing a discussion of how HIV kills CD4+ cells with your ideological belief that HIV doesn't cause AIDS.
Did you crib your debate skills from creationists?
"I hadn't realized that you must have fallen off of a turnip truck if you think a 10 day placebo study counts as a study of whether or not a drug is more effective than nothing at all."
First goalpost move? Check. Your original statement was that no such studies existed, and that I hadn't show one. Then, caught in that outright lie, you back off to say that the study isn't long enough.
Do you come to that conclusion because you've ever studied biology, medicine, chemistry, immunology, or any semi-related field? Do you have any idea what constitutes a reasonable study length for this class of substance?
Of course not. You come to that conclusion because you are an arrogant twit who demands to be right regardless of the actual facts. The facts disagree with your premise, so rather than reconsidering your conclusion, you move the goalpost.
But again you make claims, arrogantly and confidently, about things you know nothing at all about. Do you have any idea how utterly narcissistic and stupid it is to claim, as you do, that your opinion about study lengths, borne of nothing but ignorance, trumps not only those of the study authors but of the referees?
You aren't qualified to make that judgement. You lack the basic knowledge to make that judgement. You haven't worked hard enough to understand the basic underlying issues on which you would make such a judgement. You have never designed a study. You wouldn't know where to start.
And yet, you feel like your opinion is so valuable that you can laugh these studies off. What a sad life you must lead, how impoverished your mind must be, with nothing but your own ignorance echoing back at you.
I have no expertise in HIV/ AIDS. But I would say that the peer review system provides a more healthy way to build knowledge than this thread... Implications:
- Bora (if you are around): how will you channel exchanges like this in open access journals?
- Going back to the health discussion: maybe a healthy organism is one in which its natural self-defences work above a certain threshold?
I realize that ego-committed adherence to an inflexible ideology is unlikely to yield to reason. Nevertheless, I urge you to take a hard look in the mirror.
I think you are the one in need of a mirror, Harold.
Anyone following this thread can readily see that you've chosen not to address, not in good faith anyway, the many valid charges made by the "denialists" on this blog, including my own commentary on the easily identified corruption that dominates and taints all science relating to human health. You conveniently chose not to answer my solicitation for your own non-cliched reaction to Dr. Abramson's claim that modern scientific research is so politicized that it can no longer be relied upon to produce data that conforms to clinical realities-- a situation that he, as a practicing physician, could no longer avoid. Yet, you seem quite content to pretend that Science has not been compromised. Perhaps, you should do some independent study on the matter.
So, I ask the members of this blog, including you Harold...do you not find that profiteering has influenced how medicine is practiced in the 21st Century?
Anyone who wishes to argue otherwise will need to provide evidence as to why he/she fails "yield to reason" in this matter? Of course, I fully expect that character attacks will be the primary substance of any replies, but genuine replies would be most welcome.
Furthermore, I urge you, Harold, and all of your fellow sycophants here to become educated to the importance of acknowledging the severe lack of integrity undermining the scientific research that directs human health concerns. Any reasonable discussion of the matter requires such an awareness. It is certainly impossible to answer the question, "what is health", when you cannot even admit that modern medicine, as practiced in this country, has clearly failed to improve the health of our citizenry, in spite of unprecedented spending. According to the WHO, we rank 37th as a health system and the reason for our low ranking is obvious to impartial observers: profiteering is more important than improving health. The truth is simple, as usual.
______________________
From Chapter 2 of Overdosed America, "Spinning the Evidence":
Examples of improprieties such as this one can be found at all levels of the system, from doctors to academic researchers. As numerous other denialists have pointed out, it is impossible for professionals to speak freely about the shortcomings of entrenched theories like HIV without suffering loss of status and, perhaps, even loss of employment. This is a fact.
____________________
"Seth,
You are the Hitchens of Aetiology. I'm pretty sure I like it." -- apy
That you are enamoured with the musings of an intolerant simpleton like Seth Manapio is very revealing about your own limited capabilities, "apy", and I rescind my previous statement suggesting that you are a capable contributor. In fact, reading this blog for the past year has been a real eye-opener for me. Not only was I was naive as to the extent of the corruption in virtually all social institutions, especially academia, but I was even more naive about the obsequious and apathetic attitudes that are necessary for such corruption to flourish. I now realize that these institutions are peopled with psuedo-professionals who no longer value epistemic integrity. To those of you defending the ridiculous antics employed by HIV hacks, you are all responsible for the coming consequences. HIV is by no means the only example of the specious medical claims that such corruption engenders, but it is by far the most egregious. The 25-year history of the cult of HIV is nothing short of an Orwellian nightmare.
With that in mind, in an earlier thread, Adele, among others, accused me of being a wackjob for comparing the corruption responsible for the presently unwinding real estate bubble to the corruption responsible for the poor-quality health care available in the US. However, I have come to realize that Adele has plenty of company for most on this blog are far too meek to acknowledge any such similarities, even though they are easily identified. Like HIV, the recent "ponzi scheme" culture within real estate was a devastating mistake, primarily due to scale. Like HIV, it was all based on an illusion that the fundamentals no longer applied. Coming to terms with the truth will be very painful. This housing correction will jeopardize the stability of the entire global economy and the US economy will not be spared. In fact, we will suffer the most as the middle class has been virtually annihilated by the creation of this perverted "ownership society." As the foreclosures mount, people will go from being homeowners to indentured servants, which perhaps will serve as a final wakeup call to all you with your heads in the sand (hello, Harold). However, I fear that it is too little too late to lessen the blow. Is it any wonder? Our country's future is indeed bleak when so many are so willing to accept lies as truth and profiteering as "science". We are heading for a very deep bottom if we continue to ignore the importance of accountability in this age of unparalleled greed.
Kevin
Kevin, you are unhappy with the management of health care, not the science.
I see the denialists consider drug trials to be "placebo-controlled" ONLY if they are monotherpapy trials.
Let us leave aside for now the ridiculous basis for this concept, and leave aside all the data furnished so far that:
1 drug is better than placebo,
2 drugs better than 1 drug and placebo,
3 drugs better than 2 drugs plus placebo.
Let us leave aside the inability of denialists to answer the obvious question of why, if drugs are toxic and cause death and AIDS in themselves, do patients on MORE drugs do better than patients on fewer drugs or no drugs?
Instead I thought I would list a few monotherapy placebo-controlled trials to further expose the denialists lie that there was only ever one such trial.
ZDVCG
NEJM 1987;317;185
NEJM 1987;317;192
JAMA 1989;262;2405
ACTG 016
Ann Int Med 1990;112;727
NEJM 1990;322;941
JAMA 1994;272;437
EAC(G), OPAL 017
AIDS 1994;8;313
Nordic MRC
BMJ 1992;304;13
ACTG 036
Blood 1991;78;900
EAC(G)020, OPAL020
Br J Haematology 1994;86;174
Veterans study (so beloved by Dr Many-lie-tis)
NEJM 1992 326;484
J AIDS Hum Retro 1996; 11;142
NEJM 1996;334;426
Ann Int Med 1997;126;939
EAC(G)009, OPAL 009
NEJM 1993;329;297
ACTG 019
NEJM 1995;333;401
Concorde Lancet 1994;343;871
AIDS 1998;12;1259
ACTG 114
JAMA 1995;273;295
ACTG 116a
Arch Int Med 1995;155;961
ABC phase II
AIDS 1998;12;F203
Monotherpay trials have mainly focussed on NRTIs. There are however RDBPC trials of other classes of drugs, but clearly it is difficult to justify giving patients absolutely nothing when looking at efficacy of new drugs. They will usually be offered the best standard therapy, and the new drug will be either added to this or substituted for this in a DBPC fashion. That is how all drug development and medical advances are made.
If I think I have a new drug that will treat diabetes, I cannot design a trial whereby I give my drug to some patients, and merely a placebo to the others. That is morally indefensible, criminally negligent, and ranks somewhere up with the Tuskegee study in terms of reprehensibility.
I would design a trial that looks at standard therapy (oral drugs, insulin) in comparison with my new drug in a double blind, placebo-controlled fashion, or standard therapy PLUS my drug if that was thought to be the best clinical objective.
I then determine at the end of the trial whether my drug cuts the mustard or not in relationship to standard therapy.
A series of monotherapy RDBPC trials gives little indication as to which drugs are superior to others, that is why comparative studies are crucial. The denialists either do not understand this basic concept of trial design, or are willfully advocating single drug trials as the only relevant trials, in the knowledge that the number of these trials is far fewer than the vastly more relevant and clinically important comparative trials.
My list above should at least put an end to their lie that there was only ever one "placebo-controlled" monotherapy studty in HIV. If they want a list of placebo-controlled trials for dual therapy, triple therapy and comparative studies I couls be here all night posting references.
"Anyone following this thread can readily see that you've chosen not to address, not in good faith anyway, the many valid charges made by the "denialists" on this blog, including my own commentary on the easily identified corruption that dominates and taints all science relating to human health."
----------------
Well, Kevin, it could be because we're too damn busy pointing out where the denialists are simply saying things that are demonstrably not true. So far, denialist commentary on this thread can be divided into three categories: false claims, uninformed opinions, and pure bullshit.
Your claim above falls into category three. You seem to think that the fact that pharmaceutical companies fund research renders that research invalid. This is not a reasonable conclusion, based on a record of invalid research, its a hallucination based solely on your imagination.
Kevin your paranoia is still expanding isn't it? Like a bubble I think. Here's a hint though to make your rants more believable. A "Ponzi scheme" is not the same thing as a bubble. The current housing market has been at a stand still for a few years slightly higher in some markets lower in others. If it crashes like if everyone loses half their value then we had a bubble. If it doesn't its not even a bubble. And no way is it a Ponzi scheme even if it's a bubble which is doubtful.
Also someone who owns a house and forecloses is not an indentured servant.
Kevin you've convinced everyone here you don't know anything about HIV and you're not interested in learning anything about it. Now your busy convincing us you're a ignorant in other areas. If you make some better analogies though maybe you could get someone to take you seriously. Maybe but I doubt it. Good luck!
"That you are enamoured with the musings of an intolerant simpleton like Seth Manapio is very revealing about your own limited capabilities, "apy", and I rescind my previous statement suggesting that you are a capable contributor. In fact, reading this blog for the past year has been a real eye-opener for me. Not only was I was naive as to the extent of the corruption in virtually all social institutions, especially academia, but I was even more naive about the obsequious and apathetic attitudes that are necessary for such corruption to flourish. I now realize that these institutions are peopled with psuedo-professionals who no longer value epistemic integrity. To those of you defending the ridiculous antics employed by HIV hacks, you are all responsible for the coming consequences. HIV is by no means the only example of the specious medical claims that such corruption engenders, but it is by far the most egregious. The 25-year history of the cult of HIV is nothing short of an Orwellian nightmare."
Oh come now, Hitchens has a very crass way of communicating where he takes few prisoners. Seth has a similar manor of communicating. I find both give me a chuckle when I read them.
I'm not sure why, what I find entertaining, reveals I have limited capabilities. Apparently my sense of humor has to be in line with yours in order to have anything to offer? I'm also unsure why my sense of humor devalues any of my previous posts. I suppose finding a Micheal Bay movie entertaining makes my thoughts on Citizen Kane less meaningful?
The really amazing part of all of this is you manage to take a statement I made about Seth and segway into how there is a giant inter-industry-academic conspiracy that permeates the moral and ethical standings of everyone involved. I have not seen a secret last more than a day inside a group of 4 people and some how not a single person of the hundreds of thousands involved in cancer/HIV therapy, drug discovery, and clinical trials who see hundreds of people die from these diseases has had a moment of clarity where they feel the profits aren't worth the lives of others? Every single person except the rag-tag bunch in the AIDS reappraisal group finds money more important than a human life? And how many of those involved in AIDS reappraisal has actually worked deeply in researching AIDS and HIV? We have already seen evidence that the Perth group is run by some extraordinarily stupid or (hopefully) ignorant group of people.
So what does my opinion of Seth's comments have to do with any of this? Nothing from what I can see other than some attempt to segway into your delusion that all of humanity is willing to sacrifice each other to make a few bucks. Sure, you can counter me with a long list of people who would be fine with doing that, but we are on a world of 6 billion, your list better be pretty long if you expect me to believe that it is at all representative of the scientists working to cure AIDS/HIV/cancer.
Seth, are you telling Grandma that she is not entitled to her opinion?
Well certainly these threads are nothing but opinions, as well as your own.
And speaking of opinion, what is your opinion of whether or not a 10 day trial that simply looked at RNA levels is sufficient to validate that the drugs benefit outweighs that of a placebo.
Do share with us your vast experience and educated opinion on this 10 day trial's validity as a drug versus placebo trial. What is your own opinion of it Sethie?
Well opinions aside here's a fact for you Michael Geiger. You haven't explained to the rest of us where you managed to buy a whole truck-load of kick-ass name brand SHAMELESSNESS.
You were going to join us, remember, promoting health and awareness of the virus AIDS link if Chad Parenzee lost in Australia? What happened?
Come on Granny Geiger don't you remember? I hope you're not suffering from dementia!
Dementia is a disease created by the drug companies and academia in order to suck money out of older people.
"Seth, are you telling Grandma that she is not entitled to her opinion?"
I'm sorry, but there is no entitlement to have your opinion treated as anything other than total bullshit if you don't know anything about a highly technical topic. You haven't put out enough effort in your life to have your opinion about placebo trials of anti-virals taken seriously. The fact that you somehow think that you have is either completely delusional or breathtakingly arrogant. Either way, you show yourself to be a fool who first puts out false information and then tries to cover up that fact by pretending to great wisdom.
Well, to hell with you. You simply don't know what you are talking about.
Ladies and Gentlemen, and AIDS advocates.
It has been brought to my attention that some believe that
I, Abe Lincoln should have joinined up with Team Virus, if Parenzee lost in Adelaide.
However Adele, et al., if memory serves me correctly, a simple offer was made to Chris Noble that if Parenzee won, Mr. Noble would refrain from posting anti-dissident posts, and if Parenzee lost, I would join the advocates.
A contract such as this is only valid if it is approved and accepted by both sides. Chris Noble never agreed to such a contract, and it was therefore nulled and voided.
Had Chris Noble agreed to this offer, I myself would now be in the obnoxious role of promoting the false belief that HIV is the cause of AIDS.
Fortunately, Chris Noble did not accept the offer.
As an attorney in my prior life, I do understand contracts. The offered contract was never accepted by Mr. Noble.
As an insightful gentleman, however, I was quite aware that Mr. Noble would never agree to such a thing, which is why I made such a silly offer to begin with.
Thanks for explaining but people who really think they're right about something don't make offers like that Mr. Geiger. Obviously this is just a big game to you.
You just go on pretending to be gray geese black crows and grandmothers and assassinated Presidents, Michael Geiger. Because for many of us it's not a game at all. It's a struggle for lives and health. Of people who are endangered by the misinformation you and your disgusting friends spread around like poisoned Halloween candy.
If denialists are so sure HIV does not cause AIDS, I don't see why you all don't just get HIV and prove it. I can't see that as anything other than a win-win.
"India, once believed to have the largest HIV-positive population of any country in the world, today announced that new, more accurate surveillance data suggest India has about 2.5 million people living with HIV - about half the number estimated by UNAIDS based on previous surveys of HIV prevalence among pregnant women"
http://www.aidsmap.com/en/news/C216549D-65B8-483D-8C84-D513A22900B6.asp
Hello Adele. You asked why us dissidents are doing all that we can to inform the public of the obvious inconsistencies and bad science regarding those who believe HIV causes AIDS and that the AIDS drugs are "proven and effective".
I will be glad to to tell you why, Adele. And right back at ya!
Because for many of us it's not a game at all. It's a struggle for lives and health. Of people who are endangered by the misinformation you and your disgusting friends spread around like the medications which are more toxic and deadly than poisoned Halloween candy.
Some of us, like myself, have lovers who are HIV positive. Some, like Noreen, are HIV positive.
Some, like Kevin, were threatened with believing they were HIV positive.
Some are treated like lepers.
This is a quite a struggle for us dissidents Adele, and one we will not cease.
It is a struggle for the God Given right of people to hear all sides of an issue and be permitted to make up their own minds based on that evidence, or the lack of it, without the condemnation of others.
It is a struggle against the censorship that has been leveled and foisted upon those who believe something other than what the brainwashed masses believe.
It is a struggle against the labeling, trauma, and subsequent making ones self sick over the belief and labeling of being "infected with the death virus" that is imposed on HIV positives.
It is a struggle against those who seek to profit off of the illness and problems of others.
It is a struggle against VooDoo medicine and Iatrogenic death and maiming.
It is a struggle against the rascism and homophobism that is inherent in the belief that HIV causes AIDS.
It is a struggle for truth, and dignity, and rights, and health.
And you are more than welcome to believe your own version of what truth is Adele.
But so are we!
Hey Apy, or is it Ape-y, You said:
"If denialists are so sure HIV does not cause AIDS, I don't see why you all don't just get HIV and prove it".
If you were not such a dolt, you would realise that most of the dissidents or "denialists" as you prefer to call us, ARE HIV POSITIVE! DumbAss!
Go read the virusmyth AIDS dissident threads fool. Most of it is posted by HIV positively diagnosed people!
Scuse me, I meant AIDSMYTH EXPOSED, not Virusmyth.
http://groups.msn.com/AIDSMythExposed/
It's apy.
It is more likely that you were a weasel in a past life.
In the end you unconditionally promised to give up your "dissidunce" if the Parenzee appeal was turned down.
Perhaps, my love, my proposal is just too much pressure for you, so I will withdrawl my terms. I will put it another way.....
What I will do in the case that the appeal is turned down....
I will agree to shut up eternally on the dissident issue and I will refrain from ever again posting any dissident beliefs on this or any other site, and furthermore, I will take up arms with the opposing side, and I will henceforward be twice as determined to espouse only the establishment views.
Now, I ask you the same question, my dear. What will you, Chris, yourself do, if the case is found in favor of Mr. Parenzee?
"It is a struggle for truth, and dignity, and rights, and health."
No. It isn't. Its a struggle against reality, against truth. Your rights aren't at odds, and seriously, the medical establishment would lose money by selling you expensive drugs that hurt you. Your position is a non-sensical fear reaction to nothingness.
I doubt quite seriously that the majority of HIV deniers are HIV positive. I am quite confident that you can't cite any study or evidence to demonstrate the truth of that claim.
I know its easier to believe that you are a victim of racism, homophobia, and greed than to believe that someone you love has a manageable disease that can, if left unchecked, become life threatening. But there just isn't any evidence to support your belief. It is just wishful thinking.
Hey Seth, are you sure, cause thats not what this HIV positive guy said today in a European blog:
http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2007/06/28/facts-but-also-fear-hiv-t…
He said:
1. Please cite the study or studies which proved HIV is transmissible at all. I've searched for years for such a study, and what I've found is that there are two types of studies which deal with HIV transmission: Those that *assume* transmissibility, and those that actually *study* transmissibility. Of those that actually study transmissibility, ALL have proven that HIV isn't transmissible, but they hide this fact behind a claim of low transmissibility. (Exempli gratia among many: Padian et al 1997). If you cannot provide the proof that HIV is transmissible, then you are assuming that it is, and we both know what happens when we assume, don't we?
I myself have been HIV-positive for 9 years, and in that time I've had 3 long-term relationships with women with whom I've had unprotected vaginal and anal sex literally thousands of times (and yes, they all knew my alleged HIV status.) To date, all have been tested repeatedly, and all are HIV-negative.
I also met a guy, shortly after my (mis)diagnosis, who'd been a "bug chaser" for 13 years. Guess what? After 13 years of actively TRYING to get HIV, he was still HIV-negative.
2. You're right -- becoming HIV-positive is NOT a death sentence. It's what happens to you afterwards that kills you, such as having your doctor utterly ignore real health issues because your numbers are so "good" (as happened to me, nearly resulting in my death in November 2000,) and/or killing you with highly toxic drugs for a virus that has never been proven to exist in your blood (as happened to Ryan White.)
3. You've obviously never lived as an HIV-positive, or you wouldn't be saying this. You sound like a white person trying to explain to a black person that racism doesn't exist anymore. If ignorance is bliss, then your planet must be Paradise. Your insensitivity to the issues faced every day by PWAs is appalling, and you should be ashamed.
4. The medications are toxic, there is no doubt about it. Period. After only one year of triple drug therapy, I was already showing signs of liver damage. Incidentally, the #1 killer of AIDS patients in the US since 1999 is liver failure caused by the medications.
Now, let's do the math. According to the CDC, about a 3rd of all HIV-positives don't even know their status, therefore they could not possibly be taking ARVs. Another 40% or so are aware of their status, but aren't taking meds, leaving about 25% of HIV-positives who are actually taking meds.
Now, with only a small minority of HIV-positives actually taking meds, the largest single fraction of those who actually die in any given year die from liver failure brought on by the meds (not to mention those that die of stroke and other complications from the meds).
Oh yeah, there is NO DOUBT that ARVs are extending lives, is there?
5. Thanks for the suggestion. It just so happens that "joining the fight in a more affirming way" is exactly what I'm doing, by going out among the public to fight ignorance about this fraud which has spawned a multi-trillion dollar industry. ( http://www.shillfactor.net )
As an HIV-positive who is joining the fight in an affirming way as you suggest, how much do you want to bet that by this time tomorrow, my post will no longer be here?
6. Even if what you said ("millions are fighting to get the treatment...") were true, that wouldn't prove that it works. Either you can provide the scientific studies to prove it, or you don't know what you're talking about.
An article published in the August 5, 2006 edition of Lancet tells a MUCH different story (HIV treatment response and prognosis in Europe and North America in the first decade of highly active antiretroviral therapy: a collaborative analysis. - May MT, Sterne JA, et al, Antiretroviral Therapy (ART) Cohort Collaboration
Lancet 2006 Aug 5 368(9534):451-8 p..pdf...)
In the article, it is demonstrated that while Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy (HAART) is effective at reducing viral load and increasing CD4 count, this does not translate into better clinical outcomes, and HAART actually appears to increase the risk of developing AIDS.
...But at least HAART increases CD4 count, right? Yes, it does, but according to a study published only a month later in JAMA (http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/296/12/1498) higher CD4 counts have very little correlation (a single-digit percentage of correlation in all cases) to eventual progression to AIDS.
I myself had a CD4 count of over 1400 before starting ARVs, and was as sick as a dog with what otherwise would certainly have been called "AIDS". Once I started meds, my CD4 count shot up to over 1700, and I got even sicker. However, when I'd ask my doctor about my illness, she'd say, "What illness? Your numbers are great; you're healthy as a horse!" She even went so far as to publicly call me her "miracle patient" on several occasions.
Within two years, I suffered a near-fatal case of pneumonia, with a CD4 count that was substantially higher than normal, and I have (as you put it) NO DOUBT that if I'd died, it would have been called "AIDS". As it turns out, it was due to a severe mold allergy, and when I got a proper diagnosis and treatment, it cleared right up, after I'd suffered severe illness for two years with an HIV doctor who insisted that there was nothing wrong with me, because my CD4 counts were substantially higher than normal.
By all means, your readers should visit aidstruth.org, and I say that as someone who strongly disagrees with what that website has to say. However, I'd highly recommend getting all sides of the story, for anyone who doesn't want to learn the REAL facts about AIDS the hard way like I did:
http://www.virusmyth.net
http://www.aliveandwell.org
http://www.helpforhiv.com
http://www.rethinkingaids.com
http://www.shillfactor.net
http://www.duesberg.com
http://www.karymullis.com
Signed (since you seem to think that's important),
--- Gos
--- gos@nerosopeningact.com
"Nobody here but us heretics..."
"Hey Seth, are you sure, cause thats not what this HIV positive guy said today in a European blog:"
Right. What some guy said in a blog is exactly the sort of deep demographic analysis you need to back up your claim that most denialists are HIV positive.
As far as "the" study that show transmission, what are your requirements? What would constitute proof? I mean, based on your current standard of proof, I just need a few anecdotes of a guy who had sex with an HIV positive person and later became HIV positive, and there are THOUSANDS of those.
I really don't give a damn about your personal medical history, or your relationships with doctors. It sucks that your doctor didn't take your mold allergy seriously. But its not relevant to the question of whether HIV causes AIDS. Nor is it homophobic in any way to say that AIDS is a disease caused by a virus.
Its a little homophobic to, like Duesberg, claim that AIDS is just the bodies natural response to the "gay lifestyle", but apparently thats okay with you.
So lets see... you've got some anecdotes, a fine tuned sense of outrage, a total denial of reality, and some unsupported claims. Yep. That sounds like truth to me.
Gos, unless there were some specific clinical issues (e.g. myelopathy etc.) that prompted the decision, putting someone with a CD4 count of 1400 on antiretrovirals is just plain bad medical care. But your personal story is no excuse for lying about sexual transmission, the Lancet ART Cohort Collaboration study and the Benigno Rodriguez JAMA paper.
Michael/whoever,
You stated:
"Some of us, like myself, have lovers who are HIV positive."
then:
"I myself have been HIV-positive for 9 years, and in that time I've had 3 long-term relationships with women with whom I've had unprotected vaginal and anal sex literally thousands of times (and yes, they all knew my alleged HIV status.) To date, all have been tested repeatedly, and all are HIV-negative."
Can you expand on this apparent inconsistency, please?
(Cue here for backtracking and truth-fudging about lovers who are not partners, etc. If you are going to contrive yet more "partners" to factor into your equation by way of explanation, please take note that when you say "literally thousands" of times [for sex], I assume you mean at least 2 thousand, and that this leaves very little time for you to have had any other sexual encounters as you are already averaging a rate of 2 sexual encounters every single day)
Two different people: quote #1 is from Michael Geiger, quote #2 is from Gos.
Ahh - thank you. Apologies all round.
On the topic of discordant couples, maybe it's worth reiterating that immunity plays a key role. If you look at the placebo arm of the study of valacyclovir for preventing HSV2 transmission that was published in NEJM (Corey et al), I think it was only something like 27 out of 741 discordant couples that transmitted. Uninfected participants whose partner had been infected with HSV2 for more than 2 years prior to joining the study were LESS likely to acquire infection during follow up compared to those whose partners had been infected for less than 2 years. In other words: longer duration of prior exposure equaled less risk of becoming infected during follow up (sound familiar?).
The same phenomenon was reported many years ago in one of the best studied cohorts of individuals that have been repeatedly exposed to HIV but remain uninfected, the Nairobi sex worker cohort. Women starting sex work have a huge risk (~90%) of becoming infected with HIV during the first couple of years, but those that remain uninfected during this initial period subsequently have a risk of acquiring infection that is near zero:
http://www.aegis.com/pubs/iavi/2001/IAVI2001-0706.html
Apologies for the self-reference. The article also includes a link to a listing of discordant couples studies, and appended below is a new study that just got published. Note that HIV-specific CD4 and CD8 T cell responses emerge as important in this research, just as they have in studies of LTNPs.
http://cdli.asm.org/cgi/content/abstract/CVI.00488-06v1
CVI Accepts, published online ahead of print on 3 July 2007
Clin. Vaccine Immunol. doi:10.1128/CVI.00488-06
HIV gag ANTIGEN SPECIFIC T-HELPER AND GRANULE-DEPENDENT CD8 T CELL ACTIVITY IN EXPOSED BUT UNINFECTED HETEROSEXUAL PARTNERS OF HIV-1 INFECTED INDIVIDUALS IN NORTH INDIA
Suresh Pallikkuth, Ajay Wanchu*, Archana Bhatnagar, Ravinder Kaur Sachdeva, and Meera Sharma
Department of Internal Medicine, Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh, India; Department of Biochemistry, Panjab University, Chandigarh, India; Department of Medical Microbiology, Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh, India
Repeated exposure to human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) does not always result in HIV infection and several cohorts of HIV exposed but uninfected (EU) individuals have been described. We studied T helper and granule-dependent CTL activity in a group of thirty EU partners of HIV-1 infected individuals. HIV-1 specific helper T cell activity was studied by measuring the levels of interleukin (IL)-2 produced by peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) and the granule- dependent cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) activity by measuring the intracellular perforin and granzyme B expression in CD8+ T cells after stimulation with gag p24 antigen. Elevated IL-2 production by PBMCs after p24 stimulation occurred in EU individuals. Perforin and granzyme B expression in CD8+ T cells also was higher among EU individuals than healthy controls. HIV specific helper T cell and granule-dependent CTL activity inversely correlated with time since last unprotected sexual exposure in these individuals. In our cohort, activation of T helper and granule-dependent CTL activity against HIV might be due to unprotected sexual contact. These results indicate that HIV-1 specific T cell responses could play a role in protection against acquiring infection in this cohort of EU individuals.
Michael Geiger wrote
You asked why us dissidents are doing all that we can to inform the public of the obvious inconsistencies and bad science regarding those who believe HIV causes AIDS and that the AIDS drugs are "proven and effective".
No Michael I never asked that. I asked why you don't stand by your word to abandon reality denial if Parenzee lost. You lied, said it was dependent on Chris Noble. It wasn't. Chris just gave us your exact words. You are a liar just like the homophobes and racists you think are your friends.
There is nothing inherently racist or homophobic acknowledging HIV causes AIDS. Just the opposite. It's a friggin VIRUS. It's not a ethnic background or a sexual orientation. It's a virus.
And you might want to look around you. Yes there are some AIDS patients and other HIV infected people who were decieved by denialism. But the people at the top of denial have the same beliefs you try to put on scientists who are some of the most liberal people you'll ever meet. It's denialists who are the ultraconservatives the homophobes the racists. Lie all you want Michael it doesn't change reality.
So you are lucky or making it up. We know someone who is HIV+, CD4 count is heading down, he is getting sick quite often. His Thai girlfriend was HIV+. I use the past tense deliberately. She is now dead of AIDS, at age 26.
"Kevin, you are unhappy with the management of health care, not the science." -- Robster
Perhaps, this better describes your position, Robster, for I certainly have demonstrated that I am unhappy with science, first and foremost. If this were simply a problem of poor health care management, the task of cleaning up this mess would be considerably easier. That however is not the case. The bottom line is that the special interests need to be removed from the process of conducting science, thereby leading to "true" independent inquiry. Until that happens, Science with a captial "S" will be nothing more than a quasi-religious pursuit, an important distinction that is apparently lost on all of the "believers" posting here.
________________________
"You seem to think that the fact that pharmaceutical companies fund research renders that research invalid."
-- Seth, the uninsightful blowhard
I've provided numerous examples of that very occurrence, Seth. (see a previous discussion HERE of Mayo Clinic Studies examining the cause of Chronic Sinusitis.) Are those Mayo Clinic Studies "hallucinations" and are they based on "invalid research", Seth? You are the religious freak who refuses to acknowledge the facts, and you have yet to provide worthwhile counterexamples. Instead, you continue to respond to those with whom you disagree with immaturity and ignorance. Christopher Hitchens, you are not!
_______________________
"So what does my opinion of Seth's comments have to do with any of this?" -- apy
See Above. You've insulted Mr. Hitchens, and, as for your sense of humor, please direct me to its location.
______________________________
"Nothing from what I can see other than some attempt to segway into your delusion that all of humanity is willing to sacrifice each other to make a few bucks. Sure, you can counter me with a long list of people who would be fine with doing that, but we are on a world of 6 billion, your list better be pretty long if you expect me to believe that it is at all representative of the scientists working to cure AIDS/HIV/cancer." -- apy
Perhaps, you mean "segue"? Anyway, you and Robster should work on understanding this issue together. You both seem to have a strong need to disavow the numerous and transparent conflicts of interests within human health research. As I've previously noted, the culture of corruption is endemic, i.e. it has been normalized; therefore, "all of the scientists working to cure AIDS/HIV/cancer" are essentially grandfathered-in to a system that eschews independent inquiry. As long as the new guys don't rock the boat, their "research" is lauded, no matter how worthless it turns out to be. Furthermore, the way that scientists are educated really amounts to nothing more than indoctrination. Our educational system is almost as bad as our health care system. Lastly, as the quote from Overdosed America demonstrates, the system is obviously broken when an academic professional declines to speak the truth simply because he is "consulting with pharmaceutical companies". Pray tell, apy, what alternative reason will you provide for this behavior because it seems apparent that personal financial gains are the reason for these lies of omission?
The truth is that this situation is very common, and it is an unacceptable conflict of interest, particularly in the fields that you mention since the compensation packages from pharmaceutical companies are quite substantial where cancer and AIDS are concerned. To argue otherwise is dishonest and far more indicative of a "denialist" stance than anything HIV rethinkers have argued.
______________________________
"Kevin your paranoia is still expanding isn't it?" -- Adele
Why Adele, it most certainly is....especially when I read pleas for academic censorship from fascist pigs like Mark Wainberg and John P. Moore:
AIDS and the dangers of denial
Readers be sure to read over the comments, but a simple quote from this propaganda piece should clearly demonstrate why posters like "apy" and "Robster" should re-evaluate their own willful ignorance. Wainberg and Moore write the following nonsense after failing to get Dr. Rebecca Culshaw fired for her dissident views:
"The university should have shown leadership on the issue and dismissed the faculty member from her position, rather than hiding under the cloak of academic freedom."
Academic freedom is not a fucking cloak. It is a necessary component of a healthy research environment, and to suggest that only tyrants like Mark Wainberg and John P. Moore have the right to decide what viewpoints are acceptable for their colleagues to hold, is nothing short of fascism. Wainberg and Moore are intellectual neanderthals who obviously realize that Dr. Culshaw's arguments are superior to their own. If they are so confident in their position, they should not have to resort to censorship to defend it. The truth is simple, as usual.
____________________________
"The current housing market has been at a stand still for a few years slightly higher in some markets lower in others. If it crashes like if everyone loses half their value then we had a bubble. If it doesn't its not even a bubble. And no way is it a Ponzi scheme even if it's a bubble which is doubtful." -- Adele
And you are accusing me of being confused? Alas, I've tried on a couple prior occasions to direct you to THIS WEBSITE, which might help a moron, such as yourself, understand this colossal housing bubble and its relation to our collective economic future, but you obviously aren't interested in reading intelligent discussions on the subject. Why am I not surprised? After all, you weren't interested in the intelligent offerings from Dr. Abramson, either. (Come clean, Adele, you never read Overdosed America.) Don't worry though, I'll continue to demonstrate to you how real analysis works with my future postings from the book.
"A "Ponzi scheme" is not the same thing as a bubble....If you make some better analogies though maybe you could get someone to take you seriously." -- Adele
My analogy was spot-on. The corruption in the housing market is very similar to the corruption found in HIV "science." They are both "shell games", and they both have more in common with a ponzi scheme than with the historical fundamentals of their respective professions. I don't care if you or anyone else takes me seriously. Pretty soon, you won't have that choice... especially if tyrants like Wainberg and Moore have their way.
Kevin
"Kevin, you are unhappy with the management of health care, not the science." -- Robster
Perhaps, this better describes your position, Robster, for I certainly have demonstrated that I am unhappy with science, first and foremost. If this were simply a problem of poor health care management, the task of cleaning up this mess would be considerably easier. That however is not the case. The bottom line is that the special interests need to be removed from the process of conducting science, thereby leading to "true" independent inquiry. Until that happens, Science with a captial "S" will be nothing more than a quasi-religious pursuit, an important distinction that is apparently lost on all of the "believers" posting here.
________________________
"You seem to think that the fact that pharmaceutical companies fund research renders that research invalid."
-- Seth, the uninsightful blowhard
I've provided numerous examples of that very occurrence, Seth. (see a previous discussion HERE of Mayo Clinic Studies examining the cause of Chronic Sinusitis.) Are those Mayo Clinic Studies "hallucinations" and are they based on "invalid research", Seth? You are the religious freak who refuses to acknowledge the facts, and you have yet to provide worthwhile counterexamples. Instead, you continue to respond to those with whom you disagree with immaturity and ignorance. Christopher Hitchens, you are not!
_______________________
"So what does my opinion of Seth's comments have to do with any of this?" -- apy
See Above. You've insulted Mr. Hitchens, and, as for your sense of humor, please direct me to its location.
______________________________
"Nothing from what I can see other than some attempt to segway into your delusion that all of humanity is willing to sacrifice each other to make a few bucks. Sure, you can counter me with a long list of people who would be fine with doing that, but we are on a world of 6 billion, your list better be pretty long if you expect me to believe that it is at all representative of the scientists working to cure AIDS/HIV/cancer." -- apy
Perhaps, you mean "segue"? Anyway, you and Robster should work on understanding this issue together. You both seem to have a strong need to disavow the numerous and transparent conflicts of interests within human health research. As I've previously noted, the culture of corruption is endemic, i.e. it has been normalized; therefore, "all of the scientists working to cure AIDS/HIV/cancer" are essentially grandfathered-in to a system that eschews independent inquiry. As long as the new guys don't rock the boat, their "research" is lauded, no matter how worthless it turns out to be. Furthermore, the way that scientists are educated really amounts to nothing more than indoctrination. Our educational system is almost as bad as our health care system. Lastly, as the quote from Overdosed America demonstrates, the system is obviously broken when an academic professional declines to speak the truth simply because he is "consulting with pharmaceutical companies". Pray tell, apy, what alternative reason will you provide for this behavior because it seems apparent that personal financial gains are the reason for these lies of omission?
The truth is that this situation is very common, and it is an unacceptable conflict of interest, particularly in the fields that you mention since the compensation packages from pharmaceutical companies are quite substantial where cancer and AIDS are concerned. To argue otherwise is dishonest and far more indicative of a "denialist" stance than anything HIV rethinkers have argued.
______________________________
"Kevin your paranoia is still expanding isn't it?" -- Adele
Why Adele, it most certainly is....especially when I read pleas for academic censorship from fascist pigs like Mark Wainberg and John P. Moore:
AIDS and the dangers of denial
Readers be sure to read over the comments, but a simple quote from this propaganda piece should clearly demonstrate why posters like "apy" and "Robster" should re-evaluate their own willful ignorance. Wainberg and Moore write the following nonsense after failing to get Dr. Rebecca Culshaw fired for her dissident views:
"The university should have shown leadership on the issue and dismissed the faculty member from her position, rather than hiding under the cloak of academic freedom."
Academic freedom is not a cloak! It is an essential component of a healthy research environment, and to suggest that only tyrants like Mark Wainberg and John P. Moore have the right to decide what viewpoints are acceptable for their colleagues to hold, is nothing short of fascism. Wainberg and Moore are intellectual neanderthals who obviously realize that Dr. Culshaw's arguments are superior to their own. If they are so confident in their position, they should not have to resort to censorship to defend it. The truth is simple, as usual.
____________________________
"The current housing market has been at a stand still for a few years slightly higher in some markets lower in others. If it crashes like if everyone loses half their value then we had a bubble. If it doesn't its not even a bubble. And no way is it a Ponzi scheme even if it's a bubble which is doubtful." -- Adele
And you are accusing me of being confused? Alas, I've tried on a couple prior occasions to direct you to THIS WEBSITE, which might help a moron, such as yourself, understand this colossal housing bubble and its relation to our collective economic future, but you obviously aren't interested in reading intelligent discussions on the subject. Why am I not surprised? After all, you weren't interested in the intelligent offerings from Dr. Abramson, either. (Come clean, Adele, you never read Overdosed America.) Don't worry though, I'll continue to demonstrate to you how real analysis works with my future postings from the book.
"A "Ponzi scheme" is not the same thing as a bubble....If you make some better analogies though maybe you could get someone to take you seriously." -- Adele
My analogy was spot-on. The corruption in the housing market is very similar to the corruption found in HIV "science." They are both "shell games", and they both have more in common with a ponzi scheme than with the historical fundamentals of their respective professions. I don't care if you or anyone else takes me seriously. Pretty soon, you won't have that choice... especially if tyrants like Wainberg and Moore have their way.
Kevin
"Kevin, you are unhappy with the management of health care, not the science." -- Robster
Perhaps, this better describes your position, Robster, for I certainly have demonstrated that I am unhappy with science, first and foremost. If this were simply a problem of poor health care management, the task of cleaning up this mess would be considerably easier. That however is not the case. The bottom line is that the special interests need to be removed from the process of conducting science, thereby leading to "true" independent inquiry. Until that happens, Science with a captial "S" will be nothing more than a quasi-religious pursuit, an important distinction that is apparently lost on all of the "believers" posting here.
________________________
"You seem to think that the fact that pharmaceutical companies fund research renders that research invalid."
-- Seth, the uninsightful blowhard
I've provided numerous examples of that very occurrence, Seth. (see a previous discussion HERE of Mayo Clinic Studies examining the cause of Chronic Sinusitis.) Are those Mayo Clinic Studies "hallucinations" and are they based on "invalid research", Seth? You are the religious freak who refuses to acknowledge the facts, and you have yet to provide worthwhile counterexamples. Instead, you continue to respond to those with whom you disagree with immaturity and ignorance. Christopher Hitchens, you are not!
"So what does my opinion of Seth's comments have to do with any of this?" -- apy
See Above. You've insulted Mr. Hitchens, and, as for your sense of humor, please direct me to its location.
______________________________
"Nothing from what I can see other than some attempt to segway into your delusion that all of humanity is willing to sacrifice each other to make a few bucks. Sure, you can counter me with a long list of people who would be fine with doing that, but we are on a world of 6 billion, your list better be pretty long if you expect me to believe that it is at all representative of the scientists working to cure AIDS/HIV/cancer." -- apy
Perhaps, you mean "segue"? Anyway, you and Robster should work on understanding this issue together. You both seem to have a strong need to disavow the numerous and transparent conflicts of interests within human health research. As I've previously noted, the culture of corruption is endemic, i.e. it has been normalized; therefore, "all of the scientists working to cure AIDS/HIV/cancer" are essentially grandfathered-in to a system that eschews independent inquiry. As long as the new guys don't rock the boat, their "research" is lauded, no matter how worthless it turns out to be. Furthermore, the way that scientists are educated really amounts to nothing more than indoctrination. Our educational system is almost as bad as our health care system. Lastly, as the quote from Overdosed America demonstrates, the system is obviously broken when an academic professional declines to speak the truth simply because he is "consulting with pharmaceutical companies". Pray tell, apy, what alternative reason will you provide for this behavior because it seems apparent that personal financial gains are the reason for these lies of omission?
The truth is that this situation is very common, and it is an unacceptable conflict of interest, particularly in the fields that you mention since the compensation packages from pharmaceutical companies are quite substantial where cancer and AIDS are concerned. To argue otherwise is dishonest and far more indicative of a "denialist" stance than anything HIV rethinkers have argued.
"Kevin your paranoia is still expanding isn't it?" -- Adele
Why Adele, it most certainly is....especially when I read pleas for academic censorship from fascist pigs like Mark Wainberg and John P. Moore:
AIDS and the dangers of denial
Readers be sure to read over the comments, but a simple quote from this propaganda piece should clearly demonstrate why posters like "apy" and "Robster" should re-evaluate their own willful ignorance. Wainberg and Moore write the following nonsense after failing to get Dr. Rebecca Culshaw fired for her dissident views:
"The university should have shown leadership on the issue and dismissed the faculty member from her position, rather than hiding under the cloak of academic freedom."
Academic freedom is not a cloak! It is an essential component of a healthy research environment, and to suggest otherwise is both pathetic and dangerous. The idea that only tyrants like Mark Wainberg and John P. Moore have the right to decide what viewpoints are acceptable for their colleagues to hold is nothing short of fascism. Wainberg and Moore are intellectual neanderthals who obviously realize that Dr. Culshaw's arguments are superior to their own. If they are so confident in their position, they should not have to resort to censorship to defend it. The truth is simple, as usual.
____________________________
"The current housing market has been at a stand still for a few years slightly higher in some markets lower in others. If it crashes like if everyone loses half their value then we had a bubble. If it doesn't its not even a bubble. And no way is it a Ponzi scheme even if it's a bubble which is doubtful." -- Adele
And you are accusing me of being confused? Alas, I've tried on a couple prior occasions to direct you to THIS WEBSITE, which might help a moron, such as yourself, understand this colossal housing bubble and its relation to our collective economic future, but you obviously aren't interested in reading intelligent discussions on the subject. Why am I not surprised? After all, you weren't interested in the intelligent offerings from Dr. Abramson, either. (Come clean, Adele, you never read Overdosed America.) Don't worry though, I'll continue to demonstrate to you how real analysis works with my future postings from the book.
"A "Ponzi scheme" is not the same thing as a bubble....If you make some better analogies though maybe you could get someone to take you seriously." -- Adele
My analogy was spot-on. The corruption in the housing market is very similar to the corruption found in HIV "science." They are both "shell games", and they both have more in common with a ponzi scheme than with the historical fundamentals of their respective professions. I don't care if you or anyone else takes me seriously. Pretty soon, you won't have that choice... especially if tyrants like Wainberg and Moore have their way.
Kevin
Kevin,
Where is your evidence that HIV does not cause AIDS? What is your hypothesis that better explains the data than HIV causing AIDS?
You don't have either, so you have to paint all researchers as corrupt. You are running with a conspiracy theory based on blatant and demonstrably dishonest interpretations of research, backed up with weak circumstantial evidence.
Adele, You just had the audacity to say:
"But the people at the top of denial have the same beliefs you try to put on scientists who are some of the most liberal people you'll ever meet. It's denialists who are the ultraconservatives the homophobes the racists. Lie all you want Michael it doesn't change reality".
Either you are very naive Adele to call the HIV advocating scientists "some of the most liberal people you'll ever meet", or you are a knowing liar, or an UltraConservative, or you are just plain un-American, or all the above. I really do not know what your problem is.
See the following for absolute proof of what I say!::::
Perhaps you will explain to us, Adele, how it is that the very supposedly "most liberal" biggest mouths of HIV research and AIDS Advocacy, your heros John P Moore, and Mark Wainberg, who run the AIDSTRUTH website, have the AUDACITY, to declare to the world, on Independence day, the FOURTH OF JULY, no less, that FREE SPEECH SHOULD BE ABOLISHED!
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070704.wcommentt07…
AIDS and the dangers of denial
By MARK WAINBERG AND JOHN MOORE
And how dare the Globe & Mail to allow these two pharma paid goons to declare that free speech should be abolished, let alone allow them to do this on the very day America celebrates "INDEPENDENCE DAY", The Fourth of July!
This is a day we Americans celebrate our Freedom including the Right to Free Speech!
Especially if I am an HIV positive but even if I am not, then I have the BASIC HUMAN RIGHT to hear ALL SIDES OF AN ISSUE before making personal health decisions such as taking proven deadly toxic AIDS medications, such as promoted by these two! Wainberg owns patents on very toxic AIDS drugs that have caused death by liver failure, as well as maiming by lipodystrophy and neuropathy in thousands of people. Moore is the recipient of a half million dollar grant from another maker of AIDS drugs that are just as toxic as Wainbergs.
I have the right to know if there are scientists that disagree that HIV causes AIDS. I have a right to know the full hazards of the medications these people peddle.
How dare the Globe/Mail, or any of you censor worshipping AIDS Advocates, allow people such as this who would politic to take away my right to be informed on all sides of an issue!
Shame on the Globe Mail for allowing this, and heaps of shame on the mainstream scientists such as these two, that wish to censor information that is important, and may well even save my own life.
Liberal my ass, Adele! Liberal my ass!
Adele,
you said: "It's denialists who are the ultraconservatives the homophobes the racists".
OH REALLY? Is that why President Mbeki who fought apartheid for 20 years chose the "denialists" to be on his Presidential AIDS Panel?
Is that why AIDS dissidents are regularly featured on the extremely liberal lewrockwell.org
Is that why Harvey Bialy's own child was born during his many years in Africa, and why his wife is Cuban?
Is that why Charles Geshekter is a black historian who spent many years volunteering in Africa?
Is that why me and my gay lover and a lot of our gay friends and acquaintences of all races are often invited to hang out with Peter Duesberg, Bialy, Geshekter, Rasnick, Farber, Maggiore, Steele, Liversidge, and other dissidents?
Is that why Christine Maggiore's meetings are about 1/2 gay, and several blacks and hispanics?
Is that why AIDS 99% of the dissidents I know are gay?
Is that why our Heal San Diego dissident meetings are 90% gay members?
Is this All Because all these dissident people and scientists are rascist and homophobic?
EXPLAIN YOURSELF ADELE!
Is everything that you and the other AIDS advocates write and say pure propaganda and bullshit?
Well, yes, that does seem to be the case!
Actually...Michael,
I think there's plenty of truth to what Adele is saying.
People who call themselves "liberal" are some of the biggest supporters of the AIDS paradigm.
Should we make a list? There will be countless gays, lesbians, and so-called "progressives" on it. I'm sure you know that.
The AIDS belief system is like crack for liberals. They're addicted to it, and they just can't get off the stuff.
They'll berate the pharmaceutical companies for everything under the sun...except "AIDS". For their tireless work to get profitable, slow poisons into as many bodies as possible, the so-called "liberals" give the drug companies a standing ovation! The "liberals" aren't any smarter than their knuckle-dragging cousins-the conservatives-when it comes to marketing. All it took was these three words: life-saving drugs. End of story. You can go home now.
Here's a good review of Dr. Henry Bauer's new book by Dr. Joel Kauffman, a PhD in chemistry from MIT. He gets it about right:
One of the most difficult things to write is a refutation of a massive fraud, especially a health fraud, in the face of media control and knowledge monopolies by financial powerhouses. Making it still more difficult is the possible threat of libel lawsuits from the powerful parties essentially accused of scientific misconduct at best and criminal negligence at worst. Following in the footsteps of Peter Duesberg, Robert Root-Bernstein, Neville Hodgkinson, Gordon Stewart, David Crowe, Linda Marsa and many others, Henry Bauer has produced a very readable explanation of why HIV does not cause AIDS, and whatever AIDS is, it has not caused an epidemic. His civility of tone is remarkable. Dr. Bauer's conclusions are backed up by about 450 references, about 100 to primary medical journals. The book has a good index, 27 figures and 35 tables.
Part I shows that HIV does not cause AIDS. Dr. Bauer makes it clear that "HIV positive" means a response to a test that shows little more than stress and immune system potentiation. Because of this, Dr. Bauer labels the prevalence or frequency of positive HIV tests "F(HIV)". An actual virus has not been isolated. This is the main reason that no vaccine has appeared. People who test positive are usually not sick, will not develop AIDS, may spontaneously change so they are no longer HIV positive, and are not likely to infect anyone else by blood transfer or sex. The failure of F(HIV) to spread, and its steady incidence, with some decline, over 20 years contradict the scary warnings that permeate publications and TV programs. The % of people who show HIV-positive is dependent on race, sex and location, not their behavior. Some people who develop AIDS were not HIV positive. Further obfuscating the issue was a medical cabal confusing an outbreak of Kaposi's sarcoma in the 1980s with AIDS. More confusion was sown by changing the definition of AIDS to merely being HIV positive, rather than a wasting illness from infections normally controlled by a healthy body. Many perfectly healthy people who were given AZT or mixtures of anti-retroviral drugs (triple cocktail) developed symptoms said to be AIDS that were actually drug side effects. In a sneaky way this "confirmed" the false premise that a positive HIV test indicated AIDS. Even now, healthy people who have a positive test are said to be "living with AIDS", a false and destructive description, according to Dr. Bauer.
Part II discusses other mistakes and scares in medical science. One sequence is on treatment of schizophrenics, who were infected with malaria, treated by electric shock, and then by lobotomy as supposed "cures" we see today as brutal and idiotic. The very common notion that high cholesterol levels cause atherosclerosis and heart attacks is also mentioned by Dr. Bauer as false. So was the resistance of orthodox medicine to admit that bacteria were the prime cause of stomach ulcers. Much of this resistance to the latter pair of ailments was said to be Big Pharma's desire to maintain profits, which also applies to anti-retroviral drugs.
Part III is the most wrenching to read, at times as hard as reading details of the Holocaust. The claim by Robert Gallo in the National Cancer Institute to have isolated "the cause of AIDS", eventually named HIV. After his receipt of a sample of something in AIDS patients from the Pasteur Institute, he developed a test for antibodies to HIV. This was followed by a patent dispute between the NCI and the PI on who invented the test. Dr. Bauer noted that the PI probably did it based on the outcome of the patent fight. Dr. Bauer also noted that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention spread panic about the connection between F(HIV) and AIDS, exactly opposite to one of their mandated functions. Exact quotations from the CDC and others on HIV and AIDS were reproduced with explanations of internal inconsistencies or mutant statistics. Turns out that President Mbeki of South Africa was correct to refuse anti-retroviral drugs, and that there is no epidemic of AIDS or even F(HIV) in Africa. On p241 Dr. Bauer cites a WHO claim that 34,000,000 people worldwide were HIV positive in 2000, and that there were 470,000 AIDS cases. This is only 1.4%, of which many would be misdiagnoses. A gullible media, also prone to financial pressure by withdrawal of advertising revenues, gets some blame, with most reporters accused of going only to mainstream "experts", and not taking the time to understand the field. The control of medical journals and failures and biases of peer-review are aired. (See my review of The Trouble with Medical Journals.) The difficulty of dumping the dogma is made only too clear as Dr. Bauer discusses the near-impossibility of having so many organizations recant, partly because of the record number of lawsuits that would arise.
Buried under this exposé of brutal bureaucratic bungling and fraud, some really good news emerged from this book. In my opinion, if you test positive for HIV, relax, and refuse any treatment if you have no symptoms. If you have had "unprotected sex" at any time, relax, because transmission of whatever the test responds to is under 1/1000. Many people, babies especially, spontaneously become HIV negative. Of course, refuse to have the test if at all possible, and where you are forced to have the test, be ready to sign on to any class-action lawsuit for invasion of privacy, since transmission rates are so low, negating the excuse for invading privacy in the first place. Not in the book were promising results of treatment of AIDS patients with low levels of CD4 cells or with PCP by means of intravenous sodium ascorbate. (See pp92-102 and my review of: Levy TE (2002). Vitamin C, Infectious Diseases, and Toxins, Xlibris.com, Xlibris.)
Division of AIDS, Center for Immunology and Pathology, National Institute of Health, Seoul,1 Department of Internal Medicine, College of Medicine, Pusan National University, Pusan, Republic of Korea2
Received 22 January 2007/ Accepted 26 February 2007
Specific antibodies against human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), usually used for diagnosis, almost invariably become detectable within 3 months of exposure. We report on a patient whose HIV infection was identified early by a combined antigen/antibody test, but seroconversion did not occur for 7 months, until the implementation of antiretroviral therapy.
You literally can't make this stuff up! :-D
"But none of the few examples proves p24 cross-reactivity is widespread. And please remember the coroner's people did control slides to rule out the remote possibility in the EJ situation."
I'm sure the controls used were impeccable;)
"Unfortunately, EJ's health problems were ignored and she was neglected so long she died and so responsible doctor's won't ever be able to confirm or throw out her diagnosis by the methods reported in your Brazilian conference abstract. Her symptoms and how the CDC diagnosis criteria was met with the tissue antigen sample really scream "HIV and AIDS", (not)
*cough*massively*elevated*cough* T-cell counts*Lack of PCP defined pneumonia*hack*spits*.
"ALL of this is just a weird coincidence set with NOTHING to do with the mother's HIV".
Which has been disputed plenty of times....
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?z=y&EAN=978…
"Martha Howard, MD, A reviewer, 09/08/2005
Christine Maggiore is HIV NEGATIVE
I can't believe I am the first to point this out. Hasn't anyone wondered why Christine Maggiore refuses to submit to the National Institutes of Health or the Center for Disease Conrol for HIV testing (using ELISA, Western Blot, PCR)? She was the victim of false positive ELISA testing over a decade ago (not that unusual) and, worse, a physician who disclosed her test results without the mandatory Western Blot confirmation. Subsequently learning of her HIV NEGATIVE status, Christine has taken the conspiracy theory ball and run, run, run away with it. Believe me friends, Maggiore is HIV NEGATIVE - which explains consistent claims that she and her children are 'ridiculously healthy' - most young HIV negative women are ridiculously healthy too. She is a charlatan who has desperately harmed the lives of HIV positive people by outright lies. They believed in her - by example. If she were healthy after so many years of HIV infection, then HIV=AIDS was a lie (a wonderful fantasy, I know). No lie folks. If left untreated, HIV is lethal. For an HIV NEGATIVE woman such as Christine Maggiore to claim that HIV is harmless certainly lacks conviction!"
There used be quite a few other remarks along a similiar vein on Amazon and several anti-dissident sites.They're all mostly wiped now, very curious.
Then there's the fact both her husband who she boinks with no latex and her breast-fed son are HIV negative despite repeated testing(darn).Christine herself has tested positive,negative and indeterminate.
"People like y'llo and Maggiore deny the evidence forever because the truth they let a little girl die because of their own nutty AIDS denial hurts too much."
Stop you're breaking me heart(sniff).I never realized we're such evil devious monsters for questioning the parroted claptrap.
BTW, I feel extreme pity for the racist neo-nazis using Prof. Culshaw's work, her fury against bigotry in all it's form knows no bounds, as I'm sure certain fellow members of the dissident community have felt.She may not be able to stop them, but she will in no uncertain terms rip them a new one.
(fraudulent cash)
Why wouldn't a college kid want the moola.It's easy cash!
And your nemesis finally gets her comeuppance, with her own money no less.Think of it, she'll finally have to recognize she has no one to blame for her daughter's death but herself.
Sorry for the late posting, the software bounced me 'round a lot ;)
No Mr. Noble, I haven't gotten 'round to your variable sized retroviruses yet.
What the bleeping 'ell?
All the pubmed refs I posted are disappeared, WTF Tara?!?
Grizzly,
Pretty much everything you quoted is wrong to some degree, so just a few notes:
Ah, but Duesberg says it has. He must just be a pharma shill, eh?
How incredibly US-centric of him. Of course, it has indeed spread elsewhere, and continues to spread (albeit more slowly) in the US. Safer sex campaigns and additional AIDS awareness have also helped to slow that spread here in the US.
Not any behavior? Not drug use, as the other "dissidents" claim?
That's a myth. There's a nice figure there that shows the increase in papers published on Helicobacter since Marshall's linking the bacterium to gastritis (which was his original paper, by the way, not actually gastric ulcers). As the evidence in the literature increased, and success was shown using antibiotics as treatment, more and more physicians were swayed--just the way science should work, rather than some orthodoxy/big Pharma conspiracy.
Need to sleep, but that's for starters...
Can you give me more information? I just checked and don't have any comments stuck in the spam filter or unpublished--is it something that actually appeared on the site, or did you get a commenting error message?
Bauer's book would appear, on the basis of the review, to be complete horse crap.
Bauer and Kaufman (who is probably Bauer's sock) are rather behind the times. South Africa have now reversed their strategy of denial of HIV and HIV drugs. There remain some stupid individuals within the govt who still deny the connection between HIV and AIDS, but mostly everyone else has woken up and smelled the coffee.
Now that's weird. Doctors advise asymptomatic patients to defer therapy anyway, but what are they implying? That if someone has symptoms they SHOULD start treatment? Why? After all Kaufman/Bauer claims this is an entirely imaginary virus/disease.
Hang on, I thought it was imaginary. Now they say don't worry because it's transmission rate is low? (Besides that, unprotected sex exposes one to many other things, and it's not really a good idea, even for people like Eleni "any time" Papadopoulos).
A singularly ignorant statement, demonstrating complete misunderstanding of antibody transfer during pregnancy. Of course if Mom is HIV positive, passive transfer will take place to the infant (as it does for every other infectious disease, such as measles, chicken pox etc). This antibody will disappear over the first 6 months or so of life (unless the babe is really infected, in which case it will persist).
That proves it then: "the AIDS paradigm" has to be wrong. Hooray.
You don't believe in that kind of "logic" yourself, so why do you post it?
Division of AIDS, Center for Immunology and Pathology, National Institute of Health, Seoul,1 Department of Internal Medicine, College of Medicine, Pusan National University, Pusan, Republic of Korea2
Received 22 January 2007/ Accepted 26 February 2007
Specific antibodies against human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), usually used for diagnosis, almost invariably become detectable within 3 months of exposure. We report on a patient whose HIV infection was identified early by a combined antigen/antibody test, but seroconversion did not occur for 7 months, until the implementation of antiretroviral therapy.
You literally can't make this stuff up! :-D
Like so many of the denialist attempts at rhetoric in these threads, this is just the rhetoric of ignorance. It is not in any way surprising that a virus that infects dividing, differentiating HIV-specific CD4 T cells impacts the HIV-specific B cell response (as it also does the HIV-specific CD8 T cell response). Some rapid progressors never seroconvert. It is also not surprising that the suppression of viral replication by ARVs would allow sufficient maturation of the HIV-specific CD4 and B cell response for seroconversion to occur.
I'm pretty sure Walter Gilbert had a grasp of these basics even when he was publicly supporting Duesberg; his company Biogen worked on some kind of CD4 T cell-independent B cell activation approach as an HIV therapy.
Mikey dear, you are entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts. Look up the definition of "fact".
And Kevin, do you even know that the USA are the only country in the First World that lacks universal healthcare? The next richest country without universal healthcare is South Africa. The housing bubble, on the other hand, is limited to the USA, along with most of the mortgage phenomenon; I keep getting all that spam that tells me to "REFINANCE NOW!!! RATES LOWER THAN EVER!!!" and couldn't do anything with it even if I were gullible enough (and owned a house). Yet, you act as if all research on AIDS were done in the USA by Americans and entirely funded by US pharma companies. That is not the case. Open your eyes and have a look around yourself.
"You are the religious freak who refuses to acknowledge the facts, and you have yet to provide worthwhile counterexamples."
--------------
That is because there are so many drugs that work, Kevin, that I don't have to. Pharmacuetical companies benefit the most be developing drugs that work. You aren't being rational.
A few cases over several decades, compared to the thousands of yearly studies, does not make for an endemic problem.
Michael,
Thanks for linking to the oped by Wainberg and Moore. I hadn't seen it yet, but agree on many points. Free speech does not extend to statements and actions that endanger the health and safety of others.
Exceptional breaches of ethics and blatant academic dishonesty, such as that performed by denialists or creationists or (insert crackpot group here), should have consequences in an academic setting. Academic freedom and tenure should not be proof against ethical breaches and fraudulent scholarship.
When expanded into the arena of public health, where advocate rights are dutifully protected, I am uncertain that the ends justify the means. However, the comparison with tobacco companies lying about the risks of smoking made in the oped are certainly valid.
But how would such a law work? Would this fall under RICO statutes? Would denialist organizations found partly responsible for a death be prosecuted under existing law, as has been done with white supremacist groups? The consequences for medical pseudoscience, such as antivaxers and the like, would be far reaching. Cue black helicopter rants...
I feel that Michael's outrage comes from self interest and self preservation. "HEAL" (what an ironic name) would be ground under, at least until it reorganized under some legalistic excuse of not advocating anything. He can fret as much as he likes. Even in the unlikely event that such a law was passed, these groups would just move out of the states or decentralize their organizations.
What Michael can't do is come up with an competing hypothesis that better explains the data than HIV as the cause of AIDS.
------------
Grizzly, should we be surprised that Kauffman, apparently a denialist himself and someone publishing in the half baked "Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons" would write such a doggerel? Clearly, Kauffman has bought into the lies of the denialists, especially the Perth group. Sad to see a once productive scientist slide into conspiracy thinking. Has he written any papers outside of the AAPS "journal" since 2004? Of course, pushing bad science with an appeal to authority (look, an emeritus agrees with us!) is nothing new for pseudoscientists.
Tara,
I think that whole thing from "y'ello" up there was cut and pasted from another thread so maybe he just didn't cut and paste right.
Michael,
You're so full of rage its almost impressive. Maybe you have alot to be angry about, I don't know you. But please don't make the mistake thinking your friends are the only people in the world or the only denialists. You remind me of some Republicans who are like "yeah we're very tolerant, i know a black guy and my friend also knew this gay guy once who came to my party last year and oh this woman came in the store the other day and she was wearing this veil and I thought, OK, that's OK. Oh and Condi is so cool too!"
I said in my comments to you, yes, there are denialists who are not homophobes. And obviously you know some of them. But knowing some denialists who are also decent people doesn't mean the people who made up the whole movement don't have some disgusting ideas and ties that kind of influenced them.
When George Bush was re elected most of us in science thought how the hell was that possible? Nobody I know voted for him. Or two people out of five hundred I know or something like that. IT's a fallacy. Most scientists know each other and we live in cities and we're very liberal in outlook. So no we don't know alot of people in farms on Texas.
And I disagree with you about Wainberg and Moore. They're not fascists I don't think. If I say screaming bomb on an airplane isn't a good idea does that make me a fascist? If my neighbor tells my kids drinking gasoline is fun and healthy and I report him am I a fascist?
YEah I'm sure if we question a hundred thousand doctors and scientists we can find a few who are racists or homophobes. Maybe even a few Republicans. In denialism there's only a few thousand people in the whole movement and its some of the people at the top are the racists and homophobes.
Test, sorry.
Tried to comment earlier, didn't go through. Basically just responding to Michael and his terrible comments about respected scientists.
My neighbor's a doctor. I like my neighbor. But if someday my neighbor tells my kids to drink gasoline, it's fun and healthy and it's what all the cool people do, Im going to get pissed off at him. Then if he writes a book on health benefits of drinking gasoline and he's like "hey I'm a doctor I know this stuff you should listen to me I've studied gasoline drinking for twenty years" I'm going to take action. I'll call his supervisor at the hospital and complain about him. Does that make me a "fascist"?
For the gasoline drinkers like Michael his book will sound great. To the other doctors at the hospital he sounds like an idiot whose using his degree to lie and hurt people. That's not covered by free speech.
Sorry Adele, telling lies about medical issues is legal in the USA and most other places. Peter Duesberg has tenure that the UC Berkeley, and nobody with any power to keep him from telling lies that adversely affect individual or public health will ever actually do anything, because Duesberg's tenure gives him the right to say whatever he pleases.
I am not sure if Andrew Maniotis has tenure at the U of Illinois Chicago, but the same principle applies. As much as a school may dislike having foolish liars teaching their students, they have a greater fear of being seen as restricting any sort of "free speech". So in some cases they will reduce the teaching loads of bad professors, but they would never get rid of them.
True Duke. I don't think its right but that's how it is.
Weird too how Ward Churchill got fired for saying stuff about 9-11. Maybe people didn't like what he said but fired? What HE said didn't hurt anyone. Duesberg and Maniotis are saying stuff that puts people in the morgue if they believe it. And they'll never get fired youre right. Crazy world.
I'm trying this one more time.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&do…
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&do…
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&do…
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&do…
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&do…
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&do…
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Display&ito…
http://gateway.nlm.nih.gov/MeetingAbstracts/102223351.html
http://www.lymphomation.org/story-graham.htm
http://aras.ab.ca/test-discordance.html
http://aras.ab.ca/test-antigen.html
True,
So most professors who advocated monster doses of AZT early in the 80's, who pushed Ho's lie of hit hard and hit early and who advocated vaccines with 100x the EPA's safe limit of mercury without informing patients that mercury was even present should be fired.
Cooler, can you give us an example of a university professor who did any of those things? I have not seen any professors writing books that claim that mercury is good for you, or going on blogs or YouTube advocating dangerous things.
Most professional scientists stick to the peer-reviewed literature, and real science, and don't get into trying to influence public opinion. The CDC and other governmental agencies do have a mandated role to play in influencing the public to accept vaccines etc. But most CDC officials are not University professors.
Are you people stupid?
So you want to ban people from learning that hiv doesnt cause disease in 99.9% of animals , is only present in less than 1% of t cells and that its said to cause disease only after antibody production, when most disease cause the most havoc before antibody production.
People who point out these paradoxes should be jailed? People believe these arguments because they make a lot more sense, people would not beleive a bogus argument like drinking gasoline, if they did it would be their fault for being so stupid.
Its like choosing between the atkins diet and other diets, many people say the Atkins diet is dangerous but if you educate yourself its your body and your own responsibilty to make a decscion based on informed consent.
Noboody should go to jail for informing themselves on both sides of an issue. Its you cowards that call for censorship because your arguments are so weak and so fallacious that you need to resort to aboloshing the 1st amendment, rather than have anyone challenge your propaganda.
"Just shutup and take 100x the EPA's safe limit of mercury, any professor that opposes this should be jailed" You guys are losers, plain and simple.
Keep calling for censorship because you know thats they only way you can lie to people, once they hear both sides, you guys get revealed for the frauds that you are.
The hypothesis that hitting the infection early and hard would be best for patients in the long run, was not really a "lie". Neither David Ho nor anyone else made false claims about that hypothesis. They claimed that it was a treatment that should be scientifically tested. It was tested. And when it was found to be not in the best interest for the majority of patients people stopped advocating it for the majority of patients.
It still is useful in some patients, for example a recent study completed in South Africa showed that treating infants earlier was better:
http://www.aidsmap.com/en/news/89CA2C4D-D598-45C1-91C8-28CFA08ACD32.asp
Which vaccine has 100-fold the EPA safe limit of Mercury? And is that 100-fold the lifetime safe limit of mercury, or 100-fold the daily safe limit of mercury? What EXACTLY are you talking about there?
Cooler, nobody is calling for any sort of censorship. We are merely pointing out that university professors with tenure can tell lies about public health matters with no fear of any censorship.
If you want to think that someone who claims that HIV is harmless is not lying, that is your choice, but it does not mean that in reality "both sides" of every issue have equal basis in science or fact. There are hundreds of "sides" to every issue, and some of them are based on outright lies.
HIV does exist, has been isolated, and causes AIDS. Liars are free to claim that HIV does not exist, or that HIV is harmless. But it does not mean that everyone should be taught that the lies are equally valid as the science.
My neighbor's a doctor. I like my neighbor. But if someday my neighbor tells my kids to drink gasoline... -- Adele
Earlier, you were disparaging my analogy, and now you offer up this BS. Comparing those who question the specious "science" behind HIV with gasoline-drinkers is really over-the-top, even for you, Adele. I see that your standing as blog-moron-supreme is not in danger, though you do regretfully have plenty of company in the fascism department...
______________________________
Thanks for linking to the oped by Wainberg and Moore. I hadn't seen it yet, but agree on many points. Free speech does not extend to statements and actions that endanger the health and safety of others. -- Robster
Showing your true colors, now, eh Robster? And who do you suppose gets to decide what statements and what actions are a danger to the health and safety of others, because as I've demonstrated, scoundrels like Mark Wainberg and John Moore are clearly too unethical to be taken entrusted with a such a role. Myself, I prefer to be given the facts of the matter and for making up my own mind as to what is or is not a danger to me. Of course, it's the facts of the matter that HIV revisionists, such as yourself, are so careful to avoid.
Furthermore, it is apparent that you don't care about "real" ethics; you only care about protecting the image of HIV. Your loyalty, Robster, will no doubt land you a cherished position in the Ministry of Truth, once we've jettisoned all of our dangerous democratic freedoms.
________________________________
Would denialist organizations found partly responsible for a death be prosecuted under existing law...
It's the hacks who have made millions off of HIV that should be prosecuted. In particular, those responsible for bringing high-dose AZT to "the market" are essentially guilty of mass-murder. After all, anyone who is not interested in protecting HIV's image can easily see that using a previously shelved chemo-therapuetic agent as the first-line of treatment for immuno-suppression is, prima facie, a really horrible idea! Only a complete idiot or a greedy bastard might see it otherwise. Chemotherapy weakens immunity, does it not?
High-dose AZT was the first clear example, within HIV/AIDS, of profiteering trumping human health concerns, but it certainly hasn't been the last. There are plenty of scoundrels who deserve to prosecuted and with more and more people waking up to the realities of the HIV/AIDS fraud, scoundrels like Mark Wainberg and John Moore have reason to be so obviously afraid of debating the facts of this issue.
You're disgusting, Robster.
Kevin
So you want to ban people from learning that hiv doesnt cause disease in 99.9% of animals , is only present in less than 1% of t cells and that its said to cause disease only after antibody production, when most disease cause the most havoc before antibody production.
the conspiracy theorist's points show us again he has no idea what he's talking about. Most diseases are not transmissible between very many species. Percentage of cells infected by HIV varies during infection by place in the body etc. and plus alot ofcells not just T-cells are infected. And HIV destroys T-cells in the gut in days after infection and that's the beginning of the end for the immune system. So yes HIV causes disease before antibody production. As well as after.
If someone says what I just said is false they have every right. Who said they didn't? They can say HIV is a kind of cheese and black cats don't have antibodies and AIDS is from reading under fluorescent lights. IT's a free country.
But if they say that they're getting no respect from me unless they can back it up. And they won't get respect from peers if their doctors or scientists. So they won't get much funding. If they work for a company they could be fired. Universities probably not, but maybe. Nothing here is "banning" or "censorship" though and it's not restricting free speech. IT's just a normal healthy response to dumbasses who don't know HIV RT from telomerase.
The megadoses of multiple vaccines given to infants one one day in the early 90's exceeded the EPA's safe limit by over 100 times. Todays flu shots exceed the EPA's safe limit by several times (around 25)
Of course if anyone knew this they would demand that all mercury to have been taken out of vaccines decades ago, like it has been in most all of Europe. But like Nurse Ratched's hospital you should just swallow pills without daring question anything.
But over here YOU ARE NOT EVEN INFORMED THAT MERCURY IS IN VACCINES, YOU ARE TOLD TO SHUTUP AND TAKE YOUR MEDICINE AND IF YOU ASK ANY QUESTIONS YOU ARE TOLD THAT A VAGULEY DEFINED GROUP OF EXPERTS SAID MERCURY IS JUST DANDY, IF YOU LOOK AT THE DATA THERE HAS BEEN NO STUDY COMPARING PEOPLE WHO HAVE RECIEVED NO THIMEROSOL VS. PEOPLE WITH THE 1991 LEVEL OF MERCURY TO CHECK FOR ADVERSE EFFECTS.
CONGRESSMAN DR. DAVE WELDON POINTED OUT HOW THE IOM FUDGED DATA AND SAID IT BEST, IF YOU DONT KNOW WHAT THE EFFECTS OF A POTENT NUEROTOXIN LIKE MERCURY'S EFFECTS ARE, AND YOU CAN'T BECAUSE THERE HAS BEEN NO PROPERLY DESIGNED STUDY COMPRING 1991 LEVELS OF THIMERSOL TO NO THIMEROSOL, IT SHOULD NOT BE IN VACCINES.
After all, anyone who is not interested in protecting HIV's image can easily see that using a previously shelved chemo-therapuetic agent as the first-line of treatment for immuno-suppression is, prima facie, a really horrible idea! Only a complete idiot or a greedy bastard might see it otherwise. Chemotherapy weakens immunity, does it not?
Kevin your insults are great. You're real good at that. I can't compete so I'll stick to the facts.
A chemotherapy that doesn't work just might not hurt immunity. AZT didn't work as a chemotherapy. It didn't kill cells it was supposed to kill. So it went into a library of failed drugs. So much for Duesberg's toxic drug thing.
These libraries are sometimes "screened" to see if there's a compound with activity against a new disease. That happened with HIV. Out of I don't remember how many compounds tested, but it was alot in the hundreds, AZT did the best to inhibit HIV and it wasn't toxic in their test. Animal studies also showed it wasn't toxic. It made sense to test it in humans. It worked in humans for a while. But there were side effect. Main thing though what they didn't know was the virus would adapt to the drug and become resistant. So finally the side effects weren't worth the short time it worked well kept virus from multiplying.
You can keep thinking someone woke up one morning and thought hey here's a dumb idea why not use a really toxic drug to kill off a bunch of people I'm trying to sell drugs to. You can keep thinking it but it doesn't make much sense. It's also not what really happened.
If you want to think that someone who claims that HIV is harmless is not lying, that is your choice... -- Dr. Dukes
You're damn right, it is, and morons like you are far more dangerous than any HIV rethinker. Once again, if your position is so strong, you should not need to censor those with whom you have professional disagreements. Perhaps, you too are holding out for a position in the Ministry of Truth, or are you more inclined to seek a "consulting position" with the Thought Police?
Cooler, nobody is calling for any sort of censorship.
No need to prevaricate, Dr. Dukes...academic censorship is exactly what you and your cohorts are calling for. Once again, your dishonest intentions reaffirm that your position is so bankrupt that it grows ever more difficult for you, and all of the HIV revisionists, to call a spade a spade. You've had at least 22 years to prove the HIV theory of AIDS, and anyone who reviews the data with an open mind can clearly see that not only have you failed to do so, but you've tried to cover-up each and every failure. First of all, it's undeniably bad science, but the criminal negligence is even worse when you factor in the controlled killing that is taking place just to save the reputation of that bad science.
Kevin
And who do you suppose gets to decide what statements and what actions are a danger to the health and safety of others
Yeah, who gets to decide you can't sic a pit bull on small children? Who gets to say you need a license to fly a plane? Who gets to say a drug company can't just sell whatever the hell it wants without any regulation? Like maybe cyanide. Who gets to say someone can't tell a flight attnedant they've got a I e D in their carry-on? Why do we need real engineers to make highways and buildings why not some first graders they work for cheaper and their more creative and why should we restrict their free speech?
Libertarianism is ok until you start to think about it practically.
The megadoses of multiple vaccines given to infants one one day in the early 90's
Yeah! They inject like two liters of the vaccine! That's the kind of MEGADOSE we're talking here. Like, they totally load these kids up with MERCURY!!! It's pure POISON! MURDER!!!!
It's strange. I can't remember any of the defenders of academic freedom rushing to Tara's defence when Harvey Bialy attempted to modify Tara's career by writing surreal emails to the Dean of Tara's college.
Disgusted
I can't remember any of the defenders of academic freedom rushing to Tara's defence when Harvey Bialy attempted to modify Tara's career by writing surreal emails to the Dean of Tara's college.
With all due respect to our bloghost, Dr. Bialy's emails may have been inappropriate ( I didn't read them ), but his alleged attempts to slander one individual pale in comparison to the institutionalized censorship that Mark Wainberg and John Moore are advocating. No comparison. Dr. Bialy does not speak for all dissidents; however, the two previously mentioned tyrants are attempting to silence ALL HIV dissidents by passing LAWS that sigficantly alter free speech, as we know it. Once again, no comparison.
You are a hack, Chris Noble.
Kevin
Alleged attempts? Bialy collected the emails and put them in a pdf document on his website.
Again, I will note that none of the HIV dissidents rushed to the defence of free speech when Bialy attempted to get Tara fired.
I'm not sure if Wainberg and Moore's approach is the right one. I am not in favour of any attacks on the freedom of speech. At the same time I hold Duesberg, Bialy, Maniotis, Culshaw etc. morally responsible for the lies and misrepresentations that they peddle.
The correct place for scientific debates is in the scientific literature. Duesberg and other "dissidents" simply have not come to terms with the reality that they have lost this scientific debate. Instead they have taken their pseudoscientific nonsense directly to the lay public through the internet or books.
http://www.udo-schuklenk.org/files/prbspd.pdf
Kevin,
Showing your true colors, now, eh Robster?
You mean being an advocate of intellectual integrity?
And who do you suppose gets to decide what statements and what actions are a danger to the health and safety of others, because as I've demonstrated, scoundrels like Mark Wainberg and John Moore are clearly too unethical to be taken entrusted with a such a role.
Actually, you haven't shown that. Only that you are paranoid regarding people who have health care related incomes, tellingly excepting fellow denialists.
I would say that a statement of censure from the university would be proper. If their statements clearly violated standards of professional ethics, more severe penalties could be considered. A university senate would serve such a process quite well. In Duesberg's case, his access to students dried up, which for the sake of the students, was a good thing. His recent "novel discovery" of aneuploidy as a cause of cancer is just claiming a nearly century old, but under-investigated concept, as his own. What an exceptional ego.
Myself, I prefer to be given the facts of the matter and for making up my own mind as to what is or is not a danger to me. Of course, it's the facts of the matter that HIV revisionists, such as yourself, are so careful to avoid.
You mean all the crap the denialists post and repost, which we correct and re-correct? You claim that the scientific community is avoiding facts, while it is we that have held to testable and demonstrable reality.
Furthermore, it is apparent that you don't care about "real" ethics; you only care about protecting the image of HIV.
So, when someone deliberately makes false and damaging statements, abusing their position to push their lies, there should be no consequences? As I wrote earlier, this clearly extends well beyond HIV denialists.
Your loyalty, Robster, will no doubt land you a cherished position in the Ministry of Truth, once we've jettisoned all of our dangerous democratic freedoms.
We are calling it MiniTruth these days.
Joking aside, being responsible and ethical in our writings and professional activities is where my loyalty lies. That means standing against pseudoscience and baseless conspiracy theories. Ethics, honesty and responsibility are plainly absent among the denialists.
It's the hacks who have made millions off of HIV that should be prosecuted.
Where is your competing hypothesis? You don't have one. You only have ad hominem attacks and a hatred of profit not your own.
There are plenty of scoundrels who deserve to prosecuted and with more and more people waking up to the realities of the HIV/AIDS fraud, scoundrels like Mark Wainberg and John Moore have reason to be so obviously afraid of debating the facts of this issue.
The "scoundrels" are those that convinced South Africa's leaders to withhold treatment and prevention measures from their people. Their's is the fraud.
The debate already happened in the scientific literature. The calls for more debate come from the side that lost (exactly like creationists). More people may be coming to your side, but as a fraction of the population, you are shrinking.
You're disgusting, Robster.
I could say the same of you, but rather, you are deluded, and I feel sorry for your passionate ignorance.
Once again, if your position is so strong, you should not need to censor those with whom you have professional disagreements.
A statement that one has no support from their institution is not censorship. Removal from a position would not be censorship. Never mind that shouting fire in a crowded theater is not protected speech, hence deliberately acting against public health is not protected either. Seizing the property and accounts of a group responsible for the death of a patient... It is a logical, but distasteful progression. My speculation as to how this would work (RICO does include fraud and murder, but perhaps not wrongful death) is just that, speculation, and I don't know that I support it. I'll have to think long and hard about it.
You've had at least 22 years to prove the HIV theory of AIDS, and anyone who reviews the data with an open mind can clearly see that not only have you failed to do so, but you've tried to cover-up each and every failure.
Where's that competing hypothesis, Kevin? The behavior, drug abuse, and other hypotheses didn't explain things as well as HIV as the cause of AIDS did, and since then, it has done so splendidly. The truth passed right through your so called open mind.
First of all, it's undeniably bad science, but the criminal negligence is even worse when you factor in the controlled killing that is taking place just to save the reputation of that bad science.
What background is it that you rely on to make judgments regarding the quality of science, again? You didn't have HIV or AIDS, but were sick, and you had to look for a doctor who was willing to try something different. None of that is evidence against HIV.
You are a hack, Chris Noble.
I couldn't agree more. So far Mr. Noble has done nothing other than present facts with links to the associated papers to back them up. He is a disgrace to the supposed 'science' he is defending. Knowledge is not advanced by reproducible experimentation, no. It is advanced by anecdotes and attacking the character of those that disagree with you rather than their supposed 'facts'. We won't get anywhere in this world if we continue to read the literature for ourselves and come to our own conclusions. We have to repeat what those that we feel agree with our limited knowledge state regardless of if they have any specialized training in the topic.
You should be ashamed of yourself 'Dr' Noble.
I call this the consistent denialists.
Not being a MD but giving med advice to someone who dies because they follow your advice, that's protected free speech.
Asking people to fire Tara Smith or cut off her internet, that's protected free speech.
Complaining to Duesbergs superiors because people died from his advice and he distorts papers, that's fascism and censorship.
Another thing I want to tell everyone about a guy who's a pharma hack by Kevins' and Michael's standards.
He got a big award from Merck and it jumpstarted his career.
He got funding from other political conservatives.
Later he went into a big biotech thing with a bunch of other capitalists and a totally shady venture capital guy.
Who is this "shill" and "hack"?
His name is Peter Duesberg.
Kevin, you wrote:
". Dr. Bialy does not speak for all dissidents; however, the two previously mentioned tyrants are attempting to silence ALL HIV dissidents by passing LAWS that sigficantly alter free speech, as we know it."
Can you tell us more about these LAWS? What LAWS are they proposing? There are already many laws against telling lies about financial matters. A professor of economics could not lie about the value of a company's stock and get away with it, for example, just because he was a tenured professor.
As far as I can see, nobody is arguing for LAWS against lying about medical matters yet. Wainberg and Moore are only suggesting that perhaps reporters don't always need to report on "both sides" of a medical issue, when one side is backed up by data and facts and the other side is simply empty rhetoric aimed at killing people.
A professor of economics could not lie about the value of a company's stock and get away with it, for example, just because he was a tenured professor.
Are you really that naïve or do you just have a poor mind? You obviously haven't been following the housing market crash, Dr. Dukes. I guess, since it further substantiates my point regarding the devastating examples of corruption that can be found in virtually all public institutions, you, like Adele, would prefer to just wish it away. You continue to demonstrate that you, yourself, are a shill, Dr. Dukes, and you are no doubt too indoctrinated to see the matter clearly, so let me explain. There were plenty of economics professors shilling for real estate during this bubble, and none of them have lost their tenured positions, as far as I know, even though the middle class in this country has been severely mislead by following their guidance. Of course, their tune has changed significantly now that housing is obviously tanking, so it's difficult to find current examples of their ridiculous ballyhooing; however, back in 2003, 2004 and 2005, the real estate shills were out in full force and many were indeed university-affiliated economists--saying things like "this is a new era for housing", "buy now or be priced out forever", "real estate is always a good investment in the long run"...The only high-profile economic forecasters who were even remotely honest about housing, back in those halcyon days, were those at UCLA's Anderson School of Business. All of the rest could be ubiquitously found in the mainstream media giving glowing endorsements to lending practices that were obviously unsustainable and that are currently threatening the health of the entire economy. In addition, the "rearview mirror" approach to reporting was adopted by the mainstream media. With that in mind...
Wainberg and Moore are only suggesting that perhaps reporters don't always need to report on "both sides" of a medical issue, when one side is backed up by data and facts and the other side is simply empty rhetoric aimed at killing people.
Oh, now I get it, you are a fan of "rearview mirror" reporting, as any HIV revisionist must be. Furthermore, you are arguing that the mainstream media should continue in its current function as a propaganda entity in the service of select private investors, rather than as a protector of public trust in the service of all citizens. You fail to realize (or acknowledge) that such a scenario is blatant manipulation, for it will ensure that patients won't have full access to all interpretations of medical data without first putting forth herculean efforts to discover that an "other side" even exists. How does that fit within a Democratic framework, Dr. Dukes? Your fascist intentions grow clearer with every word out of your mouth.
I can't believe how truly ignorant all of the HIV revisionists on this blog are. And you have a doctoral degree? Wow.
Kevin
Kevin this isn't a housing market thread. I have some great articles on the housing market and I would love to debunk you but this isn't an econ thread so I'll be polite. Why don't we both do that.
Kevin why is it people who get money from drug companies are bad if you disagree with them, like Moore if what you said is true, and just fine if you agree with them, like Duesberg?
Why is everyone entitled to free speech EXCEPT for people you disagree with, who are all "fascists"?
I'm just curious.
Wainberg and Moore are only suggesting that perhaps reporters don't always need to report on "both sides" of a medical issue, when one side is backed up by data and facts and the other side is simply empty rhetoric aimed at killing people.
And what about the third side? AIDS is a viruses created by tauntauns on the planet Hoth that was sent here to wipe out humanity in hopes of making Hoth2, a frigid planet where tauntauns can survive.
Notice my exceptional use of facts here, as well as logical and consistent reasoning. It is censorship for the media to not project this theory to be as valid as fact-based reasoning that AIDS 'advocates' throw around so willy-nilly.
Kevin wrote:
"full access to all interpretations of medical data without first putting forth herculean efforts to discover that an "other side" even exists. How does that fit within a Democratic framework, Dr. Dukes? Your fascist intentions grow clearer with every word out of your mouth."
How about the side where Peter Duesberg and Etienne de Harven both work for the US government's "special virus cancer program" which www.asidsbiowar.com and www.boydgraves.com claim was the source of the AIDS virus?? Then these two, and a few others, want to see that their creation does as much damage as is possible, so they talk people into not taking the treatments that are made available?
That's another "side" of this story. Should it get "equal weight" in the press?
You forgot the grant from the Council for Tobacco Research. Does that make him a shill for Big Tobacco?
Dr. Duke wrote:
How about the side where Peter Duesberg and Etienne de Harven both work for the US government's "special virus cancer program" which www.asidsbiowar.com and www.boydgraves.com claim was the source of the AIDS virus?? Then these two, and a few others, want to see that their creation does as much damage as is possible, so they talk people into not taking the treatments that are made available?
That's another "side" of this story. Should it get "equal weight" in the press?
I'm pitching the story to Harper's Magazine.
Equal time for equal evidence.
A good science news report on denialism or creationism (or whatever woo would report...
This is what scientists have found out: A, B, and C. There is legitimate discussion on D, as well as the root causes of C. [long discussion of these topics].
Then, if there is a reason to include to mention the "other side"...
An outside group disputes A, B, C, and D, but have no competing hypothesis, or compelling evidence for their positions.
The press has this odd fascination with making science interesting by confabulating a horse race or controversy. Then there are the conspiracy believers who push claims into the media for their own agendas.
Then these two, and a few others, want to see that their creation does as much damage as is possible, so they talk people into not taking the treatments that are made available? That's another "side" of this story. Should it get "equal weight" in the press? Dr. Dukes
Hey...Adele! Grab your buddies Seth and "apey", I've the conspiracy theorist that you've all been looking for...
Kevin
Kevie says:
"Hey...Adele! Grab your buddies Seth and "apey", I've the conspiracy theorist that you've all been looking for."
It's not "the conspiracy theorist". There are more people who believe that HIV is a bioweapon designed to kill blacks and gays, than there are denialists who aim to convince people that HIV does not exist at all. Do a GOOGLE search on [Garth Nicholson] for one example.
They don't post on the same blogs and websites that the denialists post on, but they do have their own places to share misinformation.
And the denialists are not just one group, but dozens. There are those who claim AIDS is just God's punishment for the gay lifestyle; those who claim HIV does not exist; those who claim HIV is harmless; those who claim HIV is an endogenous retrovirus that comes out after oxidative stress; those who claim the HIV tests are worthless; those who claim the HIV tests show that oxidative stress has weakened the immune system... etc...
Most, like Kevie, never clearly state what they believe other than that they believe all of HIV/AIDS science is a conspiracy to sell poisons. Andie Maniotis, for example never tells us what he thinks is the cause of AIDS.
Check out this video of Mark Wainberg -- the guy's a freak!
yeah hes a total creep, dumb loser should leave the country if he wants to abolish the first amendment. Go live in Saudi Arabia
DR. Garth Nicolson never said hiv doesnt exist, he doesnt talk much about hiv at all, but in his book he implies co factors might be necessary, montangier and shyh lo felt this way as well.
...
AIDS is really undiagnosed syphilis
AIDS is caused by HHV6
AIDS is caused by a large number of STDs
AIDS is caused by the antibiotics taken becasue of STDs
AIDS is caused by poppers.
AIDS is caused by corticosteroids
AIDS is caused by benzene in lubricants
AIDS is casued by oxidative stress
AIDS is caused by a human intestinal fluke
AIDS is just a group fantasy
AIDS is caused by large amounts of semen
AIDS is caused by recreational drugs
...
Interview of Peter Duesberg in some health/nutrition site.
Cooler, why don't you get together with Kevin, Andrew Maniotis and the sockpuppets (is that the name of a band?) and put forward a clear idea about what causes AIDS?
"hey guys we cant really figure out AIDS(if you dont look for anything else besides hiv, youre not gonna learn much) so lets just go with HIV cause thats what everyone else thinks, forget about the people who said theres no animal model, hiv is barely present in the blood (1 in 1000 cells), viruses wreak the most havoc before antibodies, not after, etc etc cause the government said it at a press conference its gotta be true
duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh"
Aids apologist
There are animal models.
HIV is present in much higher quantities in lymphoid tissue where not uncoincidentally the majority of CD4+ cells can be found.
HIV causes the greatest amount of CD4+ depletion during the acute infection stage before antibodies develop.
The vast majority of scientists accept that HIV exists and cause AIDS not because of a press conference but because of the evidence that you and other Denialists spend an inordinate amount of time denying the existence of.
HIV "dissidence" is vacuous. There is no research program that is attempting to attain any evidence for any alternative theory. The sole activity of HIV "dissidents" is the vain attempt to pick holes in the science that they mostly fail to understand.
Grizzly wrote:
"Interview of Peter Duesberg in some health/nutrition site."
Which turns out to be a regurtitaion of all the same half-truths and lies presented by Duesberg in other places. For a couple examples:
Duesberg says:
"First, AIDS is not infectious. For example, between 1981 and 2004, 930,000 American AIDS patients had been treated by doctors or health care workers. But, despite the absence of an anti-AIDS vaccine, there is not a single case report in the peer-reviewed literature of a doctor ..."
Half-true, there are indeed few doctors and nurses who have contracted HIV from patients, and none that I am aware of who have died of AIDS and been written up in a peer-reviewed publication yet. But the half that is left out, is that doctors and nurses don't usually have sex with their HIV-infected patients and they take precautions not to inject themselves with blood from any patients. The SARS coronavirus was tens of thousands of times more contagious than HIV-1, and yet there are no peer reviewed publications on doctors or nurses dying from that virus either. Doctors and nurses know how to avoid infections.
Peter wrote:
"Second, like all other viruses, HIV induces anti-viral immunity, which is the basis of the HIV/AIDS test."
Outright lie. Infection with HIV-1 induces both antibody and killer T-cell (CD8) immune responses, but not "immunity". Although super-infections (super infection is a new infection with a new strain of HIV-1 after seroconversion to the first strain; dual infections are infections when it cannot be proven that the second infection did not occur during the window period) are rather rare, they are not unheard of. Nobody with HIV infection should assume that they are "immune" from re-infection with other strains.
Steain MC, Wang B, Dwyer DE, Saksena NK.
HIV-1 co-infection, superinfection and recombination.
Sex Health. 2004;1(4):239-50.
PMID: 16335754
McCutchan FE, Hoelscher M, Tovanabutra S, Piyasirisilp S, Sanders-Buell E, Ramos G, Jagodzinski L, Polonis V, Maboko L, Mmbando D, Hoffmann O, Riedner G, von Sonnenburg F, Robb M, Birx DL.
In-depth analysis of a heterosexually acquired human immunodeficiency virus type 1 superinfection: evolution, temporal fluctuation, and intercompartment dynamics from the seronegative window period through 30 months postinfection.
J Virol. 2005 Sep;79(18):11693-704.
PMID: 16140747
Smith DM, Wong JK, Hightower GK, Ignacio CC, Koelsch KK, Petropoulos CJ, Richman DD, Little SJ.
HIV drug resistance acquired through superinfection.
AIDS. 2005 Aug 12;19(12):1251-6.
PMID: 16052079
Diaz RS, Pardini R, Catroxo M, Operskalski EA, Mosley JW, Busch MP.
HIV-1 superinfection is not a common event.
J Clin Virol. 2005 Aug;33(4):328-30.
PMID: 16036183
etc...
Also, most other virus infections DO NOT produce sterilizing immunity. People can and do get the flu (even with the same serotype) repeatedly in their lifetimes. Likewise, although infection with rotaviruses reduces the severity of symptoms in subsequent infections, it is common for an individual to suffer from rotavirus infection of the same serotype many times in their lifetime.
Peter wrote:
"Third, unlike all other viral epidemics, AIDS in the U.S. and Europe is highly nonrandom:"
Outright lie. Very few viral epidemics are random, and no sexually transmitted epidemics are random. Humans do not engage in even casual contact "randomly". Rich people tend to have more contact with other rich people, firemen tend to have more contact with other firemen, etc... When it comes to sexual contact, humans are even more selective, they hardly ever engage in truly "random" sex, they almost always select partners they are attracted to. It is the pattern of epidemics, whether they are caused by pathogens or "environmental" factors such as cigarette smoking, that makes them traceable to their causes.
Peter knows all these things. He is not ignorant, he is deliberately lying. The big question is: WHY???
Duke, here's to your rubbish:
Duesberg says:
"First, AIDS is not infectious. For example, between 1981 and 2004, 930,000 American AIDS patients had been treated by doctors or health care workers. But, despite the absence of an anti-AIDS vaccine, there is not a single case report in the peer-reviewed literature of a doctor ..."
Half-true, there are indeed few doctors and nurses who have contracted HIV from patients, and none that I am aware of who have died of AIDS and been written up in a peer-reviewed publication yet. But the half that is left out, is that doctors and nurses don't usually have sex with their HIV-infected patients and they take precautions not to inject themselves with blood from any patients. The SARS coronavirus was tens of thousands of times more contagious than HIV-1, and yet there are no peer reviewed publications on doctors or nurses dying from that virus either. Doctors and nurses know how to avoid infections.
Duke, why compare occupationally acquired HIV with an obcure coronavirus that in spite of its supposed high infectivity seems to appear and disappear fron the world population even more adroitly than HIV from peripheral blood cells? No occupationally acquired AIDS deaths have been written up in peer-reviewed journals in spite of intense scrutiny for 25 years. There may not be peer-reviewed occupationally acquired SARS cases, but according to the CDC,
As often occurs when infectious disease outbreaks are caused by an emerging agent, healthcare workers were the group most affected. According to the World Health Organization, 8,098 cases occurred during the outbreak, and 774 (9.6%) persons died (2). Healthcare workers accounted for 1,707 (21%) of the cases
More specific information from outbreak hospitals in Hong Kong (3), Singapore (4), Guangdong Province (5), and Toronto (6,7) showed that 378 (57%) of 667 cases occurred in healthcare workers or medical students. The higher proportion in these reports may be attributable to the availability of more detailed site-specific information. The number of fatal infections in healthcare workers is not known, but deaths have been reported.
Of course, SARS is not the only infection that presents an occupational risk to healthcare workers. During the past 2 decades, occupationally acquired hepatitis B, HIV infection, multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, and viral hemorrhagic fevers, among others, have killed healthcare workers http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol11no07/04-1038.htm
It would seem accidents do happen even if healthcare workers know how to protect themselves. And, smartass, it's not part of a healthcare worker's job description to have sex with patients, so infection by this route would hardly be listed as 'occupationally acquired', would it?
.Peter wrote:
"Second, like all other viruses, HIV induces anti-viral immunity, which is the basis of the HIV/AIDS test."
Outright lie. Infection with HIV-1 induces both antibody and killer T-cell (CD8) immune responses, but not "immunity". Although super-infections (super infection is a new infection with a new strain of HIV-1 after seroconversion to the first strain; dual infections are infections when it cannot be proven that the second infection did not occur during the window period) are rather rare, they are not unheard of. Nobody with HIV infection should assume that they are "immune" from re-infection with other strains.
And where does "Peter" say that infection with one strain induces immunity to all strains? Where does he say it induces perfect immunity?
Here's what "Brian" says - I trust you know him even more intimately than "Peter":
The HIV-1 M group of viruses and the HIV-1 O group of viruses are not "one and the same thing". Calling them "one and the same thing" just because they have been named "HIV-1" and because they infect CD4+ T-cells of primates and cause AIDS in humans, is analogous to calling mice, elephants and cats "one and the same thing" because they have been named "mammals" and because they produce live young , feed them milk and breath air. (Brian Foley, BMJ debate)
So again, where does Peter say that immunity against Jerry automatically protects you against Tom and Dumbo?
Peter wrote:
"Third, unlike all other viral epidemics, AIDS in the U.S. and Europe is highly nonrandom:"
Outright lie. Very few viral epidemics are random, and no sexually transmitted epidemics are random. Humans do not engage in even casual contact "randomly". Rich people tend to have more contact with other rich people, firemen tend to have more contact with other firemen, etc... When it comes to sexual contact, humans are even more selective, they hardly ever engage in truly "random" sex, they almost always select partners they are attracted to. It is the pattern of epidemics, whether they are caused by pathogens or "environmental" factors such as cigarette smoking, that makes them traceable to their causes.
Duke, although your insight into the realities of casual partner choice motivation is fascinating, it does zippo to tell us why the HIV/AIDS epidemic has never hit any other group than the initial risk groups in Europe and the US. Not the square gay men, not the Duracell energizer bunny college kids, not even Republican senators.
My question is, Duke why are you lying about "Peter"?
where does "Peter" say that infection with one strain induces immunity to all strains? Where does he say it induces perfect immunity?
http://www.duesberg.com/papers/ch2.html
"the "AIDS test" identifies effective natural vaccination, the ultimate protection against viral disease."
Also from the Duesberg interview that is linked above:
"Fortunately in the U.S., God must have distributed Candace Pert's elegant HIV non-receptors otherwise: Here the majority of the heterosexual population has no HIV-receptors and therefore does not get AIDS! Instead, God must have distributed good HIV-receptors in the U.S. non-randomly to male homosexuals, junkies, and a few hemophiliacs and transfusion recipients, which make up over ninety-five percent of the American AIDS cases. Let's thank God that our mainstream heterosexuals--from our president to our leading HIV-AIDS researchers--are genetically protected against this "deadly" virus via defective HIV receptors, and are therefore AIDS-free--ever since this virus is said to have arrived in the U.S. over twenty years ago."
Duesberg has also referred to hemophiliacs and transfusion recipients as "a few minor risk groups" and "fringe groups." These comments are completely revealing.
Lisa, you say (to support your creaky premise): ".....but according to the CDC,"
I hope the irony is not lost on you. The CDC have published many cases of occupational HIV that has resulted in AIDS. Despite the fact that there are indeed peer-reviewed papers to show this, the denialist wail has always been "but they are only unverified CDC figures!"
Now, it seems to suit you to say "...but according to the CDC". So lets hear it - Do you agree with the CDC or not?
If you quote them regarding SARS, you can quote them regarding occupational HIV, surely.
You also naively think only gays, hemophiliacs or drug users get HIV in the USA. I suggest you go back to your trusty CDC and check how many transfusion recipients, children of HIV-infected Moms, and yes HETEROsexuals have HIV. Try and tell them they haven't caught anything.
My question is, Duke why are you lying about "Peter"?
Because Dr. Dukes is a total fraud and like all of the other HIV apologists he cannot afford to stop telling lies in defense of HIV without the whole charade collapsing. All HIV apologists are forced to adopt absolutism because they know their position is otherwise indefensible.
_________________________________________
A good science news report on denialism or creationism (or whatever woo would report... -- Robster
One more time, Robster, I am not a creationist and neither are any of the "denialists" that I respect. You, and most of your fellow HIV apologists, are the quasi-religious weasels in this debate. After all, it is you who are holding fast to belief in a virus that supposedly causes 30-some disparate diseases, even in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary. Furthermore, it is quite clear that you are hoping to divert attention from HIV and its numerous failings by erroneously labeling HIV rethinkers as being akin to creationists. Do you really expect that readers will take you seriously when you employ such weak-minded gestures?
____________________
Looks like another modern miracle drug was fast-tracked so that profits could be maximized...
Advocacy group says FDA knew Avandia's risk
Hey Robster, care to comment on this story...looks like the news broke yesterday that Avandia is definitely responsible for a significant increase in cardio events for patients taking it. Of course, I'm sure you'll have some familiar excuse to explain away this fact, too, and that your misplaced belief in the holy trinity of modern medicine (profit, profit, and more profit) will survive.
Kevin
______________________
a virus that supposedly causes 30-some disparate diseases, even in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary
Kevin got something right by mistake. It's true HIV does NOT cause "30-some dispearate diseases" , it attacks the immune system within days of infection and that weakens the system and it keeps getting weaker until it can't fight off infections and diseases caused by OTHER things.
It's amazing Kevin is this ignorant about a subject he obsesses on almost as much as he used to obsess about needing monster doses of antibiotics AGAINST his doctor's advice.
Epi-Lisa,
If you intend on using "epidemiology" in your handle, know something about it. HIV spread via heterosexual contact has been increasing as a percentage of total cases in the US since the mid 80s.
Looks like another modern miracle drug was fast-tracked so that profits could be maximized...
BiaxinClarithromycin Abbott
oral tablet 250mg$5.10
Diflucan Fluconazole Pfizer
tablet
50 mg$5.77
100 mg$9.07
150 mg$14.42
200 mg$14.80
Biaxin Post-Marketing Experience
http://www.rxlist.com/cgi/generic/clarith_ad.htm
Allergic reactions ranging from urticaria and mild skin eruptions to rare cases of anaphylaxis, Stevens-Johnson syndrome and toxic epidermal necrolysis have occurred. Other spontaneously reported adverse events include glossitis, stomatitis, oral moniliasis, anorexia, vomiting, pancreatitis, tongue discoloration, thrombocytopenia, leukopenia, neutropenia, and dizziness. There have been reports of tooth discoloration in patients treated with BIAXIN. Tooth discoloration is usually reversible with professional dental cleaning. There have been isolated reports of hearing loss, which is usually reversible, occurring chiefly in elderly women. Reports of alterations of the sense of smell, usually in conjunction with taste perversion or taste loss have also been reported.
Transient CNS events including anxiety, behavioral changes, confusional states, convulsions, depersonalization, disorientation, hallucinations, insomnia, manic behavior, nightmares, psychosis, tinnitus, tremor, and vertigo have been reported during post-marketing surveillance. Events usually resolve with discontinuation of the drug.
Hepatic dysfunction, including increased liver enzymes, and hepatocellular and/or cholestatic hepatitis, with or without jaundice, has been infrequently reported with clarithromycin. This hepatic dysfunction may be severe and is usually reversible. In very rare instances, hepatic failure with fatal outcome has been reported and generally has been associated with serious underlying diseases and/or concomitant medications.
There have been rare reports of hypoglycemia, some of which have occurred in patients taking oral hypoglycemic agents or insulin.
There have been post-marketing reports of BIAXIN XL tablets in the stool, many of which have occurred in patients with anatomic (including ileostomy or colostomy) or functional gastrointestinal disorders with shortened GI transit times.
As with other macrolides, clarithromycin has been associated with QT prolongation and ventricular arrhythmias, including ventricular tachycardia and torsades de pointes.
There have been reports of interstitial nephritis coincident with clarithromycin use.
There have been post-marketing reports of colchicine toxicity with concomitant use of clarithromycin and colchicine, especially in the elderly, some of which occurred in patients with renal insufficiency. Deaths have been reported in some such patients. (See WARNINGS and PRECAUTIONS.)
http://www.rxlist.com/cgi/generic/flucon_ad.htm
Diflucan Post-Marketing Experience
In addition, the following adverse events have occurred during postmarketing experience.
Immunologic: In rare cases, anaphylaxis (including angioedema, face edema and pruritus) has been reported.
Cardiovascular: QT prolongation, torsade de pointes. (See PRECAUTIONS.)
Central Nervous System: Seizures, dizziness.
Dermatologic: Exfoliative skin disorders including Stevens-Johnson syndrome and toxic epidermal necrolysis (see WARNINGS), alopecia.
Hematopoietic and Lymphatic: Leukopenia, including neutropenia and agranulocytosis, thrombocytopenia.
Metabolic: Hypercholesterolemia, hypertriglyceridemia, hypokalemia. Gastrointestinal: Dyspepsia, vomiting. Other Senses: Taste perversion.
Kevin,
I was grouping creationists and denialists together because neither has evidence for their positions, and both use the same rhetorical tricks and devices when attempting to advance their crackpot ideas. Both are pseudoscience.
For me to comment on Avandia, I would need to read much more about it. If the FDA backed down on requiring a mention of cardiotoxicity, then the FDA did wrong. In no way, yet again, is this evidence against HIV.
"For me to comment on Avandia, I would need to read much more about it...if the FDA backed down on requiring a mention of cardiotoxicity, then the FDA did wrong."
Jesus, what a mealy-mouthed loser you are, Robster..."the FDA did wrong"? In recent history, how many times has the FDA "did wrong"? Let's see, off the top of my head, there's Vioxx, Phen-fen, AZT-monotherapy, and now Avandia. Of course, those are but a drop in a very large bucket. Your "I would need to read much more about it" line is total bullshit, and you know it. I guess you're just taking cues from all of the HIV apologists who have produced study results that DO NOT support the orthodox position, and then they boldly claim, "we just need more time to research HIV, but HIV is definitely the cause of AIDS." Complete and utter bullshit. Nothing more than faith-based science. After nearly 23 years of complete failure, I'd say that time is running out for HIV. Thus...
"Where is your competing hypothesis? You don't have one."
The burden of proof is on your end, Robster, which you seem to forget. After all, you and your incompetent colleagues have had access to untold billions to research and to explain HIV/AIDS, and you've failed. Instead of being interested in my "competing hypothesis", which I've explained numerous times, you should focus on the failures of your own worthless hypothesis.
Why don't you explain to the gallery, Robster, how HIV works its magic? Since HIV's causal role in producing AIDS is so well-understood, you should have no trouble explaining in your own words the details of how HIV causes AIDS, right? Once again, you have two decades of research from which to draw, and you being a self-proclaimed "man of science" are no doubt familiar with most all of it.
____________________________
As an atheist, it's certainly not Science that I am criticizing; it's the Bad Science that is currently in vogue that I object to. Unfortunately, I fear that Max Planc is correct:
where does "Peter" say that infection with one strain induces immunity to all strains? Where does he say it induces perfect immunity?
http://www.duesberg.com/papers/ch2.html
"the "AIDS test" identifies effective natural vaccination, the ultimate protection against viral disease."
Richard Jefferys.
This is a repeat of Duke's lie, nothing more. There is nothing in this that says antibodies against Tom protects you against Jerry.
Your other quote from the interview is completely irrelevant in this context.
Lisa, you say (to support your creaky premise): ".....but according to the CDC,"
I hope the irony is not lost on you. The CDC have published many cases of occupational HIV that has resulted in AIDS. Despite the fact that there are indeed peer-reviewed papers to show this, the denialist wail has always been "but they are only unverified CDC figures!"
Now, it seems to suit you to say "...but according to the CDC". So lets hear it - Do you agree with the CDC or not?
DT, I'm glad the irony is not lost on you regarding why Duke chose this particular short lived coronavirus as an example of no peer-reviewed cases, while not even mentioning the thousands of reported cases from one outbreak. Now go and reread the other differences in this respect I cited between AIDS and SARS.
Epi-Lisa,
If you intend on using "epidemiology" in your handle, know something about it. HIV spread via heterosexual contact has been increasing as a percentage of total cases in the US since the mid 80s.
Robster, go look up the definition of "epidemic" and "pandemic", then go look up how a viral one of the kind is supposed to behave when introduced into a virgin subpopulation.
"There are animal models.
HIV is present in much higher quantities in lymphoid tissue where not uncoincidentally the majority of CD4+ cells can be found.
HIV causes the greatest amount of CD4+ depletion during the acute infection stage before antibodies develop.
The vast majority of scientists accept that HIV exists and cause AIDS not because of a press conference but because of the evidence that you and other Denialists spend an inordinate amount of time denying the existence of."
Ok 99.9% of animals injected with hiv dont get AIDS, focus on the less than 1% of animals that are locked in cages and have a few abnormal t cells years /decades later, ignore all the other animals that have not gotten sick.
The tcell count is a BLOOD test, so you would assume there would be high % of tcell infection in the blood, there is not, its about 1/1000 t cells infected.
I suggest you read the article by Bryan Ellison about the myth of high hiv in lymph nodes, even if it were high it would not explain blood tcell depletion
http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/data/belymph.htm
The whole reason we get vaccines is for immunity, hiv causes the most damage 10 YEARS AFTER immunity, .................. after some dubious mild flu like illness the tcell count is just fine and the patient is healthy
Read www.projectdaylily.com to find out about a really dangerous microbe called mycoplasma incognitus that killed every animal Dr. Lo injected, was part of the biowarfare program.
See hiv fact or fraud free.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5064591712431946916
This is a repeat of Duke's lie, nothing more. There is nothing in this that says antibodies against Tom protects you against Jerry.
But that isn't all you asked, you asked for a citation on "perfect immunity" and there it is: he's arguing that antibodies = perfect protection against viral disease. In terms of superinfection cases, many involve HIV from the same subtypes, not different. Surely you're aware that Duesberg has constantly and consistently argued that HIV is neutralized by antibodies and is therefore "dormant." You have to look no further than the HIV-specific CD8 T cell response to give the lie to this claim. New CD8 T cell responses to epitope variants are generated throughout the course of progressive disease - care to tell us how that happens if the virus has been neutralized?
Going back to this ELISPOT analysis:
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=116093&render…
How has participant #21 managed to accumulate HIV-specific CD8 T cell responses that compromise 18% of their total CD8 T cell pool? This is certainly an underestimate, as ELISPOT requires interferon gamma production and this function is lost in completely exhausted CD8 T cells (which can be identified by tetramers, and are usually around 3x more frequent than CD8 T cells capable of making interferon gamma). In very simple terms, having this large a proportion of your T cells targeting a single pathogen is not healthy, this is well known from studies of T cell repertoire skewing and CMV-specific CD8 T cell expansions in the elderly.
Lisa,
Epidemic: More cases than are expected.
Pandemic: Epidemic across a large region.
As a sexually and body fluid transmitted virus, transmission wise HIV isn't doing anything that unusual.
You were simply wrong about what subpopulations are affected. Someone calling themselves "epidemiology" whatever should know this.
---------------
Kevin, I just am not familiar with Avandia. Diabetes isn't my area of study, and I have missed out on the controversy entirely.
Let's see, off the top of my head, there's Vioxx, Phen-fen, AZT-monotherapy, and now Avandia.
Vioxx. Cardiotox issues came out publicly in the post-market studies, if I recall correctly, and previously to this, the drug company kept their information from the FDA. My opinion is that the dose was too high and should have been used for acute pain episodes instead of chronic ones.
Fen-Phen was colossally stupid. Combine one drug from family one and another from family two and you will get side serious side effects.
AZT monotherapy was the best we had starting out. Now we have much better drugs based on what we have learned over time.
I would love to see the FDA be more proactive and better funded. Cutting funding to a regulatory agency is a sure route to end up with ineffective regulation.
... and then they boldly claim, "we just need more time to research HIV, but HIV is definitely the cause of AIDS." Complete and utter bullshit.
You have it backwards. We know HIV is the cause of AIDS, and we need to do more research on HIV and AIDS to develop better treatments.
After nearly 23 years of complete failure, I'd say that time is running out for HIV.
So the side with evidence is a complete failure, but the side with no competing hypothesis, data, evidence, etc. is ready to experience a resurgence? How does that work?
The burden of proof is on your end, Robster, which you seem to forget.
No. You are the one with the incredible claim. Science works by accepting the best hypothesis that explains the data at this time. If you want HIV denialism to even begin to resemble science, you need a hypothesis that is better.
After all, you and your incompetent colleagues have had access to untold billions to research and to explain HIV/AIDS, and you've failed.
Actually, we have done quite well. Pubmed is that ^^ way. We don't know all the details, but are doing more than the denialists (hands over ears, singing LALALA!). Your problem is that you are arguing from incredulity. You don't believe it, so no level of proof will convince you (just like creationists discussing evolution).
Instead of being interested in my "competing hypothesis", which I've explained numerous times, you should focus on the failures of your own worthless hypothesis.
Your personal competing hypothesis was that AIDS is a fungal infection, right? Yet, you can't explain how AIDS doesn't stop when a patient receives antifungal drugs.
If you want to be taken seriously, you need a serious hypothesis. You don't have one. As to a lesson in how HIV works, many here have explained to no avail many of the issues to you, but you are prideful and unassailable in your ignorance.
You have it backwards. We know HIV is the cause of AIDS, and we need to do more research on HIV and AIDS to develop better treatments.
(Sigh)...yet another mealy-mouthed response from "Robster". Tell me...have you ever had an original thought or have you always had a "party-line" from which to cull? Your statements of faith are ever-so tiresome.
Let me repeat the question (hint: this is your chance to demonstrate that you are capable of independent thought, Robster):
Please explain to the gallery, Robster, how HIV works its magic?
You have asserted on numerous occassions that that hypothesis of the orthodoxy is "better" than the "denialists'", so let's hear it. If HIV's causal role in producing AIDS is so well-understood, you should have no trouble explaining in your own words the details of how HIV causes AIDS?
Lest you feel inclined to continue to offer up faith-based rhetoric, here's a short quote from Aldous Huxley for you to consider:
you asked for a citation on "perfect immunity" and there it is: he's arguing that antibodies = perfect protection against viral disease.
In your quote, it says 'ultimate'. not 'perfect' as in you're now and forever dressed in impenetrable armor regardless. After 25 years, have you come up with something better than working with the body's own immune responses?
in terms of superinfection cases, many involve HIV from the same subtypes, not different
Richard Jefferys, the topic of strains, subtypes, genetic diversity, recombination etc. is interesting, but viral causal guesswork and more or less arbitrary classifications do not refute Duesberg's basic point.
These questions are fom 2002:
The current case report leaves a number of questions open, but these questions will clearly help focus future research efforts. For example, to what extent is the increasing number of recombinant viruses worldwide the result of superinfection? Does superinfection occur within clades? Can such cases be used to begin to dissect the components of protective immunity in HIV-1 infection? We urgently need detailed evaluations of the immune responses and of the sequences of circulating virus before and after loss of control of viremia in cases of superinfection. The magnitude of the task of creating an effective AIDS vaccine will then become more apparent
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/347/10/756
Lisa,
Epidemic: More cases than are expected.
Pandemic: Epidemic across a large region.
As a sexually and body fluid transmitted virus, transmission wise HIV isn't doing anything that unusual.
You were simply wrong about what subpopulations are affected. Someone calling themselves "epidemiology" whatever should know this.
Robster, I don't know what you mean I was wrong about what subpopulations are infected, but I'm confident you're going to make a case that my nickname is misleading and killing people. Nothing is too ridiculous for you crackpots.
As expected, you managed to find the mildest definition of 'epidemic', stearing clear of 'A sudden severe outbreak of a disease' or 'spreading rapidly and extensively by infection and affecting many individuals in an area or a population at the same time...' + the pandemic aspect.
But very well, 'more cases than are expected' it is. Now I want you to reverse the logic if you can and tell me, according to nearly all early projections for the HIV/AIDS 'pandemic' in the US, are there more or fewer cases than expected in the general population?
.
Lisa (Michael?), pick up an epi textbook. Those are standard definitions. Suddenness is not required, nor is severity. Large numbers aren't either, as small scale epidemics are referred to as outbreaks. I would refer to HIV as an endemic within the US, but that is my opinion.
My statement regarding you being wrong is based on this quote, "...the HIV/AIDS epidemic has never hit any other group than the initial risk groups in Europe and the US."
It is wrong, and if you were looking at reported numbers regarding HIV incidence, you would know this.
but I'm confident you're going to make a case that my nickname is misleading and killing people.
Pushing denialism is dishonest, unethical and puts patient health at risk. Your handle is just poorly chosen, like your question.
...according to nearly all early projections for the HIV/AIDS 'pandemic' in the US, are there more or fewer cases than expected in the general population?
Early projections were based on incomplete data and knowledge and are no longer valid. An epidemiologist and scientist would know that you adapt and improve your predictions over time. Denialists prefer to live in the past, ignoring any and all advances in science.
Perhaps, though, you would care to comment on the inability of any of the denialist claims to explain the epidemiology data?
------------
Kevin, You know the answer, but ignore it whenever it is given. Briefly, the natural history of HIV follows (assuming no resistance factors are present and patient exposure is sufficient to cause infection); HIV infects patient, preferably infecting CD4+ lymphocytes. CD4+ cell numbers are gradually depleted, leading to susceptibility to normally controlled opportunistic infections and uncommon cancers, leading to patient death.
The fact remains, the denialists have no real competing hypothesis. They are pretenders to science.
Robster:
Early projections were based on incomplete data and knowledge and are no longer valid. An epidemiologist and scientist would know that you adapt and improve your predictions over time.
Ok, so we finally agree, early pojections were wrong, along with not so early projections, and beliefs about the epidemic impact of HIV were wrong. Numbers were much lower than expected, especially outside the risk groups. Your definition of 'epidemic' is 'more cases than expected'. The expected epidemic didn't occur
But Robster, you know your science, so what do you think early assumptions and projection about HIV were based on (apart form the always incomplete data),
1. The idea that HIV wasn't going to behave like any other fluid borne virus?
2. The idea that the impact of HIV when introduced into a virgin population would be comparable to other infectious viral agents?
Hint, you can check the Durban declaration if you're not sure.
Robster, a real scientist would know that when you are consistently wrong, you reexamine your basic assumptions, rather than keep appealing to rearview mirror predictions. Twentyfive years, billions and billions of dollars later, HIVists are still consistently way off target on the most studied, best known microbe in the universe. If AIDS Inc. had been an ordinary firm having to obey the ordinary rules of healthy competition, instead of possessing a jealously guarded monopoly, it would have gone bankrupt way before even the US Congress.
India, once believed to have the largest HIV-positive population of any country in the world, today announced that new, more accurate surveillance data suggest India has about 2.5 million people living with HIV - about half the number estimated by UNAIDS based on previous surveys of HIV prevalence among pregnant women.
The new HIV prevalence estimate for India is approximately 0.36%, which corresponds to an estimated 2 million to 3.1 million people living with HIV. UNAIDS had previously suggested the range might lie between 3.4 million and 9.4 million
Rethinkers have long predicted that HIV stats for India, and previously South Africa, would turn out to be inflated, especially those based on surveys of pregnant women.
Lisa's logic:
"You predicted bongo virus would wipe out 99% of humanity, ..right?"
" ...and now we can look at the data, we see only 95% died, ...right?"
Fingers in ears, chanting: " ...so I conclude that since fewer died than expected, there never was an epidemic of bongovirus! La la la la!"
Such desperate, twisted logic.
It would be mildly amusing if it weren't so tragic for the millions dying with HIV, whose plight the denialists seek to completely ignore or trivialise.
In your quote, it says 'ultimate'. not 'perfect' as in you're now and forever dressed in impenetrable armor regardless. After 25 years, have you come up with something better than working with the body's own immune responses?
This is an unusually half-hearted attempt at obfuscation. I'm not even sure what your question here is supposed to mean, as T cell responses are immune responses and you completely ignored everything I wrote about T cells. Then you've gone and dug up a 2002 commentary, presumably with the intent of suggesting superinfection doesn't occur within clades, only the 2005 cite Dr. Duke provided is an example of within clade superinfection and it mentions several others in the first line of abstract. And Bruce Walker, one of the authors of the commentary you cited, has also reported an example (Nature. 2002;420:434-439).
Even though you managed to get that wrong (you should have left it alone), it's irrelevant anyway, as Duesberg's lie has always been that antibodies always protect against disease. This has never been true, like most of Duesberg's "arguments" it's not aimed at convincing scientists who know the claim is farcically false, it's intended to resonate with a general audience who may have been educated to believe that vaccines work solely by inducing antibodies (and sometimes Duesberg's propaganda is effective - see cooler's comments above and one of Noreen Martin's recent posts; D. David Steele was boldly asserting that vaccines all work via antibodies the first time I ever posted on this blog).
As I said previously, Duesberg's claim that HIV is not replicating after the antibody response arises is also a lie. The evolution of the immune response during chronic infection is unequivocal proof of this fact. You can look at this in multiple ways, by interrogating the CD4 T cell, CD8 T cell and B cell/Ab response. To use the CD8 T cell response as an example, mutations in HIV's genetic sequence that cause a variation in the protein epitope that an HIV-specific CD8 T cell is targeting can be tracked, the corresponding epitope variant identified and the appearance of a new CD8 T cell response to this variant epitope can also be tracked. The same is true for the epitopes being targeted by HIV-specific antibodies and CD4 T cells. To suggest that this is all happening by coincidence or that it is the result of some massive cross-reactivity to nine different retroviral proteins is like saying that there's a perfect chance that you could recreate the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel by throwing a bunch of cans of paint at a wall; not just once, but every time.
I know I'm beating a deceased horse with this, but denialist "scientists" - if they were anything other than the liars and frauds that they unfortunately are - would have to deal with the T cell immunology as it stands in 2007 and they cannot. This endless ridiculous posturing about seeing cell damage in an EM - HIV infection depletes naive CD8 T cells, you're not going to see that in an EM. Infected cells undergo cell cycle arrest, you're not going to see that in an EM. HIV preferentially infects differentiating, HIV-specific CD4 T cells that are needed to generate effective HIV-specific CD8 T cells, B cell and Ab responses, you're not going to see that in an EM either. HIV-specific CD4 T cells lack functionality in progressive disease, as do HIV-specific CD8 T cells and there is a several month lag time in the maturation and generation of effective neutralizing antibodies (again, completely consistent with the impairment of the HIV-specific CD4 T cell response).
Duesberg learnt from Harry Rubin that retroviruses go for dividing cells. This makes a CD4 T cell attempting to mount an immune response to HIV an ideal substrate for viral replication. When the virus first shows up, it's up to naive CD4 T cells mount a response. Naive CD4 T cells engage in a prolonged (~24hr) hug with dendritic cells prior to becoming activated, plenty of time for viral transfer from DC to T cell and virus integration. That naive CD4 T cell will then divide at least 15-20 times, generating, at minimum, several hundred thousand daughter cells, all infected. Most are destined to undergo activation-induced cell death, but a subset would normally mature into long-lived "memory" CD4 T cells that would be responsible for coordinating the immune response to HIV. And it is these nascent HIV-specific memory CD4 T cells (which can be identified based on expression of a receptor for interleukin 7, IL-7R) that are preferentially infected in acute infection.
This also gives the lie to Brian Ellison's woeful attempt to comment on lymph node data. He claims HIV replication occurs late in disease as the result of immune suppression caused by something else; but it is the HIV-specific immune response that is impaired from the earliest timepoints after infection onwards (in all but LTNP), while immune responses targeting other pathogens are still intact and functionally competent.
Kevin wrote:
If HIV's causal role in producing AIDS is so well-understood, you should have no trouble explaining in your own words the details of how HIV causes AIDS?
This is extraordinarily lame, even for a troll. Here is a question for you, Kevin, based on your logic that pathogenesis must be understood for causation to be understood:
If MTB's causal role in producing tuberculosis is so well-understood, you should have no trouble explaining in your own words the details of how MTB causes tuberculosis?
Gee Mr. Jefferys, I only meant to say that all these classifications, types and subtypes and clades and new strains and never two alike HIVs, of wildly different size too, and O and AE and 1 and 2, just don't mean much more to me than Brian Foley's cats and mice and elephants, you know what I'm saying?
What I meant by selecting that paper at random is that it seems by 2002 they had to know a patients history to determine whether it was a genuine superinfection, especially within the clades.
Duesberg said that the body's own neutralizing antibodies is the ultimate defense, and I just don't see how any of that is changed. Obviously Duesberg has never before seen all the novel biological phenomena and astounding genetic diversity of a super microbe like HIV before, but nevertheless, if the superinfecting strain is distinct enought to be recognized as such, perhaps it can infect a couple of cells before it gets detected. What does that change? According to you, the neutralizing antibodies can't even deal with the first infection, because I see you have some fine indirect evidence there that HIV must be biochemically active all along in the, what? 10-15-20 years it takes for it to tap and drain the immunesystem? Do you happen to have a mathematical model for that by any chance?
Anyway, when is the HIV most active, right after infection or 10 years after when the patient comes down with AIDS?
Duesberg said that the body's own neutralizing antibodies is the ultimate defense, and I just don't see how any of that is changed.
I'm sorry then Claus that half a century of cellular immunology has passed both you and Peter Duesberg by. If you ever need an organ transplant, don't worry about pre-transplant serology or opportunistic infection prophylaxis, based on your and Duesberg's assertions you can surely be confident that your circulating neutralizing antibodies will protect you.
I'm very sorry, I made a bit of a mistake in that last post. If you need an organ transplant, you should do the pre-transplant serology. That way, you'll know which opportunistic pathogens those neutralizing antibodies are going to protect you against!
Also, if you're interested in attempts to mathematically model the impact of accumulating T cell dysfunction in HIV infection, I'd recommend this analysis from a recent PLoS Medicine paper by Andrew Yates and colleagues:
http://medicine.plosjournals.org/archive/1549-1676/4/5/supinfo/10.1371_…
WoW Mr. Jefferies! Just answer the damn question!
According to you, the neutralizing antibodies can't even deal with the first infection, because I see you have some fine indirect evidence there that HIV must be biochemically active all along in the, what? 10-15-20 years it takes for it to tap and drain the immunesystem? Do you happen to have a mathematical model for that by any chance?
That, by the way Mr. Jefferies, is a simple YES or NO question!
DO YOU HAPPEN TO HAVE A MATHEMATICAL MODEL FOR YOUR CLAIMS???????????????????
YES OR NO!
(just to make sure no-one reading this is left in the dark, Mr. Jefferies can find no such mathematical model in all of HIVology because it does not exist! David Ho attempted to base his Hit Hard Hit Early strategy on a supposed math model that was later found to be full of nothing but bullshit!)
Hey Jefferies, Robster, Adele, et al. What part of the following do you not understand, and you can find the link just below this blog thread:
THEORY OF HOW HIV ATTACKS IS WRONG:
http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2007/06/theory_of_how_hiv_attacks_is_w…
CHICAGO (AFP)--The theory on how HIV attacks the body's immune system is wrong, a new study has found. Dohhhhhhh!
Lentivirologists studying HIV(meaning "slow virologists") and Lenti-Scientists have long believed that HIV causes the slow depletion of healthy white blood cells--the T cells which recognize infections so the body can fight them off--by causing infected T cells to produce virus particles before dying.
This ongoing cycle of infection, HIV production, reinfection and cell destruction has been called the "runaway" hypothesis.
But if this were so, the T cells would be killed off far too quickly, the researchers found.
Using a simple mathematical model, researchers in the United States and Britain showed the current "runaway" model, long believed in by lenti-dolts such as Richard Jefferies, Chris Noble, Adele, DT, and other mentally slow people, would deplete the body's healthy T cells in a matter of months.
Hey Robster, Perhaps you would be so kind as to come up with the mathematical model to back up your own crackpot ideas of HIV causing AIDS, especially, seeing as you wrote to Kevin regarding AIDS dissidents and creationists:
"I was grouping creationists and denialists together because neither has evidence for their positions, and both use the same rhetorical tricks and devices when attempting to advance their crackpot ideas".
Come on Robster, Show us YOUR evidence of mathematical proof of how HIV causes AIDS by attacking Tcells that you claimed up above!
Until you do, you are the crackpot!
Hey Jefferies. Are you insane? Don't answer that.
Just what kind of bogus math are you trying to pull off as HIV science facts?
Are you blind as well as deaf and dumb? Your ever so certain mathematics model link up above has the following words and disclaimers attached:
1) "requires additional parameters" not in any literature"
2) "illustrates a potential mechanism"
3) "we ASSUME that in the presence of HIV"
4) "this model CAN predict" not DOES!
5 The parameters for the model were not based on any facts, but were simply pulled out of thin air!!!
JP Moore was right in his interview with the Gay Lesbian Times: http://www.gaylesbiantimes.com/?id=9919
"The AIDS advocates are all in it for the money or or are all just stupid"!
Speaking of killing CD4 cells, y'all might be interested in my latest investigation into those graphs that show things like CD4 cell counts declining shortly after HIV infection, then rising, then steadily declining until illness and death.
Turns out that the graphs are fake, or at least they're not based on data, which amounts to the same thing.
See: http://aras.ab.ca/articles/scientific/DatalessGraphs.html.
Oh what delicious irony!
1. Richard Jefferys tells denialist troll to look at a study by Yates on mathematical modelling of HIV.
2. Meanwhile, denialist troll trumpets a NEW STUDY as showing previous theories about HIV pathogenesis "were wrong".
3. In response to Jeffrys, same denialist troll then tries to debunk the model in the Yates paper as flawed, asking Jefferys: "What kind of bogus math are you trying to pull off as HIV science facts?".
4. Denialist troll is in blissful ignorance that the study he is championing is the SAME study that he is simultaneously criticising as pulling numbers out of thin air.
This little vignette reveals the complete bankrupcy of the denialist position on HIV - Which is to uncritically support every study that appears to contradict the orthodox view, and criticise every study that supports the orthodox view, without ever attempting to read or understand the studies.
PS: Note to denialist trolls - check which studies you are talking about before opening your mouths.
Jeffrys
PPS: Ignore the "Jeffrys" at the bottom of my last post - it is left over from editing and not trying to suggest the post is by him.
DT,
I am not attempting to ruin your gleeful morning, and if I were I'm pretty sure I wouldn't succeed short of sprinkling a good handful of your lifesaving drugs on your corn flakes. But for others out there a few considerations.
1. The part of the 'same study', which was apparently the best Richard Jefferys could come up with, does not reflect what was actually studied and tested, namely the 'runaway' hypothesis. It was the obligatory attempt by HIV scientists to salvage the basics of the hypothesis they have just shot down. It's half a page long, with half of that consisting of hypotheticals and qualifications. In this case it was not enough to redeem the researchers as Pope predicted right here on Aetiology, so Jefferys et al. were content to follow his advice and have Yates et al. appear on AIDtruth.org to profess the true faith. http://aidstruth.org/andrew-yates.php
Now that's irony.
2. What the troll in question meant by 'bogus math' is very obvious to anybody who can read. He doesn't criticize the math per se, but the, hardly overstated, fact that,
5. The parameters for the model were not based on any facts, but were simply pulled out of thin air!!!
The troll in question I am sure is grateful for your defence of his shortcomings. He made no attempt to understand the papers in question, just criticised the first thing he could think of. [Namely: "Its a theoretical mathematical model? Well I'll criticise it for being theoretical then!"] Don't pretend you cannot see the strategy running through his tiny troll brain.
The fact remains that he was happy to marvel at how wonderful this study was when he felt it contradicted the orthodox theories about pathogenesis, while at the same time dismissing another study as "bogus math" when he thought it supported the ortodox position. Only he never realised that the 2 studies were the same, single study!
Egg on face or what?
Perhaps he can explain if he agrees with the theory espoused by Yates or not. I don't really expect a reasoned response, since he clearly lacks the ability to understand what the hypothesis is.
Lisa, obviously the ad hom spouting DT is too lame to comprehend that the model Jefferies presented above is NOT THE SAME MODEL presented in the Yates study which verified the theory of HIV attacking T-cells is wrong.
DT is yet incapable of understanding that the Yates "addendum" that Jefferies presented here is a SALVAGE ATTEMPT post that study, and based on no real data, done afterward to try to save the fatally flawed theory that HIV attacks T Cells by using conclusions that are indeed not based on any facts.
But considering the entire belief system of deadly HIV was
never based on facts, it should be no surprise that the avid believers such as DT would continue to ignore the lack of real data and continue to rely on their over active imagination when all else has failed.
Again, pubmed is your friend. You have been given one model already, find others for yourself.
Lisa,
Duesberg said that the body's own neutralizing antibodies is the ultimate defense, and I just don't see how any of that is changed.
Duesberg is making two false assumptions. First is that all antibodies are "neutralizing." Second is that the presence of antibodies means that an infection is over. There are many viruses that persist long after antibody production has begun. But an epidemiologist would know that.
Ok, so we finally agree, early pojections were wrong, along with not so early projections, and beliefs about the epidemic impact of HIV were wrong. Numbers were much lower than expected, especially outside the risk groups. Your definition of 'epidemic' is 'more cases than expected'. The expected epidemic didn't occur
So it is down to semantics. Numbers of cases were increasing, but not as fast as predicted. So the epidemic wasn't as severe. That is a good thing. If you are trying to argue by semantics that an epidemic didn't occur so HIV doesn't exist, you aren't even near the realm of science.
But Robster, you know your science, so what do you think early assumptions and projection about HIV were based on (apart form the always incomplete data),
1. The idea that HIV wasn't going to behave like any other fluid borne virus?
It is transmitted exactly like an STI/fluid borne pathogen. From what we know via study, the rate of transmission is similar to many STIs. Incidence appeared to be higher at first, but now we know more. Those same studies have long since demonstrated that the hypotheses cleaved to by the denialists are plainly false.
2. The idea that the impact of HIV when introduced into a virgin population would be comparable to other infectious viral agents?
It appeared to spreading more rapidly. It wasn't. But it was still spreading.
Robster, a real scientist would know that when you are consistently wrong, you reexamine your basic assumptions, rather than keep appealing to rearview mirror predictions.
I agree. What does that tell us about Duesberg and the denialists? The answer is that Duesberg is not a real scientist.
Twentyfive years, billions and billions of dollars later, HIVists are still consistently way off target on the most studied, best known microbe in the universe.
The off target ones were the researchers who pushed behavior, drug abuse, treatment hypotheses. Their predictions didn't explain the data as well as HIV did. 25 years later, our predictions are far better, we know far more about HIV, from the population level to the molecular. Your statement that AIDS researchers are "consistently way off target" is just wrong.
If AIDS Inc. had been an ordinary firm having to obey the ordinary rules of healthy competition, instead of possessing a jealously guarded monopoly, it would have gone bankrupt way before even the US Congress.
So you want competition? That already happened. The denialists refused to admit they were wrong and started looking for windmills. If you want to compete, you need a hypothesis that better explains the evidence. You don't have that, so you lie.
India, once believed to have the largest HIV-positive population of any country in the world, today announced that new, more accurate surveillance data suggest India has about 2.5 million people living with HIV - about half the number estimated by UNAIDS based on previous surveys of HIV prevalence among pregnant women.
Epidemiologists understand that any prediction is not perfect, and should be revised when new data becomes available. That is precisely what has been done, and is the purpose of surveillance programs. Less HIV+ individuals in India is a very good thing, but not evidence that HIV doesn't cause AIDS.
Sadly, no level of evidence will convince the cult of denialists. Just like creationists, 9/11 troofers, homeopaths, antivaxers...
Forgot to mention that now that we have since found many retroviruses from other species, and that within those species cause syndromes extremely similar to AIDS. Denialists always exist in a magical world where scientific knowledge hasn't progressed over time.
DT is yet incapable of understanding that the Yates "addendum" that Jefferies presented here is a SALVAGE ATTEMPT post that study, and based on no real data, done afterward to try to save the fatally flawed theory that HIV attacks T Cells by using conclusions that are indeed not based on any facts.
No, it's from the original paper:
http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10…
The authors used the same model and added an exhaustion parameter because, to use their own words:
"the model has two key limitations. First, while it distinguishes between quiescent and proliferating memory CD4+ T cells, it neglects other potential sources of phenotypic heterogeneity within this population with respect to activation, proliferation, and death. Second, it assumes that cells' replicative capacity remains intact after repeated rounds of stimulation"
It is well known that a T cells' replicative capacity does not remain intact after repeated rounds of stimulation, so they did the supplemental analysis. I'd guess that the data they need to make the analysis more robust is an estimate of how many rounds of division a memory CD4 T cell can go through before it reaches exhaustion and an estimate of the lifespan of exhausted memory CD4 T cells. There is abundant published evidence that exhausted, dysfunctional T cells accumulate in HIV infection, I'll post some of the cites.
I wouldn't make too much of this analysis though, because there are other assumptions in their mathematical model that are questionable (like the one about HIV infecting memory CD4 T cells as they undergo homeostatic turnover). I only posted it in response to Claus's question about whether anyone had mathematically modeled the effects of accumulating T cell dysfunction in HIV infection; he was trying to take a dig about the Yates paper so I thought it might be bleakly humorous to cite the same study back at him (guessing, correctly, that he hadn't read it).
You actually identify the limitations of mathematical modeling in your rant about David Ho: the results from these models are hostage to the assumptions that go into them. This doesn't become untrue just because there's one output of a model that happens to fit your biases. You could create a model that precisely predicts the immunological perturbations that occur in progressive HIV infection and the assumptions that went into it could still turn out to be wrong!
Lisa wrote:
It was the obligatory attempt by HIV scientists to salvage the basics of the hypothesis they have just shot down.
OK, so to support this statement you need to show us these "obligatory" attempts in the immune activation papers that shot down David Ho's tap and drain hypothesis. I look forward to reading those quotes.
Here are a few recent papers addressing T cell exhaustion. Before anyone accuses me of manipulation, text has been used to replace the less than/greater than signs because otherwise they register as HTML code.
Exp Gerontol. 2007 May;42(5):432-7. Epub 2007 Jan 8.
Accelerated immune senescence and HIV-1 infection.
Appay V, Almeida JR, Sauce D, Autran B, Papagno L.
A recent consensus has emerged regarding the association between chronic immune activation and poor outcome in HIV-1 infection. However, its basis remains unclear. Accumulating evidence suggests that the cells of the immune system may have a limited replicative lifespan in vivo. In this context, persistent activation during chronic HIV infection may lead to an exhaustion of immune resources. This may occur at two levels: Clonal and Global. Some HIV-1-specific CD8+ T-cells start expressing the senescence marker CD57 soon after primary infection. Persistently activated HIV-1-specific T-cell clones may eventually reach stages of replicative senescence and disappear, resulting in the specific loss of CD8+ T-cell populations important to control viral replication. In addition, HIV-1 infected individuals are characterized by the accumulation of highly differentiated CD8+ and CD4+ T-cells overtime. Together with the decline of T-cell renewal capacities, this may reflect a general ageing of the lymphocyte population. Similar observations have been done in HIV non-infected elderly individuals, which suggests that premature immunosenescence occurs in HIV-1 infection, as a result of persistent immune activation.
Blood. 2007 Jun 1;109(11):4671-8. Epub 2007 Feb 1.
PD-1 up-regulation is correlated with HIV-specific memory CD8+ T-cell exhaustion in typical progressors but not in long-term nonprogressors.
Zhang JY, Zhang Z, Wang X, Fu JL, Yao J, Jiao Y, Chen L, Zhang H, Wei J, Jin L, Shi M, Gao GF, Wu H, Wang FS.
The immunoreceptor PD-1 is significantly up-regulated on exhausted CD8+ T cells during chronic viral infections such as HIV-1. However, it remains unknown whether PD-1 expression on CD8+ T cells differs between typical progressors (TPs) and long-term nonprogressors (LTNPs). In this report, we examined PD-1 expression on HIV-specific CD8+ T cells from 63 adults with chronic HIV infection. We found that LTNPs exhibited functional HIV-specific memory CD8+ T cells with markedly lower PD-1 expression. TPs, in contrast, showed significantly up-regulated PD-1 expression that was closely correlated with a reduction in CD4 T-cell number and an elevation in plasma viral load. Importantly, PD-1 up-regulation was also associated with reduced perforin and IFN-gamma production, as well as decreased HIV-specific effector memory CD8+ T-cell proliferation in TPs but not LTNPs. Blocking PD-1/PD-L1 interactions efficiently restored HIV-specific CD8+ T-cell effector function and proliferation. Taken together, these findings confirm the hypothesis that high PD-1 up-regulation mediates HIV-specific CD8+ T-cell exhaustion. Blocking the PD-1/PD-L1 pathway may represent a new therapeutic option for this disease and provide more insight into immune pathogenesis in LTNPs.
Nature. 2006 Sep 21;443(7109):350-4. Epub 2006 Aug 20.
PD-1 expression on HIV-specific T cells is associated with T-cell exhaustion and disease progression.
Day CL, Kaufmann DE, Kiepiela P, Brown JA, Moodley ES, Reddy S, Mackey EW, Miller JD, Leslie AJ, DePierres C, Mncube Z, Duraiswamy J, Zhu B, Eichbaum Q, Altfeld M, Wherry EJ, Coovadia HM, Goulder PJ, Klenerman P, Ahmed R, Freeman GJ, Walker BD.
Functional impairment of T cells is characteristic of many chronic mouse and human viral infections. The inhibitory receptor programmed death 1 (PD-1; also known as PDCD1), a negative regulator of activated T cells, is markedly upregulated on the surface of exhausted virus-specific CD8 T cells in mice. Blockade of this pathway using antibodies against the PD ligand 1 (PD-L1, also known as CD274) restores CD8 T-cell function and reduces viral load. To investigate the role of PD-1 in a chronic human viral infection, we examined PD-1 expression on human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-specific CD8 T cells in 71 clade-C-infected people who were naive to anti-HIV treatments, using ten major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class I tetramers specific for frequently targeted epitopes. Here we report that PD-1 is significantly upregulated on these cells, and expression correlates with impaired HIV-specific CD8 T-cell function as well as predictors of disease progression: positively with plasma viral load and inversely with CD4 T-cell count. PD-1 expression on CD4 T cells likewise showed a positive correlation with viral load and an inverse correlation with CD4 T-cell count, and blockade of the pathway augmented HIV-specific CD4 and CD8 T-cell function. These data indicate that the immunoregulatory PD-1/PD-L1 pathway is operative during a persistent viral infection in humans, and define a reversible defect in HIV-specific T-cell function. Moreover, this pathway of reversible T-cell impairment provides a potential target for enhancing the function of exhausted T cells in chronic HIV infection.
Nat Med. 2006 Oct;12(10):1198-202. Epub 2006 Aug 20.
Upregulation of PD-1 expression on HIV-specific CD8+ T cells leads to reversible immune dysfunction.
Trautmann L, Janbazian L, Chomont N, Said EA, Gimmig S, Bessette B, Boulassel MR, Delwart E, Sepulveda H, Balderas RS, Routy JP, Haddad EK, Sekaly RP.
The engagement of programmed death 1 (PD-1) to its ligands, PD-L1 and PD-L2, inhibits proliferation and cytokine production mediated by antibodies to CD3 (refs. 5,6,7). Blocking the PD-1-PD-L1 pathway in mice chronically infected with lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus restores the capacity of exhausted CD8(+) T cells to undergo proliferation, cytokine production and cytotoxic activity and, consequently, results in reduced viral load. During chronic HIV infection, HIV-specific CD8(+) T cells are functionally impaired, showing a reduced capacity to produce cytokines and effector molecules as well as an impaired capacity to proliferate. Here, we found that PD-1 was upregulated on HIV-specific CD8(+) T cells; PD-1 expression levels were significantly correlated both with viral load and with the reduced capacity for cytokine production and proliferation of HIV-specific CD8(+) T cells. Notably, cytomegalovirus (CMV)-specific CD8(+) T cells from the same donors did not upregulate PD-1 and maintained the production of high levels of cytokines. Blocking PD-1 engagement to its ligand (PD-L1) enhanced the capacity of HIV-specific CD8(+) T cells to survive and proliferate and led to an increased production of cytokines and cytotoxic molecules in response to cognate antigen. The accumulation of HIV-specific dysfunctional CD8(+) T cells in the infected host could prevent the renewal of a functionally competent HIV-specific CD8(+) repertoire.
Clin Immunol. 2006 Aug;120(2):163-70. Epub 2006 Jun 9.
Low CD4+ T-cell counts in HIV patients receiving effective antiretroviral therapy are associated with CD4+ T-cell activation and senescence but not with lower effector memory T-cell function.
Fernandez S, Price P, McKinnon EJ, Nolan RC, French MA.
The adverse effects of immune activation on CD4(+) T-cell recovery and the relationship between CD4(+) T-cell counts and effector T-cell function were examined in HIV-1 patients receiving long-term effective ART. Patients with nadir CD4(+) T-cell counts less than100/microl, greater than 12 months on ART and greater than6 months with less than50 HIV RNA copies/ml were stratified by current CD4(+) T-cell counts and patients from the lowest (n = 15) and highest (n = 12) tertiles were studied. We assessed proliferation (Ki67), activation (HLA-DR, CD38) and replicative senescence (CD57) by flow cytometry and CD4(+) T-cell responses to CMV by IFN-gamma ELISpot. Proportions of CD4(+) T-cells expressing HLA-DR or CD57 were strong univariate predictors of total (P = 0.0002 and P = 0.002) and naive (P less than 0.0001 and P less than 0.0001, respectively) CD4(+) T-cell counts, suggesting that CD4(+) T-cell activation drives the depletion of naive CD4(+) T-cells. This was clearest in patients with a small/undetectable thymus. IFN-gamma responses to CMV were similar in patients with low or high CD4(+) T-cell counts.
J Immunol. 2006 Jun 1;176(11):6973-81.
Maintenance of HIV-specific CD4+ T cell help distinguishes HIV-2 from HIV-1 infection.
Duvall MG, Jaye A, Dong T, Brenchley JM, Alabi AS, Jeffries DJ, van der Sande M, Togun TO, McConkey SJ, Douek DC, McMichael AJ, Whittle HC, Koup RA, Rowland-Jones SL.
Unlike HIV-1-infected people, most HIV-2-infected subjects maintain a healthy CD4+ T cell count and a strong HIV-specific CD4+ T cell response. To define the cellular immunological correlates of good prognosis in HIV-2 infection, we conducted a cross-sectional study of HIV Gag-specific T cell function in HIV-1- and HIV-2-infected Gambians. Using cytokine flow cytometry and lymphoproliferation assays, we show that HIV-specific CD4+ T cells from HIV-2-infected individuals maintained proliferative capacity, were not terminally differentiated (CD57-), and more frequently produced IFN-gamma or IL-2 than CD4+ T cells from HIV-1-infected donors. Polyfunctional (IFN-gamma+/IL-2+) HIV-specific CD4+ T cells were found exclusively in HIV-2+ donors. The disparity in CD4+ T cell responses between asymptomatic HIV-1- and HIV-2-infected subjects was not associated with differences in the proliferative capacity of HIV-specific CD8+ T cells. This study demonstrates that HIV-2-infected donors have a well-preserved and functionally heterogeneous HIV-specific memory CD4+ T cell response that is associated with delayed disease progression in the majority of infected people.
J Immunol. 2005 Dec 15;175(12):8415-23.
Functional and phenotypic characterization of CD57+CD4+ T cells and their association with HIV-1-induced T cell dysfunction.
Palmer BE, Blyveis N, Fontenot AP, Wilson CC.
HIV-1 replication is associated with reduced or absent HIV-1-specific CD4+ T cell proliferation and skewing of HIV-1-specific CD4+ T cells toward an IFN-gamma-producing, CCR7- phenotype. The CCR7- T cell population is heterogeneous and can be subdivided based on the expression of CD57. Although CD57 expression on CD8+ T cells is associated with proliferation incompetence and replicative senescence, less is known about the function of CD57-expressing CD4+ T cells. In this study, the frequency, phenotype, and function of CD57+CD4+ T cells were evaluated in 25 HIV-1-infected subjects and 10 seronegative controls. CD57+CD4+ T cells were found to be proliferation incompetent, even after strong mitogen stimulation. Percentages of CD4+ T cells that expressed CD57 were significantly higher in untreated HIV-1-infected subjects than in HIV-1-seronegative donors, and CD57 expression did not normalize in subjects receiving at least 6 mo of effective antiretroviral therapy. CD57 was predominately expressed on the CCR7- fraction of the CD4+ T cell compartment and accounted for the majority of cells in the CCR7-CD45RA+ population from untreated HIV-1-infected subjects. HIV-1-specific CD4+ T cells producing only IFN-gamma had the highest expression of CD57, whereas few cells producing IL-2 alone expressed CD57. These findings further define a novel population of proliferation-incompetent CD4+ T cells that are generated in the presence of chronic Ag exposure. A better understanding of the generation and persistence of CD57+ T cells in HIV-1 infection could provide important insights into the immunopathogenesis of this disease.
Immunol Lett. 2005 Feb 15;97(1):19-29.
Significance of senescence for virus-specific memory T cell responses: rapid ageing during chronic stimulation of the immune system.
van Baarle D, Tsegaye A, Miedema F, Akbar A.
There is a generalized age-related decline in immune responses which leads to increased susceptibility of elderly to infection and, possibly, to autoimmune disease and cancer. This is associated with phenotypic changes of CD8+ T lymphocytes that include the loss of costimulatory molecules CD28 and CD27, which are important for proliferation and cell survival of CD8+ T cells. Loss of these molecules is associated with less ability to respond to recurrent infection. Functional changes within T cells during ageing include a reduction in the number of naive T cells and a progressively limited T cell repertoire. Furthermore, persistent life-long antigenic stress upon the memory pool leads to telomere erosion and concomittant loss of proliferative capacity, a phenomenon known as replicative senesence. In this review, we discuss that replicative senescence, or clonal exhaustion, may also occur in relatively young individuals, as evidenced from HIV-infected individuals and healthy Ethiopians. We discuss data suggesting that T cell defects may arise in individuals because of chronic antigen activation leading to rapid ageing of the memory CD8+ T cell pool.
Curr HIV Res. 2003 Apr;1(2):153-65.
Replicative senescence: the final stage of memory T cell differentiation?
Effros RB.
One of the major obstacles to effective prolonged CD8 T cell control over HIV and other latent infections may be the intrinsic, genetically programmed barrier to unlimited proliferation that is characteristic of all normal human somatic cells. Replicative senescence, characterized extensively in cell culture for a variety of cell types, comprises both irreversible cell cycle arrest and striking changes in function. CD8 T cells with features similar to senescent CD8 T cell cultures (i.e., absence of CD28, inability to proliferate, telomeres in the 5-7 kb range, resistance to apoptosis) increase progressively during aging and in chronic HIV infection, suggesting that replicative senescence may be occurring in vivo, and, in fact, may constitute the final stage in the normal differentiation of human T cells. CD8 T cells with characteristics suggestive of senescence have also been implicated in modulating immune function and altering bone homeostasis. Further characterization of the underlying mechanism leading to the generation of senescent memory CD8 T cells and analysis of their functional attributes will help elucidate their role in HIV disease pathogenesis.
AIDS. 2002 Mar 8;16(4):519-29.
CTLA-4 upregulation during HIV infection: association with anergy and possible target for therapeutic intervention.
Leng Q, Bentwich Z, Magen E, Kalinkovich A, Borkow G.
OBJECTIVE: To study the role of cytotoxic T-lymphocyte-associated antigen 4 (CTLA-4) during HIV infection. METHODS: Intracellular CTLA-4 expression, determined by flow-cytometry, and proliferative responses to HIV antigens, were studied in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) from 93 HIV-1-infected [HIV(+)] patients and 40 HIV-1 seronegative controls. RESULTS: The proportions of CTLA-4 expressing CD4+ T cells were: (1) significantly higher in HIV(+) patients, 10.95 +/- 0.66%, than in controls, 6 +/- 0.45% (P less than 0.0001); (2) inversely correlated to CD4+ counts (r = -0.67, P less than 0.005, n = 16, drug-naive patients; r = -0.57, P less than 0.0001, n = 77, HAART-treated patients); and (3) positively correlated to proportion of activated (HLA-DR+CD3+) (r = 0.53, P less than 0.0001) and memory (CD45RO+CD4+) T cells (r = 0.46, P less than 0.001). CD28 median fluorescence intensity in CTLA-4- cells was twice that in CTLA-4+ cells (140 +/- 5.3 versus 70 +/- 2.28, P less than 0.00001), whereas cells low in CD28 and CD4, expressed more CTLA-4 (P less than 0.0001). Higher proportion of CTLA-4+CD4+ cells expressed CCR5 and Ki-67, in comparison with CTLA-4-CD4+ cells, (65 +/- 11.9 and 25 +/- 7.5% versus 27 +/- 8.9 and 3.7 +/- 2%, P less than 0.0001 and P less than 0.01, respectively). Among HAART-treated patients, with viral load below detectable levels, CD4+ cells increase was inversely correlated to %CTLA-4+CD4+ cells (r = -0.5, P = 0.003, n = 39). Proliferation of PBMC to anti-CD3, gp-120 depleted HIV-1 antigen or HIV-1 p24 stimulation was inversely correlated with CTLA-4 levels (r = -0.68, P = 0.0035; r = -0.38,P = 0.04; and r = -0.43, P = 0.028, respectively). CONCLUSIONS: (1) CTLA-4 is upregulated during HIV infection and may therefore account for CD4 T-cell decline and anergy in HIV-1 infection. (2) Increased levels of CTLA-4 may undermine immune responses and in the HAART-treated patient-immune reconstitution. (3) Blocking of CTLA-4 may offer a novel approach for immune-based therapy in HIV infection.
I only posted it in response to Claus's question about whether anyone had mathematically modeled the effects of accumulating T cell dysfunction in HIV infection; he was trying to take a dig about the Yates paper so I thought it might be bleakly humorous to cite the same study back at him (guessing, correctly, that he hadn't read it).
Jefferys, you piece of shit liar, DT assumes that somebody whom he calls 'troll' hasn't read the two-paragraph science fiction addendum to the Yates et al. study which somebody calling him/herself 'Epidemiology-LISA' brought up. And by that you dare accuse me of not having read it... Is that how you do science, chump, by association?
You linked the Yates et al. science garbage as a bleak indeed attempt at humour. Very well, keep it at that, clown.
You could create a model that precisely predicts the immunological perturbations that occur in progressive HIV infection and the assumptions that went into it could still turn out to be wrong
Why don't you create a model based on the right or wrong assumptions as you please then, and see if it passes peer-review and the test of time. Bluff!
You're a real scientist, you've got all of AIDStruth behind you. I'm but a homophobic kickboxer, according to Adele, is this all you can do?
Now state for the gallery and posterior (bleak humour intended) that you're behind Ho. After all, Ho was standing on the shoulders of 20 years of sterling HIV research. How could he be wrong and still in business?
So those obligatory attempts aren't so obligatory after all. Ho's model assumed that CD4 T cell proliferation in HIV infection was a homeostatic response to direct killing and that CD4 T cell loss from the blood directly reflected total body losses. He was wrong on both counts, as was suggested immediately in letters to Nature by immunologists Jonathan Sprent, David Tough and Don Mosier and later confirmed by published data on immune activation and T cell turnover in HIV infection. I'm not a scientist by any means, Claus, but I do try my best to keep up with the scientific literature.
Dear Richard Jefferys,
It warms my heart to see you adopt a firm stance.
I think your next logical step as a tax payer and as a conscientious human being, in that order, would be to campaign on AIDStruth to get David et al., et peer-reviewers fired for wasting what is ultimately public funds. I don't know if it could rival in importance and public interest an anecdotal story about Duesberg seeming to,
"delight in humiliating people, including visiting scientists who gave lectures at Berkeley. When the lights dimmed and the projector was turned on, Peter always moved close to the projector light beam so he could make hand puppets that projected on the screen. The students laughed, but the lecturers and most faculty members hated him." http://aidstruth.org/stephen-martin-on-duesberg.php
Hard to beat, Jefferys, but you could try and try just a little bit harder. BTW what's your role on that popular site? Quality control? Ombudsman? Please tell us; it's in the interest of your 200 readers worldwide.
Jefferies, get a grip man, Yates makes the fourth mathemetician to debunk HIV=AIDS.
Pope, the site has only 150 readers worldwide, and 125 of them are the rethinkers checking daily to see what trash they have recently put up that we can tear apart.
Poor Jefferies and Moore.
Barnesworld still has many times more traffic than AIDS-un-TRUTH, according to the Alexa website ratings. In spite of nothing even being posted there for two months!
Dear Omniscient All-Knowing Mr. Jefferies,
You should have been a scientist!
"A goodly number of scientists are narrow-minded, dull and stupid." - James Watson
"We're not laughing at AIDS, we're laughing at you." - Kary Mullis
Does Yates think he is debunking HIV=AIDS? Or is that only your own personal spin?
Attempting to use theoretical mathematics to "debunk" the relationship between HIV and AIDS is a bizarre stroke of genius (or delusion). Something only a theoretical mathematician would think of?
I can imagine the Denialists in Robert Koch's time demanding the mathematical model for the pathogenesis of the tubercle bacillus.
How many times has the understanding of the pathogenesis of TB been overturned in history? Has that meant "debunking" the bacillus as the aetiological agent behind TB?
With the Denialists using multiple sockpuppets it is impossible to determine how many of *you* there are.
It is impossible to determine who comes back under a different pseudonym with the same refuted argument time and time again.
I can't help thinking that this is the intention.
Dr. Noble, the idea with the pseudonyms, apart from trying to avoid having some AIDstruth lunatic call up one's employer and demand a cease and desist order be issued, is to keep you guys on topic. If you think you're dealing with Godscalk it's all about gravity, if Dach it's about some alleged mistake made on another thread, if Claus it's kickboxing, if Maniotis it's an alleged misquotation made 2 weeks ago we have to deal with over and over etc.
Those who use different pseudonyms to spice things up a bit don't pretend they are new commenters. There's no real doubt in your mind I hope that Mr. Wow, Mr. If you want to see a troll go look in the mirror, Mr. hehehehehehe, and Mr. hahahahahDavidhohohoho are one and the same person and that that person is not Pope (whom Jefferys in his aidstruth driven inquisitory obsession with discovering the identities of denialistst has decided is identitcal with Claus Jensen)
I do want to apologize for the unnecessarily strong language in the first line of your quote though.
I can understand how being caught out in such an obvious manner might annoy someone enough to make one resort to intemperate language.
I can also see the logic of the "multiple sockpuppet" strategy. It must be tiresome for any regular rethinkers here to be continually called to account about questions they have left unanswered and for their previous misquotes. Quite clever for Maniotis, Dach, Godschalk, Claus et al to think of this. Bit puzzling as to how they all thought of this strategy at exactly the same time though.
If you want to address the core discussion in the thread, perhaps you could discuss Richard's posts about upregulation of PD-1 expression and activation of T cells.
Barnesworld still has many times more traffic than AIDS-un-TRUTH, according to the Alexa website ratings. In spite of nothing even being posted there for two months!
Neat how the numbers game comes up so selectively. But the comparison's not too good. Also too bad the denialist didn't read the Alexa website where they say
Traffic Rankings of 100,000+ should be regarded as not reliable because the amount of data we receive is not statistically significant.
So the only people who really know what websites like barnesworld and aidstruth are getting are the webmasters.
If denialists want to compare anyway barnesworld's like the main denialist website with higher rankings then any other one. It's one week average is 883,507 ranking on Alexa. It's been going down since February. Three month is 265,000. Trend maybe but again not significant by Alexa.
contrast this, Aidstruth isn't the main website for HIV info it's got a focus on denialism. There are alot with higher rankings. Including above 100,000 and those rankings ARE significant by Alexa.
Look at thebody with steady ranking 30,000. One website out of hundreds with this same message.
Oh and then speaking of science there's pubmed on ncbi thats like 300. Not 300,000, three hundred!
Denialists play the numbers and lose. Again.
Robster,
You repeatedly said in this thread:
"If you 'denialists' want to be taken seriously, you need a serious hypothesis. You don't have one".
We don't need a hypothesis, when we have facts, such as EVERY GROUP OF AIDS CASES ALWAYS INVOLVES COMBINATIONS OF NUTRITIONAL DEFICIENCIES, OR DRUG ABUSE, OR DRUG TOXICITIES, CELLULAR BREAKDOWN AND STRESS!
Perhaps you could be the very first in the world to show us ANY AIDS COHORT that does not FIT THESE FACTS?
Robster, you also said:
"Forgot to mention that now that we have since found many retroviruses from other species, and that within those species cause syndromes extremely similar to AIDS".
Another lie. Simply more evidence of animals that are stressed and malnourished or suffering with other illnesses whose cellular activity activates RT activity and registers positive for the molecular weights of the proteins in the antibody antigen tests likely due to cellular breakdown and overstimulated immune systems.
Robster, you are not even knowledgeable or bright enough about retroviruses to know what they are, let alone know that every cell in your body and in every human body body has more than 1000 retrovirus sequences as a natural part of your DNA, as does every other animal on the planet.
What do you suppose happens to those sequences during cellular DNA breakdown?
How many of those sequences breaking down at one time might register as a retroviral antibody antigen on the antibody tests?
Never even considered that for a moment, now did yah? Well thats alright, neither did the lenti(slow)virologists!
But robster still drones on about "you guys don't have a hypothesis".
What a Homer! Dohhhhh!
Yet another sockpuppet wrote,
But robster still drones on about "you guys don't have a hypothesis".
That is how science works. You need a better hypothesis to be taken seriously. You have to be able to explain the data better than the current one. You don't have one.
We don't need a hypothesis, when we have facts, such as EVERY GROUP OF AIDS CASES ALWAYS INVOLVES COMBINATIONS OF NUTRITIONAL DEFICIENCIES, OR DRUG ABUSE, OR DRUG TOXICITIES, CELLULAR BREAKDOWN AND STRESS!
Wheee! Caps lock! Many AIDS cases include these factors, but not all of them. What they do all include is HIV. If you have all these "facts," then you should be able to develop a hypothesis. Thing is, the nutrition, drug abuse, toxicities, hypotheses are old and failed to explain the evidence as well as HIV. Many disease states cause stress on the body, but only HIV causes AIDS, so this one doesn't even get off the starting block. If you can demonstrate that cellular breakdown is a cause of AIDS and not a result of HIV and OIs, you might have something interesting, but since such processes are ongoing in all individuals, healthy or ill, but AIDS only occurs in HIV infected individuals, this one won't lead anywhere either.
C'mon. Think back to high school. You start with observations, develop a hypothesis, test it, and confirm, adapt or reject. If another hypothesis works better, you need to improve yours to better fit the data or move on.
Regarding retroviruses from other species...
Another lie. Simply more evidence of animals that are stressed and malnourished or suffering with other illnesses whose cellular activity activates RT activity and registers positive for the molecular weights of the proteins in the antibody antigen tests likely due to cellular breakdown and overstimulated immune systems.
Animal experiment data is based on very solid controls. The animals are well fed, maintained under careful veterinary care, treated exactly the same regardless of which treatment they receive. The groups receiving retrovirus, but not a sham injection or the inactivated virus or replication deficient virus develop an AIDS like syndrome.
Robster, you are not even knowledgeable or bright enough about retroviruses to know what they are, let alone know that every cell in your body and in every human body body has more than 1000 retrovirus sequences as a natural part of your DNA, as does every other animal on the planet.
And the endogenous, inactive, dead retroviruses have different sequences from HIV. We all have these dead retroviruses, but AIDS patients have HIV, and the presence of HIV almost perfectly predicts progression to HIV.
What do you suppose happens to those sequences during cellular DNA breakdown?
How many of those sequences breaking down at one time might register as a retroviral antibody antigen on the antibody tests?
So I'm the one that doesn't understand viruses? Heh. Those DNA sequences don't become antigens. Proteins can be antigens, not DNA. And in case you just posted without proofreading, so you could get your ever so clever Simpsons reference in, their different DNA sequence would prevent them from showing up on PCR as HIV RT.
So... Where is that hypothesis? Without one, you don't have anything.
How many times has the understanding of the pathogenesis of TB been overturned in history? Has that meant "debunking" the bacillus as the aetiological agent behind TB? -- Chris Noble
Here we go again...Chris Noble and Richard Jefferies attempting to employ another dubious comparison to direct attention from HIV's flimsy connection to AIDS. Unbelievable.
With TB, the symptoms were uniform, and the treatments were clearly effective, i.e. the patients actually recovered and were not deformed in the process! Furthermore, unlike TB, your predictions about the pathogenesis HIV have endured constant and radical revisions BECAUSE the clinical presentation of the disease has not corroborated the studies yielding those aforementioned predictions. (Read that line again, pricks) As has been pointed out numerous times, the ridiculous and near-constant back-peddling by "HIV scientists" is clear proof that the climate producing these studies is not healthy; therefore, the studies themselves are not reliable. I think we've found your "sockpuppets", Adele. After all, it seems far more logical to me to apply that term to the litany of HIV apologists who have denied the clear results of their studies due to obvious political pressures from the AIDS orthodoxy, i.e. Rodriguez, Padian, etc... Don't you agree, Adele?
Of course, I understand why hacks like you, Mr. Noble, and you, Mr. Jefferies, need desperately to believe that such extensive revisions have come about because our understanding of the pathogenesis has improved, but the clinical picture continues to move further and further from the HIV explanation. The fact is the assumed pathogenesis HIV is as much a mystery today as it was in 1984. That's not progress. In addition, it is clear that the ever-expanding definition of HIV/AIDS is a pathetic attempt to buy a little more time without explaining the pathogenesis. Good luck with that. The public is finally waking up and, for all intents and purposes, the ruse is up.
I haven't even begun to discuss the radically different political climates in which TB and HIV/AIDS have evolved, respectively. Without such an analysis, any comparison between the two is woefully incomplete. The effects of the corruption and of the obvious conflicts of interests within human health today are revealed daily--whether it's the Bush administration's muzzling of the the Surgeon General, or CNN and it's attack on Michael Moore, or the FDA being exposed as clearly negligent by approving numerous dangerous drugs for mass consumption (Avandia, Vioxx...). All of this is readily available for the public to ponder, Mr Jefferies. Yet, you'd have readers believe that such corruption is irrelevant? Screw you. The corruption is so extensive that even the highly-corporatized media can no longer deny it. And you wish to label me a "troll"--all for demanding that accountability be returned to public institutions? Well, I much rather be a troll than a pussy-footed sycophant, like you.
Kevin
Earlier in this thread, the mealy-mouthed Robster opined:
Robster certainly professes to be interested in ethics an awful lot, yet, he doesn't seem to be at all concerned with the very real conflicts of interests inherent to HIV science. With that in mind, I offer up the following word problem, which will demonstrate that honesty and responsibility are far more likely to be absent within the ranks of the orhtodoxy than amongst denialist:
__________________________
Let's look at the "denialist" example first...
Fact #1:
Fact #2
_______
How strange! According to Robster's logic, Dr. Rasnick is undoubtedly an unethical scientist because he is a dissident. However, according to my logic, Dr. Rasnick would certainly stand to gain a lot more, both financially and professionally, if he just kept his mouth shut, like all the rest. After all, if HIV doesn't cause AIDS, Dr. Rasnick is more than likely out of a job. If anything, it seems that Dr. Rasnick's sense of ethical responsibility is exceptional. Could it be that Robster's faith-based absolutism be so glaringly false?
We're only halfway done with this word problem...
________________________________
Let's look at an example from the "other side"...
Fact #1:
Fact #2:
_________
Interesting! According to Robster's logic, Dr. Wainberg is exercising his professional responsibility; yet, it is clear that he is substantially benefitting, both financially and professionally, from the continuation of the status quo. Not only has he suggested that HIV dissidents should be criminally prosecuted for simply speaking their opinions, but he obviously doesn't want his personal goldmine (his ARV patent) to go away, even if it means cheaper "life-saving" medications for the developing world. Interesting, indeed. I guess Dr. Wainberg cares less about the life-saving part of the equation the he does about maximizing his personal wealth gains. Is that what you mean by ethical responsibility, Robster?
________________________________________________
According to my logic, it doesn't take a retrovirologist to figure out who is engaging in unethical practices, and it certainly isn't Dr. Rasnick. There are many more examples besides these two. I realize that you aren't capable of appreciating "fresh" analysis, Robster, unless it has been peer-reviewed by the appropriate pencil-pushers, but you really should give critical thinking a try. It's not that hard, and it just might open up a whole new world for you, where you will actually be able to discern pseudoscience from justified criticism.
As for Mr. Jefferies, perhaps, he'd like to be the feature in our next "word problem"; He obviously has significant skin in the game. What say you, Mr. Jefferies...what's your connection to HIV/AIDS and which denialist would you prefer to be evaluated against?
Kevin
ps
Denialists play the numbers and lose. Again. -- Adele
Perhaps, you're just looking at the wrong numbers, Adele....follow the money.
Hey Robster the "you don't have a hypothesis" Drone. You said:
"Wheee! Caps lock! Many AIDS cases include these factors, but not all of them".
Nobody said "ALL" shit for brains. I said there is NO GROUP of AIDS cases that do not have these commonalities. Is there some part of the word "group" that you do not understand?
Can you show us a "group" where less than 95% did not fit the categories I listed? No, you cannot. Therefore, I don't need a hypothesis, Mr. Drone, when I have facts.
Just because you and the rest of the AIDS pushers all choose to ignore facts, does not make them any less of a fact.
Until you show us some proof of any group where more than 5% do not fit the categories I listed, you and the rest of the AIDS pushers are all f'ing liars!
But everyone here already knows that, so go suck some AZT! I am sure DT and Richard Jefferies can get you and the rest of the drones a good deal on buying it in bulk!
Robster the drone says: "Those DNA sequences don't become antigens. Proteins can be antigens, not DNA".
Are you on dope? Nobody said they become antigens gonads for brains!
The implication was that various antigens are created in response to cellular dna breakdown in order to clear the body of these fragments for any that are in the bloodstream.
Hey Robster the lenti-drone. News Item on Seed Magazine:
The Theory on how HIV attacks is WRONG!!!
http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2007/06/theory_of_how_hiv_attacks_is_w…
Dohhhhhhhhhhh!
I don't think Rasnick would know a protease inhibitor if it bit him in the ass. How many decades agos did he work in that lab again?
Last I heard he was flogging vitamins as an AIDS cure in South Africa with his mate Mathius Rath.
Now there's a conflict of interest for you - claim the HIV drugs are all poison, so people come flocking for your vitamin shots!
Hey shitforbrains.
I agree 100 percent! You certainly are.
Interview with David Rasnick, a real scientist.
http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/data/mcinterviewdr.htm
Excerpt:
Protease expert Dr. David Rasnick takes on the HIV/AIDS myth and the protease inhibitor hype.
Virtually no one who isn't a biochemist directly involved in research on protease enzymes and the pharmaceuticals that inhibit them has ever heard of the Gordon Conferences on Proteolytic Enzymes, held every other year in New Hampshire. But the 1994 Gordon Conference featured a presentation on a topic that two years later would become the hottest AIDS story worldwide: the use of protease inhibitors to control the alleged "AIDS virus," HIV.
British researcher John Kay presented the results of a clinical trial in which 400 people with AIDS were given two grams a day of a protease inhibitor made by Hoffmann-LaRoche called Ro 31-8959 (now being sold under the generic name saquinavir and the trade name Invirase). After 18 months of this regimen, the patients who received the protease inhibitor showed no clinical improvement whatsoever over the study's control group. Kay asserted that the reason for these disappointing results was that the patients on the inhibitor initially improved, but subsequently their HIV evolved resistance to the inhibitor. He also announced that Roche was imposing a blackout on further discussion of these results because they were so disappointing, and to this day the study has not been published in the scientific press.
David Rasnick, Ph.D. -- a man who had been working on proteases his entire professional life, ever since he won his Ph.D. from Georgia Tech in 1978 for studying them - challenged the blithe assertion that mutations in HIV were responsible for the long-term failure of the protease inhibitor. He noted that there are eight different places -- "substrates," they're called in science -- where proteases are needed in the reproductive cycle of HIV.
To help produce a new HIV particle, the proteases have to cut apart eight bonds between nine different proteins in the right sequence and at the right time. Dr. Rasnick pointed out that, according to the literature produced by the manufacturers of HIV protease inhibitors, even the mutations that successfully blocked inhibition of one of those protease cycles had little or no effect on the other seven -- and even if a mutation occurred that successfully blocked inhibition of all eight sites, he doubted that the result would be a functional virus that could infect anything.
"I went on to propose that the HIV protease inhibitors were performing as designed -- blocking HIV production -- without being undermined by the emergence of drug-resistant mutant strains," Dr. Rasnick recalled in an article in the August 1996 issue of the newsletter Reappraising AIDS. "The reason that these drugs did not alleviate AIDS is that HIV is not the cause of AIDS. During private discussions, none of my colleagues found any flaws with my reasoning and even thought it was right. I left the meeting thinking that these fellows would continue the analysis where I left off. Well, that, of course, didn't happen. The HIV protease mutation hypothesis has become more entrenched with time."
Two years after the Gordon Conference debacle, HIV protease inhibitors have become a worldwide growth industry. According to Cameron Lee of ACT UP Golden Gate, the Merck drug company is currently building two entire factories just to manufacture its protease inhibitor, Crixivan (indinavir). Abbott Laboratories, manufacturer of the protease inhibitor Norvir (ritonavir) - which Dr. Rasnick claims is even more potentially toxic than the other two - made $10 million profit off Norvir the first three weeks it was on the market. To get around the alleged "mutation" problem that rendered the protease inhibitors clinically useless when they were tested on their own, doctors are being told to prescribe them as "combination therapies" with the nucleoside analogue drugs, such as AZT, that have their own major toxicities and also do little or nothing to lengthen the lives or improve the clinical health of the people taking them.
While Dr. Rasnick has had reasonable doubts about whether HIV could cause AIDS for years, the hype surrounding the protease inhibitors appears to have pushed him out of the scientific closet and led him to "come out" as an AIDS dissident. In this interview, he discusses the potential toxicities of the protease inhibitors, explains why he thinks they will be useless in fighting AIDS, and vividly describes the fear, intimidation, and terror that operate at all levels of AIDS, including among the scientists themselves, to prevent rational discussion of alternatives to the HIV/AIDS model and the use of highly toxic chemotherapies as Western medicine's standard treatments for AIDS.
Keep us on topic?
What was the topic of this thread? The Denialists hijack these threads and then lead into discussions of crank ideas about biological weapon programs that turn mycoplasma incognitus into a killer pathogen by adding HIV ENV or the dangers of Hepatitis B and HPV vaccines etc.
The people responding to the Denialists have attempted to keep the discussion on solid footing by keeping track of which Denialist has said what. The pseudonyms is an obvious attempt to never having to admit being wrong.
Take the example of the "Sonny Lester" pseudonym that was used once, made a stupid comment, and never reappeared again. The beauty of sock-puppets is never having to dmit to being wrong.
It seems likely that they aren't new commenters because they bring up exactly the same long refuted pseudoarguments.
Real scientists admit when they make mistakes.
Rasnick has been claiming that protease-inhibitor resistant mutations are impossible since before the 1998 interview that you cite. His arguments for the impossibility of these PI resistant mutations are uncanniloy similar to Creationist arguments against evolution.
However, since this time the evidence that these mutations do occur has become so overwhelming that only a Denialist could deny them.
Citing the interview from 1998 and neglecting to mention the past decade of scientific literature is nothing other than dishonest.
You can even go to AIDS reagent prgrams and order panels of infectious molecular clones of HIV with the various PI resistant mutations.
Maniotis was caught with several false quotations. That the various Denialists defend Maniotis is a good indication of their method of determining good science form bad. If some one agrees with the Denialists then he is a good scientist if he doesnt he's a pharma shill or stupid.
One of Maniotis's misquotations was invented whole cloth. He took it from a web post by a "Robert Gallo" that just happens to work at the same university as Maniotis. Coincidence?
Lets make this clear. Maniotis writes a bizarre interpretation of a paper on the internet. He then copies his own barely literate scrawlings and falsely attributes them to authors of a different study. He then produces this citation as evidence.
Add this to the fact that Maniotis has no research of his own to support his views. His entire project is the misinterpretation of the literature.
Maniotis can't be honest enough to admit to these mistakes. He can't admit that he is incapable of reading and understanding the DAIDS virology manual.
Denialists in general do not admit to making mistakes.
Don't try to avoid dealing with these mistakes.
Of course, that make much more sense - Not!
If you are going to make up a hypothesis at least make it plausible.
This blog sucks!
Denialists in general do not admit to making mistakes.
Ohhhhh, I see. Chris Noble and the other AIDS drug pushers are the ones who admit to mistakes. Yeah right! Show me where you ever admitted to any of your countless mistakes errors, misleading comments, or plain old tired bull!
Chris. You, as always, are full of shit, and you constantly ignore answering any question that portray you as the fool of shit bullshitter that you are.
By the way Chris, News Item on Seed Magazine:
The Theory on how HIV attacks is WRONG!!!
http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2007/06/theory_of_how_hiv_attacks_is_w…
Oh, Chris, I apologise. I didn't realize you were talking about yourself when you said "Denialists in general do not admit to making mistakes".
I agree with your statement wholeheartedly. You and your fellow AIDS Advocating Reality denialists generally do not admit to making mistakes.
I'm tired of the sockpuppetting. I'm closing this down, and next time, Michael, pick one alias and stick with it. I don't care if you're lincoln or granny or whatever you choose, but a new name for every response is both childish and annoying.