AIDS/HIV
tsmith | August 16, 2007A reader pointed this out to me awhile back, and it's just too absurd not to mention. You may or may not be familiar with Gary Null. He's a self-proclaimed "natural living" guru, and the writer/director of the recent HIV denial documentary, AIDS Inc.:
AIDS, Inc. is a film about the multi-billion dollar AIDS industry, and how it profits from continuing fears and misconceptions about the disease....Could it be that after so many years of research, and so much money being spent, that the entire orthodox medical establishment has been wrong about AIDS, or even worse, has sought to profit on a…
tsmith | August 13, 2007There have been some interesting updates in the field of HIV politics and denial recently. First, after having several months of moving forward with a real plan to combat AIDS in South Africa, the deputy minister of health, Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, has been fired. For those who follow this area, Madlala-Routledge stepped into the limelight when she took over for her boss, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, while she had surgery. Tshabalala-Msimang, you may recall, is the one who sided with President Thabo Mbeki regarding causes of AIDS (and cures for it), advocating treatments such as a recipe of…
tsmith | July 27, 2007XDR-TB has been in the news quite a bit lately, largely thanks to Andrew Speaker's notoriety. Even though his TB was later re-classified as "just" multi-drug resistant (MDR-TB) instead of the initial extremely drug resistant (XDR) type, it did serve to raise awareness about the issues public health authorities face when dealing with something like tuberculosis--and where the gaps are in the control of its spread. (Indeed, a breaking story out of Taiwan shows how difficult it can be to enforce a travel ban).
However, while XDR-TB is rather new on the radar of the general public (and even…
tsmith | July 24, 2007
After 8 1/2 years of imprisonment, torture in jail, and a death sentence hanging over their heads, the Tripoli Six (collected links) are back home, and have been granted pardons from the Bulgarian president.
Revere, again, has the details; more at the BBC and New York Times. Many kudos go out to both Revere and Nature reporter Declan Butler for spreading this story out through the blogosphere, and sighs of relief out to the workers themselves and their families and loved ones.
Image from http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/07/24/world/24cnd-libya2.large…
tsmith | July 18, 2007The strange and tragic case of the Tripoli Six, a group of 5 Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor working in Tripoli, Libya, is finally drawing to a close. The six health workers had been found guilty of infecting up to 400 children in the hospital where they worked with HIV, and had previously been sentenced to death--even though the science had shown that the epidemic began prior to the arrival of the workers. This saga has been dragging on for the better part of a decade (Declan Butler at Nature has a very nice story here discussing the various twists and turns along the way), but…
tsmith | July 12, 2007Traveling yet again today (things finally calm down in September, I think). In the meantime, here are a few posts from elsewhere I've been meaning to highlight:
Some more background for those of you who may not be up to speed on HIV/AIDS: AJ Cann explains what we know (and don't know) about how HIV causes AIDS.
Speaking of HIV, ERV has 4 years to come up with an HIV vaccine, and another bad story about science in the media.
David asks if biologists have physics envy. I think I just have other-fields-of-biology envy, and want to do it all.
PZ has a very nice posts explaining the…
tsmith | July 9, 2007Last year, Seed magazine and Scienceblogs noted the 25th anniversary of the recognition of AIDS. You'd think that in all that time, especially with the identification of HIV and all the public education campaigns in the 1980s, people would realize by now that HIV isn't spread by casual contact. You can't get it by sharing drinking glasses, by coughing and sneezing around others, by being in the same swimming pool. However, the message still hasn't gotten out in some areas, it would seem, as a two-year old HIV+ boy was restricted from using the pool and showers at an Alabama campground.…
tsmith | July 4, 2007I 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…
tsmith | July 2, 2007Over at Uncommon Descent, the blog of William Dembski and friends, a contributor has a post up discussing Peter Duesberg's aneuploidy hypothesis for cancer (which Orac discussed here for more background). The post itself is a bit confusing--it's titled "When Darwinism Hurts," and according to the author's clarification, it's about "Darwinism" leading us down the wrong path as far as cancer research goes. (Though whether cancer would be due to mutations in specific genes or in chromosomes, it's still an evolutionary process, but I digress...) To me, anyway, the more interesting portion was…
tsmith | June 29, 2007I don't often provide a lot of background into HIV science or HIV denial, instead referencing previous posts I've made or websites such as AIDStruth.org or the NIAID fact sheet. For those of you who may be looking for more background in a nice, concise format, HealthDot has a 20-minute interview with John Moore and Jeanne Bergman (both who help run AIDStruth.org) regarding the issues of HIV science and HIV denial--including a few minutes on what journalists can do.
tsmith | June 22, 2007While I was out last week, I completely missed this Science article all about HIV denial and the AidsTruth.org website, and features frequent commenter Richard Jeffreys:
For 20 years, a small but vocal group of AIDS "dissenters" has attracted international attention by questioning whether HIV causes the disease. Many AIDS researchers from the outset thought it best to ignore these challenges. But last year, another small and equally vocal group decided to counter the dissenters--whom they call "denialists"--with a feisty Web site, AIDSTruth.org. It has started to attract international…
tsmith | June 13, 2007 Over at The Examining Room of Dr. Charles, the good doc brings up another instance of quackery from an unexpected source: Dr. Henry Heimlich, originator of the Heimlich maneuver for choking. While that procedure has clearly saved many lives, Dr. Heimlich doesn't stop there--he advocates using his maneuver for drowning victims and asthmatics, neither of which have been scientifically proven (and indeed, major medical associations have spoken out against them). Dr. Charles also reveals that Heimlich also carries out other questionable research, including deliberately infecting HIV+…
tsmith | June 11, 2007HIV "dissident" David Crowe is like the gift that just keeps on giving. Last year, I mentioned a paper he'd written in the journal Medical Hypotheses, suggesting that influenza serotype H5N1 doesn't exist. Well, it just keeps getting better. Now, it seems he's writing a book on "the infectious myth"--like previous commenter jspreen, he's going to write about how the germ theory is wrong. Read more about it below...
From Crowe's site:
Most people believe that every disease on the following list has an infectious cause:
* HIV/AIDS
* SARS
* West Nile
* Mad Cow, CJD and other…
tsmith | June 5, 2007Time journalist (and newly minted Nieman fellow in global health) Christine Gorman recently gave a talk at the Global Health Council's annual meeting. Christine discussed topics that get a lot of press--such as HIV/AIDS--and others that occasionally bubble up to the surface, such as malaria and non-infectious global health issues like female genital mutilation. However, she also noted stories that are rare or missing in mainstream health journalism--more on those after the jump.
First, she notes a dearth of stories that "cut across lines, across diseases, across silos." Much like the…
tsmith | May 31, 2007Today is the kids' last day of school, and just happens to be an early dismissal as well, so I'll be busy with them and not tied to the computer this morning/afternoon. However, there are tons of good things to read elsewhere.
First, Orac has a long-awaited update on the Tripoli Six: the group of nurses and doctors accused of killing children in Libya by deliberately infecting them with HIV. The science exonerated them, but that didn't change the court outcome, and I've not seen updates until now.
Next, Revere writes about the H7N2 influenza outbreak in Wales, reminding us (as as I've…
tsmith | May 25, 2007A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, I reviewed the HIV/AIDS chapter in Tom Bethell's book, "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science." I discussed his characterization of AIDS in Africa:
As the chapter title suggests, Bethell claims that AIDS in Africa is a made-up epidemic; AIDS is really due to simple malnutrition and dirty water supplies, rather than a virus. Government officials, scientists, and journalists are either too brainwashed or too scared to speak against the "AIDS orthodoxy." The evil liberals aren't concerned about AIDS because the real concern of the left,…
tsmith | May 17, 2007There were a few comments in the vaccine creation post asking about HIV vaccines. I've not had the time to get back to them yet, but in lieu of my response (and since I'm not 100% up-to-date on all the HIV vaccine literature anyway) I'll offer up a new review from the latest issue of the New England Journal on "HIV Vaccines--Evolving Concepts."
tsmith | April 27, 2007I wrote a post back in February about HIV's "Kitzmiller vs. Dover" trial. The trial was appealing the sentence of one Andre Chad Parenzee, a native of South Africa who'd been convicted in Australia back in 2004 of infecting one woman with HIV (and exposing two others). Parenzee knew of his HIV+ status, telling the women he had cancer instead and not disclosing his infection nor using condoms. In the appeal, the HIV "dissidents" led the way, with Valendar Turner and Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos of the Perth group taking the stand and denying that HIV even existed. Papadopulos-Eleopulos…
tsmith | April 26, 2007As pointed out by Dale in the comments over at Orac's post on Duesberg and aneuploidy, Duesberg and fellow HIV "dissident" David Rasnick are marketing a new cancer detection system, AnuCyte Cancer detection system, based upon his aneuploidy-basis-of-cancer ideas. And guess who else is on the company's Board of Advisors? Our old friend, Harvey Bialy, also a HIV "dissident" and author of a biography on Duesberg: Oncogenes, Aneuploidy, and AIDS. Very interesting....
Now, I don't besmirch anyone's ability to make a profit from their research if that's their angle. Certainly other biomedical…
tsmith | March 24, 2007 Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection is as old as civilization. The bacterium infects approximately a third of the world's population--roughly 2 billion individuals. It's estimated that 8 million new cases are contracted each year--around a new infection every second. ~2 million individuals die as a result of TB every year. The bacterium also plays a prominent role in the history of microbiology: it was on March 24, 1882, that Robert Koch announced his discovery of the causative agent of the dread disease tuberculosis:
"If the importance of a disease for mankind is measured by the…