Science Guardian

Simple approach doesn’t rate with UN fantasist when there are toxic drugs to push

How Dr. Mantombazana “Manto” Tshabalala-Msimang should have defended herself

Why Mexico City 2008 may be very different!

The dresses made of hundreds of condoms by a Brazilian “artist” and the rest of the artefacts of the Toronto AIDS Conference were packed up on Friday, presumably with a sense of coitus triste, since the world’s biggest ever gathering of HIV enthusiasts – 26,057 people wasted money and time attending this event without double checking its basic premise – won very little recognition from the locals, including the disappointment of being stood up by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and not even attracting the most celebrated HIV?AIDS scientist in the history of the world, Robert Gallo.

Gallo was allegedly miffed because he wasn’t invited to give the main speech, possibly because when he agreed to give it in South Africa in 2000 he somehow failed to turn up (could this have been because he feared the HIV critics in the HIV Review Panel Mbeki commissioned that year before the conference might have stuck around? The Gallo family is known for 100% reliably producing emergencies when Peter Duesberg is expected to appear at a meeting where Gallo is scheduled to speak).

Laurie Garrett at the HIV Science and Responsible Journalism session is our prime source on this. As usual her prime source was a newspaper, the Toronto Globe and Mail, which had just published a story suggesting that the whole shebang was a waste of money and time:

LAURIE GARRETT: Well something interesting on that … there’s a story in today’s Globe and Mail. It’s part of their package of set up of this conference. The story is all basically alluding to the conference as being a total waste of time, just a bunch of glitz. Why is everybody here? Maybe that explains why there’s no banners welcoming us to this city as we come into the airport, why this is the first international AIDS conference I’ve ever been to where there’s no visibility, no red ribbons, nothing about AIDS on the streets. You don’t see it. You’d think we’d gone to the moon. But put that aside. The Globe and Mail piece has a long article that’s basically one voice. It’s Robert Gallo saying this conference sucks and that’s why I didn’t come. Why didn’t they interview the organizers to find out that Gallo was insisting he could only come if he could have a plenary speech. And when he was denied a plenary spot because he’d be previously offered one in Durban South Africa and then didn’t show up, that is why he is not here. So you have this report that biased towards giving everybody the perspective or the sense that this is a trash meeting, that one of the great scientists in the world says there’s no reason to come. And there wasn’t sufficient delving to really get to the bottom. They didn’t ask the organizers why isn’t he here.

In the case of the Canadians, as Hank points out on Barnesworld it may have had something to do with the fact that only 272 new cases of HIV/AIDS were discovered in Canada last year. Indeed, according to all reports local excitement was zero, with some 15,000 tickets unsold locally, and only scientists of the level of distinction of John P. Moore of Cornell bothering to turn up. As Lawrence Altman had told us previously, all the researchers with high-splash index science worth publishing in the top journals know better that to put themselves into this biennial zoo, even when it is on their doorstep.

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SPECIAL NOTE: The next is in Mexico City, also nearby, in 2008. This is dangerously close to Cuernavaca and devilish critic and author Dr Harvey Bialy, currently the most fearsome live threat faced by the paradigm priesthood, many of whom he terrorizes almost daily with email messages well designed to undermine their confidence in the long term viability of their regime. We do not think it is impossible that many more key dissidents will attend and that Bialy and Peter Duesberg will give a joint press conference in 2008, since by that time the AIDS Monolith, even if not yet past its tipping point to collapse, will be in much deeper trouble than today. Only six months have passed since the watershed Harper’s piece, Celia Farber’s “Out of Control: AIDS and the Corruption of Medical Science”, gave mainstream editors an excuse to at least look at alternative views in HIV?AIDS, and the printing presses are already pumping out two of four more books on the topic, and a handful of mainstream media have dipped their toe (New York Post, New York Observer, Time Out Chicago, Boston Globe, and soon Canada’s Alive) in the forbidden stream. Mexico will come after an interval five times longer. END OF SPECIAL NOTE ********************************

Harper’s excuse, in fact, was that the meet was “too political”. The last Canadian PM to turn up at a local AIDS Conference was booed, and Harper seems to have good instincts (perhaps the guy also reads Harper’s religiously, since one can imagine it would be his favorite magazine). His substitute was booed this time (he sent three Ministers and the Canadian Attorney General).

The locals also feel that the AIDS gang are a little jumped up with all their demands that everyone pay so much attention to them, according to an otherwise fully propagandized columnist in the Globe on Saturday:

The very success of AIDS advocacy seems to have made it intemperate, and led some of its leaders to believe they have a “right” to bully and jeer, and a “right” to call people before them to bully and jeer them. Such was the reception given to Canada’s Minister of Health, Tony Clement, when he, in fact, did attend the conference. This was, at best, ill manners, and less than should be expected from visitors to a world conference toward our government’s representative.

It has a whiff of imperiousness derived from self-righteousness.

Nancy Padian actually said at the HIV Science and Responsible Journalism that she was surprised “so few” people had turned up to the important session, presumably because she was hoping to get the message out as widely as possible that her studies in the nineties, proving beyond a shadow of doubt that HIV fails to transmit between lovers engaged in heterosexual sex often enough to form an epidemic of any kind, let alone a global pandemic, were NOT in any way contrary to the standard text, and anyone who thought so was misreading them, even though she had made the point very clearly in the paper at the time, and anyone can read it still. We will cover the point very thoroughly in our posts deconstructing every line of this session, and especially the Padian study issue, imminently.

But we await further information from the horse’s mouth as to whether the Conference really was less than met the eye, especially from the mysterious GS who has appeared in Comments to give us the real dope. Our new surprise informant is an HIV scientist, he says, actually researching how to defeat the nefarious Virus, but with enough of his wits about him still to see the points made by Irresponsible Blogs are not entirely invalid.

Nutrients rule – if not in Toronto

Meanwhile we hope he or others will throw further light on the attention if any paid at the Conference to nutrients as a factor in curing the symptoms of AIDS in Africa or indeed here, since as noted earlier in our post on the Causes and Cures of AIDS the literature indicates that this is the crux of the matter and HIV treatment is entirely irrelevant to any cure.

As indicated in early reports on the Conference, the South Africans installed a booth there where delegates could contemplate simple and non toxic nutrient immune system boosters such as beetroot and garlic supplied for very little money by a more conventional God than Western Pharma and minimal agricultural toil, but these were immediately scorned and derided by the HIV ideologues of TAC addicted to the idea of costly and immune system damaging commercial drugs designed by scientists in suits and supplied by profit making companies, and so ARVs were hastily added to the display.

However, this concession didn’t impress one UN official who was so filled with virtue that he couldn’t stop himself ending the conference by attacking Mbeki’s policy of encouraging the alternative treatment of basic and specific nourishment in a speech on Friday:

A top United Nations official delivered a blistering attack on South Africa on Friday at the closing of the 16th international AIDS meeting here, saying that its government “is still obtuse, dilatory and negligent about rolling out treatment.”

In a keynote address, the official, Stephen Lewis, the ambassador to Africa for AIDS for the United Nations, said South Africa “is the only country in Africa whose government continues to propound theories more worthy of a lunatic fringe than of a concerned and compassionate state.”

The sad thing is that however ignorant U.N. special envoy on AIDS in Africa Stephen Lewis may be of the medical literature (not to mention the general rule that UN officials are not meant to attack the governments of member nations, however inflated they may feel with virtuous motives when standing up and standing for for establishment science and the rights of women everywhere not to be sexually tyrannized by men) which has stated in crystal clear terms since 1997 that his group scientific-political fantasy of heterosexual pandemic is impossible (Thank you Nancy, sorry you have been forced out into the open finally, and had to write your sadly self-compromising mea exculpa on the AIDSTruth site), the defenders of a more realistic approach are equally without grace in this respect.

Poor Mantombazana “Manto” Tshabalala-Msimang, South Africa’s Health Minister, quotes absolutely no textual authority in reply, thus probably convincing most readers of newspapers who carried this exchange that she had indeed made the country a laughing stock in the knowledgeable environs of the world’s greatest (we are talking quantity here) scientific conference.

South African newspapers on Sunday joined the fray, describing the Toronto display as “a salad stand” and demanding President Thabo Mbeki, who is also often accused of mishandling the AIDS crisis, sack his controversial minister.

“Tshabalala-Mismang has become a comic figure who comes across as a clown, if her behavior in Toronto is anything to go by,” the influential Sunday Times said in an editorial.

“For how long must South Africans suffer the embarrassment of a senior cabinet minister who does not appear to take her work seriously?”…

The government did launch a public ARV program in 2003 and is now providing the drugs to about 175,000 people.

But activists say the drugs only reach a fraction of the people who need them and accuse Tshabalala-Msimang of creating deadly confusion by continuing to promote her home-grown approach to the disease.

City Press Sunday columnist Khathu Mamaila wrote that Tshabalala-Msimang’s determination to promote natural foods such as beetroot and garlic instead of ARVs had “reduced South Africa to an international joke.”

“Maybe she should be allowed to work for the department of agriculture,” he said.

Dr. Mantombazana “Manto” Tshabalala-Msimang’s best answer

We think that Dr Mantombazana’s (she is a qualified physician) best response may be her physical self, at 66 positively glowing with health according to her pic. We challenge most ladies of the same age in Western nations to look half as good. But it is astonishing that someone on Mantombazana “Manto” Tshabalala-Msimang’s staff or elsewhere in the South African government doesn’t simply search the literature and produce the many papers that state loudly and clearly for any layman to understand that the key deficits of the immune system which are so typical of HIV?AIDS, such as the lack of selenium and zinc (in correct proportion to copper), are very quickly remedied by supplements or the appropriate food.

Needless to say, in Africa sometimes the problem is basic nutrition across all fronts, ie insufficient food period. One of the saddest news stories this week concerned the need for many HIV?AIDS patients in Africa to stay on drugs because otherwise they don’t get the food that is supplied with the medication.

Of course, the staff don’t even have to search the literature, they can simply go to the nearest mainstream textbook. For example, the latest professional bible of nutrition and the immune system, Diet and Human Immune Function, edited by David Hughes of the UK Institute of Food Research, Gail Darlington of Epsom and St. Helier University Hospitals NHS Trust, Surrey and Adrianne Bendich of GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare, New Jersey, with a foreword by William Beisel, emeritus professor of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, Baltimore (Humana Press 2004).

This will quickly give them (and Mr Lewis too, if he has time to read any science at all) a clear picture, nicely outlined in the chapter on “HIV Infection”, by Ph.D’s Marianna Baum and Adriana Campa of Florida International University in Miami, of the completely dominant influence of nutrition on the outcome of treatment of those supposedly suffering from HIV. Naturally the chapter pays lip service to the HIV faith, but every page confirms that nutritional factors rule both decline and recovery. At the end of the 14 page chapter are eight “take home messages”. Listen to the first:

“HIV-1 infection is characterized by protein-energy malnutrition and micronutrient abnormalities, which may persist even after administering effective antiretroviral treatments.”

Other key conclusions:

“Nutritional repletion should be an adjuvant to antiretroviral therapy”…

“Vitamin B1, B2, B3 and B6 deficiencies are accompanied by lack of energy, fatigue, and neuropsychological abnormalities…”

“Vitamin B12 deficiency is associated with faster disease progression and mortality and neurologic abnormalities, which improve with vitamin B12 repletion…

“Vitamin A deficiency is associated with …faster HIV disease progression and mortality.” And finally,

“Selenium and zinc deficiency are associated with immunodeficiency, oxidative stress, increased HIV-related morbidity, and mortality.”

A few key sentences from the body of the article:

“The risk of dying from HIV-related diseases decreased by 33% for every 1 mg/d increase in dietary zinc intake, and this relationship was independent of antiretroviral therapy and CD4 cell count at baseline and over time. The relative risk for mortality for those with an intake under the median (9.34 mg zinc/d) was 11 (eleven!) times greater.”

“Selenium status is predictive of HIV-related prognosis and survival. In a cohort of chronic drug users with HIV-1 infection only selenium deficiency was an independent predictor of survival when joint effect of nutritional deficiencies that had singly predicted mortality was evaluated. This significant effect of selenium persisted when controlling for CD4 count at baseline and over time.”

“Selenium deficiency was associated with decreased length of survival of 31.4 mo, compared with 57.4 mo for those with normal plasma selenium levels.”

“Supplementation of antioxidants, including selenium, may prove to be an important part of the ammunitions used to fight the catastrophic sequelae of the HIV disease and AIDS.”

“A long term double blind placebo-selenium supplementation trial (200mcg selenium/d) in healthy study participants demonstrated a 51% reduction in total cancer mortality and a 41% reduction in total cancer incidence…”

Actually, we see in the study referenced by Baum that she did in 1997, an even more exciting way of expressing these results is that selenium deficiency is associated with a ten to twenty times higher mortality in AIDS patients, ie 90-95 per cent reduction in chances of death if you have adequate levels of selenium. This is much higher than CD4 count, which is associated with only a 31 per cent reduction in risk of death if it is normal over the course of the study, which is barely significant. With very low CD4 levels (under 200 initially in the three and a half year study period), mortality was only three times higher. And similarly, according to another study Baum’s group did, zinc deficiency yields a three to five times greater chance of death than adequate zinc levels in the blood plasma. An Italian study in 1995 showed a reduction of opportunistic infections of 13 fold – 92% – with one month’s zinc supplementation to AIDS patients on AZT, which benefit continued for two years, whereas those untreated with zinc but on AZT did no better. The AIDS symptoms PCP and candidiasis were virtually wiped out with zinc.

(Special note for the strong minded:

Have a HAART

It is important to say here that HAART is associated with an increase in selenium and zinc plasma levels, as noted in our earlier post. This is probably a main reason why AIDS patients given HAART may leap from their beds and climb mountains, as they say, and why we are constantly told that dying Africans brought into clinics in wheelbarrows are restored to health and walk back to their villages after three months of ARVs and adequate food.

But why is there this special boosting effect, which studies haven’t yet explained (except in HIV related terms, of course, with the recovery mechanism undemonstrated)? This book suggests an answer.

Apart from the usual stimulation of the immune system by introducing a poison, which it takes as evidence of a pathogen, the phenomenon is probably due to protease inhibitors, though it is not clear why, since these two elements are not of course in the chemical makeup of the drugs. Possibly there is a digestive effect, due to a broad spectrum antibiotic effect knocking out parasites and pathogenic bacteria in the intestines. These would be associated with the diarrhea and malabsorption of trace elements in the gastrointestinal distress common in AIDS, and why doctors may advise patients to take yogurt and other probiotics to increase the beneficial microflora of the gut, known to improve the performance of the immune system, as another chapter, “Probiotics and immunomodulation”, in this book explains. Yet another chapter describes how drugs knock down the immune system: “Use of drugs that affect nutrition and immune function”, including glucocorticoids (corticosteroids), which are very relevant to AIDS risk groups. A section of that chapter describes “Drugs and HIV Infection”.

Of course all this is temporary as the recent study result tells us, showing HAART hasn’t dented long term survival rates in the last decade.)

And of course, while lip service is paid to ARVs throughout, any reader wearing non-HIV spectacles will find that one of the editors, Adrianne Bendich Ph.D from GlaxoSmithKline, in her review of drugs provides enough valuable patient oriented information on adverse drug side effects to get her into a little trouble if anyone from Glaxo reads it carefully, so in gratitude we won’t emphasize that too much. And given the contribution of Baum and Campa to the enlightenment of those is search of a better answer to the “mystery” of HIV?AIDS, we won’t draw attention to them either. Otherwise we can imagine them having to write out “We didn’t mean to diss HIV” 100 times on the AIDSTruth.org site, just as Nancy Padian has been forced to do.

In fact, the TAC has mercilessly pursued Mantombazana “Manto” Tshabalala-Msimang on this front from the beginning of the Conference, and is now joyfully posting the news reports and editorials on the AIDS Truth web site.

C’mon guys and gals, read the texts. They won’t bite

All we mean to do is urge someone on Mantombazana “Manto” Tshabalala-Msimang’s advisory staff to order this volume from Amazon forthwith, instead of being kicked around by the TAC and the ignorant editorial writers of the South African press for peddling olive oil, beetroot and garlic as home remedies – even though there are in fact plenty of studies supporting the anti-infection properties of garlic, the Mediterranean diet based on olive oil is acknowledged to be exemplary, and beetroot is good for the liver, the key to health and detoxification (beetroot contains betaine, closely related to another methyl donor choline, a B complex factor shown in mainstream studies to support liver function and promote liver regeneration).

Quote the mainstream authorities back at the TAC goons, Manto. Learn the simple, mainstream validated picture which is the answer to HIV?AIDS and all its “conundrums”.

As for us, we would have advised her or anybody else at the HIV?AIDS conference, if they wanted to do anything useful with their time there other than watch the lunacy of faith in action, they should have made sure to meet Marianna K. Baum and Adriana Campa.

They are the true heroes of HIV?AIDS research, not the once globally celebrated specialist in useless achievements in AIDS, Robert Gallo, whose only signal achievement so far is to show beyond reasonable doubt that HIV was not the cause of AIDS before any other scientist did.

Temporarily floored by absurdity, Geiger fails to act

‘Intellectual powerhouse’ researches goo and rings

According to his report filed in Bill, Melinda and Bill Comments just now, Michael Geiger of HEAL, San Diego turned up on Monday in Toronto for John Moore’s presentation in the “Novel Targets for Drug Development Session, intent on “exposing his empty bag of tricks.”

Unfortunately, Moore’s presentation on “Entry Inhibition as Models for Microbicide Development” so horrified Geiger that he managed (according to him) only to hit the back of Sam Broder’s toupee with a spitball.

This is unfortunate, since Geiger had a very good question ready, judging from his note, one which could have seen him publicly confront the New York Times Op-Ed writer on “Dangerous Quackery” with the final solution to Africa’s AIDS problem, no gel required:

Moore started his lecture out by saying one of the most bizarre statements that I have ever heard. He said that One in Four women in Africa get HIV infected from heterosexual activity! Simply not believable, as our own American Made HIV has been found to be completely non-transmitted sexually, by Nancy Padian. All should by now be familiar with Padian’s study, that showed zero sexual transmission in 370 or so heterosexual couples over a six year period.

Why can’t we just bottle up our own HIV and ship our own non-sexually transmitted HIV to Africa? That would solve the supposed HIV problem over there!

But we can sympathise with his reaction to the appalling revelation of what Moore and his hardworking group – an “intellectual powerhouse”, according to Moore, when he presented them for applause – have been up to.

Then Moore disgusted me again by talking about doing things to monkeys vaginally and anally that I have never even seen in the raunchiest of porn videos

Even if Michael’s account is a little over the top, as a report on the session, it doesn’t seem that his description of Moore’s presentation is anything but sober fact. (You can check it out on video, he notes, at this KaiserNetwork page.)

He promises it will be the most affordable goo lube in town. And best of all, “it will not be Nasty, Runny, or Smelly!”

What it adds up to is this: there can be no more vivid example of the absurd lengths to which scientific visionaries such as Moore will go before questioning whether what they are doing makes any sense at all.

No wonder Geiger was momentarily at a loss, faced with Moore’s effrontery. He went there to write a satirical report, and found the event itself was pure satire.

Just as I was took one more huff to launch, Dr. Moore called his goo team an “Intellectual Powerhouse”! I choked on this statement. I choked and could not launch. As I was choking on the silliness of his words, he said his final thank you, asked if there were any questions, all you could hear was the audience choking and no-one could even get out a question, and he slyly shuffled off the stage.

That, perhaps, is the entire story of HIV∫AIDS and the XVI International AIDS Conference, Toronto, 2006. The total sum of the foolishness on display is so staggering that it is impossible for critics to get a handhold.

All they can do is gape, and reach for a drink.

Did anyone ask the macaques?

Michael’s full posted report in Comments:

John P. Moore’s informative lecture on abusing macaques for fun and profit:

A microbicide can be applied as a gel, crème, suppository, sponge or vaginal ring that gradually releases active ingredient, but in the most common incarnation, it is a gel. To be useful, a microbicide in the end has got to be safe for obvious reasons, effective, also for obvious reasons, but it also has to be affordable; essentially it is give-away technology. It is something that would be priced in the cents-per-usage for the developing world. Something that costs 10 bucks per use isn’t going to be terribly practical, so it has to be cheap. We always have to be aware for the need for affordability. Again, it has to be acceptable because it is going to be used in a sexual

setting, so anything that is sort of nasty or runny or smelly simply isn’t going to be used. That is a formulation issue that I am certainly not going to address today because I am going to address experiments in the monkey model and, to be honest, monkeys aren’t that choosy. ….

We did a Hail Mary experiment, which wasn’t in the paper, but I think it’s worth going over. We wanted to see if you could protect against multiple, repetitive challenges. So we put the three inhibitors, compound 167, BMS806 and C52L all at the highest doses. We have those to the macaques as a triple combination every day for five days and then did a SHIV challenge every day for five days. So they got five consecutive, daily, high-dose challenges. Obviously, all the controls got infected. Three out of the five inhibitory recipients got infected. If you put that either way, two animals were protected against five consecutive, daily, high-dose challenges, which I don’t think is all that shabby given the stringency of the model. So I think that is encouraging for the real world.

No sign of independent thought from rich activists

Dissenters read tea leaves to no avail

Well, the dissenters in HIV∫AIDS may have been excited to have been mentioned at all, in however back handed a way, at the Toronto Conference, but the sessions so far have shown that the minds of the Big Three in the private funding of HIV∫AIDS activity show every sign of being occupied by the AIDS meme as completely as ever. If Thabo Mbeki even mentioned the topic of dubious science to Gates, he didn’t make a dent.

Neither in Bill Gates’ opening address on Sunday, nor in the sessions yesterday, was there anything said by Bill Gates, Melinda Gates or Bill Clinton which veered from the basic party line – “Infectious pandemic, ARV exports, Condoms, Microbicides for Women”. Everything they said confirmed that they completely subscribe to this and see no reason to insert any caveat or caution.

Melinda talked of microbicides as the key to saving women from AIDS, Bill talked of the need to expand ARV delivery, Bill Clinton of the same to “save a lot more lives”.

Clinton wants more education to encourage abstinence and condom use for young people. He is delighted by the progress made in expanding ARV delivery at ever cheaper rates to the poor of Africa. He is ecstatic, he told the admiring audience, that “a study last week showed that in the poorest African villages people take their medicine at a stunningly high percentage accurately!” (Applause). “They’ll live if you give them the tools to live. They’ll do just fine!”

Bill Gates informed the same audience that “this male circumcision thing is very likely to be a helpful tool which will drop the numbers down in a very big way.” He also told Clinton “It would be great if we could get the drug price down even further to $50. That would be heroic, but it could be done.”

Gates’ belief in the message is matched by his strong support for expanding the propaganda machine world wide. He emphasized that “the (Gates) Foundation is the biggest funder of media based activities. We did a Global media launch at the UN. I was there. I saw we must get well beyond public service advertising in foreign countries, and get the word out in television shows and get the news people to understand the issues and see the scale of the epidemic in a country. Part of advocacy is media, including every important element, and it is one we put a lot into.”

The only spark of enlightenment came from Bill Clinton who allowed that nutrition was important. But he hurried to say that this didn’t mean that drugs were not the top priority. “Nutrition has got a bum rap because some people have offered it as a substitute. Increasing caloric intake will increase overall health. Improving nutrition will increase our capacity to deal with HIV∫AIDS, as long as it is not a smoke screen for denial.”

Dissenters may be comforting themselves that this is all just public go-along, and that even now a Gates staff member may be double checking what truth there may be to Mbeki’s tip that things are not as they seem in the world of HIV∫AIDS, despite the unanimity and virtuous self-congratulation.

But from what was said it looks pretty clear that the richest man in the world, his wife and the ex-President will be making sure that the world’s poor get their microbicides and ARVs if they and their money can manage it.

Gates may be a poker player who parlayed a quick trip across town to bag the nearest Operating System for IBM PCs into a fortune larger than the world has ever seen, at the cost of disturbing the peace of mind of many millions of PC buyers, but it seems that if you are a scientist with a theoretical pig in a poke you should go to market and look around for Bill.

Irresponsible for journalists to quote HIV∫AIDS review, say Moore, Geffen, Horton of Lancet.

Why have the HIV boys adopted a losing tactic?

Barnesworld relays news of a development that must have Dr Anthony Fauci of NIAID having kittens over the crumbling of his highly successful strategy, over two decades, of banning any mention of why HIV∫AIDS science may be fatally flawed.

Yesterday John Moore of Cornell and his partner in crime Nathaniel Geffen of Treatment Action Group drew even more attention to the anti-HIV critique by publicly lambasting journalists who mention it. The venue can hardly have been more prominent. It was one of the Conference’s first sessions, titled HIV Science and Responsible Journalism.

As reported by Michael Geiger of San Diego HEAL at BarnesWorld, Moore and Geffen were joined from the audience by Richard Horton of the Lancet, whose grand survey of AIDS matters last week included the enbarrassing revelation that HAART hasn’t done much to reduce the death rate of AIDS patients, as in “no reduction in all-cause mortality” in the 20,000 studied.

The post Signs of Civil War Erupt at Toronto AIDS Conference // John P. Moore – The Dissidents’ Best Friend on BarnesWorld, newly renamed “Barnes-ville”, describes the session in amusingly irreverent terms, pointing out the paradoxical truth that the more Moore et al try to quash dissent the more they call attention to it.

John P. Moore, The Rethinkers BEST FRIEND, has helped us all to further disseminate HIV Dissenter’s information to the world press today. Every time he opens his mouth, or puts keystroke to computer he either sells HIV Dissenter’s books, promotes HIV Dissent magazine articles, or further informs the world of the importance of HIV Dissent issues.

Now we (and probably Dr Fauci) are wondering why they don’t appreciate this simple truth, first voiced by author and critic Harvey Bialy, and we think we know the answer.

Sure, Harper’s Celia Farber piece in March (“Out of Control: AIDS and the Corruption of Medical Science”) paved the way, landing like a MOAB (the Mother of All Bombs, a 21,000 lb superbomb) from a great height on the deep bunker of NIAID’s protective guard against any mention in the media of the HIV∫AIDS review. But in their response, Gallo, Moore, Geffen and others chose the wrong strategy for a reason beyond being shell shocked.

Why is NIAID censorship cracking from within?

Surrounded by tyrannized conformists who do not speak out, these activists of questionable science imagine that the whole world is their captive. They fail to realize, as Dr Fauci always has, that dissent is catnip to the independent mind. Every good scientist knows that the future lies in correction, the key to progress, and that the inevitable result of advance is replacement of the conventional wisdom.

To make scrambled eggs in science, you have to break shells. As Kuhn pointed out, paradigms don’t just accumulate, they replace the old, which resists mightily, and review is a constant process. Anyone who stands in the way of this process is simply making a public announcement that they are fools, or self interested, or both.

Alas, the report doesn’t mention any dissenter standing up and making a good point. We hope that Michael Geiger, at least, who is known to be good at such things, did so, even though under such circumstances it is usually shouting into the wind.

Saving babes from AZT

Meanwhile David Crowe scored a small victory in Canada earlier by getting a letter into the Globe and Mail explaining the toxicity of AZT. The country’s equivalent of the New York Times, the newspaper printed a contradiction from a qualified pharmacist, it appears, but the letter won a spot on a talk show for Crowe, who heads up the Alberta Society for Reapprasing AIDS.

It might seem inconceivable that a woman would deliberately evade AIDS drugs for her infant, but that is only because the toxicity of ‘life saving’ AIDS drugs is rarely discussed. AZT, the drug given to the vast majority of pregnant, HIV-positive mothers, most of their infants and, in combination with other drugs, to many other HIV-positive people, is one of the most toxic substances known to man.

There was time for one call in, a woman who told listeners her brother had given up on taking AZT because of its toxicity.

Crowe’s letter was triggered by a case where a mother was sentenced to six months (conditional) for trying to avoid medicating her newborn. Meanwhile, more mothers-to-be clamor for the test. All those who ignore the scientific literature in their enthusiasm for the paradigm being celebrated in Toronto should ponder the real-life consequences of their neglect and denial.

—–

Michael at Barnes-ville on “John P. Moore, The Rethinkers BEST FRIEND”:

25 years of mental inertia on parade

Does the HIV meme ever leave?

Now we have the Toronto AIDS conference upon us. Dissenters must feel enormous conflict as they contemplate this monstrosity. On the one hand, the biggest and best target audience in the HIV∫AIDS world, assembled right on their doorstep, and easily accessible from New York, San Francisco, San Diego, Alberta and other locations of key dissenters, especially Toronto, where CBC-associated Colman Jones has been operating for years.

But on the other, the sheer size of this planetary sized snowball of nonscience is forbidding, to say the least. What hope have sense and reason, those frail levers of the individual mind, of moving this mountain? This great agglomeration of communal fantasy will gather 45,000 believers, all told, if all the 20,000 public tickets are sold at the $20 million event. They will include great names in celebrity and politics, including the world’s greatest disease philanthropist, Bill Gates, who will give the opening address, having just handed over another half billion to the Global AIDS, TB and Malaria Fund, Bill Clinton, co-chair of the International AIDS Trust with Nelson Mandela, the Canadian Health Minister Tony Clement and even Elton John will turn up, so they say. Alicia Keys will perform Sunday night.

For some reason the Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is unable to participate owing to pressing business elsewhere, but this doesn’t seem to be the result of being tipped off that the whole thing is a giant mistake, predicated on a false reading of the scientific literature. That’s about as likely as the vision of Thabo Mbeki mentioning his realistic view of HIV∫AIDS to George W. Bush at the White House on Thursday, when our President cut short his vacation to hear what he had to say.

The crowd is so thoughtless that even mainstream scientists of any accomplishment no longer bother to turn up to this circus, according to Larry Altman, who gave us a reassuring rundown of what to expect in the Tuesday Science Section of the New York Times, the newspaper of record in HIV∫AIDS.

So comfortably conventional was Altman’s piece that despite close examination we could not detect one single glimmer of independent thought in the entire lengthy exercise, which covered Larry’s attendance at 13 of the 15 World AIDS Conferences that have taken place since 1985. Larry’s account did not veer from the conventional wisdom in any respect, however wide the gap between the scientific literature and what he was saying. It is now quite clear that the medical correspondent of the New York Times is nothing less than the propaganda partner of Dr Anthony Fauci, head of NIAID.

For what his deft rundown reveals is that even at the tippy top of the ladder, media reporters have been coopted for years into becoming the chief cheerleaders for the paradigm. In fact, Altman’s account is that of an activist, who gets “sad and angry” when he meets with an African leader who rejects the news he brings.

What precisely does Larry Altman get paid for?

This is the question that came to mind as one ploughed through this homily. Is not Altman meant to be an independent reporter, independently assessing what he is told by scientists? Is it not reasonable to expect independent thought from the mind of a senior medical correspondent of the paper of record when he tackles a disputed field where lives of millions are at stake?

Let’s deconstruct what Larry has learned after twenty years tracking AIDS with the HIV∫AIDS meme firmly entrenched in his brain. Has the meme now finally paralyzed all movement in his neural networks? It looks dangerously close to doing so, if it hasn’t already.

August 8, 2006

The Doctor’s World

Talking About AIDS, With All the World Watching

By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN, M.D.

Perhaps we have a clue straight away in the title A Doctor’s World. Apparently Larry is a doc, an MD – not a scientist, educated at Tuft and trained at the University of Washington, and then the CDC, and now teaching at NYU. If so, then by nature he is not in any position to challenge science, since he is well trained to absorb established knowledge in medicine, not to question. He is more like an auto mechanic learning a manual. He has been learning, and teaching, the manual of AIDS for twenty years. But why does he not read the mainstream literature?

The 16th International AIDS Conference opens in Toronto on Sunday a huge arena for many groups to share the now huge body of knowledge.

Indeed, the manual is now huge, it is too long to allow any independent thought whatsoever.

I have attended all but two of the conferences since 1985, and I have watched the meetings change, reflecting one of history’s worst pandemics.

Larry, we understand. With barely time to read all the press releases and attend the press conferences and catch one or two people in the corridors in 13 Conferences, and with access to all the key people and covering the medical story throughout the year, in twenty two years you have never had time to think about whether the pandemic made any sense, or notice that for a decade the mainstream literature has been saying that the global pandemic is based on a false assumption, that “HIV positive status” is sufficiently infectious.

They have also have played a major role in lowering the price of antiretroviral drugs in poor countries.

Larry, are you an activist or a reporter? Activists may have continually made the mistake of assuming that all new drugs are good, but what excuse has an MD and CDC graduate got for not examining this assumption? This is the man on whom the Times and its readers are relying for an accurate and balanced report on the most politically charged and commercially profitable area of HIV?AIDS. Has he ignored Harper’s March issue, or read it and dismissed it – if so on what grounds?

In the last six years, the conference has been held in South Africa and Thailand… to give scientists in modern laboratories and hospitals their first view of the challenges in delivering antiretroviral therapy in developing countries, where a vast majority of the world’s H.I.V. infected people live.

But has what you and they ’see” been interpreted through distorting lenses? Is it not better that they first read the literature thoroughly, so that they have a more sophisticated interpretation of what seems obvious in front of their eyes? Is this not the difference between “anecdotal” and “scientific” evidence?

In 1988 The mainstay of therapy then was AZT, which cost about $8,000 a year. Additional drugs were needed to treat the many and often fatal opportunistic infections that developed when the number of a patient’s CD-4 immune cells fell too low.

And why were additional drugs needed? AZT was a drug that was abandoned after it was discovered and tested as too damaging to the patient, even as it killed cancers. Before the dose was reduced, it evidently killed a lot of people earlier (2-3 years) than they were expected to die of the Virus (10-20 years). By some estimates 300,000 patients were lost to AZT, a catastrophe which is the crux of the new book, Wrongful Death, by Stephen Davis. Maybe, Dr Altman, you should read it, if this enormous debacle hasn’t yet triggered some skepticism in your mind?

King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden attended the conference in Stockholm. Former presidents, including Bill Clinton and Nelson Mandela of South Africa, have attended. Both have said they wished they had done more to prevent AIDS when they were in office.

The tendency of celebrities and politicains to cloak themselves in virtue by unwittingly supporting the paradigm in this field against review is a propaganda success for its promoters, but is all the more reason to ensure that the factual basis for their concern and attention should be gotten very, very straight.

The Toronto conference will be the third held in Canada. Prime Minister Brian Mulroney opened the 1989 meeting in Montreal, but his successor, Jean Chrétien, did not appear at the Vancouver meeting in 1996. The current prime minister, Stephen Harper, has not accepted an invitation to appear in Toronto, disappointing the organizers. But as Dr. Helene D. Gayle, the president of the International AIDS Society, an independent professional group that is chief organizer of the meeting, said, “AIDS conferences can sometimes be hard on politicians.”

Maybe Harper has been talking to Mbeki? But more important, is it not the professional duty of Altman as the Times guide to the field to note the interlocking career paths of key players in the arena? Gayle, who has just moved from the Gates Foundation, was at the CDC for years, as noted in an earlier post.

The conferences have also had their more startling moments. In a speech at the Durban conference in 2000, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa refused to acknowledge H.I.V. as the cause of AIDS. Minutes later, he walked out of a televised forum as Nkosi Johnson, 11, spoke of being born with H.I.V. He wished, he said, that the government would “start giving AZT to pregnant H.I.V. mothers to help stop the virus being passed on to their babies.”

What precisely was it that told Larry Altman not to take Thabo Mbeki’s response seriously, and proceed to investigate what lay behind Thabo Mbeki’s judgement? Did Larry ever do a lengthy, respectful interview with Mbeki, then or later? Why not? We can’t find one listed at the Times. Would he not have jumped at the chance to do one with Tony Blair, if he had shown such a reaction? Mbeki is a world leader of stature, involved in top international negotiations in G8, for example, and leading peace initiatives in Africa and elsewhere. Why doesn’t he rate?

In 1996 in Vancouver, the audience cheered after a grandmother told the conference: “How did I get infected? The answer is very simple: It just doesn’t matter.”

Really? Does the AIDS meme paralyze all thought in Larry’s brain? Wouldn’t this have triggered some faint response in your mind? Do grandmothers usually serve as VD vectors?

There was a growing understanding that the AIDS virus, which had yet to be named H.I.V., had been spreading silently for at least a decade before the disease was first detected in 1981.

Silently stealing over minds everywhere, the AIDS meme…but Larry, all the evidence is that the “AIDS virus” spreads only with the maximum of effort, and not in the general population, and this has been the case from the beginning. And the evidence from the CDC’s estimates of prevalence in the US (roughly 1 million for the duration, once the artificial changes due to altering assumptions are removed) is that it has not spread at all. In fact, evidence from the testing of Army recruits suggests that not only has it not spread among the general population but that its prevalence is probably twenty times less than the CDC estimate.

Dr Altman, you are writing fiction and passing it off as fact, according to the mainstream literature.

At the time, there were no effective antiretroviral drugs. Some doctors were shunning AIDS patients. Hospital workers left meal trays at patients’ doors. Many people feared that they might become infected from casual contact despite epidemiologic evidence to the contrary.

And now they fear they might be infected through heterosexual sex, despite all evidence to the contrary. Larry, read the literature, where this question has been discussed for years, how exactly is HIV spreading in Africa and Asia if the largest studies show it cannot be transmitted between man and woman?

The cases in the United States, then fewer than 10,000, were mostly among gay men, intravenous drug users and hemophiliacs. But the totals were doubling every six months. In one presentation, Dr. Peter Piot, a researcher who is now the executive director of the United Nations AIDS program, reported a cluster of heterosexual cases in Africa. But few knew how wildly the disease was spreading there.

No inkling yet that this may not have happened? No inkling yet that the whole case for this wild spread has fallen apart, and that it was merely a wild expansion of estimates, which took conventional disease and placed it under a new umbrella, “AIDS”?

Activists proclaimed “No test is best” because of the stigma linked to the disease and the lack of effective therapy. Now the federal government wants all Americans to be tested.

Tested and then given dangerous drugs for a virtually non infectious agent for a disease which the literature shows is caused by toxic substances, including the very drugs they will administer – according to the unrefuted reviews in the literature of the mainstream studies in that literature?

Maybe the activists are saving the world from mass HIV testing and mass ARV taking, since the latest theory demands that ARVs should best be given “within a few days” of infection. So if the Feds do succeed in getting us all tested, then at least one million people will have to suffer the side effects of ARVs on the dubious basis of counteracting HIV, which has been demonstrated to be efficiently overcome by a normal immune response.

Conceivably, it might be argued that with HIV “spreading” silently no one can be tested in time to catch the “first few days” unless everybody is given HAART prophylactically. The ‘market’ would then expand to the entire US population, and then to the world.

By 1988, when the meeting was held in Stockholm, there were more discouraging findings for H.I.V. patients: a vast proportion would develop full-spectrum AIDS within a decade of being infected, countering earlier suppositions that a relatively small percent would be struck down by its debilitating complications.

Did this not correlate with AZT, later reduced drastically in dosage since even HIV∫AIDS scientists could see it was killing people in three years or less, when the Virus was supposed to kill them only in ten to twenty years, a supposed benefit never explained?

The Montreal conference in 1989 made me sad — and angry — when President Kenneth D. Kaunda of Zambia delivered an apology for his indifference to the epidemic, saying he had lost a son to AIDS in 1986.

A year earlier, denying my request to interview Mr. Kaunda about AIDS in the Zambian capital, Lusaka, his press secretary scolded me for going to Africa to report on an American disease. The president had more important things to do, the aide said.

Sad and angry – what are you, Dr. Altman, an activist or a reporter?

At the meeting, Mr. Kaunda pleaded with governments to support scientists to find a cure for AIDS, saying failure would turn the epidemic into “a soft nuclear bomb on human life.” But in the years of Mr. Kaunda’s silence, hundreds of thousands of Africans had become infected.

How responsible were you, Dr Altman, for selling this story? How had these thousands of Africans become infected, now we know they weren’t infected sexually?

Organizers moved the 1992 conference to Amsterdam from Boston to protest the new United States’ policy of denying visas to H.I.V.-infected people. Since 1990, no conference has been held in the United States.

Superstitious even by the rules of the paradigm. But nothing compared with the vile injustices forced on mothers who must give their children AZT or lose their custody. David Crowe has pointed to the scandal of a recent case in an August 7 letter to the Globe and Mail, which Dr Altman should read, if he wishes to ponder the consequences of blind faith in the current science.

The Berlin conference in 1993 was my dreariest. The epidemic was worsening, and the outlook for major scientific advances seemed bleak. A European study, presented at the meeting, showed that AZT alone did little good over the long term.

Well, well. And why was that a surprise for you, if you were familiar with its toxicity, as advertised on its label? And have you covered the possibility that protease inhibitors and HAART are following exactly the same pattern? See Lancet last week, where HAART was revealed as not yet having improved the death rate one iota in ten years.

For years, scientists said they had learned more about the AIDS virus than about any other microbe. But skeptics were numerous because therapeutic advances were few.

Skeptics are more numerous than that, since no good justification for the theory that HIV was the correct target was offered then or since, with all evidence was against it and no explanation for it.

Then, in 1996, reports at the Vancouver conference showed that a combination of new antiretroviral drugs, called protease inhibitors, and older ones could successfully treat AIDS, extending the lives of many people. Some patients got up from their deathbeds to live more normal lives in what seemed like Lazarus.

Otherwise known as HAART, based on a theory of David Ho that even his colleagues soon laughed at, and which has produced horrendous side effects and no reprieve from death since, see Lancet last week (Vol 368 Aug 5, 2006 p 427). Does nothing arouse your curiosity, Dr Altman? Does nothing vibrate your antennae? Since 1996, what has happened? Have deaths declined? Are there not other reasons for the initial benefits that the narrative of HIV∫AIDS claims prove that HIV is the correct target of HAART?

If Coca-Cola could deliver its product in Africa, an AIDS expert said in Vancouver, then the world could deliver AIDS drugs to poor countries. The drug cocktails, which cost about $20,000 a year, reduced the amount of H.I.V. detectable in the blood and increased the number of T cells, a crucial component of the immune system. The startling turnarounds in patients confirmed, in their own way, the causal role of H.I.V. in AIDS and refuted claims to the contrary.

Right. The initial improvement, often quite striking in seriously declining patients in Africa, which is the only “proof” offered now of the “Virus which causes AIDS” phrase which is part of the Times stylebook now. The current argument is that HAART cocktails produce immediate turnarounds in patients, therefore they must be directed at the right target. This supposedly refutes myriad arguments to the contrary, otherwise unanswered in the literature. But eventually, side effects, and death at the same rate as before. Some turnaround, Dr Altman. Is your curiosity not aroused as to whether there might be some other interpretation of the magical initial effect? Should you not cover the issue, constantly raised even by patients, as to whether they really do feel better for long?

Exuberant leaders talked about curing AIDS by ridding the body of H.I.V. Later, experiments showed that a cure remained beyond reach because the virus found hiding places in the body to escape the drugs.

So now drugs have to be taken forever. Based on keeping the presence of the virus as negligible as it would be anyway with a functioning immune system, which is then burdened by the drugs, which eventually cause what the virus is then blamed for, decline and death. Meanwhile, those who do not take drugs flourish with a normal immune system until some other threat overtakes them.

That year, as the treatments began to emerge, the United Nations created its AIDS program. In the years since, its director, Dr. Piot, has stressed that the political will of top world leaders is necessary to turn the epidemic around.

At the Geneva conference in 1998, the first country-by-country estimates of H.I.V. infections and AIDS deaths underscored the devastating impact of the epidemic in the developing world.

Did overall deaths rise? At least check that, Larry. Were populations decimated? Have predictions of disease and death proved out, except where “life saving” drugs have been added to the burden of poverty, hunger and malnutrition, and their associated conventional diseases? Or have populations expanded, sometimes by huge numbers (in sub Saharan Africa, for example) that make a nonsense out of claims that HIV has brought illness and death that will decimate whole societies. Look at the population statistics, Dr Altman, before retailing all these claims without examination.

And enthusiasm about promising reports of effective treatments was dampened by the recognition of unexpected complications. In the case of the drug cocktails, it was lipodystrophy, a side effect of protease inhibitors that causes fat to disappear from some areas of the body and redistribute in other areas, changing the body’s shape in peculiar ways.

Hideous side effects but sold to patients as worth the sacrifice to avoid the unproven depredations of the invisible Virus.

The Durban meeting, in 2000, was the first international AIDS conference held in a country with such widespread poverty. Speakers directly attributed the magnitude of the epidemic to the failure to advocate protective measure and to provide effective treatments to vast populations in Africa and elsewhere.

And you put on the spectacles they gave you to wear, rather than use your own?

A session was scheduled to announce what organizers thought would be favorable research findings: that a spermicide, nonoxynol-9, could be an effective microbicide against H.I.V. A microbicide, any substance that kills germs, can be formulated as a cream, gel, film or suppository. But the plenary session became a surprising disappointment: the product had failed.

And is now the subject of heavily funded research, to support the defense of women in under developed countries against their abusive men who will not wear condoms, and thus infect them from visits to prostitutes, although studies show that women infect men at a rate of 1 in 9000.

In Barcelona in 2002, Dr. Bernhard Schwartlander, a W.H.O. epidemiologist, provided the outline of what has become the agency’s efforts to treat millions of people. Though the plan has failed to meet its target, health officials say it has fundamentally changed attitudes about what can be done in poor countries.

What can be done in poor countries is deliver Western drugs and persuade the otherwise uninformed population that they need to take them, rather than the medicines normally prescribed for their ailments, you mean? Do you not have some responsibility as a prominent reporter and opinion maker to check out the questions surrounding the basis of this policy, as far as you reasonably can?

The last conference, in 2004, was held in Bangkok to focus attention on AIDS in Asia. Yet the Thai government had to cancel a summit meeting of 10 invited heads of state at the conference because only President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda accepted.

Is it at all possible that heads of state, like some domestic critics, might finally feel in their intuitive political bones that something is out of whack with the HIV∫AIDS story, as Mbeki has signaled, though they don’t quite know what it is?

This year in Toronto, to accommodate the disparate interests of the 24,000 participants, the sessions will cover a wide range of topics. Over six days, the presenters are to deliver 4,500 reports — and hundreds more in satellite meetings before and after the main event.

As an index of the busywork that the paradigm has generated, this is truly impressive. Alas, if the basic premise is inaccurate, it is also a demonstration that in modern science, failure to examine the premise critically does not prevent the expansion of research to infinite size if funding is available.

A few major advances have been announced at the international meetings over the years, but most gains have been incremental, as is true for meetings in other fields.

Does it not appear that research in this field has been unusually unfruitful, given that the advances at the fundamental level amount to disproving almost all early speculation about the modus operandi of the Virus, as well as finding no way of accounting for its supposed lethality after two decades, and no cure yet discovered, and with a vaccine now said possibly never to be achieved?

For these and other reasons, a number of leading scientists have stopped attending, choosing to present their findings elsewhere…some supporters complain that the quality of the scientific presentations has declined at recent conferences. Recognizing that criticism, Dr. Gayle, the president of the international society, said that the organizers had focused on strengthening the meeting’s scientific component.

But will they include any scientific review of the basic assumption, or will they and Dr Altman continue to ignore the unanswered review papers of Duesberg et al as if they didn’t exist? Don’t bother to answer. After all, no one involved would benefit from any revision, especially those paying for the show.

The conferences have come to attract a wide array of institutional sponsors and commercial exhibitors, who together are paying about half the $20 million cost of the Toronto conference, about the amount for similar meetings.

The spirit is in the opposite direction: implementing current belief as globally as possible:

Scientists have come far in the 25-year history of AIDS. Some infected patients now need to take only one pill a day. Only a few years ago, many regimens involved a dozen or so pills, taken several times a day. But scientists and political leaders still have much further to go. In the decade since the drug cocktails were introduced, 20 million people have become infected, underscoring that the need to build a system to deliver effective health care is as urgent and essential a need as lowering the cost of antiretroviral drugs.

That is why “Time to Deliver” is the theme for the Toronto conference. So many lives — and so much money — is now at stake, organizers say, that everyone involved in fighting the AIDS pandemic must be held accountable.

Thanks very much for the rundown, Larry. Now just one question: when you say, everyone must be held accountable, does that include the medical correspondent from the Times?

Talking About AIDS, With All the World Watching:

Lancet study shows HAART fails to save more lives

The pills that give you AIDS

No one is keener to take HAART drugs than gay activists, but now there is a new trapdoor beneath the activists’ confidence in the deadly drugs.

HAART boosters are going through new contortions explaining away the new 2006 Lancet study of HAART, released Aug 5 just in time for the Toronto World AIDS Conference. This shows that in ten years death rates under HAART haven’t improved for the first year or two of treatment, and that overall mortality and AIDS sickness may both have risen, with more AIDS occurring earlier. All this despite great success in controlling the virus, which has been steadily reduced to ever lower levels in the blood.

The study, May MT et al. HIV treatment response and prognosis in Europe and North America in the first decade of highly active antiretroviral therapy: a collaborative analysis. Lancet. 2006 Aug 5;368(9534):451-8 is a huge review of the experience of 22,217 patients, impossible to ignore. It is from the Antiretroviral Therapy (ART) Cohort Collaboration, and has a list of hundreds of signatories longer than your arm, using up two double column pages of the Lancet in fine print, naming hundreds of researchers from everywhere from British Columbia to Lisbon and Poland. All of them swear they have no conflict of interest at work in reporting their findings. The study has 38 references.

You can read it on The Lancet’s page 451 of Vol 368, August 5, 2006. This is the last line of the summary:

“Interpretation: Virological response after starting HAART improved over calendar years, but such improvement has not translated into a decrease in mortality.”

In other words, patients’ viral count goes down, but in the first year or two they die as often as before. In fact, more often than before in recent years, especially from tuberculosis. This, despite the development of regimens involving fewer pills and allegedly reduced toxicity, which have resulted in no improvement in mortality overall since 1998 – after a jump in deaths in 1995-1997 – and a significantly higher risk of AIDS sickness and AIDS deaths.

The study involved 22,217 HIV positive people in Europe and North America, including many from sub-Saharan Africa, who had never taken ARVs before, and about 75% had no AIDS symptoms at the start of medication. As the Lancet says in its own comment, HAART’s first decade: success brings further challenges ,p 427, “The major findings are that, despite improved initial HIV virological control (percentage there were no significant improvements in early immunological response as measured by CD4-lymphocyte count, no reduction in all-cause mortality, and a significant increase in combined AIDS/AIDS related death risk in more recent years.” Not a brilliant record. Less HIV, the same dismal results.

The editorial comment notes that “importantly, the recent increase in AIDS risk seemed largly because of increase tuberculosis incidence.” That means simply that they are giving HAART medication to people flowing in from sub Saharan regions where more people suffer from TB, as well as among the poor in the West, who offer an expanding market in the eyes of those anxious to help deliver these palliatives.

The unfortunate Africans arriving in the West from the sub-Sahara are thus welcomed with the additional burden of ARVs to cope with, or not as the case may be. As this study makes plain, all too often not. “We noted that the median time to the first AIDS event after starting HAART decreased over time”.

This ineffectiveness in staving off early (within two years) AIDS and early deaths (which, of course, could also be interpreted as effectiveness in causing death) occurred although the groups taking medication shifted away from high risk gays with drug abuse histories to heterosexual males and females, usually poor and black.

Also despite the move away from protease inhibitors to non-nucleoside reverse-transcriptase inhibitors, toxicity seems to be roughly the same. The study says that HAART has reduced the latent period of HIV before AIDS symptoms to two months after the first intake of the politically popular medications.

In other words, sicker quicker. People have been growing ill with AIDS symptoms earlier, almost as soon as they start taking the drugs: “Another intriguing finding was a reduction in the median time to AIDS, with half of AIDS events in the 2000-03 cohort occurring in the first 2 months of the 12-month follow up.”

Those with sensitivity to style will notice the deplorable arms-length untroubled objectivity of the word “intriguing”, as if this was a board game and the pieces were poor people and Africans that the writer need never encounter as he/she sits at the Lancet desk puzzling over the next move to make with their lives.

Since all these hundreds of AIDS researchers are infected with the AIDS meme, they of course don’t conceive – publicly, at least – of the possibility that the reason no one is getting provably better from HAART and in fact dying as quickly as before may be that the drugs are harmful and HIV is the wrong target. After all, with HIV under better control and no accompanying improvement in health history, the disconnect is rather obvious to anyone not infected with the AIDS meme. But HIV/=AIDS researchers are universally infected, and so having found that people are getting AIDS faster than ever and TB is a growing factor, they suggest that “immune restoration syndrome is a contributing factor.”

Apparently this is the fashionable, upside down cell suicide theory developed to explain why an increase in immune cell count from ARVs doesn’t seem to help after all. A stronger immune system may not be a good thing, and you might prefer that your T cell count hadn’t improved, because the immune system goes awry, and kills off its own cells. This rather fantastic idea is a staple of AIDS think now, seen in many papers which view a decline in health despite a decline in viral load as a “paradox”.

As always a “greater understanding” is sought to explain why none of this makes sense – “a greater understanding of emerging patterns and pathogenesis of HIV-related morbidity” – rather than using a swift stroke of Occam’s Razor to chop the centipede of endless rationalization in two, and admit the obvious, which is that all of it makes instant sense if the basic paradigm premise, HIV=AIDS, is abandoned.

The study did come up with one mysterious sign that HAART may be good for you, in that drug holidays don’t seem to benefit patients. People are dying faster from interrupted anti-retroviral therapy, as compared with continuous antiretroviral therapy. Perhaps the patients do initially benefit from the antibiotic effect and immune boosting effect of ARVs, which seem undeniable at the beginning of therapy. If so, ARVs take over and act as a substitute for the immune system attacks on pathogens. Interrupt the “therapy”, and the battered immune system loses its crutch but cannot recover its strength by itself.

Or it could be the simple fact that for some of the patients antobiotics were being administered along with HAART. In the earlier 1998 study mentioned above, that’s what was going on for half the patients, under the name “chemoprophylaxis,” with the antibiotics aimed at the particular problems the patient exhibited. Perhaps the initial impact of HAART, trumpeted as enabling swallowers to leap off their sickbeds and climb mountains, or at least go back to the office, has something to do with the antibiotics given them in tandem with the drugs, which also have some rotorooter effect.

Whatever is going on, the recognition of a death rate unimproved over ten years certainly seems to dent claims of great benefits of HAART. As the dissenters in AIDS never tire of pointing out, the improvement in AIDS mortality was visible by 1992 and 1993, when it plateaued before a decline since. The new protease inhibitors weren’t given to more than 2% of patients in mid 1995, when HAART came in. It was mid 1997 before they reached 86%, according to the Palella study (referenced just below). So the fewer deaths were too early for HAART to gain credit If anything the improvement was due to cutting AZT dosage by three times or more.

This study doesn’t seem to add any improving trend at all, as far as deaths go. According to this study, the risk of AIDS and deaths went up noticeably from 1995 to 1997, though the figures are not statistically significant (at 95% CI). It is hard to see how it bolsters claims that HAART enhances health straight away and then cuts the death rate by as much as 80%, so you can “live for ten years or longer”.

In 2003 Duesberg pointed out the death rates claimed for HAART in “saving lives” were actually higher than would be the case if everybody with AIDS dropped dead within the year. In the Palella et al paper above referenced by Duesberg in his Journal of Biosciences Paper of June 2003 (p 410), “Declining morbidity and mortality among patients with advanced human immunodeficiency virus infection. HIV outpatient Study Investigators.”, New England Journal of Medicine 338 853-860, for example, it was claimed that mortality was reduced to 8.8%, and another study (Hogg et al 2001 “Rates of Disease Progression by Baseline CD4 Cell Count and Viral Load After Initiating Triple-Drug Therapy”, JAMA 286 2568-2577) found it was 6.7%.

But Duesberg pointed out that even if all the 471,451 AIDS cases counted by the WHO in 2000 when 34.3 million were “living with HIV” were soon fatal ie all of them dropped dead within the year, the rate would still be only 1.4%. So no treatment at all might be the best bet.

Toxicity of ARVs exposed by panel and FDA in 2000

Meanwhile the toxic effects of ARVs became so obvious by 2000 – “nerve damage, weakened bones, unusual accumulations of fat in the neck and abdomen, diabetes, … heart disease” as Larry Altman put it in the Times in U.S. Panel Seeks Changes In Treatment Of AIDS Virus” February 4, 2001 (referenced in error in the Biosciences paper as “US Warns doctors to limit use of anti-HIV drugs”, January 5 p A12, when Altman actually published a different warning not to use nevirapine for needle stick cases, “U.S. Warns On Some Use Of a Fighter Against H.I.V.”) that a government panel warned prescribing the medications should be delayed as long as possible and the FDA ordered drug manufacturers to stop exaggerating benefits and minimizing risks in their ads.

Now we have the HAART study in the Lancet confirming that anyone who embarks on this regimen will be jumping on a conveyor belt to death that is running faster than before, and passing through the same sickening side effects – along with the famous buffalo humps and faces are so drained of fat that expensive cosmetic restoration is needed to be socially acceptable.

This even though the make up of the drugs has been changed somewhat and now finally there is the One Big Pill, instead of the bowl full of pills which was one of the most striking images of early AIDS (though with pills added for “non AIDS” ailments and specifically directed against other targets than HIV replication, perhaps this bowl is otherwise as full as ever, we don’t know).

So where does this leave earlier reports saying that HAART cut death rates by up to 80 per cent? For example, news of a GlaxoSmithKline funded study in 2003 was headlined MRC study shows highly active anti-retroviral therapy dramatically cuts deaths from AIDS.

A dramatic increase in life expectancy for people infected with HIV has been achieved since the introduction of Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy (HAART), say Medical Research Council (MRC) scientists today (Friday 17 October 2003).

New research conducted at the MRC Clinical Trials Unit in London and published in this week’s issue of The Lancet shows that in the first four years after the introduction of HAART, death rates from AIDS fell by over 80%.

Independent observers can only wonder at this dramatic revision two years later, although it only applies for the first two years of AIDS. Perhaps as always in AIDS the confounding element of hardiness intervenes – those that don’t succumb rapidly to assaults on their systems can live with them a long time.

HAART helps, it’s just the patients are sicker, blame that

As mentioned, the media reports have followed the line that the drugs are still doing patients good, and the unchanged mortality reflected the spread of their benefits to people from geographic (in Africa) or financial (poor) regions where people are sicker to start with by the time they are medicated, with their initial CD 4 counts much lower in recent years than before.

For example, from medicine.net, the good news is this:

All agree that today’s drug regimens are remarkably effective. So effective, in fact, that one study found the nine out of 10 patients who stay on the treatment can expect to live for more than a decade.

Rather, the findings seem to reflect the changing face of HIV infection in Europe and North America, experts say…

He says many of the HIV-infected patients he now treats also have mental health and substance abuse issues.

“For these patients, HIV is just one more problem in an already problem-filled life,” he says. “They may be dealing with schizophrenia, drug abuse, or any number of other issues. Many refuse therapy or don’t stay on it.”

The fact that mortality has not improved, even though treatments for AIDS have improved, underscores the need to focus more on preventing HIV infection, del Rio says.

“HAART has made a big difference, but we can’t rely on therapy alone in this population,” he says.

Faith in God and secular faith are lovely to behold, unless you want your researchers to focus on reality, perhaps because you are “on the meds”, as they say.

Why heterosexual men and women should benefit less from ARVs than gay men is not explained, except by saying that immigrants from Africa and residents of the poorer neighborhoods may be sicker to start with, from malnutrition or TB, though drugs are not the cause, it seems, since they play a much reduced role now:

Specifically

* The percentage of female patients starting therapy increased from 16% in 1995-1996 to 32% by 2002-2003.

* During the same period, the percentage of men who became infected through sexual contact with men declined from 56% to 34%.

* The percentage of patients presumed to have become infected via heterosexual contact increased from 20% in 1995-1996 to 47% in 2002-2003.

* The percentage of patients infected via injected drug use declined from 20% in 1997 to 9% in 2002-2003.

The study suggests that homosexual men have benefited the most from HAART. The best viral responses to therapy have been seen among this group, while women and men infected via heterosexual contact have not benefited as much.

In this search for other, non-HIV reasons for the health decline in AIDS patients, the paradigm apologists are once again adding to the list of factors which cause AIDS which have nothing to do with HIV.

And with the decline of HIV viral load that has gone along with the success of HAART in that respect, the link between HIV and AIDS is once again weakened if not broken outright.

The residual question is, what are the claimed benefits of HAART in the early phase of the treatment due to? That’s the subject of another post, but a quick answer would include a) the antibiotics administered to many, often half, the patients for very specific reasons, b) the antibiotic effect of HAART itself, which may clear the intestine of parasites and allow better absorption of nutritional elements vital to the immune system, and c) food (in the case of starving Africans who may sign up for HAART simply to get food , and d) the anitoxidant effect of HAART, pointed to by Al-Bayati and others.

But whenever told of the benefits of HAART, it always reminds us of the fact that AIDS in North America and Western Europe has been decreasing since it topped out 1992 and 1993, not later, 1995, when HAART came in.

AZT was lowered in dose from 1992 onwards, or even earlier, and further when it was included in the HAART regimen with protease inhibitors came in in 1995. The decline in AIDS cases matched the decline in lethal medication, AZT, not the arrival of HAART, the new regimen.

Now we learn that the death rate for the first two years of AIDS certainly hasn’t improved from 1995 to 2003. All that happens is that viral count improves a little, making no difference in your unrelenting progress toward a fatal end brought on by adding noxious drugs to the burden of disease and other medications AIDS patients are heir to.

Death rates have if anything worsened, according to a close reading of the paper, and the rate of AIDS sickness and death has gone up, at least in the first two years of treatment.

The bottom line seems clear. Lowering the dose of AZT cut the death rate, and HAART has served to maintain it, after initial benefits which are easily accounted for by factors other than its success in lowering viral load.

Secrets in plain view, once HIV is dismissed as Gallo and Duesberg have indicated it should be

Yet another confirming paper in JAIDS this week

We note with interest a paper to be published in the Journal of AIDS this week (Vol 42, Number 5, August 15 2006). The full title is too long to reproduce in plain sight here (click ’show’)

but it emerges from the prestigious University of California at San Franscisco Medical School, and its message is plain. Restoring AIDS patients’ bust immune systems with nutrient supplements works wonders, compared with dosing them with HAART, which may do them no good whatsoever, by the favorite measure of HIV advocates, CD4 count.

In the study, a bunch of patients on HAART (Highly Active (originally Aggressive) AntiRetroviral Therapy) were given micronutrients to see what happened. “The absolute CD4 count increased by an average of 24 per cent in the micronutrient group versus a 0% change in the placebo group.” (The latter were on HAART alone.)

Let’s repeat that. Over 12 weeks ARVs did precisely nothing to improve their T cell count, whereas it recovered 24 per cent with the addition of a full range of vitamins, beta carotene, calcium, magnesium, selenium, zinc and other healthy substances, none of which are patentable.

Lead author is Jon Kaiser MD, who has apparently already written Healing HIV: How To Rebuild Your Immune System, a helpful little book on boosting your immune system with micronutrients, in which he straddles the two stools of ARVs and Micronutrients, presumably to avoid exciting the natives. No doubt the drug companies will greet his work as welcome supplementation to the drug regime, and no one will mention the fact that drugs alone showed zero benefit.

But in fact his result matches many other studies which have shown this is the path to recovery for AIDS patients, rather than toxic and misdirected drugs. Definitive in its design (double-blinded, placebo-controlled) this is a flagship study for the nutrition approach, the first such clinical trial in America to show a very marked benefit for nutrient supplementation in AIDS, against none for HAART.

It follows in the footsteps of the Harvard Tanzania study by Wafaie Fawzi where extra B-complex, Vitamin C and Vitamin E boosted CD4 and CD8 counts markedly in women with HIV/AIDS (none of them taking ARVs), reducing deaths and warding off disease without antiretroviral drugs. Sadly, Fawzi has similarly been vociferous in advocating ARVs and denying his study justified supplementation alone. The card he and others play is that his supplementation “slows progression to HIV disease” but ARVs are vital too.

Multivitamins aren’t meant to replace ART, the researchers stress. “ART is the gold standard for treating HIV/AIDS,” explains Wafaie Fawzi, an associate professor of nutrition and epidemiology at HSPH and lead author of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) study. “But at relatively low cost, multivitamins can prolong the time people can live and work before they require drugs–which for millions are not yet affordable, or even accessible.

Well, one doesn’t get to Harvard without learning tact.

In Jiamton’s study in Thailand, also a prospective, randomized trial that did not involve antiretroviral drugs, deaths of HIV-infected men and women were lowered fifty per cent – halved! – by micronutrient supplements.

Confusion about the source of AIDS

While waiting to see what the drug companies make of that one – it was supported by the public spirited Bristol-Myers Squibb – we thought we would salute its appearance by announcing what, if for the sake of argument HIV is ruled out as the cause of AIDS, are the causes and cures for AIDS which then appear in the mainstream literature.

After all, no one at the Times reads the scientific literature any more, it seems clear, so it is our public duty to take up the fallen torch and illuminate this dark corner of scientific activity.

This is especially so since, with the media censorship imposed by Dr Fauci for twenty years on any mention of literature that points in some other direction than HIV, we have noticed some confusion recently as to what the mainstream literature says is the cause and cure of “AIDS”.

For example, some people appear to think that the mainstream literature still tells us that the retrovirus HIV is the cause of immune deficiency. This is not the case, of course. In fact the mainstream literature has rejected this idea from the very first papers of Robert Gallo in 1984, which were the first to demonstrate that HIV was not the cause (it was found in only one third of patients). Top level review critiques by Peter Duesberg and others have repeatedly confirmed this conclusion over two decades.

Reasons for denial in HIV?AIDS

There seem to be various reasons for this continuing “We love HIV too much” denial of credit to Gallo and his friend and colleague Peter Duesberg for their two decades of efforts to make their negative result known, a denial which prevents otherwise reasonable people from accepting their obvious and repeatedly confirmed conclusion that HIV is not the cause of AIDS.

One is that HIV scientists are suffering from a brain dysfunction common to all of us, and now confirmed by brain science fMRI experiments, where any new idea which doesn’t fit with what we believe on a fundamental level is simply rendered invisible or even flipped upside down by the left prefrontal cortex as it enters the brain. This phenomenon is so ubiquitous in the HIV debate it deserves special attention in a later post.

Another possibility is that no one reads the scientific and medical literature, including even the officials at NIAID, which is confirmed by the fact that nearly a year after we at NAR pointed it out, Dr Anthony Fauci, the leader of NIAID, is evidently unaware that studies tell us that bird flu would be easily medicated with Vitamin A, which counters tumor necrosis factor (TNF) production, the reason why H5N1 bird flu is fatal.

Some suggest that the large amount of money, political power, high positions, and other perks such as television appearances and international conferences in faraway places are influencing the minds of the scientists in the field, but of course that is impossible.

Also ruled out as an influence is the fact that Dr Anthony Fauci has seen fit to repress all media coverage of the conclusions of the mainstream literature in rejecting HIV, as a danger to the community which might weaken the authority of mainstream medicine and even encourage people not to worry as much as they do about making love without being tested and rubbered.

But it is improbable that the producers of TV network news shows and the editors of grand print institutions such as the New York Times would be influenced by the threats of a NIH bureaucrat to cut off any reporter from NIH sources who steps out of line. Reporters in science are well equipped to write their stories without any special help from NIH scientists.

AIDS: CAUSES AND CURES

As long as this denial (of the conclusion that “HIV is not the cause of AIDS”) continues without being fully explained, however, we at NAR think it appropriate and useful to provide a simple guide to the true causes and cures of “AIDS”, as revealed by the mainstream literature, which now clearly shows that rejecting HIV as the cause of AIDS simplifies the analysis, provides clear cut explanations for the causes of AIDS, and suggests its simple cure.

CAUSES:

The valid causes of AIDS are

1) Drugs both recreational and medicinal which weaken the immune system.

2) Malnutrition and its weakening impact on the immune system (the most neglected key factor).

3) Infections and parasites which attack weakened immune systems.

4) “Witchcraft” effects of beliefs induced by health workers and other authorities.

1 a) Recreational drugs can have a direct immunotoxic effect on the immune system. In addition, some (such as poppers, which are amyl nitrite and butyl nitrite) also bind with trace elements needed for the proper functioning of the immune system, such as zinc and selenium, which are antioxidants, and remove them from the bloodstream. This chelation leads to oxidative stress and a decline in T cells. More mainstream research on this area would elucidate mechanisms further, but the effects are clear: drug abusers are deficient in key trace elements.

AIDS patients are shown to develop deficiencies of antioxidants and oxidative stress and immune deficiencies when they use poppers and other recreational drugs. Studies have long shown AIDS patients are seriously deficient in zinc and selenium, known to be essential for proper immune function (babies with genetic inability to absorb zinc – AE, or acrodermatitis enteropathica – die within the year without supplementation, which in 1970 was discovered to return them to normal). There is also very little active thymulin, the hormone from the thymus gland, in AIDS patients, because of the lack of zinc. Thymulin is required for the production and differentiation of T cells.

All this nutritional data has been relatively ignored since HIV was fastened on as the cause of AIDS, when all funding for research on drug effects on the immune system and nutrients was curtailed here in the US, since the accepted solution was already published. Yet the research above was published in JAMA and similar journals by prestigious authors. One problem may be that nutritional elements such as zinc and selenium, like vitamins, cannot be patented.

1 b) Medicinal drugs are useful for the specific conditions of AIDS such as TB, where they are proven treatments. But the medicinal drugs prescribed when HIV antibodies are detected, against the supposed effects of HIV, cause immune deficiency through loss of T cells.

There is an initial increase in white cells or leukocytes, an effect called white cell trafficking. This is a standard response to toxins and pathogens. But the anti-HIV medications such as AZT and DDI (not the Protease Inhibitors) are DNA chain terminators which block DNA synthesis and prevent production of new white blood cells. This is clearly stated in the PDR (Physicians Desk Reference) where the effect is listed as leukopenia, a reduction in white blood cells. They also can also cause pancytopenia, the loss of all blood cells, white and red.

HAART (DNA chain terminators and protease inhibitors) can make patients initially feel much better, and this is currently the biggest reason why many health care workers and scientists believe they are aimed at the right target, HIV. If HIV is the wrong target, they ask, why the feeling of improved well being?

One explanation is that HAART increases the levels of key trace elements. Studies show selenium and zinc levels are dramatically increased by HAART, which explains much of the beneficial effect felt by patients. There is also the initial toxic effects of combination drugs which may be knocking out parasites and other infections, acting as broad spectrum antibiotics. So to some extent they substitute for a weak immune system, or act as boosters. At the same time, the side effects include lipodystrophy (appalling misplaced lumps of fat), diabetes, heart disease, liver and kidney problems. More AIDS patients die of such symptoms now than of the list of AIDS symptoms.

1 c) Corticosteroids. Mohammed Al-Bayati has supplemented the work of Peter Duesberg by showing that corticosteroids can reduce the number of T cells in the blood by as much as 2/3rd in ten days. All AIDS risk groups are exposed to corticosteroids. Gays use corticosteroids in creams as anti inflammatory agents while pursuing their recreational practices. Even hemophiliacs are prescribed corticosteroids to prevent rejection of Factor 8, the blood clotting factor. Drub abusers use them too, according to Al-Bayati. Yet corticosteroids are fully recognized by mainstream medicine as producing immune suppression, being used for that purpose in transplant operations, and to treat auto immune diseases.

2 a) Malnutrition. People who take recreational drugs tend not to eat well and lose weight. Thus the most popular diet in Hollywood, the “Coke diet.” It is known that the level of the body’s endogenous corticosteriod, cortisol, rises with malnutrition in Africa, producing an immune suppressive effect by inducing oxidative stress and T cell decline. The specific type of immune deficiency seen in AIDS – marked reduction in helper T cell, CD4 count – occurs in specific types of nutritional deficiency, including zinc, selenium and PCM (protein calorie malnutrition) as seen in Africa.

2 b) A lack of the trace elements which are essential to the operation of the immune system – zinc, selenium, and copper. Zinc and copper must be maintained in a ratio of 10:1 zinc:copper, a requirement that has been ignored in some studies. Megadosing with zinc will not benefit patients who are zinc-deficient unless the balance is maintained with copper.

2 c) Vitamin deficiencies, such as Vitamin A deficiency. Vitamin A is especially useful for lowering TNF (Tumor Necrosis Factor) levels, and these tend to be high in AIDS patients. Vitamin A also decreases the apoptosis (the suicide of surplus cells) due to multiple infections. Any infection results in immune activation, followed by apoptosis, due to TNF. This is an essential process, since if there was no apoptosis it would lead to leukemia, with the blood overcrowded with cells. But Vitamin A deficiency leads to excessive TNF and excessive cell death via apoptosis.

Other nutrient deficiencies shown to lead to apoptosis are those of Vitamin E, and zinc.

3) Diseases and parasites overload immune systems weakened by malnutrition in Africa. This obvious result has been well known for decades.

4) Threatening beliefs inculcated by doctors, health authorities and other advisors are clearly implicit in the adverse effects of HIV testing and medication. Stress in response to such scare tactics has been shown to correlate with a rise in cortisol levels.

Those, then are the causes of AIDS according to the mainstream literature, once HIV is removed from the equation. On the other hand, the mainstream literature now also contains a copious number of papers telling us what the best cure for these attacks on the immune system are.

CURES FOR AIDS

THE CURES for AIDS are thus unimpressively simple:

1) Remove “witchcraft” of paradigm propaganda from mind and rely on mainstream scientific literature.

2) Stop taking recreational and anti-HIV drugs,

3) Take in full vitamin and trace element supplements (preferably as food) and

4) possibly, dare we say this, but according to the data in a recent review paper by Dr Anthony Fauci himself, be glad if you become infected with HIV.

1) Paradigm supporters claim overwhelming, but not specific evidence for HIV causing AIDS. Claims of temporary benefit from the HAART regimen have better, non paradigm explanations, and deaths from HIV have not declined under HAART.

There is not a single known paper supporting the current paradigm with any convincing evidence, and a large number of papers pointing out a score of fatal flaws in the evidence for HIV as the cause of immmune deficiency. Refer to mainstream literature for many studies with results which defeat the paradigm, or replace it with better explanations of results, even though the authors are nominally pro-paradigm.

2 a) Stop all recreational and anti HIV drugs. Take drugs only if aimed at specific ailments for which they are standard medication.

2 b) Stop using corticosteroids as aerosols, anti inflammatory creams or in any other form.

3) Proper diet and clean water.

3a) Trace element and vitamin supplements (preferably in fruits and vegetables, or at least powder, rather than pills, according to the literature)

3 a) Zinc. It is necessary to add zinc in small amounts to avoid copper deficiency. But added in the right amounts, zinc has a spectacular effect on the decrepit immune systems of AIDS patients. In 1995, for example, the Italians got very good results using moderate amounts of zinc for a limited period without using any copper to ensure the correct balance. They got 1/13 the level of opportunistic infection than the control group, with both groups on AZT. This spectacular 92% reduction continued for a year, even with the deleterious effect of AZT! (Take the AZT away, and the patients would no doubt have done even better. Unfortunately most studies are now with patients who are obliged to take AZT. This obscures the results aimed at by nutritional advocates, since it is like running up a down escalator. As noted above, AZT is a toxic poison, as indicated by the label or the Physicians Desk Reference.)

3 b) Selenium supplementation consistently shows b eneficial, even spectacular effects – a 10-20 fold lower death rate was reported in a 1997 study -, in studies at the two main centers of this research, the University of Miami Medical Center, and the Harvard School of Public Health.

3 c) Vitamin B: No, don’t add massive amounts of Vitamin B complex as vitamin promoter Mathias Rath may have done in his South African trials, or of B1 amd B2. This only produces imbalance ie relative deficiencies of the other B vitamins that are needed, which is then a new problem. Just add moderate amounts; B12 is especially useful in production of T cells.

3 d) Vitamin C: megadoses of this water soluble anti-oxidant Vitamin C are valid. AIDS patients have recorded improvement, and those still wary of HIV should know that in the lab, Vitamin C inactivates HIV.

3 e) The Robert Gallo cure: Vitamin E is more effective that ARV’s in curbing HIV replication and excess cell suicide (apoptosis).

Vitamin E doses are useful, even or especially if you still believe in the HIV=AIDS theory. Cell suicide (apoptosis), a normal part of the immune system’s operations, is not only promoted by oxidative stress and lack of anti oxidants, but also is exaggerated by HIV, according to HIV?AIDS theorists who otherwise lack any suggestion as to how HIV kills T cells. If you give that credence, you should know that Vitamin E blocks excessive apoptosis, according to research by none other than Robert Gallo’s lab at the University of Maryland, and also by German researchers at the University of Heidelberg.

Bonus: Vitamin E also inhibits HIV production to such an extent that it can substitute for HAART, according to a study also from the Institute of Virology of the University of Maryland directed by Robert Gallo.

5) The ‘Dr Fauci cure’ – try to become infected with HIV.

It is not entirely facetious to point out a remarkable suggestion provoked by a recent review of HIV?AIDS research by Anthony Fauci of NIAIDS, which is that a weak immune system might be boosted by HIV infection. The arrival of HIV increases the T cell count noticeably, Dr Fauci has pointed out.

HIV infection from its early to intermediate stage results in a significant increase in the overall T-cell count. With a 56 fold increase of the viral load, the CD4 T-cell count remains almost the same, down 6%, whereas the CD8 count increases 20%, resulting in an overall increase of 11% in the combined T cell count. (The 56 fold increase in the viral load involves very little actual virus – there is only one virus particle per 60,000 particles counted in the viral load). With the addition of antioxidants known to inhibit apoptosis, the proliferative effect of HIV on T-cells could prove clinically useful.

Don’t blame us, that’s what science says

That’s it, according to the mainstream scientific literature in the top mainstream journals, where the studies on which we draw are published by prestigious institutions, such as Harvard or UCSF.

Disappointingly simple, perhaps, but if you trust the mainstream scientific literature, that’s all you need to know to deal with AIDS, once the chimera of HIV is dispensed with, as the mainstream literature has indicated it should be since 1984, a finding for which Robert Gallo has priority, but for political reasons has been unable to gain credit for it.

We suggest that perhaps his early Lasker prize for discovering HTLV-1, as the cause of leukemia in “1 in 100 persons infected over 50 years”, might be fairly reallocated from that now discredited claim to honoring his early breakthrough in ruling out HIV as the cause of AIDS.

Perhaps this will accord Dr Gallo’s 1984 “HIV is not the cause of AIDS” discovery the attention which it deserves, instead of the long neglect which this fine scientist has had to endure for political reasons throughout the AIDS era.