The BBC has many photos of HIV on its website, and has pages on how it causes AIDS - but it makes no mention even of the existence of scientific dissent - nor of the many eminent academics at major univerities who dispute the HIV theory of AIDS . Unusually, the BBC is making a stand on one side of an academic argument - and deserting its normal neutrality. ( Dissenting Professors named.)

This is a bit odd, when the BBC and the scientists it talks to cannot decide what HIV looks like! These are the pictures of HIV up on the BBC website as of April 16th, 2006. All four are supposed to be taken by electron microscopes - and all are simply labelled as "HIV".

1. "HIV" http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A426548

2. '3 Dimensional HIV" http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4642940.stm

 

3, The red dots are said to be "The HIV virus attacking an immune cell"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/africa/03/biology_of_aids/html/default.stm

4. BBC caption "The HIV virus - present in blood and sexual fluids

This must leave the BBC website reader convinced the virus is a master of disguise. But other scientists are convinced it looks entirely different. One virology research establishment says it really has an agggressive spiky, less 'New Age," look - for they had taken this picture of it. http://www.snof.org/maladies/imagesmaladie/retroviruslarg.jpg

But others disagree. They know what it looks like.They have seen it - and got this picture. Dr Robert Gallo, who claimed to find this virus, has this up on a website about him. It says it is of HIV, but it is of a white blood cell. The dots are presumably meant to be HIV.

 

But HIV really is, others maintain, a gorgeous wreath of well sauced blue noodles.

 

 

 

 

While other say it is a warty green object http://www.ops.org.bo/textocompleto/images/retrovirus.jpg

 

 

And others have a much more elegant post-modern grey

 

A great deal of artistic license has been taken with the above images. All of these images are what computer graphic artists have come up with when told by scientists what they have found... they are not the photos they mostly purport to be.

In fact retroviruses, of which family HIV is said to belong, are just dots in even powerful electron microscopes. A retrovirus next to a blood cell is like a human next to an enormous skyscraper. It is extrmely difficult to tell which retrovirus is being claimed to be HIV - for they do not look different.

So - what really is being seen? What photos are really being taken? Here are some samples. The first is simply labelled "HIV-1" - but they look like ordinary retroviruses - possibly.

For other say it is in this photo below

 

 

and others in this photo below

 

 

 

 

And someone with a powerfull microscope thought HIV might be the dots he saw in the bay like space on the edge of a white blood cell (the spotty body taking up the lower half of the photo.

The lower photo is the same but in 3 D. The ball like object is a blood cell, the arrows point at tiny dark dots which allegedly have been identified as HIV - although how on earth this can be told is beyond me, as in reality these could just as easily be cellular debris and normal harmless human retroviruses.

While the photo below is of thousands of particles of which three (arrowed) are somehow identified as HIV... this was claimed to be an 'isolation'

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In reality, a virus when truely isolated will photograph like this (this is NOT of HIV)

Every single one of these particles is identically shaped and sized - but this does not mean they are viruses. If they are the right size, and all retroviruses are normally of the same size, they must also be proved to be 'infectious' (ie - to enter cells and to be created by cells), before they are said to be isolated viruses.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A recent article on the BBC website, claims that the 3rd of the above BBC photos is of HIV in 3D - and explains; 'The variable size and shape of HIV has made it hard to map.... (so we) took hundreds of images of viruses and used a computer program to combine them. Professor Stephen Fuller of Oxford said 'HIV is very variable. It varies in diameter by a factor of 3.' All other retroviruses are alike in size. It is part of the definition of a retrovirus that it is of this standard size. But the Professor claims that it does not matter that many of the particles he has found are of the wrong size . It is like saying a horse is a girraffe - because it does not matter how long its neck is.

Professor Emeritus Etienne de Haven, a well reputed expert in the electron microscopy, wrote to me that 'all the "thousands of beautifull pictures of HIV" found in the world press, all derive (after considerable computer graphic embellishment!) from complex laboratory tissue cultures, NEVER directly from one single AIDS patient!'