Science Guardian

Editors excited about way for heterosexuals to evade HIV

Millions will want the $20 operation, major funds ready to give – but is Padian so wrong?

Precisely why the editors of the Times made the HIV-circumcision story the top story on their Web front page and top right hand above the fold print edition front page headline yesterday is a matter of speculation, but we assume it is because the story involves a) heterosexuals b) African sex c) danger to the genitals d) a simple but effective solution to AIDS and e) women’s revenge (photo, left, is of a Somali woman parading against Ethiopia with an AK-47).

Not to mention it allows readers to indulge their envious prejudice, which the Times editors and reporters like to reinforce monthly, against Africans for supposed sexual excesses.

Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, “Long Walk to Freedom,” contains an unnerving but hilarious account of his own Xhosa circumcision, by spear blade, as a teenager. Although he was supposed to shout, “I am a man!” he grimaced in pain, he wrote…Dr. Mark Dybul, executive director of President Bush’s $15 billion Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, said in a statement that his agency “will support implementation of safe medical male circumcision for H.I.V./AIDS prevention” if world health agencies recommend it…

AIDS experts immediately hailed the finding. “This is very exciting news,” said Daniel Halperin, an H.I.V. specialist at the Harvard Center for Population and Development, who has argued that circumcision slows the spread of AIDS in the parts of Africa where it is common.

In an interview from Zimbabwe, he added, “I have no doubt that as word of this gets around, millions of African men will want to get circumcised, and that will save many lives.”

The Times editors are so excited about this revelation (a questionable result which has been around for some time) that they devoted an editorial to it as well, Rare Good News About AIDS comparing it to “the holy grail” of AIDS research, the long heralded but still AWOL vaccine:

For years, the holy grail of AIDS prevention has been a vaccine, even one that is only 50 to 60 percent effective. A real vaccine is years away. But as of yesterday, we know its near equivalent exists. International donors and governments should join together to spread the good news about circumcision and make the procedure available everywhere.

Even if one is not a dissenter from the holey (as in Swiss cheese) HIV∫AIDS paradigm, this initiative looks fat headed. Soap would achieve the same result, any doctor will tell you. And do we really need to do unaesthetic surgery on millions of Africans to prevent the transmission of a virus which after billions of dollars worth of research has not yet been proved to cause any harm, although that assumption is built into most of the thinking on the subject? Are trainloads of foreskins going to be useful for interferon or other immune factors, is that it?

Anyhow, as far as HIV∫AIDS science critics are concerned, circumcision is a non solution to a non problem, ever since Nancy Padian demonstrated in her landmark 1997 study the heterosexual non transmission of HIV.

Of course, Padian has had to ‘clarify’ this result since it was noticed and taken up by HIV∫AIDS dissidents and used as a club to bash the paradigm and its defenders, one which knocks away the basic prop of the global pandemic. Without significant heterosexual transmission, there is no global pandemic and no need to circumcise millions of Africans.

Padian’s clarification was published a few months ago on the leading AIDS truthiness site run by John P. Moore of Cornell and other HIV apologists, AIDSTruth.org, the specific page being HIV heterosexual transmission and the “Padian paper myth”,and it reads as follows, with our corrective comments:

HIV heterosexual transmission and the “Padian paper myth”One of the more egregious myths perpetrated by AIDS denialists is that HIV is not heterosexually transmitted.

The debate on the validity of the HIV∫AIDS paradigm is a hall of mirrors, where the defense of the paradigm is very often conducted by co-opting the arguments of the critics and turning them back on their originators (who do the same to them, rather more tellingly, by pointing out that it is the paradigm defenders who are the true “denialists”, for their ostrich like approach to the myriad objections to HIV∫AIDS).

In this case, the word “myth” as in “The AIDS Myth” or “The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS” is appropriated, but rather ineffectively, since it inevitably calls attention to the possibility that the HV∫AIDS paradigm itself may be the greatest myth of all in the field.

Part of the “evidence” that underlies this myth is a 1997 paper by Dr. Nancy Padian and her colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco (Padian NS, Shiboski SC, Glass SO, Vittinghoff E. 1997. Heterosexual transmission of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in Northern California: results from a ten-year study. Am J Epidemiol 146, 350-357) (1).

A thorn in the flesh of the paradigm apologists indeed, this study, for its results accounted for the biggest flaw in the HIV∫AIDS explanation for the outbreak of immune deficiency in the US, which is that it cannot explain away the absence of a heterosexual AIDS epidemic in this country, and moreover, it is a study which is now a prime justification for rejecting the standard interpretation of events in Africa, which is that a heterosexually transmitted HIV pandemic has swept the continent and the world.

The denialists either misinterpret or misunderstand this paper. Some internet sites/Blogs even go so far as to suggest that the “HIV/AIDS establishment” (sic) finds Dr. Padian’s work inconvenient and has suppressed it, to the detriment of her professional career.

On the contrary, the skill with which Dr Padian has navigated between the Scylla of the establishment disowning her and her research and the Charybdis of renouncing it herself is a marvel to behold and an inspiration for the many other establishment researchers who have come out with embarrassing results which contradict the paradigm, such as those who came out wih the HAART and the JAMA studies this summer, and Dr Gisselquist.

The following commentary from Dr. Padian addresses HIV heterosexual transmission, discusses what her seminal 1997 paper does actually say and, ipso facto, speaks to the absurdity of the notion that her work has been suppressed, or is inconvenient to other AIDS researchers.Heterosexual transmission of HIV

Nancy Padian, PhD

University of California, San Francisco

HIV is unquestionably transmitted through heterosexual intercourse.

This kind of statement is increasingly a characteristic of HIV∫AIDS papers which these days typically come up with findings which do not fit into conventional wisdom. First, there is this kind of obligatory obeisance to the reigning belief, the sine qua non of HIV∫AIDS research, which is that all symptoms are first and foremost caused by the dread Virus itself, however much other factors may enter into the picture. For example, patients may die of drug effects such as liver rot, but HIV is really the cause, even though liver problems are not on the CDC list of HIV∫AIDS symptoms.

Indeed, heterosexual intercourse is now responsible for 70-80% of all HIV transmissions worldwide (2). The current likelihood of male to female infection after a single exposure to HIV is 0.01-0.32% (2, 3), and the current likelihood of female to male infection after a single exposure is 0.01-0.1% (2). These estimates are mostly derived from studies in the developed world. However, a man or a woman can become HIV-positive after just one sexual contact.

Rates of between 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 3,000 , or between 1 in 10,000 and 1 in 1,000 for woman to man, are not high enough to sustain a spreading epidemic.

In developing countries, particularly those in sub-Saharan Africa, several factors (co-infection with other sexually transmitted diseases, circumcision practices, poor acceptance of condoms, patterns of sexual partner selection, locally circulating viral subtypes, high viral loads among those who are infected, etc.) can increase the likelihood of heterosexual transmission to 20% or even higher (4).

These factors might raise the transmission rate but to a level of 2000 per 10,000 – ie 2,000 times as much – is unlikely, on the face of it.

Evidence that specifically documents the heterosexual transmission of HIV comes from studies of HIV-discordant couples (i.e., couples in a stable, monogamous relationship where one partner is infected and the other is not); over time, HIV transmission occurs (5).

Not in this study.

Other studies have traced the transmission of HIV through networks of sexual partners (6-9). Additional evidence comes from intervention studies that, for example, promote condom use or encourage reductions in the numbers of sexual partners: the documented success of these interventions is because they prevent the sexual transmission of HIV (1,10,11).

Such results are inconsistent wth her study which was the largest ever conducted.

In short, the evidence for the sexual transmission of HIV is well documented, conclusive, and based on the standard, uncontroversial methods and practices of medical science. Individuals who cite the 1997 Padian et al. publication (1) or data from other studies by our research group in an attempt to substantiate the myth that HIV is not transmitted sexually are ill informed, at best. Their misuse of these results is misleading, irresponsible, and potentially injurious to the public.

The intemperate language suggests a political and emotionally driven stance, and that an unproven belief (that HIV is the cause of AIDS) is acting as a premise in addressing the counterarguments. Here Padian is protesting that her study does not suggest that the paradigm is incorrect. Methinks she doth protest too much. The reason is that her results are in direct conflict with the paradigm. Substantial heterosexual transmission is a pillar of the HIV∫AIDS paradigm, a sine qua non of the supposed global panademic. Her study demonstrated it was so insubstantial that it didn’t appear at all.

A common practice is to quote out of context a sentence from the Abstract of the 1997 paper: “Infectivity for HIV through heterosexual transmission is low”. Anyone who takes the trouble to read and understand the paper should appreciate that it reports on a study of behavioral interventions such as those mentioned above: Specifically, discordant couples were strongly counseled to use condoms and practice safe sex (1,12).

As many as 47 couples did not consistently use condoms or any other means of interfering with transmission for up to six years.

That we witnessed no HIV transmissions after the intervention documents the success of the interventions in preventing the sexual transmission of HIV.

Again, as many as 47 couples did not consistently use condoms or any other means of interfering with transmission for up to six years.

The sentence in the Abstract reflects this success — nothing more, nothing less. Any attempt to refer to this or other of our publications and studies to bolster the fallacy that HIV is not transmitted heterosexually or homosexually is a gross misrepresentation of the facts and a travesty of the research that I have been involved in for more than a decade.

To say “Nothing more, nothing less” is blatantly misleading, and we suspect his was written by John P. Moore, rather than Padian. In fact as many as 47 couples did not use condoms or any other means of interfering with transmission. Yet still for these couples there was no transmission during the study. This without question demonstrated the “fallacy” in heterosexual transmission. There was none for these couple in six years.

If safe sex practices are followed, and if there are no complicating factors such as those mentioned above, the risk of HIV transmission can be as low as our studies suggest…IF.

Of course, this is presumably true. Using condoms does block transmission of any live organism pretty effectively, depending on using them properly. But the problem is that her study showed that even if safe sex practices were not followed there was also nil transmission.

But many people misunderstand probability: they think that if the chance of misfortune is one in six, that they can take five chances without the likelihood of injury. This “Russian Roulette” misapprehension is dangerous to themselves and to others.

The Russian Roulette factor only means that an individual can escape the average, and possibly, even if the chance of an event is 1 in 1000, hit the 1 time the first time, or the 1000th time, or never. This doesn’t change the average, which in this case was nil, a rather conclusive result which shows the chances of transmission of the supposed agent are far too low to initiate any epidemic, since according to her study, normal healthy heterosexuals are virtually incapable of transmitting HIV even if they are not taking any precautions.

Furthermore, complicating factors are often not evident or obvious in a relationship, so their perceived absence should not be counted on as an excuse not to practice safe sex.

The phrasing of this remark is telling. Although it is on the surface merely a practical observation, it continues the fundamental defense of the paradigm in religious terms ie have faith (and fear) that there is something there even though you cannot see any evidence for it.

Finally, it is a complete fallacy to allege or insinuate that this work has been “suppressed” or “ignored” by the AIDS community or unsupported by UCSF or any other institution with which I have worked. To the contrary, these findings have been seen as central and seminal to the problem of heterosexual transmission rates and the development of interventions to lower the rate of transmission and infection worldwide, many of which are being conducted by my research group. The success of my working group has been fueled, not hindered, by our research on the heterosexual transmission of HIV, attested to by our long record of peer-reviewed publications.

Yes, the record of Padian’s work as fundamentally disruptive to the conventional wisdom in HIV∫AIDS yet somehow turned into a piece which fits into it without a ripple is a prime exhibit of how HIV∫AIDS’s double think, Orwellian fantasy works. While the embarrassing inconsistency of her results is recognized and various escape hatches are opened – genital sores, African “dry sex”, HIV piggy backing on other diseases and so on – Nancy Padian has managed to stay a member of the club despite her study being the best argument of all against belief in the paradigm.

Nancy Padian is a Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences at the University of California and she has worked on the heterosexual transmission of HIV since 1984. She is a frequent participant in annual NIH Office of AIDS Research planning workshops and has chaired the workshop on international research for the last four years. She is an elected member to the Institute of Medicine and the American Epidemiology Society. She served as vice-chair of the University of California task force on AIDS and currently directs international research for UCSF Global Health Sciences, the UCSF AIDS Research Institute and she is co-director of the Center for Reproductive Health Research and Policy.

An impressive list of appointments which is a tribute to the political skills of Dr Padian and the way she has exchanged reinterpretation of her results to conform with the paradigm for membership of the club, a club which like the English aristocracy knows that the best way to defeat revolutionaries is to bring them in from the cold.

Unkind cut would save very few

Going back to look at the paper, we find something interesting – the numbers involved in this great halving of the risk are very small fractions of the population.

The two trials were being conducted by researchers from universities in Illinois, Maryland, Canada, Uganda and Kenya and involved nearly 3 000 heterosexual men in Kisumu, Kenya and nearly 5 000 in Rakai, Uganda. None were infected with HIV. They were divided into circumcised and uncircumcised groups, given safe sex advice [although many presumably did not take it] and retested regularly.The trials were stopped this week by the NIH Data Safety and Monitoring Board after data showed that the Kenyan men had a 53 percent reduction in new HIV infection.

Twenty-two of the 1 393 circumcised men in that study caught the disease, compared with 47 of the 1 391 uncircumcised men. In Uganda, the reduction was 48 percent.

Even if the figures for transmission reached somehow in this and other studies are valid, and HIV is a threat backed by the literature, instead of being called into question by even paradigm-based papers without valid rebuttal, mass circumcision seems an overreaction.

For example, in the two trials, the trumpeted halving of the rate of new HIV infection was 53 per cent in Kenya and 48 per cent in Uganda, which sounds good but in fact represented only 25 men in 1393 total saved from HIV, a reduction of less thn 2%.

Of course, the remaining question is how accurate was the testing and what did it represent if the difficulty in transmission is as high as Nancy Padian found it was in her study? Presumably the tests are cross reacting with other transmissible diseases, the most likely one being TB, which is very widespread in Africa.

Nancy Padian Hero of AIDS

Encounterimg her at the party following the HIV/NET trials conference in Washington this last spring, we congratulated Nancy Padian on her outstanding research, which had made her a hero of AIDS in our view. “Oh I don’t think I am that!” she demurred, “Why do you say so?”

We explained it was because she had been the first to demonstrate that HIV did not transmit heterosexually very significantly if at all.

She seemed taken aback, and after gathering her wits, pronounced feebly, “But it transmits more in Africa!”

Could it be that Dr Padian has a special interest in emphasizing heterosexual transmission in favor of her own strategy in combating HIV transmission in Africa?

Surely not. But in 2002 she won the largest single private grant ever made to UCSF, $28 million, from the Gates Foundation, “to examine the effectiveness of the diaphragm in slowing the spread of the AIDS virus.”

Director of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s HIV/AIDS and TB Program at the time was Helene Gayle, who said “finding additional barrier methods that are female-controlled is a public health priority.”

Not, of course, if heterosexual transmission without any barrier is virtually absent.

Padian’s references:

The New York Times December 14, 2006 Circumcision Halves H.I.V. Risk, U.S. Agency Finds By Donald G. McNeil Jr., who is a reliable conduit at the Times for all official pronouncements on HIV∫AIDS, SARS, Bird Flu, and similar alarms.

Their fate still in balance, but top scientists show children infected earlier through poor hygiene

Might outside Nobel reviewers reject HIV itself?

From the point of view of an HIV∫AIDS dissenter debunker denialist skeptic cynic heretic critic (a troublemaking type of which we would certainly thoroughly disapprove, if we were not forced to agree with these black sheep in science when they challenge the claim that HIV causes immune problems, since the literature backs them up in every respect we have checked) the developments in the Libyan Attempted Baby Murder by HIV court case get curiouser and curiouser.

The case is a cliffhanger. Will the court condemn the Egyptian doctor and five nurses for purposely infecting hundreds of babies with HIV and hepatitis, or will it see reason and abandon this superstitious witchhunt in favor of admitting that the Benghazi hospital practiced poor hygiene?

A retrial of the six health workers ended in Tripoli last month. The prosecutor demanded the death penalty after five Libyan experts in H.I.V. and AIDS stood by their 61-page report, written in 2003, that found that the infections of the Libyan children had resulted from an intentional act.A Libyan court is expected to deliver a verdict on Dec. 19.

The six medical workers, who have protested their innocence and said their confessions were made under torture, arrived in Libya in March 1998. They have been detained since 1999.

Which way it goes has wider ramifications than some people may realize. If Quaddafi does finally step in and tell the court to back off when it renders a verdict on December 19, and let the group go free after seven years in the Libyan prison system, not renowned for its pleasant conditions, this will be a triumph for science and common sense.

Or will it? Judging from the sketchy reports of the BBC and Reuters, the knights of science have shown that the viruses in the babes are all too old a vintage to have arrived after the Bulgarians came to help out in the hospital, so they could not have been responsible for the mini epidemic.

A team of international scientists who reconstructed the history of the virus from samples from the Libyan children has shown that a subtype of H.I.V. began infecting patients at Al Fateh Children’s Hospital in Benghazi before the foreign medical team arrived.“The evidence shows the chain of infection started a few years before the arrival of the foreign staff accused of causing it deliberately,” Dr. Tulio de Oliveira, a molecular virologist at Oxford University, said in an interview.

This makes sense even to HIV∫AIDS critics who don’t believe HIV causes any problem to babes anyway. ounds as if the Libyans will have to back down, at least if Quaddafi reads Nature.

But what will be the outcome of the Libyan affair, if this happy ending is achieved? If justice is served the nurses and the Egyptian will be compensated for the six year prison term already served. But something else is going to happen: HIV science will be made to look more expert and correct than ever.

That is, unless the same calibre of scientist decided to join in a similar review commission for HIV∫AIDS. Then, perhaps, the same conclusion might be reached, that the many thousands of pages of HIV∫AIDS papers which have so far failed to demonstrate any good reason to suppose that HIV causes AIDS, and forty three reasons why not, are based on “supposition” and “conjecture”:

There has been mounting international pressure on Libya to hear independent scientific evidence.International experts say the scientific report used in the trial was nothing but ‘conjecture’ and ’supposition’.

Last month 114 Nobel Laureates wrote an open letter to Colonel Gaddafi urging the appropriate authorities to hear independent science-based evidence, and reaffirming the need for a fair trial.

Perhaps 114 Nobel laureates can be assembled to write to Dr Anthony Fauci to urge that an independent review commission be appointed. They would have to be drawn from other fields, since scientists in the field appear to have a religious conviction that HIV causes AIDS even in the absence of confirming evidence, other than data collected and analyzed on that very assumption.

With one already in the bag, Kary Mullis, the inventor of PCR, a breakthrough which has saved well over a hundred lives by springing innocent convicts from prison, it seems possible that Walter Gilbert might revisit his earlier public uncertainty that HIV was the right answer. Now that he has presumably got to know Jim Watson well by working at Cold Spring Harbor, perhaps the two of them can discuss the matter and decide to reopen the case.

That would leave 111 to go, but once these names are on the page it seems that a counter Durban Declaration could get going, and perhaps even rapidly build and complete once other scientists take a second look and muster their courage to sign, even though Dr Fauci would object strenuously to this “dangerous” line of thinking.

If the nurses are executed, there will be a strong parallel with the behavior of the NIAID in condemning millions to the idea that HIV is the cause of AIDS illnesses around the word, without review. In the latter case, the number of lives past and present at stake in the case of HIV vs Debunkers amount to at least 65 million and going strong. 25 million are dead, hundreds of thousand in this country from what debunkers insist is mismedication aimed at HIV.

Allegations by the accused that their confessions were obtained only after torture led to an investigation of the officers involved and the judgement was overturned by the supreme court. But despite admissions by one of the policemen that dogs and electric-shock equipment were used in the interrogations, all 10 policemen involved were acquitted.In May, two years after the accused were first sentenced to death, a retrial began. Francois Cantier, director of the organisation Lawyers Without Borders in France, which is advising the defence, has said the accused, exhausted by the ordeal, have lost all hope. At a recent hearing, he said, they shouted for the nightmare to be over, even if it meant dying….

Whether international pressure and diplomatic manoeuvrings influence the outcome may never emerge, but the final fate of the accused may not become public for days or even weeks after the defence gives evidence this week. For the families of Benghazi, there is at least the knowledge that lessons have been learned from the tragedy and that their children are now getting the best care possible. With aid from Europe, the US and elsewhere, Benghazi hospital is being transformed and the city will have a world-class infectious disease centre. Its staff have been trained extensively in the best techniques to control and prevent the spread of HIV.

The Palestian prisoner, Ashraf al-Hazouz, who is unlikely to work again as a doctor because of damage to his fingers sustained during his interrogation, was interviewed after being refused bail at the beginning of the retrial in May. “We are also victims like those children, but we hope that this tragedy will end soon,” he said.

With Qaddafi reportedly offered $3 billion reparations if he lets the five nurses and one doctor go, by the same arithmetic the West should be willing to pay whatever small sum it takes to mount a review commission on HIV to save 60 million lives, on the chance that the leading scientist in the field, the thousands of academics and professionals who support him from Nobel prize winners to top quality journalists, authors of some 25 books, and HIV positive people willing to put their lives on the line are not wrong in saying that the scientific literature tells them so.

Read the rest of this entry »

Billion dollar development of torcetrapib scrapped after trial shows it kills

Could the HIV∫AIDS machine withstand similar independent review?

Pfizer chief Jeffrey B. Kindler (Fred Beckhman/Associated Press) said he was surprised and disappointed by the results of the drug trial.

The extraordinary financial penalty of abandoning the development of a promising new drug has been highlighted this week by the fate of a drug which promised to do something entirely new in fighting heart attacks and strokes – raise the level of good cholesterol.

Torcetrapib did this well enough to reach the late stages of clinical testing, but it raised blood pressure and caused more heart problems for patients who died more often than without it. With a billion dollars invested in the drug which was expected to rejuvenate the company when it went on the market, there was a lot at stake. But Pfizer immediately dumped the drug once the review came in and the company’s chief scientist, who had fathered the drug, heard about it in his shower Saturday morning.

How come the problems were made public and the company forced to abandon it? The answer is independent review.

An independent monitoring panel reviewed the trial and recommended ending it, and Pfizer complied.

This is an extraordinary turnaround since only a week ago Pfizer was telling the investment world at an analyst briefing that they would ask FDA permission to market torcetrapib next year, after which their shares rose 2%. On Monday after the announcement they plunged 11% however and took $21 billion off the value of the company, reflecting the lack of alternatives in the company’s pipeline that promise the $15 billion a year in sales that was expected to come from torcetrapib.

Pfizer with $50 billion in sales and $12 billion in profits a year employs 106,000, and is the world’s biggest drug company. Yet independent review has seen it withdraw a drug on which its immediate future rested, since it would have represented up to a quarter of annual sales.

Independent review also the answer to HIV∫AIDS

Dr Anthony Fauci speaks to warmhearted HIV positive Regan Hoffman, the Editor of POZ magazine, fellow soldier in the trenches against misunderstanding of HIV and for the necessity of condoms and getting tested.

Sometimes HIV∫AIDS critics must feel like King Canute ordering the tide to stop coming in, but we see this week’s developments as promising evidence that even gargantuan sums can be turned aside from wrongly keeping a failed medical initiative afloat.

We think that it may even presage a change of heart – or anyway, policy – on the part of Dr Anthony Fauci, heroic fund raiser for research at the NIAID he leads, and chief strategist for the defense of the paradigm ever since 1986 or earlier.

Certainly all that is needed in HIV∫AIDS is the independent review which has been politically blocked under the leadership of Dr Anthony Fauci of NIAID with the aid of his proudly admitted censorhip of the media and promotion of financial sanctions on scientists who break ranks, who will then find they get not one more penny from the NIH to fund their laboratories even if they have been one of the NIH golden haired boys for years without a single grant refused, have been a winner of the NIH’s rare Special Investigator grants and are members of the National Academy.

We are of course referring to the case of Dr Peter Duesberg, the prime critic of the undemonstrated claim that HIV is the cause of AIDS. It is not just that Dr Fauci tried to drive Duesberg’s scientific finances into the ground and largely succeeded. What has crippled his review more than anything in the field is that every other scientist knows he or she will be in the same boat if they so much as speak up in his support, and every science reporter knows that the topic is verboten.

In support of his scientific Potemkin Village Anthony Fauci has turned his scientific fiefdom into a good imitation of Stalinist Russia.

(Potemkin Village by Gerhard Busch (see this page for this work and more)

And just as the New York Times correspondent at the time managed to overlook the genocides of Stalin, so the New York Times of today overlooks the genocide of Dr Fauci, with the deaths of hundreds of thousands of gay men in his wake, not to mention the deaths of potentially huge numbers of Africans who will go unmedicated or mismedicated for their real diseases such as TB or malnutrition, except for inappropriate antiretrovirals kindly funded by the two richest men in the world, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, and the most celebrated politician in the world, William Jefferson Clinton.

These may seem intemperate words but they are unfortunately scientifically and medically accurate, according to the established medical literature available on PubMed, which will offer for your scrutiny more than 15 million papers published in reputable journals which will back up these statements if you go to your nearest computer and look up whatever you need to check.

An alternative is to look at earlier posts on this blog, which laboriously try to draw the picture in terms which the man in the street can understand, and even be entertained by, as well as appalled.

Pfizer Likely to Seek Approval of New Heart Drug in 2007

Scrutiny of Other Heart Drugs Could Grow After Failed Trial

Collapse of a Cholesterol Drug

Doing My Bit for National HIV Testing Day By Regan Hoffman

Anyone looking for light relief from the above serious topic might like to read POZ magazine editor Regan Hoffman’s blog entry this summer when she learned of a friend who had – ohmygod! – slept with her new love without using a condom.

Long Blonde Hair and AIDS and All By Regan Hoffman:

Regan’s HIV Blog
Editor In Chief, POZ Magazine

Long Blonde Hair and AIDS and All

from Long blonde hair and AIDS and All – AIDSMed.com

Forgive my absence in the blogosphere! I’m back. Hmmmm….where to start? First, the news. Things have been heating up significantly at POZ headquarters…Marvelyn Brown (our POZ covergirl in January ‘06 and spokeswoman extraordinaire) has joined our team and we’re delighted to have her. We’re working away on several big ideas to pitch at the International World AIDS conference in Toronto this August. (We plan to have those ideas come to fruition on World AIDS Day come December and will share them with you as soon as we can.) I have been appointed to the board of directors of NAPWA (The National Association of People Living With AIDS) and London’s interest in the POZ story has been piqued…get ready for some breaking press on the other side of the pond. I’ve met lots of wonderful, HIV-savvy celebs (Kathy Bates, Tea Leoni, Miss Universe, Lucy Liu, Rosie Perez, and Gabriel Byrne, to name a few) and am slowly, but surely, making my rounds within the HIV/AIDS community, meeting many more incredible and inspiring people.

A notable example is Anthony Richardson, executive director of Perceptions for People With Disabilities (differentfolks.org), whom I met in Washington, DC at the press conference for National HIV Testing Day. Anthony lost his eyesight due to HIV-related illness but managed to be one of the few who braved the flood waters (that rolled in the night before) to attend the conference. I found it amazing that while the national and regional press (save for a few tenacious souls) couldn’t seem to navigate their way across the watery capital to hear about the importance of HIV testing, a blind man and his dog got there with no trouble from NYC. Okay, well, maybe not “no” trouble – it WAS quite a deluge.

The day after the ill-attended press conference, on June 27th, I joined Frank Oldham, executive director of NAPWA, Doug Michels, CEO of Orasure Technologies and Thomas Frieden, commisioner of the NYC Department of Health to open the NASDAQ. They blasted the announcement that it was National HIV Testing Day in several-story-high digital letters above Times Square. It was pretty awesome to see the name of our disease looming above the throngs wandering around in the neon glow. It was also pretty awesome to see how oblivious many seemed to the message…I had envisioned a stampede of newly enlightened folks rushing from Times Square to the nearest testing site to find out their HIV status. However, reality checked me and instead, I took solace in the fact that at least several NASDAQ staffers were inspired by our announcement to get tested. We need to figure out how to get more people aware and motivated next year.

Which brings me to the meat of this blog.

Many people have asked about what it’s been like to disclose publicly and whether I feel that doing so has made an impact. As to the first question, I can unequivocally say that it does feel great. The fear is gone. I am still here. The shock and awe are over and except for people I’ve never met before to whom I have to tell the news, thing have mostly returned to normal in my life. Some of my fellow HIV-positive peers have written to say that they’ve also disclosed since I spilled the beans and that they’re doing okay, too. I think that’s great. Sometimes, I feel a little like the first one back in the ocean after a shark attack. You know, I’m the dumb one who wades in first while others watch from the shore to see if I’m going to be ripped limb from limb before joining me. I have to say, so far, no dorsal fins. C’mon in if you’d like. The more the merrier. There is great power in facing your greatest fear and having it not kill you or destroy your life, as we so often imagine our greatest fear can. I’m not saying it’s been fun, fun, and lots more fun. I’ve been terrified, criticized, looked at funny and told, by an HIV-positive man, no less, that I’m not someone they want to associate themselves with because I am publicly associated with AIDS. BUT, mostly, it’s been just dandy. The best reaction I’ve gotten so far? I went to a party where I saw a casual acquaintance who’d heard the news. The last time I saw him, three years ago, I had short, black hair (that’s a story for another blog). So, when he walked into the party and saw me, he boomed, “Hey, look at you! Long, blonde hair and AIDS and all!” (might be a good title for my memoir: Long Blonde Hair and AIDS and All.) While I was stunned (though not as much as those other guests who had no idea about my status), I also found myself laughing. In a way, wasn’t his reaction what I dreamed of? To see AIDS handled in as casual a way as my latest haircolor? It was oddly refreshing to hear it expressed in such an offhand way.

As to the impact of my disclosure, it’s hard to measure. Everyone’s been so supportive, but I’ve often wondered whether the news that I have HIV actually motivates people to change their behavior. So, I’ve started asking around: Have you been tested? Do you know your partner’s status? Are you using protection?

One probe into a female friend’s life surprised me. She is recently out of a long-term relationship and shared with me that she slept with “her new man.”

Me: Did you get tested together?

Friend: No.

Me: Do you know his HIV status?

Friend: No.

Me: Well, then I’m sure you used protection, right?

Friend: Well, he was married and had only one other girlfriend.

Me: Arrrrrrrrrrggggggghhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!

I mean, come on! Anyone hot enough for my hot friend to date has NOT had two lovers in his life. Especially when his life spans four decades.

I was driving when she told me the news, and I pulled off the highway to yell at her. I am not normally a hot head, but her conviction that he was telling her the truth and her naivety about his status infuriated me. I said to her, “Listen, while you’re at it, why don’t you just do a few shots of hard alcohol, get in your car, leave the seat belt off, blindfold yourself and drive around at 70 miles an hour and see what happens?!” Okay, so it was a little excessive, but how could she believe that it couldn’t happen to her when it had happened to someone just like her? Then, I calmed down and said, “If I can’t influence even my best friends to take care of themselves, how am I going to convince strangers that they need to practice safer sex?” There was a long silence. Then, I asked her, “What’s the issue? Do you really think you’re immune?” And then, she surprised me. “I’m embarassed to buy condoms.” WHAT!? She continued: “I know the guy at our local Duane Reade. He’s the son of a friend of mine and I don’t want to be seen buying condoms.” Well, at least now I had something concrete to address. “Let me get this straight, ” I aid. “You have the courage and resolve and self esteem to extract yourself from a bad relationship. You found a man you think might be the man of your dreams. But you are not going to protect his life and yours because you are afraid to appear sexually responsible in front of your friend’s son!?” I continued. “You get over to that Duane Reade and you get condoms in every shape and size and modality and you plop them on the counter in front of that teenager and if he even looks at you sideways, you tell him that at least you respect yourself enough to take responsibility for your own life. Oh, and at least you’re getting laid. A lot.” She laughed. I did not. “One last thing,” I said. “I am not coming to your art opening (she’s an artist) until I see PROOF.”

I hung up the phone and eased my car back on the highway. I drove, for a while, feeling like my disclosure might have been in vain, after all. I seriously doubted my ability to inspire others to avoiding contracting HIV if I couldn’t persuade my closest friends that the threat was real, and all around them. I worked through the day, but with the wind very much out of my sails, until late afternoon, when my phone buzzed. There was a text message from my friend.

It read (sic): Duane reade-trojan 12 v thin lub-$9.75.

And I allowed myself a tiny cheer. One down, several hundred million more to go.

Posted by Regan Hofmann on July 18, 2006 7:44 PM | Permalink

But of course, an independent review is just what Dr Fauci’s strategy of censorship and propaganda aimed at avoiding all these years. There is little chance that he will welcome any such thing now, unless he is willing to take responsibility for causing a health catastrophe.

Surrounded by admirers for two hours, the celebrated HIV∫AIDS critic is birthday boy

But no one offers a check – yet

Just how well Duesberg’s talk went at the Libertarian Lew Rockwell conference in San Francisco on Friday and Saturday, where Duesberg delivered the keynote on Friday evening at 6.30pm, “AIDS – a viral or chemical epidemic?”, is made clear on Barnesworld, the blog renamed Hank’s You Bet Your Life, where two appreciative reports are carried today. They give a good account of both the scene and the content of Duesberg’s talk to about 150 people.

Duesberg was surrounded by a throng of questioners for two hours afterwards, during which a birthday cake was carried in in his honor, December 2 being his 70th birthday (”he looks 50″ says one of the entries). Scholar and author Harvey Bialy, the eminence grise of the blog and now its frequent correspondent, follows the reports with an email from Duesberg which ends with the single down note (as far as we are concerned) of the evening, his joke that “they did offer heart-felt applause and questions from 9 until 11 PM. But no one has asked if they could write a check to the lab yet.”

In the Comments that follow, however, there is already one Pat Edmonson promising Duesberg a share of a sum he will receive after the year end.

Carrying these reports on YBYL is a significant public service, not only because it shows how overwhelming Duesberg’s critique is when presented to a live audience, but draws attention to the key factor – big money – which has crippled good science in this field, and allow bad science to triumph. Everything is being done, we hope, to make contributions to Duesberg as easy as a click on PayPal or mailing a check. His website is Peter Duesberg, where it lists his address as Professor Peter H. Duesberg, Ph.D., Department of Molecular & Cell Biology, c/o Stanley/Donner Administrative Services Unit, 229 Stanley Hall #3206, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-3206 Fax: (510) 643-6455. There is a form to write a quick email to Duesberg if you wish at Write an email.

Why send money to Duesberg?

His research into cancer is the most significant and pioneering in the field, and can be continued at the modest sum of $100,000 a year. Modest, that is, relative to the huge sums being wasted by proponents of the current oncogene paradigm in cancer research, which Duesberg and Bialy have pointed out in their respective articles and books has been a theoretical dead end since the mid eighties, like HIV∫AIDS, an even vaster money machine which is also wasting all its research millions on a paradigm which has yet to be justified in any meaningful way, not to mention wasting the expanding millions spent on delivering AIDS drugs to patients here and in Africa, India and points East, courtesy of the efforts of Gates, Clinton, Bono and other celebrities whose view of HIV∫AIDS is under researched.

At the moment, with his faithful long time lab assistant dying of the very same dread disease that they were researching, Duesberg is alone in his laboratory, dealing with his own minor errands and bench work as well as following his fruitful intellectual path into exploring aneuploidy (multiplying chromosomes) as the real trigger of cancer, as explained in Harvey Bialy’s valuable handbook to the Duesberg saga in both fields, “Oncogenes, Aneuploidy and AIDS: A Scientific Life of Peter H. Duesberg”.

There have been no graduate students in Berkeley who have dared work under Duesberg since he entered the fray by tilting against both the HIV∫AIDS and oncogene windmills two decades ago in Cancer Research. But the undergraduates he taught about viruses and cancer last year gave him a standing ovation after his final class.

All in all, there are few scientists who deserve full funding more than Duesberg, given the staggering quality and significance of his accomplishments, from starting two major fields of research (oncogenes and aneuploidy) to renouncing two (oncogenes and HIV∫AIDS) out of a love of real scientific truth and a sense of public responsibility, despite his privileges as the leading scientist in oncogenes and retroviruses and popularity among the scientific elite – he was a member of the National Academy before any of his opponents in AIDS, as far as we know, and every single grant application of his to the NIH was given the green light, until he wrote the Cancer Research paper in 1987 rejecting HIV as the cause of AIDS.

His work over twenty two years dealing with the profession and the public on the HIV∫AIDS question is a breathtaking accomplishment given the depth and breadth of the research he had to cover to shut all the escape hatches built by the paradigm promoters in arguing that even if the theory didn’t make too much sense in this regard or that regard it would all become clear in the end.

Meanwhile they need another $100 million from the NIH, please, whereas all the time Duesberg’s important research in cancer was shortchanged of his time and starved of funds, since Duesberg has never got a penny from the NIH since 1987 and the number of private patrons who have responded you can count in the fingers of one hand and have two fingers left over, and this in a country where there are now so many millionaires that only billionaires are counted as rich any more. San Francisco private investor Robert Leppo deserves a medal for taking the lead in enabling Duesberg’s work.

ABC’s John Stossel ran a segment last Wednesday taking the super rich to task for not contributing enough to charity, and we were particularly struck by the man worth $6 billion who said he didn’t know where to send it.

We are sending him a suggestion.

Talk by Berkeley scientist, public spirited conqueror of doubt and confusion in HIV∫AIDS madness

First annual award of NAR goes to indomitable scientist

We have just learned rather belatedly from our brother in arms blog, the high level Hank’s You Bet Your Life directed by Harvey Bialy that Peter Duesberg is to speak tonight (Fri Dec 1) in San Francisco. Go to Lew Rockwell and the Libertarians Celebrate World AIDS Day with Peter Duesberg to read about it, and download Duesberg’s powerpoint presentation which will be put up during today, and a live report before and after the talk.

The cost will be $150 and in our opinion, well worth it, especially for anyone who has never seen this restlessly sharp and witty analyst in action. A lecture by Duesberg is a live event that lives up to the description, for his style is entirely spontaneous, even if he is delivering slides and comment he has covered before. The only problem is that sometimes his witticisms at the expense of dull mediocrity are delivered in a conversational throwaway giggle, rather than in the ringing tones they deserve.

Come to the LRC Conference!“May you be Healthy, Wealthy and Wise.” That’s about as generous a wish one person can offer another. Well, you’re on the way if you attend the LRC Benefit Conference on revisionist health and finances on December 1–2, 2006 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Foster City, California, near the San Francisco Airport. Join us. You’ll be dazzled by our speakers, have a terrific time and help LRC as well.

Friday, December 1, Marco Polo Room

* 5:30pm: Registration and Welcome 6:00pm:

* Burt Blumert, Center for Libertarian Studies Mark Thornton, Ludwig von Mises Institute “Welcome”

* 6:15pm: Gary North, “Dr. Rothbard’s Prescription for Health and Wealth”

* 6:45pm: Peter Duesberg, University of California at Berkeley “Is AIDS a Viral or a Chemical Epidemic? – a Multi-Billion-Dollar Question”

* 7:15pm: Gala Reception

Presumably Duesberg’s presentation will be the one he gave at the meeting in New York in June, when he addressed the Rethinking AIDS group meeting and the press on the topic of how HIV∫AIDS scientists and officials have failed to realize any of the predictions inherent in their favorite paradigm, from heterosexual spread in the US to a rise and fall in prevalence in the US to virus killing T cells to significant mortality globally, while Duesberg’s alternative account of AIDS, as an immune deficit syndrome caused by drugs in the US and conventional assaults such as malnutrition and diseases in Africa, predicts everything that has happened in this field over the last two decades quite beautifully.

Peter Duesberg wins first annual NAR “Hero of AIDS”award

The Duesberg presentation on World AIDS Day coincides happily with the decision of the editors, writers and researchers of New AIDS Review to award its first annual Hero of AIDS medal to the distinguished pioneering scientist.

Other scientists in the running for the award included Robert Gallo, the first man to entirely disprove his own fervent hope that HIV was the “probable cause of AIDS”, as he and Margaret Heckler announced in 1994 at a press conference faithfully transmitted to the front page of the New York Times and thence worldwide by Lawrence K. Altman, the MD and CDC trainee on whom the Times has since depended for its unvarying support of this notion of HIV as “the virus that causes AIDS”, even though as it turned out a week later Gallo’s heralded papers in Science revealed that HIV was not the cause of AIDS after all, since he had been able to find it in only 26 out of 72 patients’ blood samples.

Also considered was Dr Anthony Fauci, Director of NIAID at the NIH, who was the first to bring the attention of scientists to the fact that HIV not only did not kill T cells in a provable manner that anyone understood, either directly or indirectly, but actually provoked the proliferation of CD4 T cells, the very cells it was meant to kill directly or indirectly, or by supernatural means, and thus cause AIDS through immune dysfunction. This didn’t provably happen.

Instead, the implication from the pen of this giant of science running NIAID was that the answer to AIDS might be infecting patients with more HIV, normally absent from their bodies in any detectable amount, which like any good leukemia virus (human T cell leukemia virus was Gallo’s first name for HIV) would not only augment the CD4 count of patients, but also act as a vaccine to ensure that they were better defended against HIV by multiplying antibodies to it, so there will be even less HIV in patients than the normal vanishing amount. In other words, the correct antidote to HIV was more HIV.

However, neither of these scientists have had the courage of Peter Duesberg in bringing their conclusions to the attention of the public as well as of scientists, so we unanimously decided that Duesberg was the first and only choice for the first award of Hero of AIDS for his work over two decades demonstrating that Gallo was correct, and there is no chance in Hades that HIV is the cause of anything, let alone AIDS.

The following is the full rationale attached to the award, which will be presented to Duesberg in person when he is next in New York:

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