| | Bill, thanks for posting your letter about Duesberg's ideas, and the summary of the study about the effects of drug use published in Nature.
Taking first the hypothesis that abusive and prolonged drug use can cause permanent immunodeficiency, I don't know enough about the subject to suggest much, beyond my earlier statement that the idea seems plausible. It appears that the study defined AIDS as immune deficiency irrespective of HIV status. It also appears that the study found that HIV was exclusively associated with subsequent AIDS, while no subjects in this group who tested negative for HIV developed AIDS. I have no background in science, so I can't reach firm conclusions about the study, which may represent accurate findings.
But alternative possibilities do exist. There is the important issue of whether or not the study was constructed properly so that its results faithfully portray the real world. Did the study incorporate drug use that was heavy and prolonged enough among most of its subjects to produce AIDS? Did the study unconsciously select healthier HIV negative men, as compared to less well HIV positives? I don't know. There is also the issue of apparent correlation (all cases of AIDS in this study preceded by HIV antibodies) being logically distinct from causation. Take, for example, the case of the presence of HIV anti bodies in subjects who subsequently developed AIDS. There is abundant evidence that HIV is an old virus, as opposed to the false hype about HIV spreading rapidly as a classic new-virus epidemic. Tests taken of US army recruits since 1985 show a constant (low) percentage of HIV positives of .4%--one in 250 people. Of course, this is inconsistent with a viral epidemic, which ascends along a parabolic curve until people develope immunity....or die.
Assuming the study published in Nature is well designed, what might account for its discrepancy between HIV negatives not developing AIDS, and HIV positives subsequently getting AIDS (other than the favored hypothesis that HIV causes AIDS)? One possibility might be that homosexual men who were more reckless in their pursuit of multiple partners and drugs--especially nitrite inhalents--were more likely to contract numerous blood borne infections, including HIV. Assuming HIV were a harmless virus, it could still serve as an approximate marker in many AIDS cases for this reason. In other words, homosexual men who had many sexual encounters with other men, and who correspondingly engaged in very heavy drug use, would be more likely to have anti-bodies to HIV, as well as numerous other viruses. Because there are numerous reports that correlate rampant sexual activity with heavier drug use, such HIV postive men might face higher risk of developing non-infectuous AIDS. I'm not claiming that this hypothesis is true, but it seems plausible.
I don't presume to know with high confidence that drug use--including of AZT--is necessarily the cause of AIDS in Europe and America. However, I have read that there have been many cases of HIV negative men contracting Kaposi's scarcoma---men who were heavy users of amy nitrite inhalents. I've also read that AZT is terribly toxic. It was originally developed as an anti-cancer drug to kill cancer cells; however, the drug decimated not only cancer cells but the cellular components of the immune system--and all other growing cells--on a lethal scale. After its brief introduction in the Sixties, the FDA removed it from use for this reason. AZT was brought back into use after it was demonstrated to kill HIV in the test tube. Further tests reported that the drug could kill HIV at low levels of use, while the dose necessary to kill T cells was said to be 1,000 times greater.
However, as Duesberg explains in his book, this happy news was too good to be true. For HIV is a retrovirus that reproduces its DNA through the machinery of the cells it takes over. Therefore, to kill an HIV viron necessarily requires killing the host cell, including T cells. Smaller laboratories found that the dosage of AZT necessary to kill HIV was 1,000 times greater than represented in the Burrough Welcome study. AZT is extremely toxic, and kills HIV infected and uninfected T-cells alike. "To this date, the Physician Desk Reference quotes the low toxicity of AZT reported by Broder, Barry, and Bolonesci, and colleagues, in 1986, although the real toxicity of the drug is one thousand times higher according to more than six imdependent studies published since." (Duesberg page 313, Inventing the AIDS Virus). Duesberg points out two other problems with AZT as miracle drug. First, the experiment in the test tube featured rapidly growing HIV; AZT only kills growing cells. But in humans who develope AIDS who had been previously infected by HIV, the virus has been long neutralized by the immune system, a dormant virus that produces no copies of itself. (Blood tests for HIV detect anti-bodies to the virus, while more recent techniques that seek to directly identify virus particles use technology that detects particles too tiny to be biologically active, according to the Nobel winner who discovered the technology.) So, AZT could kill growing cells in an artificial environment, but it couldn't kill the virus in subjects in whom it was inactive. Second, the virus kills indiscrimminately any growing cells. Since, according to Duesberg, only 1 in 500 T cells of HIV antibody positive people are ever infected, AZT must kill 499 good cells to destroy one infected cell.
Duesberg devotes a long chapter to AZT: its checkered history, the political intrigue that secured its approval, its well documented toxicity, its ability to interfer with DNA replication, and the disturbingly inconclusive (or misleading) "double blind" studies performed to secure FDA approval in record time. He describes the failure of the attempted double blind-placebo trials of the drug in detail, which featured the blind-defeating rapid sickening of those ingesting AZT, cheating by frightened placebo takers determined to take the toxin (which tasted different than the placebo), and enlarged red blood cells.
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How would one explain the tragedy of Kimberly Bergalis dying of AIDS? She tested positive for HIV. But how could she have possibly contracted an infection of HIV from her HIV-positive homosexual dentist, Acer? He pulled two molars from 19 year old Kimberly in 1987; two years later, she develped an oral yeast infection. After a brief pneumonia sent her to the hospital following intense actuarial examinations, she tested postive for HIV. Up to this point, there was nothing unusual about her medical ailments, which many suffer. But the CDC got wind of the story and Kimberly's attitude about her condition immediately worsened wehn she learned she was positive for HIV. The connection from Kimberly to her dentist, according to the CDC, rested on the fact of an inactive virus shared by both individuals. Kimberly said she had never had sex--she was a virgin--and used no IV or recreational drugs. Her dentist, who pursued sex and drugs in the fast lane, even after his diagnosis of HIV anti-bodies and feelings of unwellness, died in 1990. Meanwhile, Bergalis was prescribed AZT After this, her yeast infection worsened, and her health declined precipitously. By late 1993, her T cell count had dropped from 1,000 to 43. Her fevers hit 103. She looked like a chemotherapy patient. She died in 1991 at 23. As Duesberg points out, no one commented on the fact that the "incubation period" assumed for the HIV infection was supposed to be 10 years.
The CDC tested 1,100 of Acer's former dentistry patients, of whom 7 were HIV infected, including Kimberly, 2 with normal risk parameters for AIDS risks. Of the five with no risk factors, including Kimberly, inssurance companies demonstrated, based on their own investigations, that the HIV strain of the five was a different strain than Acer's! When the CDC expanded its study to include sixteen thousands patients of 32 HIV positive Dr.s and dentists, it turned up 84 HIV positives. 5 postivies out of 1,100 patients is 1 in 222, compared with 1 in 250 across the US population. 84 of 16,000 comes to 1 in 188. There is no evidence that Kimberly's mother was ever tested for HIV; most transmissions of the virus occur during childbearth. Kimberly may have carried this virus harmlessly from birth.
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The issue of how the state medical establishment defines AIDS, discussed in Bill's letter to Full Context, can be put to rest, easily and quickly. On page 212 of his book, Duesberg states:"One might ask how a doctor would distinguish between an AIDS-related tuberculosis and a traditional one. Clinically, the symptoms are identical, so the CDC has stipulated in its current definition that the tuberculosis must be renamed AIDS if anti-bodies against HIV are also found in the patient. In the absence of previous HIV infection, the disease is classified under its old name, in the case "tuberculosis", and treated accordingly. AIDS, therefore, can never be found apart from HIV infection--entirely by definition!"
As of 1996, when Duesberg's book was published, there were 4,621 clinically diagnosed cases of AIDS that are all HIV-free. To cover this discrepancy with its perfect HIV-AIDS
correlation, HIV-free AIDS cases were renamed in 1992 as "ideopathicCD4-lymphocytopenia" by the CDC and Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
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Duesberg's book is favored on its book jacket with positive commentary by several prominent scientists, including Kerry Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his invention 0f the Polymerase Chain Reaction., Dr. Walter Gilbert, Nobel winner in chemistry 1980, and several others. Mullis states on the jacket:"We know hat to err is human, but the HIV/AIDS hypothesis is one hell of a mistake. I say this rather strongly as a warning. Duesberg has been saying it for a long time. Read this book."
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