Sound Opinions Message Board > HIV ==> AIDS ? What do you think?

Full Version: HIV ==> AIDS ? What do you think?

Sound Opinions Message Board > Anything Goes > Et Cetera

kalmia

Mar 3 2006, 04:16 PM

Why I Quit HIV

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig7/culshaw1.html

~Rebecca V. Culshaw, Ph.D.

rebeccavculshaw@yahoo.com

As I write this, in the late winter of 2006, we are more than twenty years into the AIDS era. Like many, a large part of my life has been irreversibly affected by AIDS. My entire adolescence and adult life – as well as the lives of many of my peers – has been overshadowed by the belief in a deadly, sexually transmittable pathogen and the attendant fear of intimacy and lack of trust that belief engenders.

To add to this impact, my chosen career has developed around the HIV model of AIDS. I received my Ph.D. in 2002 for my work constructing mathematical models of HIV infection, a field of study I entered in 1996. Just ten years later, it might seem early for me to be looking back on and seriously reconsidering my chosen field, yet here I am.

My work as a mathematical biologist has been built in large part on the paradigm that HIV causes AIDS, and I have since come to realize that there is good evidence that the entire basis for this theory is wrong. AIDS, it seems, is not a disease so much as a sociopolitical construct that few people understand and even fewer question. The issue of causation, in particular, has become beyond question – even to bring it up is deemed irresponsible.

Why have we as a society been so quick to accept a theory for which so little solid evidence exists? Why do we take proclamations by government institutions like the NIH and the CDC, via newscasters and talk show hosts, entirely on faith? The average citizen has no idea how weak the connection really is between HIV and AIDS, and this is the manner in which scientifically insupportable phrases like "the AIDS virus" or "an AIDS test" have become part of the common vernacular despite no evidence for their accuracy.

When it was announced in 1984 that the cause of AIDS had been found in a retrovirus that came to be known as HIV, there was a palpable panic. My own family was immediately affected by this panic, since my mother had had several blood transfusions in the early 1980s as a result of three late miscarriages she had experienced. In the early days, we feared mosquito bites, kissing, and public toilet seats. I can still recall the panic I felt after looking up in a public restroom and seeing some graffiti that read "Do you have AIDS yet? If not, sit on this toilet seat."

But I was only ten years old then, and over time the panic subsided to more of a dull roar as it became clear that AIDS was not as easy to "catch" as we had initially believed. Fear of going to the bathroom or the dentist was replaced with a more realistic wariness of having sex with anyone we didn’t know really, really well. As a teenager who was in no way promiscuous, I didn’t have much to worry about.

That all changed – or so I thought – when I was twenty-one. Due to circumstances in my personal life and a bit of paranoia that (as it turned out, falsely and completely groundlessly) led me to believe I had somehow contracted "AIDS," I got an HIV test. I spent two weeks waiting for the results, convinced that I would soon die, and that it would be "all my fault." This was despite the fact that I was perfectly healthy, didn’t use drugs, and wasn’t promiscuous – low-risk by any definition. As it happened, the test was negative, and, having felt I had been granted a reprieve, I vowed not to take more risks, and to quit worrying so much.

Over the past ten years, my attitude toward HIV and AIDS has undergone a dramatic shift. This shift was catalyzed by the work I did as a graduate student, analyzing mathematical models of HIV and the immune system. As a mathematician, I found virtually every model I studied to be unrealistic. The biological assumptions on which the models were based varied from author to author, and this made no sense to me. It was around this time, too, that I became increasingly perplexed by the stories I heard about long-term survivors. From my admittedly inexpert viewpoint, the major thing they all had in common – other than HIV – was that they lived extremely healthy lifestyles. Part of me was becoming suspicious that being HIV-positive didn’t necessarily mean you would ever get AIDS.

By a rather curious twist of fate, it was on my way to a conference to present the results of a model of HIV that I had proposed together with my advisor, that I came across an article by Dr. David Rasnick about AIDS and the corruption of modern science. As I sat on the airplane reading this story, in which he said "the more I examined HIV, the less it made sense that this largely inactive, barely detectable virus could cause such devastation," everything he wrote started making sense to me in a way that the currently accepted model did not. I didn’t have anywhere near all the information, but my instincts told me that what he said seemed to fit.

Over the past ten years, I nevertheless continued my research into mathematical models of HIV infection, all the while keeping an ear open for dissenting voices. By now, I have read hundreds of articles on HIV and AIDS, many from the dissident point of view but far, far more from that of the establishment, which unequivocally promotes the idea that HIV causes AIDS and that the case is closed. In that time, I even published four papers on HIV (from a modeling perspective). I justified my contributions to a theory I wasn’t convinced of by telling myself these were purely theoretical, mathematical constructs, never to be applied in the real world. I suppose, in some sense also, I wanted to keep an open mind.

So why is it that only now have I decided that enough is enough, and I can no longer in any capacity continue to support the paradigm on which my entire career has been built?

As a mathematician, I was taught early on about the importance of clear definitions. AIDS, if you consider its definition, is far from clear, and is in fact not even a consistent entity. The classification "AIDS" was introduced in the early 1980s not as a disease but as a surveillance tool to help doctors and public health officials understand and control a strange "new" syndrome affecting mostly young gay men. In the two decades intervening, it has evolved into something quite different. AIDS today bears little or no resemblance to the syndrome for which it was named. For one thing, the definition has actually been changed by the CDC several times, continually expanding to include ever more diseases (all of which existed for decades prior to AIDS), and sometimes, no disease whatsoever. More than half of all AIDS diagnoses in the past several years in the United States have been made on the basis of a T-cell count and a "confirmed" positive antibody test – in other words, a deadly disease has been diagnosed over and over again on the basis of no clinical disease at all. And the leading cause of death in HIV-positives in the last few years has been liver failure, not an AIDS-defining disease in any way, but rather an acknowledged side effect of protease inhibitors, which asymptomatic individuals take in massive daily doses, for years.

The epidemiology of HIV and AIDS is puzzling and unclear as well. In spite of the fact that AIDS cases increased rapidly from their initial observation in the early 1980s and reached a peak in 1993 before declining rapidly, the number of HIV-positive individuals in the U.S. has remained constant at one million since the advent of widespread HIV antibody testing. This cannot be due to anti-HIV therapy, since the annual mortality rate of North American HIV-positives who are treated with anti-HIV drugs is much higher – between 6.7 and 8.8% – than would be the approximately 1–2% global mortality rate of HIV-positives if all AIDS cases were fatal in a given year.

Even more strangely, HIV has been present everywhere in the U.S., in every population tested including repeat blood donors and military recruits, at a virtually constant rate since testing began in 1985. It is deeply confusing that a virus thought to have been brought to the AIDS epicenters of New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles in the early 1970s could possibly have spread so rapidly at first, yet have stopped spreading completely as soon as testing began.

Returning for a moment to the mathematical modeling, one aspect that had always puzzled me was the lack of agreement on how to accurately represent the actual biological mechanism of immune impairment. AIDS is said to be caused by a dramatic loss of the immune system’s T-cells, said loss being presumably caused by HIV. Why then could no one agree on how to mathematically model the dynamics of the fundamental disease process – that is, how are T-cells actually killed by HIV? Early models assumed that HIV killed T-cells directly, by what is referred to as lysis. An infected cell lyses, or bursts, when the internal viral burden is so high that it can no longer be contained, just like your grocery bag breaks when it’s too full. This is in fact the accepted mechanism of pathogenesis for virtually all other viruses. But it became clear that HIV did not in fact kill T-cells in this manner, and this concept was abandoned, to be replaced by various other ones, each of which resulted in very different models and, therefore, different predictions. Which model was "correct" never was clear.

As it turns out, the reason there was no consensus mathematically as to how HIV killed T-cells was because there was no biological consensus. There still isn’t. HIV is possibly the most studied microbe in history – certainly it is the best-funded – yet there is still no agreed-upon mechanism of pathogenesis. Worse than that, there are no data to support the hypothesis that HIV kills T-cells at all. It doesn’t in the test tube. It mostly just sits there, as it does in people – if it can be found at all. In Robert Gallo's seminal 1984 paper in which he claims "proof" that HIV causes AIDS, actual HIV could be found in only 26 out of 72 AIDS patients. To date, actual HIV remains an elusive target in those with AIDS or simply HIV-positive.

This is starkly illustrated by the continued use of antibody tests to diagnose HIV infection. Antibody tests are fairly standard to test for certain microbes, but for anything other than HIV, the main reason they are used in place of direct tests (that is, actually looking for the bacteria or virus itself) is because they are generally much easier and cheaper than direct testing. Most importantly, such antibody tests have been rigorously verified against the gold standard of microbial isolation. This stands in vivid contrast to HIV, for which antibody tests are used because there exists no test for the actual virus. As to so-called "viral load," most people are not aware that tests for viral load are neither licensed nor recommended by the FDA to diagnose HIV infection. This is why an "AIDS test" is still an antibody test. Viral load, however, is used to estimate the health status of those already diagnosed HIV-positive. But there are very good reasons to believe it does not work at all. Viral load uses either PCR or a technique called branched-chained DNA amplification (bDNA). PCR is the same technique used for "DNA fingerprinting" at crime scenes where only trace amounts of materials can be found. PCR essentially mass-produces DNA or RNA so that it can be seen. If something has to be mass-produced to even be seen, and the result of that mass-production is used to estimate how much of a pathogen there is, it might lead a person to wonder how relevant the pathogen was in the first place. Specifically, how could something so hard to find, even using the most sensitive and sophisticated technology, completely decimate the immune system? bDNA, while not magnifying anything directly, nevertheless looks only for fragments of DNA believed, but not proven, to be components of the genome of HIV – but there is no evidence to say that these fragments don’t exist in other genetic sequences unrelated to HIV or to any virus. It is worth noting at this point that viral load, like antibody tests, has never been verified against the gold standard of HIV isolation. bDNA uses PCR as a gold standard, PCR uses antibody tests as a gold standard, and antibody tests use each other. None use HIV itself.

There is good reason to believe the antibody tests are flawed as well. The two types of tests routinely used are the ELISA and the Western Blot (WB). The current testing protocol is to "verify" a positive ELISA with the "more specific" WB (which has actually been banned from diagnostic use in the UK because it is so unreliable). But few people know that the criteria for a positive WB vary from country to country and even from lab to lab. Put bluntly, a person’s HIV status could well change depending on the testing venue. It is also possible to test "WB indeterminate," which translates to any one of "uninfected," "possibly infected," or even, absurdly, "partly infected" under the current interpretation. This conundrum is confounded by the fact that the proteins comprising the different reactive "bands" on the WB test are all claimed to be specific to HIV, raising the question of how a truly uninfected individual could possess antibodies to even one "HIV-specific" protein.

I have come to sincerely believe that these HIV tests do immeasurably more harm than good, due to their astounding lack of specificity and standardization. I can buy the idea that anonymous screening of the blood supply for some nonspecific marker of ill health (which, due to cross reactivity with many known pathogens, a positive HIV antibody test often seems to be) is useful. I cannot buy the idea that any individual needs to have a diagnostic HIV test. A negative test may not be accurate (whatever that means), but a positive one can create utter havoc and destruction in a person’s life – all for a virus that most likely does absolutely nothing. I do not feel it is going too far to say that these tests ought to be banned for diagnostic purposes.

The real victims in this mess are those whose lives are turned upside-down by the stigma of an HIV diagnosis. These people, most of whom are perfectly healthy, are encouraged to avoid intimacy and are further branded with the implication that they were somehow dreadfully foolish and careless. Worse, they are encouraged to take massive daily doses of some of the most toxic drugs ever manufactured. HIV, for many years, has fulfilled the role of a microscopic terrorist. People have lost their jobs, been denied entry into the Armed Forces, been refused residency in and even entry into some countries, even been charged with assault or murder for having consensual sex; babies have been taken from their mothers and had toxic medications forced down their throats. There is no precedent for this type of behavior, as it is all in the name of a completely unproven, fundamentally flawed hypothesis, on the basis of highly suspect, indirect tests for supposed infection with an allegedly deadly virus – a virus that has never been observed to do much of anything.

As to the question of what does cause AIDS, if it is not HIV, there are many plausible explanations given by people known to be experts. Before the discovery of HIV, AIDS was assumed to be a lifestyle syndrome caused mostly by indiscriminate use of recreational drugs. Immunosuppression has multiple causes, from an overload of microbes to malnutrition. Probably all of these are true causes of AIDS. Immune deficiency has many manifestations, and a syndrome with many manifestations is likely multicausal as well. Suffice it to say that the HIV hypothesis of AIDS has offered nothing but predictions – of its spread, of the availability of a vaccine, of a forthcoming animal model, and so on – that have not materialized, and it has not saved a single life.

After ten years involved in the academic side of HIV research, as well as in the academic world at large, I truly believe that the blame for the universal, unconditional, faith-based acceptance of such a flawed theory falls squarely on the shoulders of those among us who have actively endorsed a completely unproven hypothesis in the interests of furthering our careers. Of course, hypotheses in science deserve to be studied, but no hypothesis should be accepted as fact before it is proven, particularly one whose blind acceptance has such dire consequences.

For over twenty years, the general public has been greatly misled and ill-informed. As someone who has been raised by parents who taught me from a young age never to believe anything just because "everyone else accepts it to be true," I can no longer just sit by and do nothing, thereby contributing to this craziness. And the craziness has gone on long enough. As humans – as honest academics and scientists – the only thing we can do is allow the truth to come to light.

March 3, 2006

Rebecca V. Culshaw, Ph.D. [rebeccavculshaw@yahoo.com], is a mathematical biologist who has been working on mathematical models of HIV infection for the past ten years. She received her Ph.D. (mathematics with a specialization in mathematical biology) from Dalhousie University.

KENAN THOMPSON

Mar 3 2006, 10:41 PM

i think she's kinda cute

velocity

Mar 4 2006, 12:08 AM

There's a molecular biologist @ Cal, Peter Duesberg, , who's been arguing for years that the accepted hypothesis of HIV -> AIDS is a fallacy (he believes it's caused by recreational drug use). The guy's been trashed since he rejected the party line. It's good to see that others are stepping up as well...hopefully they'll get some funding.

DrJimmy

Mar 4 2006, 08:58 AM

QUOTE(velocity @ Mar 4 2006, 12:08 AM) [snapback]35141[/snapback]

There's a big article about HIV drug testing and Duesberg in this month's Harper's.

There's some VERY interesting evidence (but disputable), that HIV does NOT cause AIDS. Amazing.

CopyrightQ

Mar 4 2006, 09:36 AM

Fashionating.

I don't have time to research this issue, but it is not surprising that reasonable minds differ.

AIDS is such a traumatic way to die...rather like cancer...and it has SEVERAL markers, also like cancer. It's not surprising to me to see that HIV may be at the level of HPV (human papilloma virus) with regard to it being a signature of uterine cancer--only one of several correlating markers.

More important, in my mind, are the points that she raises about the lifestyle...the castigation; the encouragement of avoiding closeness; the finality. It's been a long time since I sat at the Howard Brown clinic in Chicago in the late 80s, seemingly the only straight person in the waiting room for the confidential HIV test (after learning that an ex had AIDS). I came out clean, but the two weeks waiting for the results was h@ll. Fast forward to the late 90s, when my sister, a nurse, had pricked herself with a gunky needle that she had removed from the arm of a man dying of AIDS. Her wait was probably much more nerve-racking; also negative, as was the three month follow-up.

What *if* they'd come out positive? Living with statistics and living with risk is a conscious choice that must be made to survive and thrive and fight the panic of a "terminal" diagnosis. It feels "terminal", even if it isn't.

le chaton

Mar 4 2006, 11:50 AM

QUOTE(undo @ Mar 4 2006, 08:25 AM) [snapback]35249[/snapback]

Odd how you're all so quick to dismiss this on the discussion board when Dave Grohl is quoted on the subject, yet are deeply intrigued and taken by it when there's a reasonably cute picture of a girl to back it up on the etc. board.

velocity

Mar 4 2006, 12:46 PM

QUOTE(undo @ Mar 4 2006, 06:25 AM) [snapback]35249[/snapback]

Didn't see the Grohl quote, but I brought up Deusberg's studies here a year ago. I've followed his story since reading an interview in the late 80s/early 90s. Usually any mention of alternate causality results in dismissal & derision, but I'm not a scientist. Duesberg was at the top of his field when his argument that the HIV model might be completely misguided turned him into a pariah among the scientific community. Right or wrong, it's going to take some sort of groundswell among various experts to ensure all avenues of investigation are exhausted and right now, all our eggs are still in the HIV basket. When a supposed "cure" (AZT) might actually be an AIDS trigger, it's essential to ask the right questions.

Binko

Mar 4 2006, 03:01 PM

QUOTE(velocity @ Mar 4 2006, 01:08 AM) [snapback]35141[/snapback]

(he believes it's caused by recreational drug use).

How does he account for all the African AIDS deaths? All of them recreational drugs?

velocity

Mar 4 2006, 04:40 PM

QUOTE(Binko @ Mar 4 2006, 12:01 PM) [snapback]35366[/snapback]

How does he account for all the African AIDS deaths? All of them recreational drugs?

http://www.duesberg.com/subject/africa2.html

He differentiates North American/European AIDS from African. " The discrepancies between African AIDS and infectious disease, and the discrepancies between the high AIDS risk of American compared to African HIV-positives can both be readily explained by the hypothesis that AIDS is caused by non-contagious risk factors and that HIV is a harmless passenger virus (Duesberg, 1996; Duesberg & Rasnick, 1998).

According to this hypothesis the African AIDS diseases are generated by their conventional, widespread causes, malnutrition, parasitic infections and poor sanitation as originally proposed by leading AIDS researchers including Fauci, Seligmann et al. (Seligmann et al., 1984)."

QUOTE

(1) The African AIDS epidemic fails all criteria of a microbial or viral epidemic:

(i) It is steady, i.e. about 75,000 cases per year since the early 1990s, instead of growing exponentially into the large reservoir of 617 million susceptible people, as would be typical of a new viral or microbial epidemic;

(ii) It is not self-limiting via immunity within weeks or months, as is typical of a microbial and particularly of a viral disease. Instead it appears to maintain for years a rather steady share of African morbidity and mortality.

(iii) It is clinically exceedingly heterogeneous totally lacking any specificity of its own, unlike all conventional viral and even bacterial diseases. In conclusion, the African AIDS epidemic does not have even one of the specific characters of a viral or microbial epidemic.

(2) Since the suspected African AIDS epidemic of an average of 75,000 annual cases can neither be identified as a new epidemic

(i) clinically because of its total lack of a clinical identity, nor

(ii) numerically because of its small share of the total African morbidity and because of undetectable effects on the rapid growth of the African population,

the primary scientific task of our AIDS panel will now be to determine whether there is in fact a new epidemic of AIDS defining diseases in Africa, or whether a fraction normal morbidity and mortality has been renamed AIDS. The answer to this question would be the first order of business for all AIDS prevention and treatment programs considered by President Mbeki. To find this answer, I second the proposal from an African AIDS researcher published 13 years ago, "Clinical epidemiology, not [HIV] seroepidemiology, is the answer to Africa's AIDS problem" (Konotey-Ahulu, 1987).

(3) The African statistics of AIDS and HIV antibody-positives confirm Mbeki's suspicion about discrepancies between the African and American AIDS epidemics (Mbeki's letter to U.S. President Clinton, Washington Post, April 19, 2000):

In Africa 23 million HIV-positives generate per year 75,000 AIDS patients, ie. 1 AIDS case per 300 HIV-positives.

But in the US, 0.9 million HIV-positives (WHO, Weekly Epidemiological Record 73, 373-380, 1998) now generate per year about 45,000 AIDS cases (Centers for Disease Control, 1999), ie. 1 AIDS case per 20 HIV-positives.

Thus the AIDS risk of an American HIV-positive is about 15-times higher than that of an African! Since over 150,000 healthy (!) HIV-positive Americans are currently treated with DNA chain-terminating and other anti-HIV drugs (Duesberg & Rasnick, 1998), and since American HIV-positives have a 15-fold higher AIDS risk than African HIV-positives, President Mbeki must be warned about American advice on "treatments" of HIV-positives.

(4) The discrepancies between African AIDS and infectious disease, and the discrepancies between the high AIDS risk of American compared to African HIV-positives can both be readily explained by the hypothesis that AIDS is caused by non-contagious risk factors and that HIV is a harmless passenger virus (Duesberg, 1996; Duesberg & Rasnick, 1998).

According to this hypothesis the African AIDS diseases are generated by their conventional, widespread causes, malnutrition, parasitic infections and poor sanitation as originally proposed by leading AIDS researchers including Fauci, Seligmann et al. (Seligmann et al., 1984).

This hypothesis also offers a simple explanation for the "heterosexual" distribution of AIDS in the African people, a question also asked by Mbeki in his letter to President Clinton (see above). Malnutrition, parasitic infections and poor sanitation do not discriminate between sexes. By contrast, American AIDS would be caused by recreational drugs consumed by millions and anti-HIV drugs prescribed to about 200,000 including 150,000 still healthy HIV-positives (Duesberg & Rasnick, 1998). The non-random, 85%-male epidemiology of American AIDS reflects the male prerogative on hard recreational drugs (heroin, cocaine) and the wide-spread use of drugs as male homosexual stimulants (Haverkos & Dougherty, 1988; Duesberg & Rasnick, 1998).

In the light of this hypothesis the new epidemic of HIV-antibodies would simply reflect a new epidemic of HIV-antibody testing, introduced and inspired by new American biotechnology. This technology was developed during the last 20 years for basic research to detect the equivalents of biological needles in a haystack, but not to "detect" the massive invasions of viruses that are necessary to cause ALL conventional viral diseases (Duesberg, 1992; Duesberg & Schwartz, 1992; Duesberg, 1996; Mullis, 1996; Duesberg & Rasnick, 1998; Mullis, 1998). But this technology is now faithfully but inappropriately used by thousands of AIDS virus researchers and activists to detect latent, ie. biochemically and biologically inactive HIV or even just antibodies against it (Duesberg & Bialy, 1996)! The same technology also provides job security for other virologists and doctors searching for latent, and thus biologically inactive, viruses as their preferred causes of Kaposi's sarcoma, cervical cancer, leukemia, liver cancer, and rare neurological diseases - without ever producing any public health benefits (Duesberg & Schwartz, 1992).

(5) President Mbeki must also be warned about Dr. Joe Sonnabend's answer to the president's question about the epidemiological discrepancy between the "heterosexual" AIDS epidemic in Africa and the non-random, 85%- male epidemic in the U.S. (Mbeki's letter to U.S. President Clinton, Washington Post, April 19, 2000).

According to Sonnabend's hypothesis, Africans acquire HIV heterosexually, because they simultaneously suffer from a long list of diseases, including "tuberculosis, malaria, other protozoal infections, bacterial diarrheal infections, pneumonia, plasmodium, Leishmania" etc. However, the very low AIDS risk of an African HIV-positive, compared to an American, calls this hypothesis into question. If the Sonnabend-hypothesis were correct, African HIV-positives should develop AIDS much more readily than their American counterparts. But the opposite is true. In fact according to Sonnabend most Africans should already have AIDS by the time they pick up HIV "heterosexually".

Moreover, the Sonnabend-hypothesis does not resolve the discrepancy between relatively high share of children from 0-14 years in African AIDS, ie. 7%, compared to the 1% share of AIDS by their American counterparts (WHO, Weekly Epidemiological Record, vol. 49, pp381-384, 4 December 1998). According to the WHO, "AIDS in children is an important phenomenon in many African countries, whereas it is relatively rare in industrialized countries."

Again AIDS in children is not compatible with "heterosexual transmission of HIV" while suffering from Sonnabend's bewildering list of diseases. But AIDS in children is very compatible with malnutrition, parasitic infection and poor sanitation. Therefore, President Mbeki must be warned against treatment of these children with DNA chain-terminators and other anti-HIV drugs as suggested by Sonnabend's hypothesis.

Binko

Mar 4 2006, 05:10 PM

QUOTE(velocity @ Mar 4 2006, 01:46 PM) [snapback]35312[/snapback]

Is Deusberg the same guy that was profiled in SPIN in the early 90s? There was a rather big story about him, and I remember finding it very interesting at the time. I confess I am skeptical because I don't possess the knowledge to look at the data on my own and draw my own conclusions. However, the few doctor friends I have who are really in the know about this stuff, whom I respect as brilliant individuals, seem to think his views are misguided, and I don't get the notion that they're simply parroting medical orthodoxy.

I guess what it boils down to me is that it doesn't make any sense to me. Why would the medical community be involved in some sort of massive HIV/AIDS conspiracy? If Deusberg's hypotheses are correct, I don't see why the results would be suppressed.

edit: To be fair, one should also read arguments challenging and refuting Deusberg's assertions. And here's the official fact sheet on HIV/AIDS.
I'm not saying it's proving any one side right or wrong, but to me, if I were a betting man, I'd side with the orthodoxy in this case.

velocity

Mar 4 2006, 09:12 PM

QUOTE(Binko @ Mar 4 2006, 02:10 PM) [snapback]35413[/snapback]

Not sure about Spin, but he teaches @ my alma mater so I first read about him in an alumni magazine. My best friend since 7th grade died of AIDS, so it's more than a passing interest. I'm not equipped to judge whether Duesberg is right & everyone else is wrong. The impression I've had over the years is not that there's a conspiracy per se, but that in their zeal to find a cure for AIDS, the medical/scientific community jumped on the first/most plausible cause to the exclusion of all other lines of research. If they're mistaken, it's an incredibly dangerous & costly strategy.

What's puzzling & disconcerting (to me, a layperson) is the vehemence of the backlash against him. The guy is not a crackpot or a slouch, and is still highly respected in the field of oncology:

1971, California Scientist of the Year Award
1986, Outstanding Investigator Award, National Institutes of Health
1986, elected to National Academy of Sciences
1986-87, Fogarty Scholar-in-Residence at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD
1988, Lichtfield Lecturer, Oxford, England
1990, C. J. Watson Lecturer, Abbott Northwestern Hospital, Minneapolis, MN
1992, Shaffer Alumni Lecturer, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA
1996, Distinguished Speaker, Department of Biology, Univ. Louisville, KY, Oct. 17,
"AIDS: virus- or drug induced?"; Oct. 18, "The role of aneuploidy in cancer."
2000, May 6-7 (Pretoria) and July 3-4 (Johannesburg): Member of the International Panel of
Scientists invited by President Thabo Mbeki and the South African Government to discuss the
AIDS crisis.
2000, July-December: Guest professor of the University of Heidelberg at the Medical School in
Mannheim (III Med. Klinik, director Prof. R. Hehlmann)

Mitchell

Mar 4 2006, 09:30 PM

I still think this bullshit and a list of credences and a list of reasons why HIV *might* not cause AIDS isn't going to convince me that the most obvious answer isn't the correct answer.

velocity

Mar 4 2006, 10:18 PM

QUOTE(Gareth Keenan Invetigates @ Mar 4 2006, 06:30 PM) [snapback]35509[/snapback]

I still think this bullshit and a list of credences and a list of reasons why HIV *might* not cause AIDS isn't going to convince me that the most obvious answer isn't the correct answer.

People were executed for proposing that the Earth wasn't the center of the universe.

kev

Mar 5 2006, 12:16 AM

I suppose she makes interesting points about the stigma of HIV, but based on my experience (I'm not a doctor, or a mathmetician)her theories about HIV and AIDS are bogus and irresponsible.

The people I know with HIV got it from unprotected anal sex, not drug abuse. Ther people that I know with Aids were HIV positive first. Sadly, some of them didn't make it to the cocktail era - developed full blown AIDS and died- quite horribly I might add. Is this woman suggesting that an entire generation of gay men were all drug addicts who didn't eat enough?

To insue that HIV and Aids are not related is silly. To suggest that HIV should go untreated is dangerous. The only thing "Toxic" about the cocktail drugs she derides is that they have saved so many lives, there is a false sense of complacency among the younger generation.

kalmia

Mar 5 2006, 01:49 AM

QUOTE(undo @ Mar 4 2006, 08:25 AM) [snapback]35249[/snapback]

I didn't read all this since I need to 23 skidoo really soon, but I'm more or less sure it's all a lot of crap.

Odd how you're all so quick to dismiss this on the discussion board when Dave Grohl is quoted on the subject, yet are deeply intrigued and taken by it when there's a reasonably cute picture of a girl to back it up on the etc. board.

Even if this is legit, understand how Kalmia's history of (butt)crackpot threads makes this one seem a lot less credible than it would be if anyone else posted it.

I didn't write it. I just pasted it after reading it. Her hypothesis about how some people get AIDS may be flawed, but it looks as though the HIV to AIDS theory hasn't been proven either.

I can post Buttcrack Moutain threads for humor and still post something serious too.

Mitchell

Mar 5 2006, 03:08 AM

QUOTE(velocity @ Mar 5 2006, 03:18 AM) [snapback]35538[/snapback]

People were executed for proposing that the Earth wasn't the center of the universe.

So this means every new therory someone comes up with is right then?

Binko

Mar 5 2006, 12:42 PM

QUOTE(velocity @ Mar 4 2006, 11:18 PM) [snapback]35538[/snapback]

People were executed for proposing that the Earth wasn't the center of the universe.

True, but that was based on: a) religion and b ) lack of scientific method, which isn't applicable in the case at hand.

I mean, even brilliant scientists can go off the deep end. For every Deusberg, there's probably at least dozens of equally qualified and inventive scientists who agree with the HIV-AIDS orthodoxy, and they have mountains of evidence and tests to support it. The model is predictive and, for all I can gather, works. The advances of HIV/AIDS treatment based on this has been substantial. Sure, we don't have a cure yet, but as my doctor friend tells me, it's at a point where we can pretty much control the disease, if not eliminate it. HIV positive isn't the death sentence it was twenty years ago.

What I also don't understand about Deusberg is where was AIDS pre-1980? Sure, we have evidence of an infection here and there, but not the pandemic it became since then. There was plenty of recreational drug use and starvation back then. Where was the AIDS?

beansimpson

Mar 5 2006, 01:38 PM

QUOTE(velocity @ Mar 4 2006, 09:18 PM) [snapback]35538[/snapback]

People were executed for proposing that the Earth wasn't the center of the universe.

Ya, but they had data and logical reasoning backing them up. I've read several things about the 'lack of a HIV-AIDS link' and its on very shaky scientific grounds. Although there are some major questions between HIV and AIDS, that does not instantly make the current theory false and someone elses correct by default. The information that we currently have shows that the two are linked and until there is substancial data that proves otherwise, it is the theory we need to work with as correct.

If someone wants to question the link between AIDS and HIV (and I fully think people should becuase that's good science) then they should question it in the lab, collect data, and analyze that data to either support the case for or against the HIV-AIDS link.

And since I'm talking about AIDS, AIDS/HIV did not enter the human population by having sex with apes/monkeys. It most likely came into our population via the bushmeat trade.

velocity

Mar 6 2006, 06:02 AM

QUOTE(Gareth Keenan Invetigates @ Mar 5 2006, 12:08 AM) [snapback]35636[/snapback]

So this means every new therory someone comes up with is right then?

No...but it isn't necessarily wrong yet, either. People were just as sure that the earth was flat, and that Ashlee Simpson had talent.

Mitchell

Mar 6 2006, 06:12 AM

I don't see any actual concrete scientificly tested evidence for this theory other than lack of total evidence for the existing therory. I have no problem with people searching for an answer in the opposite direction to conventual wisdom, that's what science is about. This therory has more holes the orginal.

beansimpson

Mar 6 2006, 10:10 AM

QUOTE(Gareth Keenan Invetigates @ Mar 6 2006, 05:12 AM) [snapback]36263[/snapback]

Welcome to the world of popular American basterdized science.

velocity

Mar 6 2006, 01:00 PM

QUOTE(Gareth Keenan Invetigates @ Mar 6 2006, 03:12 AM) [snapback]36263[/snapback]

I don't disagree--the important thing, imo, is that he found holes in the existing paradigm. That doesn't mean that it's wrong, for that matter. Duesberg started getting bashed just because he was questioning the popular wisdom. That's what I have a problem with.

beansimpson

Mar 6 2006, 01:10 PM

QUOTE(velocity @ Mar 6 2006, 12:00 PM) [snapback]36457[/snapback]

Things in science constantly are questioned and tested, she's getting bashed because she's drawing conclusions that are not addiquitly supported from data and making claims using bad science. She needs to question HIV appropriately with testing, and testing, and more lab testing and collect enough data to support her conclusion.

The fact the 'S' in AIDS means syndrom, and as such there is a chance you may have multiple causes to bring about the same physical characteristic, in this case, an inactivation of the immune system.

She could have easily made a less bold claim and simply said

"We need to investigate other possibilities besides the HIV cause of AIDS since although widely believed to be the primary cause of AIDS there is some lacking evidence. I would like to gain funding to research possibilities X,Y, and Z to either disprove them or show they may also be viable possibilities for causeing AIDS."

She lacks the scientific proof to dismiss HIV as she has and has entered the relm of scietific reasoning practiced by psuedo-science and creation-science (well, same thing). That is why she is getting bashed.

ginNY

Mar 6 2006, 01:37 PM

QUOTE(kev @ Mar 5 2006, 12:16 AM) [snapback]35604[/snapback]

i totally agree with you kev...

to infer that all american based HIV/AIDS cases are an affectation of recreational drugs seems irresponsible. I have friends who are HIV + and doing fine and I have had friends who were HIV+ which manifested itself into AIDS (or if it didn't manifest itself was a derrivative of...whatever) and they perished. It was was horrible to go through and unfortunately i've been through it a few times. I've known for a long time that HIV doesn't mean death sentence. It depends on the individual and how readily their body is able to fight off the virus.

If all she is worried about is the stigma that HIV causes...I really think she's not looking at the bigger picture. Maybe the HIV test is all they have right now to determine a person's chances of AIDS...maybe there is a correlation, maybe there isn't...but to me that doesn't change the fact that millions of people have died and continue to die of this disease. I challenge her to find a better test or a cure....she should be more worried about that...then finger pointing.

Mitchell

Mar 6 2006, 01:55 PM

I'm in agreeance that questioning the orginal therory is a good thing. Tacking on an even worse therory after it means she deserves to be questioned as well.

From what I see of America it's that people will point out flaws in any scientific therory they don't agree with then suggest an alternative therory which doesn't get questioned due to the personailty of the person putting their view across.

When working on my degree I had to work on data which found a strong correlation between dog ownership and blindness. Doesn't mean I tried to prove that blindness could be due to an allergic reaction to the dog or dog related items. I could quite convincingly sell that if I wanted, there's an old wives tale that dog excrement can cause blindness in children as well to back me up.

velocity

Mar 6 2006, 06:32 PM

QUOTE(beansimpson @ Mar 6 2006, 10:10 AM) [snapback]36468[/snapback]

Tee hee! Except it's not the woman mathematician Mitchell & I are discussing, it's this guy:

Welcome to Peter Duesberg's HIV/AIDS research web site.
http://www.duesberg.com/index.html
Peter H. Duesberg, Ph.D. is a professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Biographical Sketch

He isolated the first cancer gene through his work on retroviruses in 1970, and mapped the genetic structure of these viruses. This, and his subsequent work in the same field, resulted in his election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1986. He is also the recipient of a seven-year Outstanding Investigator Grant from the National Institutes of Health.

On the basis of his experience with retroviruses, Duesberg has challenged the virus-AIDS hypothesis in the pages of such journals as Cancer Research, Lancet, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Science, Nature, Journal of AIDS, AIDS Forschung, Biomedicine and Pharmacotherapeutics, New England Journal of Medicine and Research in Immunology. He has instead proposed the hypothesis that the various American/European AIDS diseases are brought on by the long-term consumption of recreational drugs and/or AZT itself, which is prescribed to prevent or treat AIDS. See The AIDS Dilemma: Drug diseases blamed on a passenger virus.

For a detailed discussion of American/European AIDS as opposed to African AIDS, see The African AIDS Epidemic: New and Contagious or Old Under a New Name.

This is Duesberg's official site, containing his written works on the subject, as well as other scientists that support his views such as Kary B. Mullis. Kary Mullis won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his invention of the polymerase chain reaction technique for detecting DNA. This is the technique used to search for fragments of HIV in AIDS patients.

Prof. Duesberg's findings have been a thorn in the side of the medical establishment and drug companies since 1987. Instead of engaging in scientific debate, however, the only response has been to cut-off funding to further test Professor's Duesberg's hypothesis.

Binko

Mar 7 2006, 01:44 AM

QUOTE(velocity @ Mar 6 2006, 07:32 PM) [snapback]36964[/snapback]

Yes, and read the refutation I linked to before which, in all honesty, I find quite convincing.

kalmia

Mar 21 2006, 10:27 PM

Why I Quit HIV: The Aftermath

by Rebecca V. Culshaw

rebeccavculshaw@yahoo.com

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig7/culshaw2.html

I want to start with an apology. I regret that I have not been able to individually answer every email I’ve received in the wake of my essay, "Why I Quit HIV," which recently appeared on Lew Rockwell. I am grateful for this forum, and I hope that I will be able to clear up some confusion people appear to have experienced. I’d also like to express my gratitude for the many, many positive and indeed inspirational letters I’ve received.

Now I'd like to address some common questions I received.

Many people inquired what impact the article would have on my job or career. I have not quit my job, nor have I been fired (so far). I’ve simply abandoned one area of research – I doubt I’ll ever be able to publish in mathematical biology again, but that was the risk I knew I was taking. Thank you all for your concern.

A few individuals kindly suggested that I inject myself with the blood of a late-stage AIDS patient. While such an act might sensationalize my viewpoint, there are a number of problems with such an "experiment." First, I can only imagine the non-HIV contaminants that might be found in such blood. Second, the data and results contained in the literature are sufficient to cast doubt on HIV. But most importantly, such an "experiment" would hardly settle anything, given the "latency period" of 10-15 years for progression to "AIDS."

Many people insisted that I don’t know what I’m talking about because I offer no alternative explanations for AIDS. There are many alternative explanations for "AIDS," or severe immune deficiency. The immunosuppressive effects of malnutrition, chronic drug abuse (pharmaceutical as well as recreational), parasitic infections, psychological stress, and other risks were well-established long before "AIDS" became recognized in the early 1980s. The fact is that most (but not all) AIDS patients do belong to risk groups whose members are subject to one or more of the above assaults. This fact can be checked by reading the annual CDC surveillance reports, although drug use is hidden because the CDC gives priority to "sexual transmission." And I should point out that the correlation between positive antibody tests and immune deficiency doesn’t necessarily imply that HIV is the cause. To shamelessly steal an analogy from Peter Duesberg, just because long-term smokers often tend to develop yellow fingers along with lung cancer, does not mean that yellow fingers cause lung cancer. This is what we refer to in statistics as a "lurking variable" – correlated but not the cause, and hence confounding the issue. In any case, pointing out the flaws in an existing theory in no way obliges me to produce an alternative.

I did receive several emails from people like myself who work or have worked with AIDS every day, people who have growing doubts or who have abandoned the theory altogether. These include doctors, pharmacists, biologists and social workers.

"I volunteer in a Community Health Center, which was started twenty years ago, mainly for HIV positive people, though our clientele has expanded to all sections of our community. Also, as a former physician and then a psychiatrist, I was never able to understand this mysterious 'disease', and your writing has clarified a lot of that mystery."

And there was also the following quote, from a social worker who works with HIV-positive prisoners:

"Having worked with women with HIV in a prison environment, they always seemed more scared than sick."

The letters that particularly affected me were those from people diagnosed with HIV, or who have lost loved ones to AIDS. I have lost count of the number of people who have told me that they are convinced their friends and lovers died from AZT poisoning rather than HIV. I have nothing to offer but my utmost sympathy. I’ve received mail from people who are HIV-positive and healthy for years without any AIDS medications. I have also gotten more letters than I was expecting from people whose lives have been seriously affected by false positive diagnoses, including a man who lost his position in the military after a positive HIV test, despite being at very little risk, and despite having had malaria and numerous vaccinations. He’s out of work now.

"I am a low-low-low-low risk group guy who has been diagnosed with HIV as a part of yearly tests (military). As a hetero[sexual], monogamous (10 years with one NEG[ATIVE] partner), non-IV drug using male...I was skeptical. However the "system" is not skeptical and it has subsequently tubed my previously successful career...The fact that I have had malaria and about a billion weird immunization shots (incl[uding] Anthrax) has not been brought up as possible source of false positive."

For everyone who has been affected by AIDS in one way or another, and for those of you who have an abiding concern about doing science correctly, please know that I read all of your letters and you are in my thoughts. What I wrote was very personal, but it was also intended to serve another purpose: the average person should be aware of all the information that exists, not just what’s been fed to us through the government propaganda machine. The individual citizen should be able to make informed choices about their health and their life. Let’s not allow overzealous, misinformed public health agencies to take away that right from us.

The article also attracted some comments from the blogosphere. The following comments appeared at a blog called Aetiology, which is owned and maintained by Seed magazine:

"That's rich. First, as I mentioned, she's a mathematician. I don't know what her background is in infectious disease epi[demiology] (I contacted her but she did not respond), and she obviously shows little understanding of molecular biology in her comments about PCR (by her logic, any microbe shouldn't cause us harm because they are so tiny)." March 9, 2006 10:43 AM

Yes, I am just a mathematician. I’ve never treated an AIDS patient, nor have I worked with HIV in the lab. But in the course of my work, I have studied both the microbiological and epidemiological aspects of AIDS, and the current HIV theory fails to explain either of these. Ever more convoluted explanations for HIV pathogenesis and epidemiology are not the signs of a mysterious virus, but rather the signs of a theory that is being shaped to fit the facts.

The following quote, as well as the quote above, indicate some confusion over what I had to say about PCR. This comes from an aspiring microbiology student:

"To understand my shock at the content of this article, you have to understand how incredibly steeped in the doctrine of the AIDS generation current education in Microbiology is. In the several years I have been working on my B.Sc, I have taken probably five courses that featured HIV or AIDS as prime examples of their precepts, have taken a course from one AIDS researcher, and have read about AIDS from several more. The idea of the AIDS virus has been one of the best known and studied examples of classical virology that we’ve ever had...I haven’t read the whole article yet, but from the part I’ve read, it seems that it’s written by a disgruntled HIV mathematician who got out of the race when she discovered that her paradigm and that of the establishment in this medical research field were radically different. From what I read, her science seems fine, except for some pretty disdainful and poorly-educated opinions on some of the best-used and most well-understood DNA techniques, such as PCR, or Polymerase Chain Reaction (the technique used by crime-scene units to amplify very small amounts of DNA so it can be identified, matched or analyzed):

If something has to be mass-produced to even be seen, and the result of that mass-production is used to estimate how much of a pathogen there is, it might lead a person to wonder how relevant the pathogen was in the first place.

First of all – to say this, a person needs to have absolutely no concept of how small DNA is, the degree of virulence of the pathogen being studied, and essentially no concept of how microbiology works. In short – a mathematician." The AIDS "Theory."

To be very clear, I did not mean that HIV cannot be pathogenic because it is so small, I meant it cannot be pathogenic because it is so sparse; there is so little of it to be found. I was comparing PCR to a Xerox machine, rather than a magnifying glass. We need the Xerox machine because traditional virus culture techniques fail to detect HIV. Worse yet, PCR is used to measure "viral load," but this quantitative use of PCR has never been validated. As mathematician Mark Craddock has said, "If PCR is the only way that the virus can be detected, then how do you establish the precise viral load independently of PCR, so that you can be certain that the figures PCR gives are correct?" An alarmingly simple question, when you think about it; perhaps too simple for an AIDS establishment already fully committed to "surrogate markers," protease inhibitors and "combination therapies."

And finally, a random blogger at LibertyPost.org appears to be lauding the toxicities of protease inhibitors:

"And worse, she claims that protease inhibitors are killing HIV patients, 'And the leading cause of death in HIV-positives in the last few years has been liver failure, not an AIDS-defining disease in any way, but rather an acknowledged side effect of protease inhibitors, which asymptomatic individuals take in massive daily doses, for years,' when that's exactly what you would hope for (mortality drastically decreasing to the point that more deaths were the result of side effects) if protease inhibitors were in fact EFFECTIVE treatment for AIDS." posted on 2006-03-03

Finally, I received a series of odd emails from a prominent government HIV researcher, which includes the following quote:

"The AIDS denialists are making some noise about you being the ‘latest PhD researcher’ to refute HIV as the cause of AIDS. The document they are citing...does not contain any new research, but only repeats a lot of the standard denialist disinformation."

The opening of this email begins with the use of the pejorative and entirely unnecessary term "denialist," and this was followed by an "elucidation" of various aspects of virology that I imagine were intended to persuade me to change my mind, despite the fact that the arguments given were precisely those arguments that led me to doubt HIV in the first place.

The arguments I presented were not intended to be "new research," but rather a short summary of the rather substantive questions that scientists such as Peter Duesberg and others have raised, which have still not been adequately answered. If the AIDS establishment is so convinced of the validity of what they say, they should have no fear of a public, adjudicated debate between the major orthodox and dissenting scientists to settle the matter once and for all. Yet all the major AIDS researchers have averted such a public debate, either by claiming that the "overwhelming scientific consensus" makes such a debate superfluous, or by saying that they are "too busy saving lives." In place of public debate, clearly politically motivated documents such as the Durban Declaration remain the establishment’s standard response to dissenting voices. Even a cursory reading of this pathetic document reveals it to be a statement of faith, designed to divert attention from dissenters at the very moment when they were threatening to expose the orthodoxy in South Africa in 2000.

To clarify an issue that has caused some confusion, it was not the mathematical models themselves that caused me to doubt HIV, but rather the scientific literature on which the models are based. Billions of dollars have been spent on HIV, and this has not led to a greater understanding of the virus, but rather to a series of unproven or incorrect speculations which have been widely trumpeted in both the scientific and lay press. Such a track record is indicative of institutional problems in modern biomedicine.

The famous Ho/Shaw 1995 Nature papers are a typical example of this phenomenon. These were the papers largely responsible for popularizing HAART (the so-called "Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy") and the "Hit hard, hit early" regime as a treatment for "HIV disease" and "viral load" as a measure of treatment success. The mathematical models used in these papers were claimed to show that HIV replicated furiously from day one – in contrast to earlier evidence suggesting it to be quite inactive. Even now, few people are aware that these conclusions were based on very poorly constructed mathematical models. Anyone who has taken a first course in differential equations can see that, if analyzed properly, the models predict the onset of AIDS within weeks or months after infection by HIV, before antiviral immunity. (For anyone interested in a mathematical refutation of the Ho paper, I refer you to Mark Craddock's analysis. Similar criticisms have been directed at the Shaw paper.)

This example illustrates a central flaw in the HIV theory. The vast majority of the literature I’ve seen uses what is known as circular logic – you assume that something will happen, and then you mold the definitions, models, experiments, and results to support that conclusion. Craddock describes a typical example of circular logic in the Shaw paper:

"They are trying to estimate viral production rates by measuring viral loads at different times and trying to fit the numbers to their formula for free virus. But if their formula is wrong, then their estimates for viral production will be wrong too."

Such tactics, by definition, are excellent at maintaining the façade of a near-perfect correlation between HIV and AIDS, and of providing seemingly convincing explanations of HIV pathogenesis. But the resultant science does little to expand our actual understanding.

To fully appreciate how such tactics became common, one needs to revisit the beginning of AIDS science. In 1984, HIV was announced as the cause of AIDS at a press conference before any supporting literature was published and had a chance to be critiqued by the scientific community. By the time the supporting papers were published, the lay press had all but declared HIV to be "the AIDS virus," and debate in the scientific arena was squelched. The current commonly used orthodox tactic of arguing by intimidation and forcing the conclusions to fit the facts became entrenched. Consider the time period in the scientific literature, when HIV went from being "the probable cause of AIDS" (1984) to simply "the cause of AIDS" (1985). What changed? What happened to make scientists come to such certainty? If you look at the actual papers, you’ll see quite clearly that the answer is: Nothing.

Returning to the Ho/Shaw papers, these have essentially been debunked by both establishment and dissenting researchers, on biological as well as mathematical grounds; they are now acknowledged to be wrong by the scientific community, and it remains a mystery how they were ever able to pass peer review in the first place. It is often asked, "Why should we care at this point? Those papers are 11 years old; our understanding has progressed since then." The short answer is that "viral load" and combination therapies are used to this day, despite the fact that they were originally based on these incorrect papers. Although current therapeutic regimens have been scaled back from the "Hit hard, hit early" dogma that was popular ten years ago, the fact remains that a large population of people have been, and continue to be, treated on the basis of a theory that is fundamentally unsupportable.

Yet there is another answer to this question which is even more fundamental. It is a curious fact that few HIV researchers seem to be bothered by the events surrounding the Ho/Shaw papers. You might imagine that people might "care at this point" because of concern over the integrity of science. You might imagine that people might feel an urge to discuss how the papers got published, and if other such mistakes have happened since that time. You might imagine that the failure of the peer review process to detect such patently inept research would send off alarm bells within the HIV research community.

You would be wrong.

HIV researchers know the Ho/Shaw papers are wrong, yet they continue along the clinical path charted by the papers. They know that the quantitative use of PCR has never been validated, yet they continue to use "viral load" to make clinical decisions. They know that the history of HIV/AIDS is littered with documented cases of fraud, incompetence, and poor quality research, yet they find it almost impossible to imagine that this could be happening at the present moment. They know their predictions have never panned out, yet they keep inventing mysterious mechanisms for HIV pathogenesis. They know many therapies of the past are now acknowledged to be mistakes (AZT monotherapy, Hit hard, hit early), yet they never imagine that their current therapies (the ever-growing list of combination therapies) might one day be acknowledged as mistakes themselves.

As a final thought, I am often asked, "How could medicine have made such a big mistake? How could so many people be wrong?." I believe the answer lies in the disintegration of scientific standards that have resulted, in large part, from the changing expectations of academic scientists. I’m an assistant professor, and my father is also a professor in the physical sciences, so I have had plenty of opportunity to see exactly how research expectations affect the quality of work we produce. It is clear to me that the pressure to obtain big government grants and to publish as many papers as possible is not necessarily helping the advancement of science. Rather, academics (and in particular, young ones) are pressured to choose projects that can be completed quickly and easily, so as to increase their publication list as fast as possible. As a result, quality suffers.

This lowering of scientific standards and critical thinking has been apparent in many aspects of research for some time, and after several generations of students, it is now beginning to infiltrate the classroom – the textbooks and the undergraduate curriculum. It is germane at this point to indicate that many of the common arguments presented in response to the queries of HIV/AIDS skeptics are essentially some form of appeal to the use of low standards. (For example, "You don’t need a reference that HIV causes AIDS," "The fact that HIV and AIDS are so well correlated indicates that it must be the cause," "HIV is a new virus, and new viruses will meet new standards," "Koch's postulates are outdated and don't apply in this day and age," "We don’t need to worry about actual infectious virus, viral ‘markers’ should suffice," or "Real scientists do experiments; they don't write review articles on the literature.") All of these observations are eloquently summed up, again by Craddock:

"Science is about making observations and trying to fit them into a theoretical framework. Having the theoretical framework allows us to make predictions about phenomena that we can then test. HIV "science" long ago set off on a different path...People who ask simple, straightforward questions are labeled as loonies who are dangerous to public health."

It is this decline in scientific standards that I point to, when I am asked how so many people could be so wrong. Given the current research atmosphere, it was almost inevitable that a really, really big scientific mistake was going to be made. But we can still have hope for the future – hope that institutional and political pressures will no longer continue to cost lives, and hope that we will soon see honest dialogue and debate, free of name-calling and intimidation.

March 21, 2006

Rebecca V. Culshaw, Ph.D.

rebeccavculshaw@yahoo.com

This is a "lo-fi" version of our main content. To view the full version with more information, formatting and images, please click here.