Science Guardian

Remarkable movie shows how AIDS story falls apart under questioning

But John Moore and his squad are on the job to sink it if possible

House of Numbers premiered last night at the Quad in New York City, and contrary to the uninformed review by Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times (see previous post), the documentary is a winner on every level – clarity of exposition, entertainment value, and unexpected revelation. Small wonder it has started garnering prizes at festivals (six so far).

Brent Leung adopts the Boy Scout approach of innocent inquiry, and travels the world in search of answers to the huge questions that HIV/AIDS ideology raises in every inquiring mind. He ends up gaining remarkable admissions from some leading lights in the field.

Web of inconsistency

The impression left as the credits roll is that every time he pokes at the supposedly solid science of HIV/AIDS he finds he meets no resistance, and his finger tears another hole is what seems like a cobweb of false claims, one that needs sweeping away before it catches another million hapless “HIV positives” to feed killer drugs to and, the film implies, shorten their lives for no good purpose except to preserve the careers and salaries of all in the vast economy of this statistically exaggerated and medically misread disease.

The film makes all the major points that the much vilified (by HIV defenders) “denialists” have made over the years, starting with Peter Duesberg’s brilliant and unrefuted reviews of the late 1980s, which have been censored from public attention ever since by Anthony Fauci of NIAID and the editors of the New York Times. But none of these McCarthy-ite internal politics are touched on in the film, which keeps it all very simple.

Conjuring the statistics

Can electron microscope images of the AIDS virus be produced? A leading expert in the technique shows Leung all the pictures produced by Gallo and by others since, but confirms they are only “probably” HIV. Do any tests provably confirm the presence of HIV or even HIV antibodies in the blood of “HIV positives”? No they don’t, other experts admit.

As the scientists quarrel on camera about which combination of tests might be definitive, it emerges that all tests, even PCR tests, have package disclaimers saying that in themselves they confirm nothing about the HIV status of the individual. Meanwhile, test interpretation varies by country, and by the information you have given the tester (are you gay? are you poor?). Rapid tests, used widely now in South Africa, are unreliable and prove nothing, it turns out, though Brent takes one on camera. Many Africans are still judged to be AIDS victims without any testing at all (the Bangui definition is still widely used, he discovers, for symptoms as simple as diarrhea and fever, no testing required).

James Chin, who was chief epidemiologist for WHO for five years, says he warned headquarters how flimsy the statistics were but no one paid any attention. Now he predicts that their “house of numbers” will collapse as the true situation emerges, and indeed huge downward adjustments have been made by the UN for the total of HIV “positives” in the world. (Kevin De Cock, the WHO official who stated a couple of years ago, that heterosexuals have never in reality been threatened by AIDS is not mentioned.)

With Brent and his audience thus instructed how a positive status doesn’t necessarily mean they are infected or have ever been infected by HIV, he is then shown how damaging and even lethal the drugs administered are. Reducing the dosage of the dreaded AZT in the nineties by substituting David Ho’s cocktail of protease inhibitors slowed patients’ decline, reprieving them from the early death guaranteed by full dose AZT before the mid nineties. Everyone lasted longer, so the triumph of protease inhibitors was applauded and the cause of AIDS spuriously confirmed. But deaths have continued at the same rate in the US since (about 17,000 a year). Meanwhile the definition of AIDS was expanded so that a decline was turned into a doubling of cases.

Applause during the film

By the time the film contemplates the experience of Steve and Sherrill Nagel the audience is ready to be horrified. The Nagels adopted a baby from Romania who tested positive in the US, and dutifully fed her AZT while doctors predicted she would barely last till age two. Her leg pains, loss of coordination, and mental disruption are disturbing to watch, and the parents finally decide that even by the measure of standard AIDS ideology it is not worth harming the child any further with AZT. There was a burst of applause at the premiere when it is announced that the child is now 19 and perfectly healthy.

The film doesn’t leave room for any official rebuttal of this or other anecdotes, but on the core points of the science and its politics well known figures such as Anthony Fauci of NIAID are given time to rebut the cynics. When they contradict themselves this is shown clearly. But what is most surprising is that Martin Delaney, who turned from being a skeptic to a staunch advocate of AIDS drugs when his San Francisco group Project Inform gained drug company funding, expresses a lot of world weary doubts about their usefulness and even notes that the companies have no financial motivation to think up a better way to go.

Montagnier’s stunning statement

In its final phase Brent Leung maps AIDS worldwide and shows how it matches poverty and how lack of good food and hygiene gives rise to exactly the same symptoms that are laid at the door of HIV. Is it possible, he asks, that much of global AIDS is sickness from poverty, and would be cured by pouring money into clean water and decent food rather than damaging drugs? That the drugs are damaging is earlier highlighted by photos of buffalo humps and by the death of Joyce Hafford after only 39 days in a test of nevirapine, with grotesque skin symptoms.

The establishment in HIV/AIDS has practiced answers to all this, to be sure, though none of them bear examination, as we have found in writing this blog. So perhaps Brent Leung can be forgiven for not including them, although they are undoubtedly among the 300 hours of film he has recorded. What he has produced is a vivid documentation of unanswered – in fact, confirmed – doubts about the scientific rationale peddled in HIV/AIDS, conflicting claims by experts, and real people examples of ignorance and suffering. He has shown how AIDS drugs could equally be causing the same and worse symptoms and deaths as HIV is supposedly causing.

The climax of the film comes with Luc Montagnier assuring him that “a good immune system” can rid the body of HIV in a few weeks. Leung gets him to repeat this unexpected statement and then asks if it applies to poor Africans. If their immune systems are restored with adequate nutrition, would their bodies conquer HIV too? The soon to be Nobelist Montagnier says “I would think so.”

Montagnier also emphasizes as he has done over the years (he was barred from the San Francisco AIDS Conference for it) that a co-factor is always necessary for HIV to do its deadly work, which opens the possibility that HIV itself is not actually involved. Presumably now that he alone won the Nobel last year for discovering HIV “the cause of AIDS” he will now be less frank in public. But here he is on film. The cat is out of the bag.

Will the doc be stopped?

This is the kind of paradigm threatening conclusion that a huge array of vested interests cannot abide, ranging from the emotions of patients who have committed themselves to taking the drugs to the vast array of career and financial interests that need to keep the 25 year old HIV/AIDS ideology in play, including now George Bush and Bill Clinton, who have both sought redemption through AIDS funding.

John Moore of Cornell, the HIV scientist most hostile in public and behind the scenes to outside review, has vowed in email to them that the filmmakers will, as the Hollywood phrase has it, ‘never eat lunch in this town again.’ Yet his efforts haven’t been able to stop their momentum so far, despite his supporters at the Times, which itself now has a huge, 25 year investment in the status quo.

With the politics so intense the censors of AIDS review may still succeed, but on behalf of the public Leung has fired the loudest shot yet across the bows of the great ship of fools, SS HIV Science. It is hard to imagine that, as has already happened, thoughtful people completely unaware of the real situation before they take their seats won’t leave the cinema skeptical of and even hostile to those that want to shut off public debate.

And the irony is that Leung has done nothing but document the tale that HIV scientists tell against themselves. The confusion he records looks amusingly like the Mad Hatters tea party from Alice in Wonderland. Could it be that they have led the world through a looking glass for 25 years?

Entertainment plus important revelation. All in all, a stunning achievement.

World deplores insanity, unaware of greater AIDS madness

AIDS critics may be in luck – another boost to growing examination of HIV∫AIDS in and out of courts

Drawing the world’s attention and curiosity for the second time, the Libyan court again convicted the five Bulgarian nurses and sentenced them to death by firing squad, along with the Palestinian doctor. The session took all of seven minutes.

Months more entanglement with this legal system, while Libya tries to extract more money than it already has from Bulgaria and the West for their ransom, is now forecast for the unhappy nurses, who have been held and threatened by the society they came to save for eight years now, an experience which has already led to some of them saying that they can’t stand it any more, just get it over with.

Apart from bringing Qaddafi and Libya once more into disrepute, this news, however, may be a gift to HIV∫AIDS critics and the millions they hope to save from largely useless and dangerous AIDS drugs.

In fact we imagine that HIV∫AIDS’s smoothest operator, the renowned Dr Fauci of NIAID, may be frowning at this tsunami of publicity centered on questionable HIV∫AIDS science, much as he probably deplores the politically dim Robert Gallo and John P. Moore for rising to the bait of the Harper’s Celia Farber essay in March on “Out of Control” AIDS science, and the subsequent wasp stings from Harvey Bialy in email exchanges which were subsequently run on Barnesworld, before that changed its name into Hank’s You Bet Your Life.

What could turn up the spotlight on the science of the shaky paradigm more effectively, and lead to more penetrating analysis of the flawed status quo, than this very vivid drama, personalized by the five hapless nurses, and the obviously flawed logic used to convict them? Not much. Maybe John P. Moore’s conscience stricken suicide jump off the Empire State Building, easily reached from the Cornell Weill Medical College building where he works and runs the misleading AIDSTruth propaganda site.

With this blatant example of non-science accepted by the courts in an Arab country under a strong man, and contradicted by the best scientists in the field across the world (or those that the public supposes to be the best scientists) editorial writers and readers across the globe will have the responsibility of thinking about it briefly for the first time in two decades.

As in the court cases in Australia and in Canada, the issue of whether HIV actually causes AIDS is likely to enter into their thinking if only because it will be raised by outsiders as a possible defense, even if the lawyers don’t run with it as they have in Australia, though not yet Canada as far as we know (for a good update post on the vindictively stupid treatment of Canadian Football League linebacker Trevis Smith for ‘attempting to murder’ women he slept with after an uncertain positive HIV test, read the stunning and nightmarish story at Hanks You Bet Your Life: The Travesty of Canadian Justice and the Trial of Travis Smith, Part II by Shelley McNeil) today (Tue Dec 19).

The paradigm under review in the courts.

Trial by judge and jury in Canada, Australia, Libya and soon the US and other countries, and in the court of world public opinion, may now be the route to unchaining AIDS from HIV. It certainly is liable to focus more public attention on the issue than ever before.

Meanwhile, those who know and study the Libyan politics which will decide the real dispensation of the case say that the Libyans will continue to negotiate for compensation from the Bulgarians and other nations before eventually releasing the group after a Qaddafi pardon.

Ramadan al-Faitore, whose 4-year-old stepsister was among the first to die, predicted earlier this month that the medical workers would be sentenced to death.

“But no one will kill the nurses,” Mr. Faitore said in Paris, echoing a statement made by Col. Qaddafi’s son, Seif, two years ago. “After the trial, negotiations will start again.”

Even if they are finally released perhaps the nurses in their long travail will be counted martyrs to the movement to liberate humanity from the best defended scientific theory extant.

The decision is due

Madness blossoms like a devilish flower

The Libyan court case is marked by agitation in the street by families calling for a guilty verdict, Bulgarian press kept out of the court, etc. as the following Sofia news agency Novinite report tells (3.30 am New York time).

Bulgaria is against the reparations demanded, saying it would be an admission of guilt.

Lawyer Osman Bizanti was attacked on the way entering a Libyan court minutes ahead of the start of a session expected to announce the verdicts on five Bulgarian medics.Darik News reported the situation both inside and outside the courtroom is extremely tense, which has called for massive police presence in the area.

All 11 Bulgarian journalists are still staying outside the court after Libyan authorities tried to bargain that only few of them enter the building.

“We firmly opposed and insist that all must attend the hearing; moreover, there are some 30 arab media already inside,” Zheni Marcheva from Darik News reported.

Bulgarian Ambassador to Libya Alexander Olshevski is expect to attend the court hearing, along with a number of other foreign diplomats.

Bulgaria’s Deputy Foreign Minister Feim Chaushev, who landed surprisingly on Libyan soil, will follow the court proceedings at the Embassy.

Our optimistic prediction:

Qaddafi won’t dare to flout international opinion on this one. The nurses and doctor will go free, appear on Larry King and write a best seller.

In all the attention and examination their story will attract, the science of HIV∫AIDS will finally be exposed for the pretense it is.

Ultimate result: Luc Montagnier and Peter Duesberg will share the Nobel Peace prize for saving the world from HIV∫AIDS think.

Focus News Agency report:

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.

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