Science Guardian

You read it here first – hold those billions, Vitamin A blocks bird flu lung devastation

All the panic over H5N1 seems a little overblown when you consider that the virus has been around for eight years at least without morphing into a deadly human version that can sweep the globe from human to human. The very same H5N1 was the cause of the “Avian flu” outbreak in Hong Kong in 1997.

But just to reduce the hysteria a few more notches, we have decided to relent on our decision (at the end of the previous post) to be kind to the drug companies, officious officials, army of doomsayers and worryworts, posturing politicians, and all the other people whose interests mesh smoothly with maximum flu alarm, and announce with a trumpet fanfare the final solution to bird flu.

We at New AIDS Review thus proudly note today (Sun Nov 20), apparently for the first time in any form of media outside the medical literature, the references that tell what the ultimate solution to bird flu surely is: a modest dose of Vitamin A to anyone who contracts it.

You read right. The $7.2 billion question is this: why spend billions upon billions on massive and uncertain preventive measures such as

a) executing the few chickens owned by poor Asian families who may depend on them for survival

b) the unlikely effort to prevent H5N1 spreading among domestic fowl by vaccinating 5.1 billion birds in China and billions elsewhere in Asia (the Chinese eat 14 billion chickens a year, so even if a gigantic army of vaccinators is successfully recruited and swings into action, they will have to keep at it forever, as if they were repainting a hundred Golden Gate bridges annually),

c) stockpiling enough vaccine for humans which if it can be done will take months and may be evaded anyway by the evolving virus, and

d) distributing enough antivirals like Tamiflu to sink a ship when there is some question as to whether they will be effective against this virus (according to the British Medical Journal current issue 2005;331;1266 ‘How the Media Caught Tamiflu’)

when, according to the mainstream medical literature lying under the noses of the pontificating pundits and overly political scientists such as Anthony Fauci and the CDC brass who are on every TV channel this morning chinking their medals and repeating what the media have been hearing for months, the simple solution to H5N1 is this: give anyone who contracts deadly bird flu a dose of Vitamin A.

This will do the trick because Vitamin A reliably blocks the pathway of creation of deadly Tumor Necrosis factor in the lungs, which is the aspect of bird flu which is so deadly.

That is what the referenced papers say which we list below, which are readily available to any of these heroes of health for their bedtime reading.

Government without time to read

Why this grand army of well paid advisors, experts, commentators, WHO statisticians, field workers, corporate chieftains, Presidential advisors, think tank wonks, fast-talking current affairs hosts, and other luminaries have somehow overlooked them in their rush to judgement we hesitate to imagine.

Could it be that, in this age of information deluge, opinion making of every kind in the hottest issues of the day has now become completely divorced from factual information if that data is buried in any form of publication other than newspaper headlines and book reviews?

If so, it bodes ill for the future. Certainly there are already two huge signs that this is now true: Katrina and Iraq. In both cases, extensive written advisories were completely ignored.

As we all know, there were plenty of warnings in the form of levee engineering reports that a strong hurricane would flood New Orleans out of existence, written years before Katrina struck. So many, in fact, that even the leisurely PBS had time to send a documentary crew down there to make the same point some years ago.

In the case of Iraq, a report of thousands of pages of what to do with the country once the war was won was prepared by the State Department, in consultation with all kinds of experts and exiled Iraqis, for the Bush administration in advance of the invasion.

According to the New Yorker, it was filed in the White House waste basket.

The Avian flu-TNF-Vitamin A paper trail

Here are the references on Vitamin A and what they say, courtesy of library research by Robert Houston, long time medical investigator and nutrition researcher in New York City, who has lectured at the New School and frequently advises reporters on health and medical topics. He now writes to us:

Can Vitamin A Tame Bird Flu?

NewAIDSreview.com scoops the world’s media by being the first to reveal that recent scientific studies point to vitamin A as a potential remedy for bird flu.

It should be noted however that the normal requirement of vitamin A is only 5000 units per day (1.5 mg), and that the therapeutic levels range from 25,000 to 100,000 units (about 7 – 28 mg).

Unlike vitamin C, it cannot be taken in gram amounts; in fact, severe toxicity has occurred at 300 mg (1 million units). Other nutrients, such as the omega-3 fatty acids of fish oil, can also help to reduce TNF overproduction.

(see Grimble, R. et al. The ability of fish oil to suppress tumor necrosis factor-a production… Am J Clin Nutr 76:454-9, 2002.)

At these tiny amounts it should be possible to defend every person on earth from avian flu for a fraction of the cost of Tamiflu. There is already a system in place for distributing Vitamin A to children in seventy countries.

Here is the paper trail that Houston followed that shows fairly conclusively that a little Vitamin A will tame Avian Flu:

As the last paper suggests, this knowledge about the modus operandi of Avian Flu can be used for the “development of novel therapeutic strategies”.

Our “novel strategy” is to ramp up Vitamin A production to straospheric levels and make sure there is enough for every man, woman and child on the planet. Since that would cost less than a few cents each, we reckon, it would save all of $10 billion right there in WHO salaries, Tamiflu patent royalties, Anthony Fauci television appearances, and all the other costs that modern health defenses are now saddled with.

But why haven’t Anthony Fauci and his cohorts at the NIH and CDC, not to mention the WHO, come up with this themselves? Why do they need an obscure onlooker to point it out to them?

It’s their job, after all, to protect us from this gigantic threat which they are saying may ruin the world. The ever authoritative Dr Fauci was saying on TV last night that, even if the virus never appears in lethal form, a vast effort to defend against it will be well worth the billions we can shovel at it. Shouldn’t Dr Fauci read the medical literature in between his many sessions under the TV lights repeating the same smug alarms?

One possibility as to why the medical authorities don’t know all this from reading their own literature, at bedtime if necessary, emerges from this sequence. It does help to be a nutrition expert who has researched Lyme disease, which is a relatively neglected and somewhat disputed area.

But then, so is nutrition a relatively neglected area, medically speaking, it seems to us. As a cause and cure of ailments, it is surely much more relevant than is suspected by many doctors in our commercial, drug-oriented system.

But of course, the unpatentable Vitamin A is no path to profits for the maker of Tamiflu, Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche, a leader in an industry where profits are not as easy to come by these days.

Having the right drug in hand for a superbug can rescue the situation very rapidly for a drug company in hard times, as the case of Viropharma shows. Crucial Antibiotic Rescues Biotech Maker’s Finances

On the other hand, as the case of Viropharma also shows, meddling with Mother Nature by dosing her with an ever increasing array of drugs can lead to unintended side effects which make it ever more important to consider the more natural alternative of nutrient supplements. Apparently in this case it is drugs that beget the need for yet another drug:

C. difficile disease occurs when antibiotics used to treat a different infection wipe out the beneficial bacteria that normally reside in the colon. That leaves an opening for C. difficile, which is resistant to most antibiotics. The bacteria form spores that can persist for months on surfaces like toilets and can be transferred to patients from the hands of health care workers or visitors.

Is it too much to ask that Dr Fauci and his battalions of scientists and health workers take up our suggestion and research the saner route of a safe nutritional alternative in dealing with what they present as the global health threat of all time?

And while they are at it, perhaps they might apply the same revisionist thinking to AIDS, which according to the mainstream scientific literature they are also ignoring is the highest mountain of theoretical scientific and medical garbage that has ever accumulated.

The Council of Foreign Relations ran a comprehensive update discussion of Avian Flu today (Wed Nov 16), filled with experts on the panels and in the audience in both NYC and in Washington.

Apart from showing that not much has changed since the global panic took hold a month ago, the event was chiefly of interest for the tone of voice and manner in which the review was conducted. That is to say, unhurried and confident, in the inimitable Council style. The topic may be the possibility of the death and illness of millions, and any solutions remote, but voices at the Council are untroubled, manners gracious, and phrasing formal, with no more stress than discussing the budget. Every male visible is wearing a dark suit.

This is typical Council stuff, a pow wow among the highly placed who have time to worry about world problems, one may feel, because their personal concerns are well taken care of. These guys live in offices on the national and international level where millions are small change, and their discussion of what has to be done seems to involve no doubt that anything necessary can be paid for. At times there seems an odd disconnect with the world of Asian poultry breeders whose household income depends on a few chickens. But here the rich are discussing how to save the whole world.

We took a few notes, hoping for major revelations, but if they came, we missed them as our attention wandered during the day. Already by 11 am it seemed clear that, if Tamiflu is ineffective against whatever form it takes, there is really no front line of effective defense against H5N1 once it has evolved into a 1918-type human flu virus, and that society will implode if this ever happens.

For the record, here are the notes:

A simple cure?

In other words, scores of points, nothing dramatically new and in the end, a pleasantly reassuring Council discussion glazed as usual with the Senatorial politesse which makes everything feel under control even if completely beyond control. No doubt as Garrett suggested at one point many of the billions to be spent by governments – many more that the $7 billion Bush budget allocation, it is clear – will amount to the same spinning of wheels.

Given this high level floundering Truthseeker believes at this point he should help out by mentioning that there are papers which suggest a possible solution to avian flu : simply to take Vitamin A supplement. At least three papers show that Vitamin A acts to block TNF – Tumor Necrosis Factor – in the lungs. Avian flu hyperinduces TNF in the lungs, which accounts for its high fatality rate.

In other words, the pandemic might reduce to an epidemic of flu like any other if enough Vitamin A is available. If it indeed proves to be the antidote, it will be interesting that it was not mentioned in this day of high level panel sessions – another indication that virtually nobody reads the medical and scientific literature any more, certainly not the advisers to the powerful.

But of course vitamin A is not the path for profits for any drug company, since it is hardly patentable. So probably this news will not be received with much enthusiasm by the kind of elite insider of capitalism that one meets at the Council.

Indeed, the idea that a pill or two of Vitamin A will reduce the greatest threat to physical and economic health heralded in three quarters of a century to mild flu seems likely to rain on a very large parade.

So maybe we won’t mention it after all.

According to the Angola Press, it became apparent some time ago that some of the health aid millions which have poured into Uganda have vanished into someone’s pockets, but they are still not sure whose.

The Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB and Malaria has now relented and allowed the fund tap to be turned on again, but it is trying to insist that the promised enquiry will continue.

We record this item simply to indicate just how strong a motive African leaders have to maximize such inflow, by fully cooperating with whatever exaggeration of AIDS and other statistics international organizations produce.

Evidently it is fairly easy for hands to dip into these millions before the money reaches the accounts of the organizations it is intended for. If the alarm is raised, the accounting is sufficiently loose that it is not immediately obvious to whom the hands belong.

Who are the true witchdoctors at work there?

Recently our resident blonde critic appeared in the study in a tearful state, having been briefed by NPR on the efforts by peasants who grow coffee to achieve justice in the face of exploitation. Consequently, in line with her decree, we made sure to buy “Free Trade” organic coffee from Papua New Guinea next time we were in Fairway, which proved to be both morally and gustatorily satisfactory even at $10.06 a pound.

Until, that is, we came across the latest outrage to sense and sanity perpetrated by the HIV?AIDS missionaries, who have apparently taken to tormenting the natives of Papua New Guinea with the news that they are riddled with HIV or at least antibodies to it, and this signals a dark future for them unless they abandon their primitive but proven way of life and submit to the dictates of the newly arrived scientific church of AIDS.

Officially there are only about 12,000 people infected with HIV-AIDS in PNG, but AIDS workers estimate that under-reporting and reluctance to be tested mean the real number ranges from 80,000 to 120,000.

The island’s 5.4 million people, most of whom live a rural subsistence life, presently face an epidemic on a par with Cambodia, Myanmar and Thailand.

But AIDS experts say that, with an annual infection rate of 33 percent, PNG is on the verge of an African-style epidemic that could kill millions and destroy the economy.

There are only 12,000 Papuans who have tested positive so far, officially, but “AIDS workers” feel that this is an underestimate and as many as 120,000 are hidden from the census.

“This is the tip of the iceberg,” said Dr Alphonse Tay, head of Port Moresby General Hospital. “In 10 to 20 years’ time about 50 percent of the population is going to be affected by HIV.”

And by what means is this rapid spread of HIV antibody positivity among the hapless primitives of New Guinea effected? According to Reuters correspondent Michael Perry, who researched this sensational story, it is through polygamy and rape, sometimes gang rape by the police and sometimes of 13 year olds.

This is what is fueling a 33 per cent spread annually, we are told. There have been 151 rapes already this year in Port Moresby, and the local AIDS expert, a Francisan monk who spent 30 years in the jungle before opening an AIDS clinic in the town, says that even 13 year olds are endangered. He carries out “mass funerals of AIDS babies”. One wife was infected by her husband “one drunken night”. And so on, and on.

There have been 151 rapes reported in Port Moresby so far this year and a recent human rights report said a culture of police violence sees officers engaging in gang rapes and spreading HIV-AIDS by beating those who carry condoms.

Many HIV-positive husbands knowingly infect their wives by refusing to wear condoms, believing it lessens their manhood.

“Money in this country justifies anything,” said Father Jude. “If one picks up a 13-year-old for sex, it’s illegal, but if one pays compensation to the family, it’s okay.”

All this means that in ten or twenty years half the 5.4 million people of Papua New Guinea could be HIV positive, “AIDS experts” reckon, unless they clean up their act. Meanwhile the Papuans generally view AIDS as sorcery and have taken to throwing HIV positive people into rivers or graves or starving them to death, for fear of being infected themselves.

All this evidence of ignorance on the part of the Papuan natives goes along, however, with claims by the same “AIDS experts” which themselves flout some of the clearest results of papers in the HIV?AIDS mainstream literature, in particular the data that shows that the ability of men to transfer HIV in heterosexual sex is almost nil (1 in 1000 bouts, if that).

So which group is truly ignorant? Perhaps there would be more reason, justice and sanity if the natives took to flinging the AIDS experts into rivers and graves, or starved them to death, rather than their friends and relations unfortunate enough to test “HIV positive”.

In fact, we rather wish they would. Evidently our efforts to support them by drinking their coffee beans are going to naught, as the AIDS missionaries bring the instruments of their fatal sorcery into the country.

The BBC, which has shown that no AIDS drama from Africa is too unlikely for it to report with a straight face on its nightly World News, today picks up a sensational story from the News of the World and Mail newspapers.

Apparently a Scot who tested positive for HIV antibodies a year ago has now tested negative. Calling himself the “luckiest man in the world” Andrew Stimpson is declining any more testing, presumably on the principle Quit while you’re ahead.

The story shows how few reporters or members of the public at large understand even what the HIV test is about. Evidently their understanding is that the test detects the presence or absence of HIV, the “virus that causes AIDS”, as the Times likes to assure us ad nauseam.

In fact of course the test supposedly determines whether somebody has at some time been exposed to HIV and generated antibodies to it. It supposedly detects such antibodies.

In other words, according to the standard HIV=AIDS tale, what happened to Andrew from Ayrshire, evidently a down-to-earth Scotsman from one of Scotland’s most beautiful corners, was that (if the tests are accurate, and consistent, and reveal what they are supposed to reveal, which is another highly questionable story) he was exposed to HIV, developed antibodies to HIV and then a year later, had somehow lost these defenses against HIV.

People with antibodies to HIV – ie those that test “positive” – supposedly have HIV lurking still somewhere in their systems, but effectively hiding from the antibodies, and from any lab researcher hunting for it. That is to say, the amount of HIV found in such people, even after they become fully fledged “AIDS patients” and eventually approach death as a result of a damaged immune system, is typically very low, and hard to tease out at all even with the help of PCR, which can find and multiply the equivalent of a needle lost at the bottom of New York harbor.

So Andrew is, according to the standard bible of AIDS theory, now worse off than before. In a world where HIV causes AIDS, he is now undefended against the dread virus. Unless he can make some more antibodies, HIV will have a field day when it emerges from its hiding place somewhere in his body, or when he is again exposed to it. Why is he celebrating?

Since such conundrums arise from the bare minimum of contemplation of the fatuously inconsistent story of HIV?AIDS peddled by news reports like this courtesy of the kind of “expert” news source quoted from AIDS “trusts” and “international AIDS groups”, one wonders whether the reporters and editors of the BBC have any critical faculties left in operation when they read this stuff.

Given the deluge of arrant nonsense purveyed in such stories, probably not. Even the sharpest mental blade grows dull if it has to cut through a tangle of anomalies as knotted as the daily world news on HIV?AIDS.

Meanwhile, we note that the Chelsea and Westminster Healthcare NHS Trust is anxious for Andrew to return for another test, presumably because they feel slightly vulnerable to Andrew pressing suit, and have a pretty good idea they can produce a positive test result again if he will just come back into their clutches.

Seems to us though that they are in something of a fix. If they want to question Andrew’s case, they are going to have to acknowledge that their tests might not be so accurate after all.

Caution over HIV cure claims

Though most news outlets have ignored the new isssue of bird arthritis (we admit we had never heard of it), the Onion has performed a public service in noting that officials at WHO have not yet taken this threat seriously.

Bird Arthritis Epidemic Largely Ignored

A CD makes it easy to access the many scientific papers in AIDS which show the official story is invalid

A fundamental problem in the HIV?AIDS discussion is the fact that virtually no one reads the scientific literature properly except the few scientists and their supporters who object to the paradigm.

This will tell you something in itself, of course, if you are wondering whose view is correct.

One thing in the ongoing dispute is certain, as we never tire of repeating. It is the scientific literature in leading journals, thoroughly peer reviewed by scientists of equal stature and expertise before publication, that is the key credible, authoritative source which tells outsiders whether or not HIV is a valid candidate for causing immune dysfunction. At the present stage of the discussion, this literature concludes that it is not.

To repeat, the top, mostly severely peer-reviewed review literature in AIDS says and has said consistently for 18 years that HIV is not the cause of AIDS, and that all logic and all evidence is against it, and if any evidence or paper purports to support the theory, it does not bear inspection.

We are referring of course to the extensive and evidently unanswerable series of papers against the HIV=AIDS hypothesis by Peter Duesberg and others in the pages of such journals as Cancer Research, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Science, Nature, Lancet, Journal of AIDS, AIDS Forschung, Biomedicine and Pharmacotherapeutics, New England Journal of Medicine, Research in Immunology and Journal of Biosciences.

The people who argue most vociferously with this, the scientific literature’s HIV review and so far unrefuted conclusion that HIV is NOT the cause of immune dysfunction either do not read the review literature properly, or if they do read it they tend to notice only what they believe supports their own beliefs. In other words, they skim it with prejudice.

Of course that statement itself is merely an assertion, without credibility unless it is referenced. And to be honest we don’t have any reference for it. The study on how well people read any of the HIV critique remains to be done. We would bet that the result of such a study would be pretty dismal.

In our experience, it is a consistent characteristic of the scientists who run HIV?AIDS meetings, and who give talks and write papers along orthodox lines, and the editors of science journals who support them, that they generally have a great natural distaste for reading literature that disagrees with their basic assumption. Their claims to have read any of it usually prove hollow if challenged.

We do, however, have an anecdote. A couple of years ago we attended a conference at Rockefeller University held by the premier scientific society for immunology research. There we met the president of the society and asked him what he thought of Peter Duesberg, and the review literature Duesberg had published rejecting the theory of HIV causing AIDS.

This gentleman, a rather dapper little fellow in a well tailored Savile Row suit, seemed to find even the mention of Duesberg’s work laughable in the context of the meeting of his distinguished fellow immunologists, However, we detected that he did not claim to have read much of the review material himself, if any at all, and that his opinion was founded on the quicksand of hearsay, which he however seemed to view as solid enough on which to base his opinion, since it was after all his familiar colleagues who had transmitted it to him.

Therefore we were rather surprised to get an email from him after the conference asking us if we still thought there was something to Duesberg’s papers. We sent an email explaining that we did, and why, and attached a copy of Duesberg’s 2003 Journal of Bioscioences devastating megacritique of HIV?AIDS, which scotches every single aspect of the paradigm and every single Ptolemaic counter argument made to what is now a two decade long review.

Strangely enough, we got only one brief reply from our smartly tailored correspondent, saying that the paper had merely confirmed his conivtion that HIV caused AIDS and that he was in a rush to get to the airport and would reply at length later. He never did.

We found that reaction to Duesberg’s paper interesting because of what it revealed in his response. This was a fairly intelligent fellow who had evidently not given the paper any serious attention, otherwise he would have been forced to admit that it at the very least provided food for thought. The paper, as anyone can see who goes to Duesberg, P., Koehnlein, C. and Rasnick, D. (2003) The Chemical Bases of the Various AIDS Epidemics: Recreational Drugs, Anti-viral Chemotherapy and Malnutrition.

(J. Biosci. 28: 383-412) and reads it for him or herself, is simply not something that can be dismissed lightly, let alone be interpreted in any way as reinforcing belief in the paradigm. even if one reads it standing on one’s head.

The only way one can read it that way is not logical but psychological, of course. Just as the man in the Aesop fable pulls his coat ever more tightly around him when the wind blows as hard as it can to make him take it off, so the Duesberg critique acts like a chill wind to make any mainstream HIV/AIDS priest wrap the protective cloak of the paradigm around himself more tightly than ever.

It is therefore with optimism and pleasure but a certain disheartened cynicism that we pass along the signal news that Harvey Bialy, the expert scientific commentator on matters biological, ex-scientific founder of Nature Biotechnology and the author of the only scientifically fully informed biography of Duesberg and his work so far (Oncogenes, Aneuploidy and AIDS: The Scientific Life and Times of Peter Duesberg (North Atlantic Press 2004) has made available a remarkable CD.

The CD (or its downloadable version) consist of a watershed article written by Duesberg, As Bialy writes

In 1992, Duesberg published an extensive and updated review in Pharmacology & Therapeutics (55: 201-277) (http://duesberg.com/papers/ch62.html) of the state of HIV/AIDS research. The article is typical of Duesberg’s reasoning and contains the usual number of abundant citations.

Between 1994 and 1996, thanks to the generous financial support of Seth Ian Goldberg, MD, I was able to compile a CD that contains the complete text of this monograph, with hyperlinks to approximately 85% of the hundreds of references and all the references listed in the footnotes—and their live urls.

This is normally an impossibly weary slog, undertaken by no one at all ever, we suspect, with the possible exception of the peer reviewers who passed on the paper. Reading these references is absolutely essential, however, if anyone is to assess the validity of Duesberg’s case, since they are the bedrock foundation upon which it is built.

Now, however, by obtaining this CD anyone even halfway literate in science can quickly click to the original sources and see for him/herself exactly why Serge Lang and numerous other independent minded scientists and intellectually alert individuals credit what Duesberg writes despite the combined political weight of the monumental scientific church of HIV?AIDS, possibly the greatest post-Soviet force for repression of thought after the Vatican and Beijing.

To be frank we don’t think that any of them will find anything that contradicts Duesberg, who with his entire reputation on the line is without doubt the best read scientist in the field on the topic of whether HIV causes AIDS.

As Bialy writes, the purpose of the CD is to answer the empty calumny occasionally voiced by the mainstream defenders of the status quo in AIDS science, those that defend the claim that HIV causes AIDS despite the endless evisceration of the paradigm by Duesberg and other distinguished reviewers, that Duesberg et al are cheating by misquoting the scientific literature.

In other words, the long list of references to the papers of the mainstream scientific literature on HIV?AIDS, which Duesberg and his fellow critics are careful to use as the sources for the various details of the paradigm they condemn, which they attach to every review paper they write to back up their own assertions and demolition of the conventional wisdom, are somehow misinterpreted.

Of course, this is a very effective counter in most circumstances since, just like our friend the British president of the immunology society, virtually no one can muster the appetitite to comb through hundreds of papers on AIDS, let alone read them carefully. So as far as anyone listening to the debate is concerned, Duesberg et al are stymied, their arguments cast into sufficient doubt that no one need attend to them. Thank God.

This gamesmanship is typical of the tricky way in which Duesberg is dismissed in HIV?AIDS on every level, scientific and political, It is particularly revolting to anyone who loves good science, since the scientific literature is really the only way of knowing whether a claim is correctly and securely founded or not. Peer review of scientific claims is the gold standard of science, and deserves to be if it is done by honest and capable scientists who do a good job of assessing a paper without fear or favor.

Unfortunately is not always the case, of course. Scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours is all too often the underlying impulse in peer reviewing, judging from the unsettling number of poorly designed studies and experiments and speciously argued papers that almost any good scientist can point to, papers which have survived peer review by colleagues friendly to their premises or their authors or both. As we have mentioned before Nobel prize winner Walter Gilbert told us once that he never embarked on any line of experimentation based on a published experiment by someone else without redoing it himself, since all too often it just didn’t stand up.

Duesberg’s major achievement in review is not just a still unrefuted demolition of the arguments and evidence for HIV as the cause of AIDS (his major peer-reviewed review papers are effectively unanswered by any peer-reviewed response in any of the leading journals in which he has published them) but also a remarkable exposure of the fact that so many of the papers supporting it do not stand up to unfriendly analysis. The studies which purport to establish that HIV possibly causes AIDS symptoms (none of them claim the stature of proof) are riddled with errors in design and logic.

Some might feel that this kind of problem with the literature in health and medicine, especially in epidemiology, is fairly evident even to the general newspaper reading public who can see how often this week’s study is contradicted by one a year later. But this is not proof of bad science since such inconclusiveness can stem from the nature of medical research on human beings, whose biological system, diet, environment and activity involve thousands of variables and make it impossible to control for just one. Large studies over long periods are needed to tease out firm conclusions and they are expensive and difficult to arrange.

Nor are we referring to actual fraud which occasionally makes its appearance in the annals of science and is generally deplored by all. The problem we are referring to is that of studies which are poorly designed, or which are prematurely concluded, or where the logic and the science are faulty, which is apparently a problem endemic in AIDS. We say this because we have in years past been in touch with Duesberg on the topic of one study or another in journals as respected as Science and Nature, where he is supposedly proved misguided in his objections to HIV=AIDS, only to find that he can clearly show us that the study itself is egregiously misleading because of inherent problems with its design.

Nevertheless, where necessary all such criticism other people’s papers is mentioned in his HIV?AIDS review papers, and it is not the basis of his fundamental disagreement with HIV?AIDS. Duesberg’s critique and rejection of HIV as the cause of AIDS is based on the same literature as the proponents of the still unproven theory claim supports it.

Duesberg does not reject the literature of AIDS so much as accept it and prove that it fails to support the theory.

Any decent scientist or other researcher who reads his arguments will want to see for him or herself what the original papers he references actually do say, since they are the foundation of his critique, and he claims support his arguments and not the hypothesis that HIV causes AIDS.

But there has always been the barrier of the trouble it takes to get to the hundreds of papers involved. The first Proceedings paper has over 200, for example.

This is what the CD prepared and made available by Harvey Bialy solves. Here is the letter from this author:

Of course, anyone with access to university research systems knows that a number of the data bases available – Sciencedirect and Scopus for instance – will provide live links to many or all of the references in this and other scientific papers. But typically the reference link proves to be an abstract. This invaluable resource has the full texts.

The CD or its online version will solve a major problem for those for those without such expensive access, letting them access the papers without being on line, or to find and read them rapidly on line (a url for this will go up shortly at the site for The Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis, currently in beta) .