HIV/AIDS in Italy — and “NEEDLE ZERO”

Professor Marco Ruggiero, University of Florence (Italy) kindly forwarded a copy of a PhD thesis presented on October 8. He tells me that it is now “freely available for consultation in the Library of the Department of Experimental Pathology and Oncology of the University of Firenze, Italy (www.patgen.eu)”; the citation is

Scarpelli S. “HIV infection and AIDS in Italy: results supporting the chemical hypothesis”.
PhD Thesis in Biological Sciences, Faculty of Mathematical, Physical and Natural Sciences, University of Firenze, Italy, October 8, 2008. (www.patgen.eu)

I can’t read Italian, but the thesis has an Abstract in English with some fascinating information:

There is no “Italian registry of HIV cases; there are no data concerning the number of new HIV infections in Italy”. The Ministry of Health does issue estimates, but “the lack of data does not allow to support the statement that there is (or that there has ever been) a HIV/AIDS epidemic in Italy; neither it allows to establish whether HIV is the cause of AIDS in Italy. This regrettable absence of surveillance is due, among other considerations, to the so called Privacy Law that, should AIDS be caused by HIV, evidently protects the individual’s right to privacy more than public health. Thus, if a laboratory finds out that an individual is HIV-positive, this information cannot be disclosed to anybody but the individual, who is then free to disregard the information and spread the virus. In fact, the Law states ‘L’identificazione del malato di HIV deve essere effettuata con modalità che non consentano l’identificazione della persona’ (art. 5, comma 2, l n. 135/1990), i.e. ‘identification of the HIV patient has to be performed with modalities that do not allow identification of the person’.”

I was struck particularly by the official recognition that HIV/AIDS is not a threat to public health. AIDS (not HIV infection) is classified “only as a third class [least dangerous or harmful] disease”, whereas influenza is in the first class and hepatitis (A, B, and C) are in the second.

Simone Scarpelli “tested the chemical hypothesis by analysing the data obtained by the rehabilitation centres for drug abuses (SerT, Servizi per le Tossicodipendenze). The data show that there is a good correlation between recreational drug abuse and AIDS cases in Italy.”

While the rate of heroin confiscation has not varied much, the pattern of consumption has changed from high usage by relatively few addicts to lower average use by a larger number of people who do not regard themselves as addicted and don’t seek treatment. The data are consistent with “a linear-quadratic model for heroin effects on the immune system and the development of AIDS” similar to that for “the biological effects of ionizing radiations and it could explain the bell-shaped curve of AIDS, the flat curve of heroin confiscation and the decreasing curve of heroin addiction in Italy. In fact, at high doses (such as in the eighties and the early nineties) the effects of heroin on the immune system are deterministic and drug addicts developed AIDS; at lower doses, however, the effects are stochastic i.e. there is only an increased probability of impairing the immune system and this might account for the decreasing AIDS incidence. According to this interpretation of the only available data for Italy, the AIDS epidemic paralleled the severe heroin abuse of the past. Nothing could be said about HIV since no data are available. This interpretation is also consistent with the recent meta-analyses that demonstrate the failure of anti-retroviral drugs in increasing survival of HIV-positive subjects (Lancet 2006; 368: 451-58), and with the statement that an AIDS vaccine could never exist (N. Engl. J. Med. 2007; 357: 2653-55).”

Scarpelli’s work supports Duesberg’s “drug-AIDS hypothesis”, for which massive evidence is collected in Duesberg, P., Koehnlein, C. and Rasnick, D., “The Chemical Bases of the Various AIDS Epidemics: Recreational Drugs, Anti-viral Chemotherapy and Malnutrition”, J. Biosci. 28 [2003] 383-412.

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In the early days of “AIDS”, a certain airline steward was identified as the “Patient Zero” whose profligate promiscuity supposedly seeded AIDS around the USA. That story is inconsistent with the current belief that illness follows infection only after an average interval of about 10 years, for the claimed victims of Patient Zero’s exploits became ill within months of their contact with him, that’s how they could be identified or traced — see Shilts, And the Band Played On: p. 130, “long latency period” of 10 and 13 months in two cases. I’m not aware that this inconsistency has been remarked on in mainstream discussions, any more than the myriad other facts inconsistent with HIV/AIDS theory. I mention Patient Zero because he exemplifies the mystery of the origin of the supposed HIV/AIDS epidemics — most particularly, perhaps, those epidemics supposedly spread primarily by the sharing of needles. How does such an epidemic get started, let alone continue to spread?

Recall the authoritative recent review that I described as a textbook instance of cognitive dissonance, “The spread, treatment, and prevention of HIV-1: evolution of a global pandemic”, by Myron S. Cohen, Nick Hellmann, Jay A. Levy, Kevin DeCock, and Joep Lange, Journal of Clinical Investigation, 118 [2008] 1244-54; doi:10.1172/JCI34706, whose authors are heavyweight mainstream HIV/AIDS gurus — Levy and  DeCock have been in this business from the beginning, though DeCock blotted his copybook somewhat by admitting that there had not been and never would be heterosexual epidemics outside Africa — “WHO Says That We’ve Been Very Wrong about HIV and AIDS? (Clue: WHO = World Health Organization)”, 10 June 2008.

According to that authoritative review, different regions of the globe see HIV spreading by dramatically different pathways:

Figure A

“The HIV-1 epidemic in Western Europe is diverse but was initially fueled by infections among MSM and injecting drug users, the latter especially in the southern part of the continent (3). Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, and the United Kingdom have been most heavily affected (3). Heterosexual transmission of HIV-1 in Europe has slowly increased, and many infections today are found among immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa (3). In Eastern Europe, where brisk and severe epidemics emerged among injecting drug users in the late 1990s, the most affected countries are the Russian Federation and Ukraine (3)” — (3) is UNAIDS, “AIDS epidemic update: December 2007”.

Now, the postulated “HIV” can’t survive for long outside bodily fluids, so the needle that supposedly transfers it must have been wetted and “infected” not much earlier. Try to construct a scenario in which that’s compatible with the regional situations in Figure A. Let’s say an infected male, Patient One — gay, bisexual, or heterosexual — enters Eastern Europe and infects a drug addict; whereupon the “virus” spreads like wildfire via the necessarily postulated orgies of needle sharing, but the infection doesn’t spread much to people who just have sex without sharing needles. What happened to Patient One? Did he leave the country again? Or did he become much less inclined to have sex, at least with people who are not needle-sharing addicts?

The absurdity is illustrated by several stories from Kyrgyzstan. “According to the CIA Fact Book, by 2003 there were in Kyrgyzstan an estimated 3900 people living with HIV/AIDS, there had been fewer than 200 HIV/AIDS deaths, and the prevalence was estimated at < 0.1% (as low as anywhere in the world)” — “SMART” Study Begets More Cognitive Dissonance, 11 June 2008. In that land where HIV is so rare, “’at least 26 people, mostly children, [were] infected in two local hospitals’. . . and medical personnel were fired” [HIV-Positive Children, HIV-Negative Mothers, 25 November 2007] because, obviously, these HIV-positive children of HIV-negative mothers could only have become HIV-positive via infected needles. How did those needles become infected in the first place? Of necessity, not long before the babies were supposedly stuck with them . . . . Were the babies all injected with the same dirty needle in rapid succession, or were there 26 different sources of infection, each of them contributing a dirty needle just in time for a baby to get stuck immediately thereafter?

See also “Babies Infect Mothers; Crazy Theory Ruins Lives”, 12 April 2008: Those babies were then apparently capable of infecting their mothers as they suckled — and this in Kyrgyzstan, which doesn’t have the vampire tradition of Transylvania — or, at least, there have so far been no reports of baby vampires in Kyrgyzstan, only a wild woman or perhaps a monkey  [Kyrgyzsylvania,  Thursday, June 19, 2008].
Of course, if it was a monkey, then the source of HIV in Kyrgyzstan becomes immediately obvious — it’s an African monkey of the ilk that first infected humans with HIV decades ago (supposedly in the knee of Africa, where there’s not nearly as much “HIV” as in southern Africa, where “HIV” is rampant — Deconstructing HIV/AIDS in “Sub-Saharan Africa” and “The Caribbean”, 21 April 2008 ).