Aidsgate –August 2

What causes AIDS if not HIV?

SO… IF HIV DOESN’T CAUSE AIDS, WHAT ARE MILLIONS OF PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD DYING OF…

The grim news of the AIDS epidemic is never far from the headlines but what is its cause? Why do we have no vaccine or cure despite the spending of $180 billion over 20 years? Could it be that our health institutions have tried too hard for too long to prove HIV to be its cause when it is not?

Despite the long-standing scientific evidence that suggests AIDS is not caused by HIV, as recounted in the last edition of the Ecologist, the health authorities have long only funded research based on the HIV theory of AIDS. Recently they emphasized this by renaming the epidemic as ‘HIV/AIDS’, a change some thought necessary to counteract the spreading influence via the Internet of the professors and scientists who say AIDS is caused by other factors entirely.

Today the UK Health Protection Agency states it is totally wrong to ‘deny’ HIV, affirming that its role in causing AIDS is totally evident since ‘those who are HIV infected [i.e. those who have a positive HIV Test] are far more likely to become ill or die.’ [1]. It bases its entire treatment of AIDS around the truth of this statement – and even goes further. Its treatment guidelines say the HIV test detects not a greater risk, but an inevitability. If positive, you will get AIDS.

But I found to my surprise that many senior professors and Nobel-Prize winners who say HIV is not the cause of AIDS are not disputing that the ‘HIV Test’ can detect a real risk of AIDS. Instead they cite research that apparently shows this test can detect, not HIV, but causes of AIDS for which there are remedies. If they are right, this would be enormously important, and would bring hope to countless thousands, but surely this was unlikely? At first sight it seemed it would be an utterly unlikely coincidence if they were correct. How could a test devised to detect a virus find instead an entirely different cause for AIDS?

But before I could consider this riddle, there was one thing further thing I needed to do. Before considering what could cause AIDS, I had to look again at the clinical symptoms of AIDS. Even if HIV did not exist, the illness called AIDS did exist. I thus consulted the textbooks and health authorities, hopeful that the clinical definition of AIDS would shed light on whether or not there really could be other reasons for this terrible epidemic.

But I discovered its official definition was far more complex and unusual than I had expected. It had been changed over 4 times in the West, and the international health authorities had given Africa an entirely different AIDS definition and clinical symptoms. I had presumed that an African is diagnosed with AIDS because they had the same symptoms as a Western AIDS patient – and was most surprised to find I was wrong.

THE FIRST DEFINITION OF AIDS – 1981-83.

At first AIDS was defined and diagnosed clinically – by the evident symptoms of the complex of illnesses from which its mostly gay drug-abusing victims suffered. These illnesses became known as ‘AIDS Indicating’. Under this definition, most patients had several of these illnesses and did not live a year after diagnosis.

The principal cause of death was a pneumonia (PCP) caused by a fungus that harmlessly lives in some 80% of humans, that had suddenly gone out of control and become a killer. The only time such an large-scale outbreak had been previously recorded in the West was among severely malnourished European children at the end of the Second World War – and likewise among such children in Africa. The victims also commonly had Candida or Thrush, another fungal infection found in most humans – but again out of control, causing not the common mild infection, but a gross growth that blocked the mouth and throat; and also a skin cancer called Kaposi Sarcoma. [2]

On top of these, most victims suffered from multiple sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) - syphilis and gonorrhoea of the penis, the mouth, the anus as well as Herpes, Hepatitis B and tuberculosis (TB).

When a newly invented test was used in 1981 to try to measure the strength of the immune system of the victims by counting how many CD4 Helper T-Cells they had in a ml. of their blood, they were found to have low numbers. This was thought to indicate an immune system in difficulty – but this symptom was not unique to these cases of illness. Similar results were coming from testing the victims of other illnesses – and from testing those suffering from severe drug abuse.

THE 1984 REDEFINITION OF AIDS.

The first major redefinition of AIDS occurred in 1984, after HIV was declared its cause. To the above list of ‘AIDS-defining illnesses’ the presence of the virus was added as an AIDS defining condition, as detected with another new test, today’s ‘HIV Test’. From now on this test would play a key role in diagnosing ‘AIDS cases.’ As the virus itself was near impossible to locate in patients according to US health authorities, this test was designed to find instead the antibodies said to attack the virus. The test was said to be totally reliable. If this antibody were present, it was firmly stated that the virus must be too. If the person tested had these antibodies, they were grimly told that they were incurably ‘HIV positive’ – and on an inevitable route to death.

This HIV Blood Test was looked on as a great advance. Every doctor wanted a way to predict the onset of AIDS. Now, instead of waiting until people were within 11 months of death, they had a test said to reliably predict even in an apparently healthy person the occurrence of AIDS within 10 years. And, if found positive, the patient did not have to be left nervously waiting for AIDS to strike at any time. The Health authorities had another test that would reveal just when this would be. They could use the above mentioned ‘Helper T-cell’ (CD4 cell) Count to see when the cells that HIV was said to kill dropped to low numbers.

In future all found HIV positive with the first test, would have to come back regularly to see their doctor to have the second ‘CD4 Count’ blood test. It was generally agreed that a count of 500 CD4 cells per ml of blood serum meant that AIDS was near – and that a count of 200 meant it was already or almost present. On average a healthy person had between 300 and 1,400 Helper T-cells per ml. of blood serum– although there are exceptions.

In future, when a person was both ‘HIV positive’ and had a low CD4 Count, they would be diagnosed to have AIDS before any physical symptoms of illness were evident. But this did not mean the former way of diagnosing AIDS was abandoned. People could still be diagnosed with AIDS because they already had an ‘AIDS Indicating’ illness and were seriously near to death. Both ways of diagnosing ADIS were seen as valid – but they could not have been more different.

No other ‘viral’ illness is diagnosed by finding antibodies in the absence of symptoms – and it is just as well! If we diagnosed other illnesses the same way, we would be facing not one pandemic but a score. Take the case of the major AIDS killer disease –– fungal pneumonia (PCP); 80% of us are exposed in early childhood to the fungus that causes it, and consequently nearly all of us are protected by having antibodies against it. If PCP were diagnosed the same way as HIV, on the basis of having antibodies against it, we would all panic. We would think a vast pandemic was about to eliminate 80% of the world’s population. But we do not predict this. The same applies to measles, mumps and many other common illnesses. The presence of antibodies against them is taken as a symptom of health, not of illness.

THE 1985 REDEFINITION OF AIDS FOR AFRICA

In 1984 scientists went to Africa armed with this new ‘HIV Test’ and discovered to their dismay that many Africans tested positive. But most had no sign of the ‘AIDS Indicating’ illnesses. This presented the scientists with a problem. If this virus causes these illnesses in the West, why weren’t Africans falling ill with the same diseases? There was also a practical problem. The HIV test was priced too high to be widely used in Africa.

Both enigmas were resolved when, in 1985 in the West African city of Bangui, the CDC experts with other international specialists agreed on an entirely new definition of AIDS especially for Africa. This listed, not the ‘AIDS Indicating’ diseases of the West, but a new group of ‘Major African AIDS Indicating Diseases.’ Astoundingly, these included the common symptoms of many common African illnesses, including persistent diarrhoea, intermittent fever and an itching skin rash! The presence of just these three symptoms would justify a doctor telling an African that he or she is incurably ill with AIDS. These symptoms are said to indicate the presence of HIV without any need to further test.

When I read this definition, it so astounded me that it took time for its implications to sink in. It seemed almost incomprehensible to believe that all an African needs to be diagnosed with AIDS are common symptoms caused by impure water supplies, by lack of sanitation – and by TB. There was no question that Africans suffer from more of their proper share of the diseases of poverty, and from rampant TB, but in future the same symptoms would be diagnosed as incurable sexually transmitted AIDS, thus terrifying millions of Africans.

The Official Definition of AIDS for Africa

The official World Health Organization ‘Bangui definition of AIDS for Africa’ says a person has AIDS, if they have two from its list of ‘Major Indicating Diseases’ and one from its list of ‘Minor Indicating Diseases’ (in the absence of ‘known causes of immunosuppression, such as a cancer or severe malnutrition.’).

It names the following symptoms as the ‘Major AIDS Indicating Diseases for Africa’, of which two are required for AIDS diagnosis,

1 Weight loss exceeding 10% of normal body weight

2 Chronic diarrhoea for over a month.

3 A fever for over a month, intermittent or constant.

It names the following as the ‘Minor Indicating AIDS Diseases in Africa,’ of which just one is required for AIDS diagnosis

1 Persistent cough for over a month

2 Itching skin rash (Dermatitis)

3 Recurrent Shingles (Herpes Zoster)

4 Thrush

5 Swollen lymph gland. (Generalised lymphadenopathy)

6 (Only for an African child – Repeated Minor Infections.)

(A patient who has Kaposi Sarcoma or cryptococcal meningitis need to have none of the above – these diseases are ‘sufficient of themselves for a diagnosis of AIDS’ in Africa.)

Thus in Africa, since 1985 to be diagnosed with AIDS, It is sufficient to have persistent diarrhoea, a fever and a persistent itch – all of which could be caused by living in unsanitary conditions – especially if also suffering from TB or one of the major pre-AIDS killer diseases of Africa. Dr Christian Fiala, who researches AIDS in East Africa, reported; ‘TB is very widespread in Africa. It's a bacterial infection that infects the lungs. TB is spread by coughing, and it's highly infectious. The typical symptoms of Tuberculosis are fever, weight loss and coughing. This is exactly what is required for an AIDS diagnosis.’

…end of box

AIDS is still diagnosed in Africa by this ‘Bangui Standard’ that conflates the effects of poverty and common African diseases. The implications are vast. It seems that WHO, the CDC and other international ‘experts’, have created by written fiat the pandemic AIDS emergency that has ever since terrified Africa, vastly concerning all outside that continent who care for what happens to its people – and fooling those journalists who do not think to check how AIDS is diagnosed in Africa before they ring the AIDS alarm bell.

I found the Bangui definition had also ‘democratized’ HIV and AIDS as all these symptoms sre shared by men and women, child and adult, gay and heterosexual, alike – as they all suffer equally from impure water supplies and from TB. Thus by the act of definition, AIDS in Africa, unlike in the West, is not mostly confined to adult gay males in the drug-scene scene but affects all categories of humans. In the UK today, the vast majority of heterosexual and female cases of ‘HIV’ and ‘AIDS’ are currently said by government experts to be confined to African immigrants ‘presumed infected in Africa’.

This redefinition also has apparently deceived experts into believing resolved one of the great enigmas of HIV science – why HIV seemingly behaves unlike any other virus by infecting mostly gay men in the West. You never hear of measles, malaria, TB, as only affecting one gender – or according to whether a person is gay or straight. The HIV scientists needed to show that women and heterosexual people were equally falling ill if they were to maintain with any confidence the HIV theory of AIDS – and a simple act of definition had done this for them.

To make matters worse, individual African countries have felt free to develop their own clinical case definitions for AIDS. Tanzania says just finding one of the above symptoms is all that is required. Uganda for a period allowed just TB to be defined as AIDS. As a result, their AIDS cases leapt up in number.

On top of this the WHO computer team in Geneva vastly increased its allowance for ‘error factors’. While their field reports list a steady number of Africans as testing HIV positive, around 70,000 a year; WHO worked out their annual estimate for AIDS in Africa by multiplying the reported cases by an ever increasing error factor to account for under-reporting. In 1996, WHO multiplied registered AIDS cases in Africa by 12. In 1997 this had jumped to 17. Recently in an 18 month period 116,000 new African HIV cases were registered with WHO, but it estimated, after multiplying by its new error factor, that the real total was 5.5 million.[3]

THE 1987 REDEFINITION OF AIDS FOR THE WEST

Despite the dramatic redefinition in Africa, those dying of AIDS in the West remained over 80% males with most of these gays in heavily drug taking communities. A 1987 CDC study found heterosexuals made up less than 5% of all new AIDS cases – and that these few cases were mostly on drugs. New York City Mayor Edward Koch drew the obvious conclusion. He told a 1987 AIDS commission. ‘The future of AIDS lies, to a great extent, in combating drug abuse.’

But some Gay organisations protested against this as an unjustified assault on their life style. They said it was proved that HIV was the cause – and they wanted a vaccine against it. They had been promised in early 1984 that a vaccine would arrive in 2 years – and it was now overdue. They broke up medical meetings, organised sit-ins in government offices. They demanded medicine. If not a vaccine, anything else that would lengthen their lifespan. Under this pressure, AZT was released in late 1986 as the first antiretroviral drug, despite having failed its safety trials when considered for cancer chemotherapy.

In late 1987 President Reagan named AIDS as a Number One killer, but other voices in the US appealed for some sanity, pointing out that it was already declining among gay men, that accidental falls in the home killed more people, that US suicides exceeded AIDS deaths by 100,000 and deaths from prescription drugs were 1.4 million greater.[4] The CDC in response grimly stated 1.8 million Americans were infected with HIV and about to get AIDS. When the White House asked E. Thomas Starcher, the CDC official who compiled AIDS case reports, to explain this terrifying estimate, he replied to their astonishment; ‘It's just a guess.’

'I was at the meeting' where this number was arrived at’, explained a CDC ‘source’ later. 'We were a subcommittee, and supposed to make these predictions. It was really just off the tops of our heads. We tried to estimate the number of homosexual men in the country. We'd fool around with those kinds of numbers, and then we'd debate what the infection rate would be...’ They then decided to take the percentage figure for the number of drug-abusing gays affected at the 1982 height of the San Francisco AIDS epidemic and apply this percentage uniformly across the whole country.

It then dawned on the Reagan Administration that AIDS among heterosexuals were also much rarer than predicted – despite the CDC classifying automatically all Black patients with a recent African or Haitian origin as heterosexuals (much as still happens). This caused a heated exchange in the White House Domestic Policy Council. The Education Secretary, Bill Bennett, asked James Mason, the director of the CDC, 'You mean this thing is not exploding into the heterosexual community?’ Mason replied, ‘No, it's not.’ Bennett then angrily asked, 'Well, why have you been telling everybody that it is?' Mason could only reply by referring to Africa, where, under the new redefinition, it seemingly affected women equally to men.

But the CDC had to do something as a result of this pressure. It responded by slashing its estimate of the number of Americans infected by two-thirds to a new total of 600,000 (a cut some have mistakenly attributed to the use of the just-introduced antiretrovirals)– and it redefined AIDS in a manner that would put its numbers back up.

Under its new definition, no longer was it necessary to have a positive HIV test before being diagnosed with AIDS – and no longer were the ‘AIDS defining diseases’ only the original PCP, Candida and Kaposi Sarcoma. Many more illnesses were added. The CDC stated that ‘with laboratory evidence against HIV infection’, (that is, with a negative HIV test) ‘any of the provided list of diseases could be diagnosed as AIDS’ if the patient had fewer CD4 (Helper T-Cells) in their blood than ‘400’ per ml. Thus, if one had a negative HIV test, the T-Cell count could substitute. T-cells were said to be killed by HIV, thus low numbers were said to indicate the presence of HIV. It was presumed that only HIV could lower the number of CD4 cells.

The CDC officials were exceedingly generous with their new definition of AIDS – as were the UK authorities who as usual closely followed the American lead. It could now be diagnosed even if CD4 count reported the immune system undamaged, even if HIV itself could not be detected, even if the HIV antibody could not be found – so no wonder the epidemic suddenly was reported as getting much worse on both sides of the Atlantic.

The new guidance to doctors stated, ‘if laboratory tests for HIV were not performed or gave inconclusive results, and if the patient had no other cause of immunodeficiency [defined as immunosuppressive treatment or cancer], then ‘any’ of the following list of diseases ‘indicates AIDS without a CD4 Count’! This list is still current and includes blindness caused by CMV (another virus), the presence of mycobacteria (the cause of TB), bronchitis, pneumonia, a herpes ulcer – and a dozen other illnesses. It also meant a specialist working on any one of these disorders would be able to get research funds from the increasingly large proportion of the medical budget put aside for AIDS research.

The new definition went on to say that if a person had a positive HIV test, then AIDS could be diagnosed if they had just one of another long list of illnesses including; septicaemia, pneumonia, meningitis, TB, bone or joint infection or an abscess of an internal organ caused by streptococcus or other common bacteria. All these had became ‘AIDS Indicating Illnesses’ brought on by HIV– as also were ‘multiple bacterial infections’ in children!

The new definition conferred an extraordinary status on HIV. Every one of these many ‘AIDS indicating’ illnesses had existed for hundreds of years before HIV was first diagnosed. Each of had its own cause; a bacteria, virus or a fungus which had to be present for the illness to be diagnosed. But HIV was said to cause AIDS without being found present. If it were not present, it presumably could not be killing our T-cells – and yet AIDS was still diagnosed. No justification for these decisions was given by the CDC.

Finally the CDC added, that people who did not fall under this definition of AIDS because they ‘have either a negative HIV antibody test’ or ‘an opportunistic disease not listed in the definition as an indicator of AIDS’, could still be diagnosed as having AIDS ‘on consideration of … a history of exposure to HIV.’[5] This last clause totally astonished me. Under this anyone with flu could be diagnosed as having AIDS despite being HIV negative, if a friend consistently has tested HIV positive.

No wonder there was an enormous public panic immediately after this redefinition! The Chicago Tribune warned: ‘New AIDS Definition Likely to Raise Toll’. [6] USA Today ran in 1988 the headline, ‘By 1991, 1 in 10 babies may be AIDS victims.’[7] In Italy this new definition was estimated by scientists to have put up the AIDS figures by 188%. In the US it was more like 280% - but with this redefinition came a watering down of the risk factor. With so many now said to have AIDS without having the original deadly AIDS Indicating diseases, the average life span after diagnosis increased without any need for medicine.

THE 1993 REDEFINITION OF AIDS

In 1993 the last redefinition of AIDS took place, one still applying in the West. All the AIDS indicating diseases added in 1987 were re-indorsed as AIDS indicating – with more diseases added – but the major reason for this redefinition was, the CDC explained, ‘was to emphasise the clinical importance of the CD-4’ (T-Cell) Count’.

In future the CDC would diagnose AIDS in people who had none of the symptoms of AIDS Indicating illnesses. All that would be needed was to find less than 200 CD4 white blood cells per ml of their blood. The CDC explained they were seeking the estimated 120,000 to 190,000’ Americans who had a CD4 Count of below 200 without knowing it. When it found them, it would add them to the list of people with AIDS. This, the CDC said, would more than double the number of reported AIDS cases, for ‘ the population of HIV-infected persons with CD4+ T-lymphocyte counts of less than 200/uL is substantially larger than the population of persons with AIDS-defining clinical conditions’ i.e. than those who were actually suffering from AIDS.

The CDC further stated that this would enable the far wider use of AIDS drugs. All with a CD4 count below 500, were to be seen as possible candidates for antiretroviral drugs – and those below 200 as for drugs against fungal pneumonia as well – despite no symptoms of fungal pneumonia appearing.

This time the UK contradictorily only partially followed suit. It said a person should have one of the ‘AIDS indicating illnesses’ to have AIDS in the absence of HIV – but after a positive test, it accepted a CD4 counts below 200 meant the person had AIDS even if not feeling ill – and should be put on antiretrovirals and drugs against fungal pneumonia.

Previously all AIDS patients had to have one or more life-threatening diseases, but by 1997, according to the CDC, 61% of all new AIDS patients did not suffer from any AIDS defining illness at all – and yet were being put on chemotherapy-type antiretrovirals for the remainder of their lives – in the expectation that they were sure to die soon otherwise!

Three illnesses were added in 1993 to the 1987 list of 23 ‘AIDS Indicating’ Diseases. These were TB, bacterial pneumonia and invasive cervical cancer. The addition of TB would have a gigantic impact in Africa – since it was already in the grip of a major TB epidemic, but also among Afro-Americans who also widely suffered from TB. Pneumonia was another major killer disease that would put up the AIDS numbers As for the addition of cervical cancer – this was the product of political lobbying by determined lesbian women in solidarity with their gay brothers. It came about because they accepted the government prediction that millions of Western women were about to get AIDS.

Until then very few women had been diagnosed with AIDS, but this could not last, or so thought Maxime Wolfe in 1992. She explained; ‘Almost all clinical research required a CDC definition of AIDS or an HIV symptom to be included in research [for funding to be granted.];’ Women were not falling ill with AIDS, but ‘we don’t know if women were really asymptomatic. They simply did not have male-defined symptoms.’ She believed; ‘Most women are in the early stages of the disease.’ By shaming the CDC with accusations of chauvinism, they apparently succeeded in having cervical cancer added to the AIDS list, despite no relevant evidence. The result was; ‘In the half-year following [the redefinition], over 9,000 cases in women were reported. The number of women said to have AIDS in the US went up by 300%.’

Thus AIDS has been greatly changed since it was first defined – but despite all this, it is still mostly the drug-abusing rave scene gays that die of AIDS in the West. You would not realise this however from the statements of the public health authorities. They emphasise the percentage rise in heterosexual cases among Westerners – without saying how many fewer these are in comparison to cases among gay men.

The Wall Street Journal investigated in 1996 the CDC claim that AIDS posed an equal danger to heterosexuals - and found that 90% of all AIDS cases were still among drug abusing gay males. The CDC was forced by the Journal to acknowledge it’s fund raising drive had deliberately exaggerated the risk to heterosexuals. It excused this by saying if it acknowledged the gay nature of the disease this would increase homophobia – and make it near impossible to raise AIDS research funds from Congress. It had thus adopted as its slogan; ‘You all can catch AIDS!” [8]

There has been no change in this tactic in recent years. In 2004 the UK government reported, ‘Recent increases in new HIV diagnoses have been largely driven by infections acquired through heterosexual intercourse’. And yet, the small print of the same Report stated; ‘Men-having-sex-with-men (MSM) remain the group at greatest risk of acquiring HIV infection within the UK, accounting for an estimated 84% of infections diagnosed in 2003 that were likely to have been acquired in the UK’ – and that out of 6,606 new cases of ‘HIV infection’ in 2003, only 43 cases were among women born in the UK, and only 57 among UK born heterosexual men.

By vastly inflating what can be called AIDS in the absence of the original severe illnesses, the life expectancy of AIDS patients was automatically increased – again by redefinition rather than by the use of medication. By 2001 life expectancy after diagnosis with AIDS had gone up from the 11 months of 1984 to over five years.

Under this watered-down definition, such a low rate of AIDS deaths is now being reported in the West that our government health agencies have been driven to what can only be called ‘cheating’ to keep up the appearance of a devastating epidemic. From 1993 the CDC recorded in its statistics every death of a person found HIV positive as if they have died of AIDS. [9] A 1997 CDC report made the rate acknowledgement that ‘Reported deaths [on AIDS statistics tables] are not necessarily caused by HIV-related diseases.’

Likewise in the UK. When I looked at the most recent official AIDS statistics, those for 2003, I found a sharp decline in AIDS cases had happened after the 1993 redefinition, from around 1,900 cases in 1993 to 766 in 2003.[10] The death statistics likewise fell from around 1800 in 1993 to 475 in 2003 - to less than half the total for the hospital super-bug. Then I looked in the small print in these statistics – and found the figures for ‘deaths’ in the ‘HIV/AIDS statistics’ were not for ‘deaths from AIDS’, as one might be forgiven to presume. They were for ‘deaths among the HIV-infected,’ leaving open the actual cause of death. This makes these UK figures not only highly misleading, but meaningless.

However from other research it seems most ‘AIDS’ deaths recorded for people born in the UK continue to be of gay men who are chronically drug addicted, dying of the same ‘AIDS indicating’ diseases that killed in the early 1980s – plus, in the last decade, from a group of illnesses never defined as ‘AIDS indicating’ – cancers, heart failure and liver disease. [11] These are all acknowledged to be possible side-effects of antiretroviral drugs. [12]

As more and more sensitive ‘HIV tests’ are devised, more and more people are being found to be ‘HIV infected’ – giving the appearance of an ever greater epidemic despite the numbers of AIDS cases sharply diminishing - as if the cases of AIDS have nothing to do with the spread of HIV! This has led to a life expectancy after a positive HIV test ‘exceeding 15 years’. This drop in AIDS cases is not due to safe sex – as in the same period the incidence of STDs has greatly increased. Neither can it be due to antiretrovirals, as the numbers of AIDS cases have also sharply declined – and these drugs are only given to such cases.

This pattern is entirely unlike any other epidemic. In every other virus-caused epidemic, as the virus rapidly spreads, the cases of illness grow equally – and then suddenly fall in number as the population develops immunity and eliminates the virus by producing antibodies. This ‘bell-shaped’ curve for epidemics is well established in virology.

But this discordance is solely the result of our use of the test. If we judged the spread of AIDS solely by the original AIDS symptoms, AIDS would be seen for what it still is, an epidemic still mostly confined to a relatively small gay drug-abusing community (and perhaps also to those ill from the effects of antiretrovirals).

My study of Government AIDS definitions, epidemic reports and statistics, has disturbingly forced me to conclude:

§ The vast ‘AIDS epidemics’ only exist because AIDS was redefined to include many healthy people and many different illnesses.

§ The HIV test results have little correlation with the actual numbers falling ill.

§ Despite our Health Authorities insisting that ‘HIV causes AIDS’, and on only funding research based on this doctrine, in practice the presence of HIV is irrelevant to an AIDS diagnosis. The US and UK Health Authorities tacitly acknowledge this by advising doctors that a negative HIV test is no bar to an AIDS diagnosis.

§ With or without a positive HIV test, the original complex of illnesses first called AIDS still inflicts people. The victims are mostly among the same group that was first affected – heavily drug using gay males.

But none of the above resolves my original enigma – why the HIV test may sometimes pick up a real risk of AIDS developing, according both to Government Health Authorities who believe in HIV and dissident scientists who do not. Does the test provide us with a clue as to the real cause of AIDS? It is time to consider it in more detail.

End of First Part.

Small box to illustrate text above?

From the 2004 UK Government’s HIV and AIDS Report – showing the drop in AIDS cases and the increase in ‘HIV diagnosis’ after the 1993 redefinition. The line for ‘Deaths,’ as explained in the article, does not refer to ‘deaths from AIDS’, but to deaths from all causes among those registered as HIV infected.

Size of retroviruses contrasted to that of a lymphcyte or white blood cell. The smal dots in upper photo -and the points of the arrows - are like retrovirues - although other particles are extremely similar so cannot be easily told apart.

So what then are the HIV tests finding…

It is popularly believed that a positive result with an HIV test is a sentence of death, a fate that is leading many heterosexual people, in the US especially but also now in Africa, to vow to a life of sexual abstinence and dedication to God to avoid this terrible curse. But in the AIDS-affected drug-taking clubbing scene, where death from the original AIDS defining illnesses is vastly more common, many see an HIV positive test result as the inevitable consequence of being true to oneself. A gay culture has grown up in which an inevitable early death is seemingly accepted, graphically depicted in recent adverts for safe sex by a gay man depicted as carrying a cross like Jesus. A positive test result in the gay community means one has joined a club in which there is much mutual support and caring. But whenever a trial of a new antiretroviral drug is announced, it is swamped by gay volunteers, desperate to find out if it will cure them.

So what is this most dreaded HIV blood test? What happens if after a passionate night you fear that you might have been exposed to HIV and so decide to seek an HIV test? If you ask how the this test works, you will be told that it looks for HIV antibodies in a sample of your blood, and if it finds them, then you can be sure that the virus is also present.

This test is normally given some 2 months after the suspected exposure, on the biological ground that it takes this long for antibodies to appear. You may also be told that there are faster tests, available after two weeks, but currently these are rarely recommended (see the P24 test below). From this year, you may be offered an immediate sharp short course of antiretroviral chemotherapy-type drugs prior to an HIV test to hopefully prevent you being infected – but although approved by the CDC in March, this is still a relatively rare medical practice.

A blood sample is taken, normally from your arm, and sent away to be analysed. The details of how it works are in the separate box, but briefly; your blood sample is diluted and then mixed with synthetic protein molecules, ‘antigens,’ said to be modelled on parts of the virus. If these are attacked by antibodies present in your blood, this means you have had a ‘positive HIV test’. Further ‘confirming tests’ are then ordered. If these are also positive, you will be told your unwise sexual act has placed you on an inexorable path to death from AIDS that this can only be delayed by taking antiretrovirals.

Thus the HIV test looks for ‘HIV antibodies’, and it is terrible news if they are found present – but what exactly are ‘antibodies’?

HOW ANTIBODIES DEFEND US

All text books on ‘immunology’, the science of our immune system, begin by describing antibodies. They are molecules created by certain white blood cells to mark for destruction foreign particles, whether toxins, viruses or bacteria. The white blood cells are called lymphocytes since they mostly take on specialised tasks in the lymph glands after being created in our bone marrow. About ten thousand million lymphocytes are made every day of our lives. An adult human may possess at any one time a thousand times this number.

Two types of lymphocytes are known as T-cells, as they are formed in the Thymus gland. One is the ‘Helper T-Cell’, also known as CD4, which HIV is said to kill. It gets its name because it helps ‘B-Cell lymphocytes’ recognise foreign particles. The B-Cells then produce ‘antibodies’ against these particles – and long-lived memory cells to give us immunity in future. The other T-Cell is the ‘Suppressor T-Cell’ (CD8) that destroys infected cells.

The antibodies are molecules so tiny that their targets are not whole viruses or bacteria, but features on the surface of molecules either floating freely or as part of the outer skin of a virus, toxin or bacteria. Each antibody is tailored to match the shape of one such feature. When it locks onto such it, it marks the particle it is on for destruction by other parts of our immune system. If antibodies by error attach to parts of us, this is known as an ‘autoimmune’ illness.

THE ‘HIV TEST’ AND THE VIRUS

The HIV test is an ‘ELISA test, ’ a tool much used in biology to detect antibodies. But is finding an antibody the same thing as finding a virus? Despite assurances that this is so in the case of HIV, I had my doubts. I could not help but remember the failures to find HIV in the original AIDS research, as described in detail last month. But – was I being too cynical? Twenty years had elapsed since then, and the UK Health Authorities assure us this test finds HIV – and surely this meant they had assessed it for accuracy? Logically such an assessment would involve the blind testing of samples to check if it reliably detects those containing the virus . But I found that it has solely been tested to see if it finds an antibody. Thus, when the authorities say, as they do, that this test is nearly 100% accurate – they don’t mean the test finds the virus.

To use this test not just to find antibodies, but to infallibly detect the presence of a certain virus:-

1 We must be certain that the proteins (antigens) used come from this virus.

2 We must know that they are unique to this virus.

3 We must eliminate the possibility that the antibody also attacks other particles.

4 We must be sure that the virus is still present.

5 We must be sure that the antibody has not made us immune to this virus.

It is absolutely vital to the accuracy of the ‘HIV test’ that the proteins used are all correctly identified as from HIV and are not from anything else. HIV is said to be made up by 10 different protein particles. This ELISA test can only tell that one kind of these proteins is being attacked, and not which kind is being attacked. Thus a mistake in the identification of just one antigen will make the test inaccurate.

As for the need to be unique, we need to know that the antibodies detected are not targeting a feature found on particles not from HIV. If so, this test again fails. As for the virus being still present – antibodies eliminate viruses and remain in the blood after they have gone, so the continual presence of viruses can by no means be taken for granted. On the face of it, this test can only show that some time in the past our immune system encountered the proteins presented to it in this test.

This left me completely perplexed at first. Where was the research proving HIV to be present alongside the antibody – and to be immune to it? I then discovered the alleged proof for the continual presence of HIV lay in the observation that people testing positive with this test, had an increased likelihood to get AIDS. This evidently meant the antibodies had failed, that the virus was still present – or so the argument went.

But to my mind, this contained a failure of logic. It did not eliminate the possibility that the antibody detected was there to protect us against something else entirely. Antibodies make us immune, so what was this one making us immune against? It evidently does not make us immune to HIV since HIV is apparently unaffected by it. This left me faced with a paradox. If it really were an HIV antibody, how could it exist alongside HIV without marking it for destruction?

We know that the test detects an attack by antibodies in the blood against a feature on the proteins added to the blood during the test. This much the test really does prove. But – is the protein attacked really from HIV? This the test cannot tell. It depends on the reliability of the science that first identified these proteins as uniquely from HIVHIV – and so I went back to look for it.

The HIV test was patented in 1984, so the work to identify these proteins had to be done by that time. I found it was published in the third of the four papers on AIDS published in Science in May 1984. It told me that the proteins were found when Robert Gallo and colleagues took samples of blood from AIDS patients and spun these in an ultra-fast centrifuge to discover if any particles were present that might be HIV. When they inspected the results, they found protein particles. When they discovered that these proteins were attacked by antibodies possessed by nearly half of the AIDS patients tested, it was presumed this meant that the proteins must come from the AIDS virus.

Gallo wrote that two of the proteins he detected ‘p[rotein] 24 and p41’ ‘may therefore be considered the viral structural proteins’ as he had found many of them floating in AIDS patient serum – an enormous presumption since he had not found them by breaking up HIV. (The numbers 24 and 41 referred to their molecular weight in thousand Daltons). Despite a diligent search, I could find any research showing that they had found these proteins inside ‘living’ HIV. Nevertheless, on this seemingly uncertain basis, he patented what was basically the same HIV test that we use today.

I felt there was something odd about his justification for this, and when I looked more closely I discovered it was logically flawed. The proteins were ‘proved’ to come from HIV because they were attacked by antibodies ‘proved to be against HIV’, and that the antibodies were ‘proved to against HIV’ because they attack these proteins – an entirely circuitous argument!

It thus seemed that the theory for the HIV test fails at the first hurdle. The proteins used in the patented test were not proven to come from HIV. But, this still did not explain why positive results with the HIV test may sometimes indicate a real risk for developing AIDS (if the claims of both health authorities and ‘dissident’ scientists are to be accepted). It only made such claims more perplexing to me.

Eureka

What so far had I established? The test sometimes discovers antibodies are present that attack one of these proteins – but not that these proteins are from HIV. So, what else could they come from?

I then found one of the top UK government experts on HIV, Dr Philip Mortimer, had warned. ‘Diagnosis of HIV infection is based almost entirely on detection of antibodies to HIV, but there can be misleading cross-reactions between HIV-1. antigens and antibodies formed against other antigens [other viruses, bacteria or toxins] and these can lead to false –positive reactions. [13] Thus it may be impossible to relate an antibody response specifically to HIV-1 infection.’[14] This seemed to be an admission that all might not be as it seemed with the HIV test, that the antibodies found might not be against HIV.

I asked myself – what did we know about the illnesses that first started the AIDS epidemic? Was it possible that these antibodies are really present to fight the specific causes of these illnesses? Over 70% of all AIDS patients in the West have major fungal infections. TB is caused by mycobacteria. Fungi and mycobacteria are major causes of death among AIDS patients. It couldn’t possibly be the antibodies are present to attack them?

This at first seemed highly unlikely – for it was just too obvious. Surely these possibilities would have been the first to be checked when AIDS was first investigated?

Then, while searching AIDS literature, I came across scientific research that demonstrated that this is exactly what is happening! Much to my amazement I discovered that it had been long known that these same antibodies attack the causes of the classic AIDS illnesses – both mycobacterial and fungal!! For me, discovering this was like finding the final missing piece in a jigsaw. The primary research on mycobacteria was in a paper produced by a scientific team that included Myron Essex of Harvard, a member with Gallo of the US Government’s AIDS task force, and a co-winner with him of the prestigious Lasker Award.[15] Other scientists had elaborated and further established their findings. They reported that the antibody detected with the ‘HIV test’ targets a carbohydrate structure common to many particles, including particles of fungi and mycobacteria, and to the thrush fungus better known as yeast! [16] They consequently warned against relying on the HIV test in Africa where mycobacteria and fungi are widespread, saying this meant even the contacts of TB patients would falsely test positive for HIV.

This to my mind was an enormously important discovery. The proteins testing ‘as if HIV’ were from the classic AIDS diseases, as well as from very minor fungal infections. All patients with AIDS (and millions of healthy people) are infected by the fungus that causes Thrush.[17] Thus it seems the ‘HIV test’ may detect the early stages of major AIDS-related illnesses, as well as common minor infections of no great seriousness, all without any need for HIV to exist. Fungal infections are everywhere. Is this why many thousands more test positive with this test than get AIDS?

Suddenly I realised this was the missing link that I had been seeking, that linked AIDS in Africa and in the West. It was not a virus – but identical features on proteins. With the same features on proteins produced by the mycobacteria that cause the African epidemic of TB and on the fungus and yeast infections inflicting gay communities in the West, no wonder the same blood test found the same antibodies in both populations.

When I dug deeper, I found since the time of Essex’s research , many other sources had been identified for proteins that test positive with the ‘HIV blood test’. Today the manufactures of the test warn of these – and report that they include having had a recent flu or tetanus vaccination, malaria, kidney failure, rheumatoid arthritis, herpes, hepatitis and even having had many children! [18] It seems that healthy placentas could produce proteins with the feature that is targeted by the same “HIV antibody’!

The relationship between having had many pregnancies and testing positive is particularly disconcerting for South Africa. The World Health Organisation currently makes its estimates for HIV infection in South Africa by testing blood from mothers stored at ante-natal clinics and then applying the proportion of positive readings to the whole country. It could be multiplying a thousand fold the consequence of such women testing positive without being ill.

Thus, the more I looked, the more contradictions I found. I even discovered that Professor Montagnier, HIV’s official discoverer, stated in 1997 that one of the particles treated as if it is part of the virus, p41, is in every human cell – as a chemical called Actin. If antibodies are attacking this, then an autoimmune disease is present, not AIDS. At a recent AIDS conference, Professor Papadopoulos-Eleopoulos of Western Australia presented a transparency contrasting the results of tests for ‘HIV antibodies’ on leprosy, TB and AIDS patients. It appeared the results were indistinguishable from one another. All the samples tested as if positive for ‘HIV’. She was repeating part of the 1985 experiment by Max Essex referred to above. [19] His finding has since been confirmed by a host of other studies. Could this be why WHO does not rely on HIV tests in Africa?

As I looked at the implications of this, I realised that this might also be why it is stipulated that blood samples from patients be diluted 400 times before being tested with the ‘HIV blood test.’ This is a highly unusual requirement. When other antibodies are tested for with the ELISA, such as those against syphilis, no dilution is done at all. Could it be that without dilution, so many of us would test positive for ‘HIV’ that the results would be unbelievable? When an AIDS researcher, Dr Roberto Giraldo, tested this with his own blood, he found without dilution, he was HIV positive, and with dilution, HIV negative.[20] His discovery has apparently been confirmed by research showing "normal human serum contains antibodies capable of recognizing the carbohydrate moiety of HIV envelope (glyco)proteins’ – meaning proteins found with the ‘HIV test’ are so common that we all have been exposed to them. [21]

What if the reactions recorded with the HIV test are weak or indeterminate? Then the technician is told to take into consideration the risk group to which the person tested belongs. If the person is African or Gay – then the official advice is to send on the sample for further testing. If the person is in a low risk group, their sample is not sent for further testing and they are told they are ‘HIV negative’. This practice can but increase the number found ‘HIV’ positive in pre-defined risk groups.

But, despite all this, the UK authorities do admit that a ‘maximum’ positive result with this test is ‘not a reliable basis to make a diagnosis of HIV infection,’ and that ‘further testing is essential’. After a positive result in the HIV test, the same test is repeated. If it is again positive, then a Viral Load test is done on the same sample. Finally a P24 test is done. Only if all these are ‘positive’ will you be told that you are ‘HIV positive.’

So how do these confirmatory tests work?

BOX

THE HIV ‘ELISA’ Blood Test.

It does not look for HIV in your blood but for antibodies said to produced by our immune system to attack HIV. If such an antibody is present, then it is said the virus must be too.

The test involves these stages.

1. Removing the red blood cells by allowing them to clot out. Since the test is a search for antibodies , what are needed are the white blood cells – or lymphocytes – among which are the B-Cells that produce our antibodies

2. Diluting the remaining serum by 400 times.

3. Pouring the diluted serum over a board to which are attached antigens. These are synthetic proteins modelled on those said to be parts of HIV. These are the bait that will hopefully attract the right antibodies. The antigens are left for half an hour immersed in the serum, then the boards are washed free of everything but the antigens fixed into position and the antibodies that have stuck themselves onto them.

4. Then over these is poured a further solution containing an antibody from another species (Gallo used ones from goats) that will attack/adhere to the human antibodies. Joined to these is an enzyme that will change colour or fluoresce according to how many antibody reactions have taken place – thus the meaning of ELISA – ‘Enzyme-Linked ImmunoSorbent Assay’.

5. The final stage is measuring the colour change against a colour density measure, with numerical cut-off points deciding if it is positive, indeterminate or negative.

6. If negative, you are told straight away. If positive the test is repeated on the same blood sample. If positive again, then further confirmatory tests are ordered – the Viral Load Test and a P24 test in the UK (in the US instead a Western Blot test)

The Other tests.

1. THE p24 TEST

The p24 test only looks for an antibody to one protein, the p24 – thus it does little to extend what is found with the ELISA. It is performed in the same way, but with just this one protein added, not a mixture.

For some time it has been recommended for infants – on the basis that the other ‘HIV’ proteins may be passed on from mother to child . It is also sometimes used to give a quicker result than does the ‘HIV test’. The p24 protein is said to be detectable from two weeks after a suspected HIV infection – as against 2 months for the antibodies found with the ELISA. It is also the routine test used in screening blood supplies for possible HIV infection. Finding p24 is rapidly becoming the key HIV test alongside finding the antibody. It’s use is now being extended to more and more situations.

I suspect that its increasing use is because p24 is easy to find. This is not surprising, given this protein is common in the human population, including in healthy people found not to be HIV infected! The official AID Vaccine Clinical Trials Group reported; "The presence of p24 band was common among low-risk, uninfected volunteers and complicated the interpretation of the Western blot test results" In another experiment, p24 was found in seventy out of a hundred HIV-negative and healthy people;[22] while, in yet another experiment, p24 was found only in 24% of ‘HIV positive’ people.[23]

The UK official HIV testing guidelines, while making this an approved confirmation test, admit that a positive result with this test gives no certainty of HIV infection. Philip Mortimer, a top UK government expert on AIDS, has reported; ‘Experience has shown that neither HIV culture nor tests for p24 antigen are of much value in diagnostic testing.’[24] No wonder, if p24 is widespread in the healthy. It is thus disturbing, to say the least, that despite it not being ‘of much value’, that the UK should approve it for use on infants and make it an official confirmatory test for all.

2. THE VIRAL LOAD TEST.

This is the second of the two UK confirmatory tests given after a positive ELISA. Like all the other tests, this does not look for HIV itself. Nor does it count viruses, as from its name one might think. It looks instead for tiny fragments of genetic code said to come from HIV. This test in recent years has been incorporated with the ELISA test and is done on the same blood sample. It is used both to confirm a positive ELISA and to monitor the health of a person already found to be ‘HIV positive’, especially those already on antiretrovirals.

It studies these tiny fragments mostly with a technique called Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) designed to multiply these fragments many millions of times to make them far easier to study and count. As this test cannot find RNA (the genetic codes of retroviruses) but only DNA – the serum has the enzyme RT added to it to turn any RNA present into DNA code. As such vast multiplication is involved, any error is also multiplied by millions of times – so the prior proper identification of fragments is absolutely vital to this test’s validity.

But when I researched how and when these fragments were identified as being part of the HIV genome, I found such classic virology work had never been done. Instead I found some of these fragments were originally located floating loose when Gallo unsuccessfully searched blood serum from AIDS patients for the AIDS virus. They are exceedingly small fragments, most much smaller than even a single gene.

If you are found to have 10,000 such fragments of putative HIV code per ml of your blood, then you are said by the authorities to be on a slow path towards death from AIDS. The UK health authorities say: ‘Although the precise values of the viral load remains a matter of debate, a viral load of less than 10, 000 copies is associated with relatively low progression rate [towards death from AIDS] If you have over 50,000, you are ‘likely to progress much faster’ towards death. Such large numbers of tiny particles only equate, it should be noted, to the presence of one or two entire virus genomes at the very best. They are also located in blood in which the putatively vastly larger HIV has not been found.

Large numbers of such fragments may not mean that you are ill. In a scientific study of 47 ‘HIV positive’ patients who had refused to take anti-retrovirals and remained healthy, 30 were found to have viral loads ‘higher than 10,000 copies/ml and 3 had viral loads higher than 500,000 copies/ml.’ [25] Thus perhaps such high numbers can be found in healthy people. It should be noted that it is entirely natural and healthy to have many such codes in our blood. Whenever a cell of ours normally dies, its DNA is washed away as fragments in our blood. As around 30% of healthy DNA is made up by code originally brought into our cells by retroviruses, this means a lot of this normal waste contains retrovirus codes.

Yet with a reading of 10,000, you may be told that you should start immediately on powerful antiretrovirals, drugs also sold as chemotherapy for cancer, and informed that you must take them for the rest of your life, for, as the UK AIDS Treatment guidelines warns; ‘following the cessation of therapy [with anti-retrovirus drugs] the wild-type virus rapidly emerges’ - as revealed not by finding the virus, but with these same tests.

Why these tests often record a rise in viral load, and a decrease in CD4 cells, when antiretroviral treatment is ended, I am not sure. Perhaps it is because that these drugs have created much damaged DNA that is rapidly removed when permitted by the end of treatment? Perhaps the CD4 cells drop in number since our immune system has converted them into killer CD8 cells to get rid of foreign particles or damaged cells?

The scientist who won a Nobel Prize for inventing PCR, the main tool used to do this count, Dr Kary Mullis, had emphatically and somewhat angrily stated that it is highly misleading to use his test like this, for it cannot count viruses. But I think the test fails one ultimate test. It is based on us knowing precisely what is the HIV genome. If the virus was never isolated, then how on earth can anyone identify these fragments as definitely coming from its genome? It seems that, as with the ‘HIV’ proteins, these are only said to come from the virus because they were found floating freely in the blood of AIDS patients, of people typically infected with a multitude of pathogens, and whose blood is full of disintegrated cells.

There is finally one other test that is used, usually after ‘HIV’ diagnosis, to measure the damage thought done by HIV and to predict the onset of AIDS.

THE T-CELL COUNT.

This test may well be ordered by your doctor immediately you are found ‘HIV positive’, Again, this does not look for HIV. It tries to measure the state of health of your immune system by counting the number of CD4 Cells, ‘Helper T-Cells” in a millilitre sample of your blood. It is now said that if you have less than 200 of these per ml. of blood, this is a definite sign both that HIV has been killing these cells, and that you are starting to get AIDS.

Healthy people were found to typically have a wide range of T-cell numbers– from 237 to 1817 in one study.[26] However the relationship between these numbers and the efficacy of our immune system is not so easy to determine. A recent study of ‘HIV+’ people found many remained ‘free of illnesses and of AIDS over three years after their CD4 counts fell below 200’ and the CDC itself estimated in 1993 that up to 190,000 Americans had levels this low without showing signs of illnesses.[27]

Other studies have shown that when CD4 cells fall in number, the number of CD8 cells in the blood often goes up commensurately, so that the total number of these cells remains the same. It has been deduced from this that our immune system can change CD4 into CD8 and vice versa as needed. Popovic mentioned this reverse ratio in his 1984 paper prior to it being edited. He stated, ‘this results in reverse ratios of helper to suppresser T cell lymphocytes.’ This statement was crossed out by Gallo. (It should be noted that a similar reverse ratio between CD4 and CD8 numbers is also observed in other illnesses.)

In any case, the CDC does not regard the number of T-Cells a person has as the critical element. It stated in 2002 "If a person has been diagnosed with an AIDS Indicator Disease, then that person meets the 1993 AIDS Surveillance Case Definition, regardless of the CD4 count." Many factors can cut the number of T-Cells. For example, an article published in Science in December 2004 reported that 1 part per million of benzene fumes can cut the CD4 cell numbers in blood by 15 to 18%.[28] Other studies indicate that nitrate inhalant drugs, and crack cocaine, can dramatically cut the number. Even stress can lower the number.

A study of patients in intensive care in hospitals concluded that low levels of CD4 cells need not involve HIV and were no measure of severity of illness: ‘Our results demonstrate that acute illness alone, in the absence of HIV infection, can be associated with profoundly depressed lymphocyte concentrations. Although we hypothesized that this depression would be directly related to the severity of illness, this relationship was not seen in our results. The T-cell depression we observed was unpredictable and did not correlate with severity of illness, predicted mortality rate or survival rate.’[29]

In short, no relationship has yet been established between the severity of illness and the numbers of T-Cells.

In Summary: None of the tests find HIV. What are looked for are antibodies, proteins, genetic code fragments and white blood cells.

WHEN YOU ARE TOLD YOU ARE HIV POSITIVE.

But despite all these flaws in the tests, your life may hinge on what results the tests give you. Undertaking the test is thus a highly risky business. If they report you are HIV (antibody) positive, and have a low CD4 count, you may soon come under considerable pressure from doctors that in good faith trust the accuracy of the tests and wish to prolong your life with antiretrovirals. They will tell you that you are about to get AIDS.

But after being found positive, your CD4 count may stay high for years. When AIDS is about to strike is not determined by when you fall ill, but by using these same tests. You will be tested every six months to reveal how fast you are proceeding towards AIDS.

When your CD4 count falls, and your viral load is high, you will be probably told by your doctor that you must now start to take antiretrovirals – or otherwise you will soon die of AIDS. This will come as a shock – for you are probably still feeling well, with no symptoms of AIDS. But nonetheless, at this point considerable pressure may come on you to start taking these powerful chemotherapy-type drugs.

If you are pregnant, the pressure to take the drugs may be intense. If you do not take them, you are said to risk giving AIDS to your child. In the US a newly born child can be taken without a court order from an HIV positive mother, put in a home and forcibly dosed with antiretrovirals if the mother has refused to take them.

ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

But – the antiretrovirals stave off death, right?

These drugs are today the major Western answer to the AIDS epidemics – but none of them are cures. Dr Anthony Fauci, Head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, confessed in 2000. ‘There is no hope for a cure for AIDS with the current drugs.’ [30]. Attacking HIV had failed to stop AIDS. Antiretroviral treatment was said to add 2 years to a person’s life expectancy after diagnosis with AIDS, bringing it up to an average of 7 years from the 5 years that followed from the 1993 AIDS redefinition.

But do people live longer because more of them are apparently healthy when put on the drugs? Alternatively, is a benefit of the drugs themselves – or the treatments given alongside them? If a patient has TB, drugs against TB are given precedence over antiretrovirals in the West. The same goes for drugs for fungal pneumonia, for decades the main killer of ‘AIDS patients’.[31] In Botswana quite sensibly it has been laid down that clean water supplies have to be provided to potential AIDS victims, not just antiretrovirals – and that nutrition should also be cared for. Such measures can undoubtedly help– but what about the antiretrovirals themselves? What do they do exactly?

THE ANTI-RETROVIRAL DRUGS

These drugs do not target HIV itself – and not even the family of retroviruses. They target instead the parents of retroviruses, the cells of our body and the cellular basis of organic life. This is not an undesirable side effect – it is the way they are designed to work. It is hoped that by stopping our cells producing retroviruses, or even from dividing, they will stop the birth of HIV. They are thus said to eliminate the production of all retroviruses – including the vast number of harmless and useful ones produced by our cells as part of us. These self-made viruses are thought to repair damaged DNA, but their extinction is rarely if ever deplored – or even considered as a risk factor. They are not valued it seems, because their role is not understood by all.

They target our cells in a manner equivalent to dropping a 2000 kg bomb on a house to kill a mouse, by targeting the most basic processes of cellular life, the production of our DNA; the very process by which our bodies grow, are healed and our cells replaced, in the near suicidal hope that, by stopping this most vital process, they also may stop the production of ‘HIV’!

At least 4 of the AIDS antiretrovirals are also marketed for chemotherapy against cancer – but for cancer they are only administered for a short period, to minimalise their very damaging side effects. For AIDS, the patients are supposed to keep on taking them until they die.

Since the drugs work by blocking the synthesis of DNA, the first cells to be eliminated are those that reproduce most often, and thus need new DNA most often – such as bacteria. Thus the initial impact of taking these drugs may seem very beneficial, since they may clear up opportunistic infections.

But this beneficial stage usually does not last more than a few weeks. The drugs by blocking cellular processes soon start to seriously damage the cells of our immune system, since these also reproduce quickly – thus doing the very damage that is blamed on HIV. As they interfere with DNA, they can also produce cancer. A medical study found; ‘opportunistic infections, AIDS-associated malignant conditions and other non-infectious diseases … often appeared shortly after the introduction of HAART.”[32]

‘HAART’ is the normal way for these drugs to be administered today. It stands for ‘Highly Active Anti Retrovirus Therapy’. It can produce heart attacks. A study found ‘The incidence of MI (heart attack) in HIV infected patients increased in our cohort after the introduction of HAART.’[33] Anther major study concluded of HAART: ‘the treatment benefit is temporary and confers no long term survival advantage.’[34]

HAART involves normally a combination of three antiretrovirals, thus its alternative euphemistic name of ‘Cocktails.’ The British HIV Association’s (BHIVA) guidelines for HAART, written by a committee dominated by doctors funded by major Anti-Retrovirus drug manufacturers, [35] currently advises HIV+ patients without symptoms of AIDS, but with a CD-4 count between 200-350, to start on a HAART consisting of two Nucleoside RT Inhibitors, and one other kind of anti-retroviral.

The major types of antiretrovirals are as follows:

Nucleoside RT Inhibitors. These include the first anti-retrovirus drug, AZT (marketed as ‘Retrovir’ or ‘Zidovudine’). It is a product of failed cancer research. When first invented it was set aside as too dangerous to use for cancer, but in 1987, after a three month controversial safety trial that became ‘unblinded,’ or seriously flawed, it was marketed for long-term use for AIDS by the company we now know as Glaxo Wellcome. Since AIDS is seen as an emergency, it has since become common to release these drugs without adequate long-term studies. A study in Lancet in 2000 reported; ‘the severity of the HIV epidemic led to accelerated licensing of many antiretroviral agents, often with very little known about long-term safety’. [36]

This drug uses a synthetic look-alike of thiamine, one of the four basic building blocks (‘nucleosides’) of our DNA. The typical daily dose provides every cell within us with some 10,000 of these artificial particles. [37] Our cells then try to use these to build DNA, as if they were the real thing. But they are not – so our DNA production is blocked. These drugs are aptly also grimly known as ‘Terminators.’

It particularly targets our bone marrow, where its first victims include the fast growing T-Cells, thus suppressing our immune system exactly as HIV is supposed to do. Inevitably the drugs then start to impede the production of the slower cells within our bodies, including those of our livers, kidneys and other organs. Such damage would be totally unacceptable – if it were not presumed that all patients found ‘HIV positive’ were already doomed.

The damage over years can be enormous, despite the best efforts of the monitoring doctors. It so impedes cell replacement that patients may start to look skeletal, an effect increased by the severe malnutrition caused by it killing stomach flora. Consequentially Glaxo Wellcome sells the drug with a warning that ‘prolonged use of Retrovir [AZT] has been associated with systematic myopathy [body wasting] similar to that produced by HIV’. In other words, AZT produces a disease clinically just like AIDS.

When first introduced, many died on doses up to five times as large as given nowadays, but these deaths were said to be due to HIV cleverly mutating. Every death while on these drugs is blamed on the virus. Today ‘AIDS” deaths are avoided or delayed by the practice of taking patients off them whenever they become critically ill, on the grounds that the virus ‘has gained resistance’ to the drugs, rather than the drugs have created the critical state. Some weeks later, when the patients have recovered some strength, the patients are mostly put back onto a different ‘cocktail’– to repeat the process again and again.

The drugs also damage the DNA of the mitochondria that provide essential energy to our cells. NRTI anti-retroviral drugs ‘inhibit mitochondrial DNA synthesis,’.[38] thus vitally weakening all internal organs and our immune system. The drugs thus create the same kind of damage as that produced by nitrite inhalants, one of the most toxic recreational drugs known – an irony, as this drug is also suspected of causing AIDS.

A recent study reported; ‘Mitochondrial toxicity of some nucleoside analogues, when used alone or in association, is now well established. These molecules can cross the placenta, such that the foetus is often exposed for several months.’ Animal trials show it can affect the brains of embryos..[39] Despite this finding, these drugs are still given to pregnant mothers in Africa – in order to prevent their embryos getting ‘HIV’!

A medical reference work entitled Drug Information for the Health Care Professional (1996) reported;’ it is often difficult to differentiate between the manifestations of HIV infection and the manifestations of zidovudine (AZT). In addition, very little placebo controlled data is available to assess this difference.’ Thus a doctor would find it very hard to distinguish a death caused by these drugs from a death from AIDS.

Glaxo Wellcome made in 2003 over $317 million from AZT sales. The drug has now brought the company over $2.5 billion in total. Several hundred thousand people are now on AZT, according to the New York Times.

‘Trizivir,’ a ‘cocktail’ of three Nucleoside RT Inhibitors including AZT made by Glaxo Wellcome, comes with the warning; ‘Does not cure or prevent HIV infection or AIDS’. When it was launched, several deaths occurred within a year. These were blamed on ‘hyper-sensitive reactions.’ The company told the Financial Times: ‘clinical trials have indeed shown that it has a potential for side effects … patients have died from using it.’[40] In its first two years of use, this cocktail brought the company around $350 million in revenue. Its current US price is $1,170 for a month’s pills, making it one of the most expensive.

Non-Nucleoside RT Inhibitors

These do much the same, but their target is to disable RT (Reverse Transcriptase), the enzyme our bodies use to move genetic codes into our DNA, one of the most basic processes in the life of every cell. These drugs spread in us synthetic particles that attach to RT, thus preventing it from doing its work. The intent is to stop the process by which HIV is thought to enter our cells, by preventing all retroviruses, mostly our own, from doing so. Yet RT is now known to be not only in all retroviruses, but in every cell of our body, giving vital flexibility and adaptability to our DNA, helping our cells do vital repair work.

One of these drugs is Nevirapine. In 2002 President Bush made this the centrepiece of US aid to Africa, as it had been especially recommended by the CDC for HIV positive pregnant women. But the CDC had warned earlier, on the 5th January 2001, that ‘healthy health care workers stuck by [possibly infected] needles’ should not be given this as ‘Nevirapine can produce liver damage severe enough to require liver transplants and has caused death’. A 43 year old laboratory worker had ‘sustained a needlestick injury after drawing blood from an HIV negative but hepatitis C positive patient. She was immediately put on an anti-retroviral ‘cocktail’ including Nevirapine, and consequently ‘required a liver transplant 35 days later.’[41]

Nevertheless the drug is still strongly recommended for pregnant mothers in Africa (but not in the US.) It is apparently better for Africans as it is slightly cheaper – at about $180 a month’s dosage. Most single anti-retrovirals cost $280-700 for 4 weeks, with Cocktails costing $650 -$1020.

The US Administration has very recently approved a ‘generic’ and cheaper cocktail for use solely in Africa. This will be made in South Africa with permission from Glaxo. It is made up by AZT, Nevirapine and Lamivudine..[42]

Protease Inhibitors

These antiretrovirals targets another vital enzyme in us, protease. This is used by our cells to divide, enabling the creation of more cells – again an essential part of life.

Dr David Rasnick, a protease specialist, reported these antiretrovirals ‘cause a massive cholesterol increase which frequently leads to heart attacks…. [43] they do most damage to the liver. [44] As a result liver failure is now the number one killer of AIDS patients.’[45] He adds that they also ‘cause lypodstropy – a deformation of fat. [It] moves out of the face, arms and legs, which become veiny sticks, the face become skeletal. The fat collects into a ‘buffalo hump’ on your upper back. The belly becomes extended and bloated.’ (ed – see photo supplied) Another study noted that ‘Hyperlipidaemia [unnatural fat distribution] at degrees associated with cardiovascular morbidity occurred in 74% of protease-inhibitor recipients.’ [46]

A new type of anti-retroviral drug is a Fusion Inhibitor. This attaches itself to the outside of our T-cells, thus hopefully preventing HIV connecting to them and infecting them. But it also blocks the access to our T-cells of many other particles, often preventing it from doing its work in protecting us. Its very use is thus a council of despair.

A recent study concluded; ‘It is safe to conclude that a cure is extremely unlikely with the current approach to treatment...There is growing concern about the long-term toxicity and adverse effects of therapy, including liver damage and mitochondrial toxicity caused by nucleosides, the most studied anti-HIV drugs. After drugs are approved, fewer organized efforts are made to monitor them for long-term toxicities...the quest for HIV treatment is fuelled by the expensive, technologically oriented approach used in wealthy countries.’[47]

Most who take these drugs die on them, usually after three courses of these drugs have failed, and after undergoing a final period of up to six antiretrovirals at once called ‘Salvage Therapy.’ But their doctor will assure them, and may well believe, that they have lived longer by taking the drugs.

ANTI-RETROVIRALS FOR THE HIV NEGATIVE

The CDC in January 2005 recommended that an HIV negative person go on a ‘cocktail’ of these drugs for 28 days immediately he or she has had ‘unsafe sex.’ To have a chance of being effective, they must be taken within 72 hours of the incident – or later, it added, if the risk is serious – so the drugs can get to the virus before it fully infects us.[48]

Lisa Grohskopf of the CDC explained; ‘The new guidelines are designed for use in specific situations, such as an occasional lapse in safer sex methods, a broken condom, rape or one-time sharing of needles.’ Ronald O. Valdiserri of the CDC added, in language reminiscent of the moral push of the Bush Administration, ‘the drugs are not a substitute for abstinence [and] mutual monogamy.’[49]

The CDC, for these HIV negative people who fear infection but who have no sign of illness, recommends short intense courses of triple cocktails including AZT on the ‘assumption that the maximal suppression of viral replication … will provide the best chances of preventing infection.’[50] This drastic course it only recommends because it tentatively thinks these drugs ‘might reduce the risk of infection.’ (In all there were 65 ‘mights’ and 22 ‘possibles’ in its statement authorising this treatment.) In making this recommendation, it has adopted a suggestion made last year by Robert Gallo, the first to claim to find HIV.

This statement means in future the manufacturers of these drugs will be able to drive up demand simply by building on our fear and paranoia. [51] Although the CDC says seek guidance from your doctor if you are not sure about your degree of risk, a broken condom suffices in its judgement. This change in practice is likely to lead to a vast increase in the use of these drugs.

THE SIDE EFFECTS

The CDC in January 2005 listed the ‘expected frequency of signs’ of ‘Acute Anti-Retroviral Syndrome’ (falling ill from the drugs). It said 97% will be fevered, 74% get lymphadenopathy, 70% a painful rash - with lesions, mouth and genital ulcers, 32% diarrhoea, 27% vomiting, 13% weight loss, 12% thrush – and 12% dangerous neurological diseases, possibly leading to dementia or death. In other words, these drugs produce most symptoms of AIDS in the West – and produce all the symptoms needed for an AIDS diagnosis in Africa.

But the CDC surprisingly left out of this list acute liver failure. In 2002, at the 14th International AIDS Conference in Barcelona, Dr. Amy Justice of Pittsburgh University, produced one of the first surveys of the main cause of death in AIDS victims. She had studied the records of nearly 6,000 AIDS patients in the US and found ‘the most common cause of death among HIV positive people is liver failure’. These patients were all on antiviral medicines. When asked if she felt these drugs were involved in their deaths, she replied she did. ‘It is the dark side of these drugs.’ [52]

Another study reported; “A comprehensive retrospective review of more than 10,000 adult AIDS patients participating in 21 different AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG) studies [confirms]... that antiretroviral therapy is associated with a high rate of severe hepatotoxicity [liver damage], regardless of drug class or combination.’[53] Another report stated; “Liver disease has become the leading cause of death among HIV patients at a Massachusetts hospital.’[54]

Many of these drugs are ‘safety tested’ today on a ready supply of American children (and now also African children). Children taken into care in New York are often used by drug companies, including the giant British firm Glaxo-Wellcome, as ‘test-beds’ for research on AZT and other drugs. This was documented in a film called ‘Guinea-Pig Kids’ transmitted on the BBC in December 2004 and by the prior work of investigative journalist Liam Sheff. He discovered that children in a Roman Catholic Home in New York were having these drugs administered to them through tubes into their stomachs when they refused to take them orally. Nine children’s homes have recently been used for such drug trials around New York. [55]

Today only 1% of the $6.5 billion spent annually on AIDS research goes on vaccine research. Nearly all is spent on vastly more profitable antiretrovirals. By 2003 the annual US market for these was worth around $15 billion.

I will finish with the testimony of one of those who now believes these drugs gave him AIDS, and who has recovered much of his health since stopping taking them.

‘I was ’diagnosed’ in 1989. I was prompted to test after my partner at the time decided to get the test and it came back positive. Mine was positive also – CD4 count 462… ‘I had no symptoms, but was told; ‘Unfortunately, the virus is already destroying your immune system. You must start AZT immediately… Later, I was told I would start to get sick in about 18 months, and then I would get very sick within 2 years – and die.

All I remember for the first several months or so is sleeping, throwing up, an unimaginable nausea, and an unending headache. I got weaker by the day. I lost a lot of my hair.’

‘After a year I thought “Well, if I only have another year, I’m not spending it like this.” So I stopped the pills.

I slowly got better over the years – I may have made a full recovery that time, I don’t know. I started living again, though, for sure. Oh...my CD4 count NEVER went above 500 during the whole experience.

But he remained HIV positive. ‘In ’97, I started ‘the cocktail’. Sounded nice enough. It consisted of Crixivan, Epivir, and Zerit (instead of AZT because according to my Doc I had had a ‘bad’ reaction to AZT.)

‘Before I knew it I had moderate/severe lipoatrophy (fat loss) and myopathy (muscle loss). My arms had stretch marks at the bicep area and looked like shrivelled balloons. I remember my arms always being tired because I held my body up with them when I sat down due to the fact that I sat on bone.

‘My face was the worst: hollow cheeks and temples and no fat anywhere. When I smiled, the skin looked like someone pulling back curtains on a stage. I looked extremely shrivelled up and old for my age. My eye sockets were hollow, my eyes looked sunken in. I always looked kind of scared, like an animal caught in a car light. Eventually, I knew it was the ‘meds’, but was terrified to stop.

‘After three and a half years I had had enough. I figured I was the living dead already, so what the hell – again I threw out the meds. By now it was Crixivan and combivir (which is AZT and something else, maybe Epivir – yeah back to AZT because unfortunately I had a worse reaction to Zerit than I had to AZT).

‘Then - nothing. I held my breath – waiting for IT. Oddly, I began to feel better. I got stronger – and calmer. Around a year and a half after stopping, I was rubbing my eyes and realized the skin on my face was thicker. I thought about it and realized I had been sitting down without the use of my arms for a while without realizing it.

‘It’s been 3 years since I stopped the meds. I can still see scars from that time – my body is not the body I used to have. But it’s better. I’m back at the gym.’[56]

Final part

UNRAVELLING AIDS

Throughout this research I have become more and more convinced that the major explanation for AIDS in the West lies in the missing ‘Risk Group for AIDS’, the one no longer mentioned in government reports, not because it does not represent the majority of those born in the UK who get AIDS, but because it does not fit with the HIV theory of AIDS.

The Key Omitted Risk Group – those on Inhalant Drugs and Crack.

Government statistics admit that, among those born in the UK, AIDS is still mostly affecting drug-abusing gay men – but why? The most common drug they take is ‘poppers,’ an inhaled nitrite – but most people think little risk is attached to this. Are gay men at risk for AIDS because of anal sex, or because of the poppers that they take intensely, scores of time a night, in the gay rave scene? We cannot tell from government AIDS statistics, since these only list injected drugs as a Risk Factor, omitting all taken orally or by sniffing, apparently since only dirty needles are compatible with HIV. They say the risk is from HIV contaminated needles – with oral drugs only a factor in that they remove inhibitions. I find this strange…for every scientific study I could find made in the UK and US over the past years has found 70 to 100% of those who get AIDS are on poppers – and only 10 to 20% on injected drugs.

There is a vast amount of evidence linking inhalant drugs with AID. The link established long ago by the CDC which reported in 1982 that a study of ’50 American male homosexuals with AIDS and 120 at risk for AIDS’ revealed the following pattern of intensive drug use (with many taking a cocktail of six or more drugs when they go clubbing or partying.). [i]

Nitrite inhalants [poppers] 96%

Ethyl chloride 35–50%

Cocaine 50–60%

Amphetamines 50–70%

Phenylcyclidine 40%

LSD 40–60%

Crystal Metaqualone 40–60%

Barbiturates 25%

Marijuana 90%

Heroin 10%

Drug-free None reported

All the way through the AIDS epidemic, study after study has repeated these findings. The Atlanta AIDS study of 1983 found 96% of AIDs victims were on the ‘poppers’ while only 10% took heroin;[57] [58], the San Francisco AIDS study of 1987 found 82% were on poppers and only 3% on heroin, [59] the Vancouver AIDS study of 1993 found 98% were on poppers, [60], the Chicago AIDS 1993 study found over 71% were on them, the Lancet study of 1993 reported that 88% of UK AIDS patients had taken them and the London-Manchester study of 1996 of 685 people at risk of AIDS, found 80% were on poppers – and only 25% on heroin.[61] In nearly all cases, AIDS is associated with a considerable amount of nitrite inhalants being very frequently taken as an integral part of the gay partying or rave scene. Crack Cocaine is the next most popular drug , followed closely in recent years by Crystal – and it seems these too are statistically associated with AIDS to a vastly greater degree than heroin. Gays not regularly on inhalant drugs or crack rarely if ever got AIDS.

Other drugs taken in combination with poppers make these drugs even more dangerous. A 2002 survey in San Francisco found one third of clubbing gay men were taking nitrite inhalants with Viagra, as the later counters the male impotence caused by the inhalants. Dr Jeffrey Kausner warned in the UK Aids journal in 2002 that poppers and Viagra together is a ‘lethal’ combination as they magnify each other’s effects. [62] . In Australia and the USA crystal methamphetamine (revved up ‘Speed’) is now epidemic in the gay clubbing scene, and, according to one AIDS foundation, it ‘eats T-cells for breakfast, lunch and dinner’.[63] Again the risk from these is not recorded in the UK AIDS statistics.

And, as mentioned in last month’s article, over a hundred toxicology studies on poppers were published in scientific journals in the first years of the epidemic, showing that these drugs severely damaged the immune system with lethal consequences ‘causing anoxia [oxygen starvation] of vital organs’ leading to death, oxidised blood – preventing it from carrying oxygen, gave low numbers of CD4 T-cells, mutated DNA and RNA, destroyed vitamins and oxidized blood.

The use of poppers has recently spread to UK women, although it is not known if this is associated with AIDS. From the mid 1990s clubbing women took them, not just for their buzz, but because they give ‘sexy’ dilated eye pupils! After two week, the drugs reportedly cause blackouts (due to lack of oxygen in the blood).[64] The women then take a few days off before starting with them again. In UK schools children have been reported selling popper ‘sniffs’ at 10p each.

Why are the ill effects of Poppers not reported? Could it be because the drugs make you ‘HIV Positive’÷

It seems that Gallo and Popovic could have launched quite a different theory about AIDS, if they had not been so wedded to their virus theory. Another answer was right there, in their experiments, but not noticed.

They could not find the virus in the T-cells it was supposed to infect. Gallo has since admitted, "We have never found HIV DNA in T-cells".[65] They only could find proteins and enzyme they thought ‘indicated’ the presence of their AIDS virus after they added to blood serum a chemical ‘growth factor’. Perhaps they should have looked harder at this ‘Growth Factor’? We now know it is an oxidising agent – and that poppers are also oxidising agents. Could the AIDS test be detecting antibodies against proteins produced, not by a virus, but by the oxidation of human cells?

In a ground-breaking recent research paper, laboratory mice were found, when dosed with nitrite poppers in the equivalent amount per body mass as taken by human party goers, to produce antibodies that test positive in the HIV test as if the nitrites were HIV. [66] This to my mind was an enormously important discovery, for it explains how the damage done by poppers could evade the attention of the health authorities. It had long been a mystery to me how this had happened. If the toxicologists were right, this damage should be obvious. But – if the drugs made you HIV positive, and gave you AIDS, then the virus would be blamed not the poppers!

No wonder the effects of these drugs has not been noticed, including by nearly all drug education programs; no wonder that the HIV/AIDS establishment misinterpreted the results. If this research paper is right, then a toxin may have done much of the damage attributed to HIV.

These inhaled nitrites were also found to cause in the mice a sharp in the numbers of CD4 immune cells – thus causing the very damage blamed on HIV. [67] Their mitochondria was also damaged, as with nitrite inhalants, thus damaging the way oxygen energy is passed around the body. But – there was something else in this experiment also of great importance, something not offered to AIDS victims by any antiviral drug. When the sick mice were treated with antitoxins, they mostly recovered.[68] They even stopped being positive for HIV . [69] It is thus possible that AIDS has a cure!

This possibility has unfortunately not attracted research funds up until now. If oxidation is partly to blame, then we should have been treating AIDS patients with antioxidants, as twice Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling said he had been doing with good results many years ago.

I am not suggesting that inhaled drugs cause all AIDS cases, for there is evidence of other toxins that could do much the same, including corticosteroids. Once it is admitted that a drug can suppress the immune system and thus cause AIDS, there is a wide range of other toxins that also should be investigated.

It is surely time for the non- HIV theories of AIDS to have the needed research funds so they can be properly and independently investigated? We have spent an absolute fortune, getting on for $200 billion, to find a remedy for AIDS by chasing a virus. We surely owe it to the gravely ill to look without prejudice at all options.

It should be noted that this is not a new theory. The basic work on nitrite inhalants was done over twenty years ago by scores of toxicologists and is supported today by a number of eminent senior professors whose work has been disregarded until now, for no other reason, as far as I can judge, than because it does not fit in with the HIV theory of AIDS.

One leading such dissenter, Professor Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos of Western Australia, sent in her paper on Oxidation and AIDS for publication at the same time as Gallo sent in his Science papers.[70] But, when his appeared first, she received hers back from the editor with the request that she re-consider it in the light of Gallo’s. This delayed its publication until 1988 when Gallo’s theory was seemingly unchallengeable. Her detailed paper argues that oxidation explained AIDS without requiring the presence of HIV.[71]

She had, like Gallo, had previously worked on cancer. She had however more success than he in discovering the cause of many cancers. She found cancers could be caused by radiation destroying the capability of the body to carry oxygen to vital organs, publishing a paper on this in 1982. She then now saw something similar happening among drug-taking men. Poppers, she noted, were made up of a nitrite acid that would destroy the ability of human cells to absorb oxygen. She theorised that this could be one of the causes of AIDS – adding that severe long-term malnutrition would do much the same damage to the blood’s capability of carrying oxygen, thus explaining similarities between AIDS in Africa and in the West.

Since then with colleagues in the ‘Perth School’ she has produced papers on AIDS in Africa, on AIDS among mothers, on antiretrovirals, stubbornly slowly gaining ground against the HIV theory.[72] Many of the latter exponents now acknowledge the role of oxidation – but as a co-factor with HIV. Others, such as the equally prolific and incisive Professor Peter Duesberg of Berkeley, also question the HIV=AIDS theory, blaming instead chemicals, drugs and malnutrition. Gallo has acknowledged of Duesberg that ‘he knows more about retroviruses than any man alive’.[73]

Other recent research indicates that an ‘HIV’ protein found to be attacked by antibodies with the ‘HIV Test’ might itself help cause AIDS without any need for it to come from a virus. The ‘HIV TAT protein’ reportedly caused in mice a ‘substantial loss of redox’,[74] meaning a very serious loss of cellular energy. This paper suggests this protein damages the immune system and creates the oxygen-starved conditions in which the original AIDS diseases flourish. It found a ‘50% drop in glutathione’, an energy chemical vital to us, and ‘an increase in [the] fibroblast growth factor’ implicated in causing Kaposi Sarcoma. But while this paper is fascinating, it occurs to me that it would be interesting to discover from whence came this protein. It too could relate to the drugs taken.

What then of Africa today? In that continent the effect of long-term near-starvation resembles that of poppers and crack cocaine. Over time near-starvation, retrovirals and inhaled drugs all create oxygen-deprived conditions within us and prevent us absorbing food. Thus people suffering from the African disease ‘Slim’ have the same skeletal look as Western drug-addicts suffering from terminal AIDS.[75]

The US Bureau of the Census, in its International Database 2001, stated that during the AIDS epidemic, between 1980 and 2000, the population of Africa south of the Sahara has not shrunk but increased rapidly from 378 million to 652 million – but we know also from other sources that many millions suffer from unhygienic water supplies, malnutrition and warfare – as well as epidemics of TB and malaria.

According to the latest official South African statistics, those issued in 2005 for 2003, TB is the greatest killer in South Africa, particularly among younger adults. It killed four times more at 12.1% than were reported for AIDS at 2.7%. Flu, pneumonia, heart diseases and even diabetes killed far more than AIDS. There were also disturbing signs of increase in the diseases of poverty in South Africa, with malnutrition being among the major causes of death for children aged under four.[76] However Pro-Retroviral groups and organisations gained much publicity in Western media by adding together AIDS and TB, on the basis that ‘TB is an AIDS illness’.

Conclusion to HIVGATE and AIDSGATE

It has taken me over 7 years to travel from accepting without question that HIV causes AIDS to discover that most people including myself had been misled. It has beeen very hard to accept that so many scientists of good faith could be so wrong. I must confess I had no idea how a single flawed hypothesis could do so much damage.

I now realise that science today is so specialised, that every generation of scientists needs to be confident that those who came before them have got things right for they cannot repeat it all again. All I can conclude now, after assessing every aspect of the research, is that a substantial part of modern virology has been built on a false trust. Since the government health institutions did not withdraw the foundation papers of AIDS science after they were discovered to be erroneous and deliberately misleading, many scientists are today basing their research into HIV in trust onthese papers.

The consequence of this trust can created the largest health disaster of our times.

In 1987 the Mayor of New York came to the conclusion, after studying the work of toxicologists, that AIDS could be eliminated by drug education. But ever since then, our government health professionals, in whom we put our trust, have ignored everything discovered by toxicologists that linked AIDS with inhalant drug abuse as well as with severe malnutrition, corticosteroids and other toxins.

Putting this right, could have an enormous effect on Africa, a vast lifting of the spirits of its people, far greater than anything so far achieved by LiveAID. We all know how devastating it must be for an individual to be told they are HIV positive and will inevitably die of AIDS, how tense and sick this belief can make them – so what does it do to the morale of a continent to be told that it is incurably blighted?

If you would like to help, please make sure this article, with its sister article, last month’s “HIVGATE[‘ , is photocopied and reprinted – and put up on your web-site, if you have one. The author gives the rights for reproduction for non-profit use freely – as long as her credit to the work is preserved, her website address (www.vaccines.plus.com is given with the article - where much of the supporting research can be found– and she is emailed beforehand so that she knows what is happening!

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The only international politician so far to take note of the theories of the above mentioned ‘dissident scientists’ has been President Mbeki of South Africa. For this, Mbeki has been internationally maligned, forcing him to issue the following letter.

President Mbeki of South Africa on AIDS.

‘Our search for these specific and targeted responses is being stridently condemned by some in our country and the rest of the world as constituting a criminal abandonment of the fight against HIV-AIDS. Some elements of this orchestrated campaign of condemnation worry me very deeply.

It is suggested, for instance, that there are some scientists who are "dangerous and discredited" with whom nobody, including us, should communicate or interact. In an earlier period in human history, these would be heretics that would be burnt at the stake!

Not long ago, in our own country, people were killed, tortured, imprisoned and prohibited from being quoted in private and in public because the established authority believed that their views were dangerous and discredited. We are now being asked to do precisely the same thing that the racist apartheid tyranny we opposed did, because, it is said, there exists a scientific view that is supported by the majority, against which dissent is prohibited.

The scientists we are supposed to put into scientific quarantine include Nobel Prize Winners, Members of Academies of Science and Emeritus Professors of various disciplines of medicine!

Scientists, in the name of science, are demanding that we should cooperate with them to freeze scientific discourse on HIV-AIDS at the specific point this discourse had reached in the West in 1984. People who otherwise would fight very hard to defend the critically important rights of freedom of thought and speech occupy, with regard to the HIV-AIDS issue, the frontline in the campaign of intellectual intimidation and terrorism which argues that the only freedom we have is to agree with what they decree to be established scientific truths.

Some agitate for these extraordinary propositions with a religious fervour born by a degree of fanaticism, which is truly frightening. The day may not be far off when we will, once again, see books burnt and their authors immolated by fire by those who believe that they have a duty to conduct a holy crusade against the infidels.

Signed

THABO MBEKI

More EXPERTS

Dr. Charles L. Geshekter, Ph.D., three-time Fulbright scholar. Professor of African History, California State University, Chico. Former chair of the History of Science, Pacific Division, of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences. He has served as an adviser to the U.S. State Department and several African governments.

“The scientific data do not support the view that what is being called AIDS in Africa has a viral cause. The World Health Organization defines an AIDS case in Africa as a combination of fever, persistent cough, diarrhoea and a 10-percent loss of body weight in two months. No HIV test is needed.

“The scandal is that long-standing ailments that are largely the product of poverty are being blamed on a sexually transmitted virus. With missionary-like zeal, but without evidence, condom manufacturers and AIDS fund-raisers attribute those symptoms to an ‘African sexual culture.’

“Traditional public-health approaches, clean water and improved sanitation above all can tackle the underlying health problems in Africa. They may not be sexy, but they will save lives. And they will surely stop terrorizing an entire continent.”

Professor Daniel J. Ncayiyana, the editor of The South African Medical Journal; ‘I am quite confident in my own mind that many cases identified as AIDS (according to their symptoms) are not AIDS…The numbers given must, of necessity, include people who possibly have other conditions.’ [77] .

Professor P.A.K. Addy, Head of Clinical Microbiology at the University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana: "Europeans and Americans came to Africa with prejudiced minds, so they are seeing what they wanted to see...I've known for a long time that Aids is not a crisis in Africa as the world is being made to understand. But in Africa it is very difficult to stick your neck out and say certain things. The West came out with those frightening statistics on Aids in Africa because it was unaware of certain social and clinical conditions. In most of Africa, infectious diseases, particularly parasitic infections, are common. And there are other conditions that can easily compromise

Dr. Henry Bauer, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Chemistry & Science Studies and Dean Emeritus of Arts & Sciences at Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University; Author, Fatal Attractions: The Troubles with Science.

 ’One result of commerce-driven science is the growing number of scandals, especially in biomedical research, where nasty side-effects or lack of efficacy of new drugs seem increasingly to be hidden from public view until significant damage has been done. Nowadays there’s the tragedy of AIDS, where the mainstream dogma that HIV is the cause may be subjecting tens or hundreds of thousands to inappropriate, indeed deadly so-called ‘treatment’ that has brought several drug companies unprecedented profits.” [78]

Dr. Andrew Herxheimer, MD, Emeritus Professor of Pharmacology, UK Cochrane Centre, Oxford; edited Drug & Therapeutics Bulletin in the UK for 30 years and also helped to found the International Society of Drug Bulletins.

‘I think zidovudine [AZT] was never really evaluated properly and that its efficacy has never been proved, but its toxicity certainly is important. And I think it has killed a lot of people. Especially at the high doses. I personally think it not worth using alone or in combination at all.”

Lynn Fall (née Gannett), former data manager, phase III clinical trials of AZT (1987-1990)

“AZT is a poison. AZT commonly causes miscarriages and severe birth defects. AZT is a highly toxic chemotherapy that interrupts DNA synthesis and destroys the immune system. In fact, AZT is a tragedy which I believe has led to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths, primarily in wealthier countries.”

Dr. Rudolf Werner, Ph.D., Professor of Biochemistry, University of Miami School of Medicine

“The HIV-AIDS hypothesis remains just that – a hypothesis. Many experts’ predictions turned out to be false. For example, contrary to the prediction that AIDS would rapidly spread into the heterosexual population, the disease in the United States is still restricted to 85 percent males. Yet HIV positives are found with equal frequency in healthy male and female Army recruits. This discrepancy doesn’t support the hypothesis that AIDS is caused by HIV.” 

“AIDS drugs have been credited for the reduction in AIDS deaths. But there is no scientific evidence that these toxic drugs prolong life. A study in Uganda shows that the time between becoming HIV-positive and the time of death is identical to that in the United States. The Uganda group received no AIDS drugs, while the U.S. group did. Since most people in the Uganda study were malnourished and multiply infected, doesn’t that suggest that antiretroviral drugs reduce life expectancy? Malnutrition is the most common cause of immune deficiency.”

Dr. Manu Kothari, MD, Professor of Anatomy, former Head of Department of Anatomy, Seth Gordhandas Sunderdas Medical College, King Edward Memorial Hospital, Mumbai, India

‘For all we know, it is not HIV that causes AIDS, but the so-called co-factors such as indiscriminate antibiotic use, recreational drugs, poverty, malnutrition, polluted water and pesticised food. AZT and the like (so-called triple therapy) are rank cytotoxic poisons. To give AZT to pregnant women is a crime against the mother and the baby she is making.’

Dr. Heinrich Broder Medical director of the Federal Clinics for Juvenile and Young Adult Drug Offenders for five German counties, including Berlin, Bremen, and Hamburg.

“The collective virus obsession enables ‘HIV’/AIDS medicine to operate in a lawless sphere without responsibility for the often fatal consequences.’ ‘It is high time to discuss the ethical consequences of the ‘virtual medicine’ currently practiced, which under the pretence of an imagined global epidemic, force-feeds highly toxic drug cocktails to patients,

Dr Roberto Rinaldo -Former Chairman of the Department of Microbiology and Parasitology, University of Antique, Medellin, Colombia. Author, Aids and Stressors 

“HIV tests are meaningless. A person can react positive even though he or she is not infected with HIV. The tests are interpreted differently in different countries, which means that a person who is positive in Africa [or Thailand] can be negative when tested in Australia. There is no justification for the fact that most people have not been informed about the serious inaccuracy of the tests. The error has catastrophic repercussions on thousands of people. ’

Dr. Juan Jose Flores, MD, Ph.D., Professor of Medicine, La Universidad Veracruzana, Mexico

“The causes of AIDS are not viral. I have witnessed the fatal effects that the anti-viral drugs have on the immune system. I treated patients diagnosed with HIV who were very poor. Their inability to afford the drugs precluded me from giving them AZT, which is very expensive. As time went by, I began to see that the rich HIV positive patients died, while the poor ones lived and continue to do so.”

Dr. David Rasnick, Ph.D., Biochemist, Protease Inhibitor Developer, University of California

“The National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, the Medical Research Council, and the World Health Organization are terrorizing hundreds of millions of people around the world….. It would be intolerably embarrassing for them to admit at this late date that they are wrong, that AIDS is not sexually transmitted. Such an admission could very well destroy these organizations, or, at the very least, put their future credibility in jeopardy. Self preservation compels these institutions to not only maintain but to actually compound their errors, which adds to the fear, suffering, and misery of the world – the antithesis of their reason for being.”

Dr. Joseph Mercola, former Chairman of the Family Medicine department at St. Alexius Medical Center, Illinois; served as editor of HIV Monograph by Abbott Laboratories

“What is not mentioned in any textbook is that AZT has been found in five studies performed after its rushed FDA approval to be equally toxic to T-cells, the very cells whose absence is blamed on HIV. This is not surprising since T-cells are produced in the bone marrow, and all the other cells produced there are depleted by AZT. These studies are but a sample of the evidence that suggest that AZT and other ‘antiretrovirals’…are causing a variety of AIDS-like symptoms which are being blamed on HIV.” The only studies published that claim positive outcome were short-term and did not have statistically significant results.”

Dr Donald W. Miller, Jr., MD, Professor of Surgery, University of Washington School of Medicine

 “The HIV-AIDS model is untenable. The twenty-plus diseases the government defines as ‘AIDS’ (when antibodies to HIV are also present) are caused, instead, by immunosuppressive heavy-duty recreational drug use, antiretroviral drugs, and receptive anal intercourse.

Dr. B.L. Meel, MD, Head, Department of Forensic Medicine, University of Transkei, South Africa 

“There are several risks associated with HIV/AIDS, but the most important immediate risk, soon after an individual becomes aware of his/her HIV status, is committing suicide. This is as a result of sudden unexpected, unprepared disclosure of HIV test result, leading to mental breakdown, i.e., severe acute depression... A study carried out in New York City (1997) found that 9% of suicide victims were HIV positive.

END

18,100 words

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[1] http://www.hpa.org.uk/infections/topics_az/hiv_and_sti/hiv/hiv_causes_aids.htm

[2] Lee LM, Karon JM, Selik R, Neal JJ, Fleming PL ‘...estimates of survival for the remaining 394,705 cases (of diagnosed AIDS-defining Opportunistic Infection (OI) in the US) showed that median survival time improved with each successive year of OI diagnosis, from 11 months for persons with AIDS diagnosed in 1984’

[3] Peter Duesberg, Evidence to South African Presidential Commission on AIDS, 2000.

[4][4] Papadopulos-Eleopulos, E., 1988, Reappraisal of AIDS: is the oxidation induced by the risk factors the primary cause? Med. Hypo 25:151

[5] MMWR Supplement, CDC, August 14 1987

[6] Chicago Tribune September 1, 1987

[7] Quoted in What if everything you thought you knew about AIDS was wrong? by Christine Maggiore. page 14.

[8] Amanda Bennett and Anita Sharpe, AIDS fight is skewed by Federal bodies exaggerating risks, Wall St. Journal, 1^st May 1996

[9] Professor Robert S. Root-Bernstein.’ The Evolving Definition of AIDS.’ On the Virusmyth website.

[10] Figure 3.1 of the UK government’s November 2004 issued; ‘2004 HIV Report.’

[11] Lewden 2003

[12] Ashby 2003

[13] HIV-1 is said to be the variant of HIV most present. Other genome fragments detected in the blood have led to the theory that there is a different HIV found in West Africa, HIV-2. Further minor types are also now posited– all based on genetic fragments, not whole viruses.

[15] Kashala O, Marlink R, Ilunga M, et al. Infection with human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) and human T cell lymphotropic viruses among leprosy patients and contacts: correlation between HIV-1 cross-reactivity and antibodies to lipoarabinomannan. J Infect Dis 1994;169:296-304.

[16] Muller WEG, Schroder HC, Reuter P, Maidhof A, Uhlenbruck G, Winkler I. (1990). Polyclonal antibodies to mannan from yeast also recognize the carbohydrate structure of gp120 of the AIDS virus: an approach to raise neutralizing antibodies to HIV-1 infection in vitro. AIDS 4:159-162.

O'Riordan DM, Standing JE, Limper AH. Pneumocystis carinni glycoprotein A binds macrophage mannose receptors. Infect-Immun 1995;63:779-784.

[17] Matthews R, Smith D, Midgley J, et al. Candida and AIDS: Evidence for protective antibody. Lancet 1988;ii:263-266.

[18] About 80 different factors are listed, each with references to scientific papers, on page 11 of Christine Maggiore’s book ‘What if everything you know about AIDS was wrong’. 2000.

[19] Myron ‘Max’ Essex, Head of Harvard AIDS Institute. In a 1994 study he warned that ‘existing antibody tests ‘may not be sufficient for HIV diagnosis’ in settings where TB and related diseases are commonplace.’

[20] Interview with Dr Rodney Richards - "HIV Tests" Can’t Tell You Whether You Have HIV By Mark Gabrish Conlan Zenger’s Newsmagazine Oct. 2001

[21] Tomiyama T, Lake D, Masuho Y, et al. Recognition of human immunodeficiency virus glycoproteins by natural anti-carbohydrate antibodies in human serum. Biochem Biophys Res Commun 1991;177:279-285.

[22] Genesca et al. (1989)

[23] Delord et al. 1991. (quoted in Papadopulos-Eleopulos et al. 1993b, pages 697-699

[24] Mortimer, P.P. 1989 The AIDS virus and the AIDS test. Medicine Internationale 56, 2334-2339.; Mortimer, P.P. Parry, J.V. & Mortimer, J.Y. 1985 Which anti-HTLV-III/LAV assays for screening and confirmatory testing? Lancet II, 873-877. Refer also footnote 236 in Rebuttal of NIH case http://www.robertogiraldo.com/reference/Johnston_NIH_Rebuttal_March2003.pdf.

[25] Candotti D et al. Status of long-term asymptomatic HIV-1 infection correlates with viral load but not with virus replication properties and cell tropism. J Med Virol. 1999 Jul;58(3):256-63.

[26] Ram Yogev Antiviral treatment of pediatric HIV infection. P 152

[27] See 1993 CDC Redefinition of AIDS.

[28] Nathaniel Rothman et al. Science 2^nd December 2004.

[29] Feeney C et al. T-lymphocyte subsets in acute illness. Crit Care Med. 1995 Oct;23(10):1680-5

[30] ‘There's no hope for a cure for AIDS with current drugs’, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Anthony Fauci, said at the 13th International AIDS Conference. ‘Eradication is not possible,’ Smith M. Current drugs no match for AIDS epidemic: Fauci. Biotechnology Newswatch. 2000 Jul 17;1

[31] A study showed that patients ill with the classical fungal AIDS diseases in 1984 had a survival time of 10 to 11 months, while in 1993 they had a survival time of just under a year and a quarter before death. The study concluded the extra 4-5 months of life was due to the anti-fungal medicines for PCP, (‘PCP prophylaxis’), not to the antiretrovirals used. A further study found the time to death after a clinical AIDS diagnosis [based on symptoms of illness rather than the HIV test] was 14.7 months in the 1983 to 1986 period, 19.1 months in the 1986 to 1988 period, and an estimated 15.7 months in the 1988 to 1993 period. In other words the introduction of antiretrovirals in 1986 appeared not to have helped at all.

[32] DeSimone JA et al. Inflammatory Reactions in HIV-1-Infected Persons after Initiation of Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy. Ann Int Med. 2000 Sep 19;133(6):447-454.

[33] Rickerts V et al. Incidence of myocardial infarctions in HIV-infected patients between 1983 and 1998: the Frankfurt HIV-cohort study. Eur J Med Res. 2000 Aug 18;5(8):329-33.

[34] Lemp et al, Journal of AIDS and HIV’, November 1997.

[35] See http://www.bhiva.org/guidelines/2003/hiv/index.html. Nearly all of the writing committee for the Anti-Retroviral Treatment Guidelines have multiple financial connections to the major pharmaceutical cmpaines.

[36] Carr A, Cooper DA. Adverse effects of antiretroviral therapy. Lancet. 2000 Oct 21;356:1423-0.

[37] ‘The standard daily prescription of 0.5g AZT corresponds to about 1021 molecules per body, or 107 per human cell, enough to kill most growing cells, especially the fastest growing.’ Roberto Giraldo, M.D. Continuum 1998/1999

[38] Walker UA et al. Toxicity of nucleoside-analogue reverse-transcriptase inhibitors. Lancet. 2000 Mar 25;355(9209):1096.

[39] Mitochondrial Toxicity Resulting from the Treatment of Pregnant Women and Infants

Stéphane Blanche

Hosp Necker, Paris, France

[40] Kibazo J. Glaxo plays down Ziagen fear. Financial Times. Aug. 21, 2000

[41] Sha BE, Proia LA, Kessler HA. Adverse Effects Associated With Use of Nevirapine in HIV Postexposure Prophylaxis for 2 Health Care Workers [second case]. JAMA. 2000 Dec 6.

[42] New York Times, 26 January 2005.

[43]

[44]

[45] This, and the associated quotes from John Laurtsen and Duesberg, are from interviews by the noted AIDS investigative journalist, Liam Sheff.

[46] Carr A et al. Diagnosis, prediction, and natural course of HIV-1 protease-inhibitor-associated lipodystrophy, hyperlipidaemia, and diabetes mellitus: a cohort study. Lancet. 1999 Jun 19;353(9170):2093-9.

[47] Henry K. The case for more cautious, pateint-focused antiretroviral therapy. Ann Int Med. 2000 Feb 15;132(4):306-311.

[48] A CDC statement reported by the BBC on Radio 4 on 22^nd January 2005.

[49] ’ The CDC has also followed a Bush agenda in withdrawing funding in 2004 it previously gave for AIDS prevention among Gays

[50] www.cdc.gov/mmwr/mmwr_rr.html

[51] www.cdc.gov/mmwr/mmwr_rr.html

[52] www.lhealsd.org/organfailure.html

[53] High Rate of Severe Liver Toxicity Associated With Antiretroviral Therapy. Reuters Health. 2001 May 23.

[54] Liver disease raises questions for AIDS patients. Reuters. 1999 Nov 19

[55] This use of children was documented in an outstanding investigation by Liam Scheff in 2004. His work then appeared as a 2004 documentary shown on the BBC; ‘The Guinea-Pig Kids’. It’s transcript is available on http://www.acftv.com/pdf/BBC_This%20World_Guinea_Pig_Kids_Transcript.pdf. One caution, the producers describe the drugs used on the children as ‘experimental’ when they are mainstream anti-retrovirals such as AZT and Nevirapine. This is not an error made by Scheff, as can be seen in his earlier excellent article.

[56] He remains unidentified, as requested, to protect his privacy.

[57] Jaffe tet al. 1983

[58] Kaslow et al 1989, , Ostrow et al 1990, Ostrow et al 1993.

[59] Darrow et al 1987

[60] Schecter et al 193, Elison et al 1986

[61] Gibbons 1986

[62] Klausner, Jeffrey, article in Aids, 10^th June 2002.Also http://www.campusoutreachservices.com/resources/viagra.htm

[63] A French AIDS foundation head, quoted in Shadownick ‘Kneeling in the Crystal Cathedral.’ 86-90.

[64] Personal communication to author 2004

[65] This was at a 1994 meeting in Washington sponsored by the US National Institute of Drug Abuse,

[66] Igel, H.J., Turner, H.C., Kotin, P. et al. 1969. Mouse Leukaemia Virus Activation by Chemical Carcinogens. Science 166:624-1626. Also, .Sterk, C. 1988. Cocaine and HIV Seropositivity. Lancet I:1052-1053. Quoted in ‘IIS A POSITIVE WESTERN BLOT PROOF OF HIV INFECTION?’ by Papadopulos-Eleopulos, E., Turner, V. F. & Papadimitriou, J. M. Bio/technology 11, 696-707 (1993).

[67] Ortiz JS, Rivera VL. Altered T-Cell Helper/Suppressor Ratio in Mice Chronically Exposed to Amyl Nitrite. NIDA Research Monograph. 1988;83:59-73.

Dax EM et al. Effects of Nitrites on the Immune System of Humans. NIDA Research Monograph. 1988;83:75-80.

Romeril KR, Concannon AJ. Heinz body haemolytic anaemia after sniffing volatile nitrites. Med J Aust. 1981 Mar 21;1:302-3.

[68] The reference for this was in a fascinating paper by James Whitehead in his Rapid Response ‘RE KS Risks’ on 11^th August 2003, BMJ http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/eletters/326/7387/495

[69] Farzadegan, H., Polis, M., Wolinsky, S.M. et al. 1988. Loss of Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 (HIV-1) Antibodies with Evidence of Viral Infection in Asymptomatic Homosexual Men. Ann. Int. Med. 108:785-790. Also Horsburgh, C.R., Ou, C.Y., Holmberg, S.D. et al. 1989. Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 Infection in Homosexual Men who remain Seronegative for prolonged periods. NEJM 321:1678-1680.

[70] The following is from an important paper by Professor Papadopulos-Eleopulo on The Reappraisal of AIDS - Is the Oxidation Induced by the Risk Factors the Primary Cause? ‘According to Karush "...the disulfide links of the antibody molecule play an essential role in the acquisition of immunological specificity and by virtue of their covalent nature, provide for the stabilization of the particular structure underlying the specific activity of the molecule" (59). Furthermore, the pattern of pairing of sulfhydryl groups to form disulfides is not an invariant property of the linear chain but depends on extrinsic factors including the redox (59,60). In other words protein synthesis and specificity in general and antibody synthesis and specificity in particular is redox dependant. If this is so, then any agent who will induce the same redox changes as a virus, could induce the synthesis of viral antibodies and antigens in the absence of the virus. ‘Medical Hypotheses (1988) 25: 151-162’ It is available online at http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/data/epmedhypo.htm

[71] Papadopulos-Eleopulos’ papers are available at www.theperthgroup.com and also at http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/index/epapadopoulos.htm

[72] The papers of Eleni and the Perth Group can be found at www.theperthgroup.com

[73] Duesberg’s papers are available at www.duesberg.com

[74] ‘Redox’ is short for ‘Reduction-Oxidation’ – this refers to the way our cells use oxygen.

[75] Papadopulos-Eleopulus et al. AIDS in Africa: distinguishing fact and fiction World Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology 1995, 11. 135-143

[76] ‘While an increasing number of deaths are associated with lifestyle diseases (such as heart disease and diabetes) as the underlying cause, the dominant contributors to the growth in mortality are deaths associated with tuberculosis, and influenza and pneumonia. Malnutrition was among the ten leading causes of death among children aged under 4. Although there was fluctuation during the three years in the percentages of deaths linked to malnutrition, the numbers of deaths increased steadily.’ South African Health Statistics. Published March 2005.

[77] Now Magazine, 9-15 March 2000

[78] Journal of Scientific Exploration, Winter 2001

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[i] Jaffe et al 1983 Table. CDC 1983: Drug use by American male homosexuals with AIDS and at risk for AIDS. (Percentage users among 50 AIDS cases and 120 at risk for AIDS.)

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