HIV infection theory challenged
HIV attacks human immune cells, called T helper cells. Loss of these cells is gradual, often taking many years.
It was thought infected cells produced more HIV particles and that this caused the body to activate more T cells which in turn were infected and died.
Imperial College London modelling suggests that, if that was true, cells would die out in months not years.
The Imperial findings have been published in journal PLoS Medicine... (The article continues)
Some time ago, when I was reading medical journals for a living, including AIDS Weekly, I happened to become party to what is considered the starkest, most outrageous heresy anyone in the AIDS community could possibly embrace: I read Dr. Peter Duesberg's book, Inventing the AIDS Virus, (Regnery Press, 1996) and thought -- and said -- about Dr. Duesberg's contention that HIV does NOT cause AIDS -- "You know, he doesn't sound crazy at all." Dr.Duesberg's claim was based on the fact that there had never been a proof that HIV WAS the cause of AIDS, only an assertion made by Dr. Robert Gallo -- never tested -- but one that was embraced and repeated by everyone in the medical community and the media. Dr. Duesberg has posited that since thousand of people with AIDS do NOT have an HIV infection, while thousands of people with HIV infection never develop AIDS, it might be a chemically-induced syndrome.*
But that and his rather wry observation that after Dr. Jonas Salk's development of immunization from polio by injection of killed polio virus, virologists were looking for a major cause celebre from which to hang their grant proposals, caused a furor and he was exiled to the outer darkness, considered as much a pariah and a madman as Ignatz Semmelweis whose insistence that doctors wash their hands after handling corpses and before putting those hands inside a woman's genitalia would prevent puerperal fever landed him in a looney bin, where, at age 42, he died, generally thought to have been beaten to death by guards who were tired of him saying he wasn't crazy.**
Dr. Duesberg wasn't imprisoned, merely denounced worldwide by the medical community as a lunatic (and a dangerous one at that) and shunned by anyone in that community who wasn't asking for some of the same treatment.
Before his outrageous position, which he based on looking at a total lack of evidence for the general assertion that there was such a thing as an HIV virus and that it caused Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, Dr. Duesberg was considered one of the most brilliant virologists in the world and thought to be, by many, the hot contender for an ultimate Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology.
Reading Dr. Cary Mullis' autobiography Dancing Naked in the Mind Field convinced me even more that I was not hallucinating. Dr Mullis, who DID win (half of) the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993 for his development of the PCR method of chemical analysis (but writes about it in such an engagingly modest manner, as if completely amused by the idea) is serious about one thing -- defending Dr. Duesberg's intelligence and integrity.
So when Thabo Mbeki, President of South Africa, stated, prior to the gathering in Durban for the 13th AIDS Conference in July of 2000, that with all those scientists gathered in one place, it might be a wonderful opportunity to find out if HIV actually WAS the cause of AIDS.
To emphasize: He was ASKING if it would be possible for this question to be discussed. Right. Welcome to Semmelweis world, Mr. President. He was not denying anything, except, as it turned out, the willingness of scientists to ask questions about generally-held truths. (Kary Mullis, in his autobiography says that the only reason anyone would want to be a scientist is because that person WANTS to ask questions and question conclusions.)
Immediately after Mbeki's statement, AIDS Weekly changed they way the spoke of research -- apparently as a matter of policy. Instead of continuing to say things such as "The HIV virus was seen to ..." every article said such things this way: "The HIV Virus (which causes AIDS) was seen to..." Even I, a layman who knew how to read medical jargon, was aware this was nothing more than a propaganda campaign to shut down anyone who doubted the Holy Grail of virology - HIV. (Or as Dr. Duesberg might put it, the gold mine of virology.)
So it's nice to see an admission of even a tiny crack in the absolute assertion that the virologists know everything there is to know about a disease they admit they really don't know nearly enough about.
Dr. Duesberg is a relatively young and healthy man.
Let's hope he lives long enough to watch the embarrassed faces of the medical community as they admit publicly -- as the science community ultimately had to do to Immanuel Velikovsky on his Worlds in Collision thesis, and the medical community had to do to the Australian pathologists Robin Warren and Barry Marshall on their contention that Helicobacter pylori caused peptic ulcers: "Sorry, we were wrong and you were right."***
(Maybe he isn't right, maybe neither of them are right, but they -- the attacking members of the medical-pharmaceutical-virological community -- were wrong wrong wrong.
Public relations people act the way they did.
Not doctors and scientists.
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ADDITIONAL LINKS TO the HIV Virus Myth and Dr. Kary Mullis:
What Causes Aids? (1994)
Dissenting on AIDS (1994)
Foreward to "Inventing the AIDS Virus (1996)
The Medical Establishment vs. the Truth (1998)
Interview with Dr Mullis (1994)
The Home Page of Virus Myth
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*To be clear -- I don't know enough science to know if Dr. Duesberg is right. But I know enough language to recognize insanity and bullshit when I see it, and Dr. Duesberg's writings are neither (unlike some of the above-mentioned statements in opposition to him or President Mbeki). Dr. Duesberg's writing are logical, reasoned, and informed, presenting relevant cases of death and disease perpetuated by absolute ignorant faith in incorrect medical conclusions from recent and less recent history and making a good case for this being another such.
I also know enough about the business world -- we ALL do -- to know that even suggesting the possibility that chemicals introduced into our societies for profit were the culprits would be anathema and an overwhelmingly urgent reason to set the character-assassination machinery and the public relations hitmen in action .
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** Dr. Joseph Lister, an English Quaker, presented the same theory some years later while working in the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, noting his own success at treating wounds and surgical instruments with carbolic acid. But he had married well, into the upper class, and had left the always-suspect Quakers to become an Episcopalian -- his wife's religion -- so the authorities were slower to lock him away, and he stayed free long enough to demonstrate results from his campaign for disinfection of hands and tools between patients. Instead of being beaten to death by sadistic guards, he was made a baron.
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*** Of course, denial of Dr. Velikovsky's theories didn't actually endanger lives, although the heavily-financed embrace of "Stop the Killer Comet" government programs might have helped acceptance along. In the case of Helicobacter pylori, simple repeatable tests proved the theory and family physicians enthusiastically supported the idea of actually being able to stop the suffering of their patients. Where HIV/AIDS are concerned, admitting a stubborn refusal to allow for a possibility of saving thousands and thousands of people from a hideous slow death, while reaping HUGE financial rewards, might be more difficult to obtain.
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posted by Saintperle at
6:25 PM
