Another talk scheduled

On Wednesday next, 18th June, 11 am to noon Eastern time, I’ll be talking again with George Whitehurst Berry at HEARITONLIINE: click on the pink box, top right, “HEAR IT ONLINE! Listen to CRASH!…”.

The program is now set for the Annual Meeting of the Society for Scientific Exploration, Boulder CO, 26-28 June, where I’ll be talking about the “Disproof of HIV/AIDS Theory”, which draws on data in my blog post of 19 March 2008, “HIV DISEASE” IS NOT AN ILLNESS; I’m scheduled for 9-9.20 am Saturday 28th.

“SMART” STUDY BEGETS MORE COGNITIVE DISSONANCE

Someone recently alerted me to a 2006 paper comparing adverse events on “continuous” vs. “interrupted” ARV therapy:

“CD4+ Count-Guided Interruption of Antiretroviral Treatment: The Strategies for Management of Antiretroviral Therapy (SMART) Study Group”, NEJM, Volume 355:2283-2296, November 30, 2006, Number 22

The study was trumpeted in the media as the death knell for so-called “interrupted” or “intermittent” ARV therapy, following the conclusion:

“Episodic antiretroviral therapy guided by the CD4+ count, as used in our study, significantly increased the risk of opportunistic disease or death from any cause, as compared with continuous antiretroviral therapy, largely as a consequence of lowering the CD4+ cell count and increasing the viral load. Episodic antiretroviral therapy does not reduce the risk of adverse events that have been associated with antiretroviral therapy.”

The original study was intended to last 6-9 years:

“We calculated that 6000 patients would need to be enrolled for the study to have a statistical power of 80% to detect a 17% relative reduction in the rate of opportunistic disease or death from any cause in the drug conservation group as compared with the viral suppression group, with a two-sided alpha level of 0.05. Follow-up was to continue until 910 primary end points had occurred (estimated to be at least 6 years for each participant), assuming an event rate in the viral suppression group of 1.3% in each of the first 2 years and 2.6% per year thereafter.”

but was stopped short after a mean patient follow-up of just 16 months, for “ethical reasons”:

“On January 10, 2006, at its sixth meeting, the board recommended stopping enrollment in the SMART trial because of a safety risk in the drug conservation group and because it appeared to be very unlikely that superiority of the drug conservation treatment would be shown. On January 11, 2006, investigators and participants were notified of these findings, enrollment was stopped, and participants in the drug conservation group were advised to restart antiretroviral therapy.

What I found most revealing about this study was:

“Only 8% of deaths were due to opportunistic disease.”

The cognitive dissonance here is astounding.

Among all patients, grade 4 events occurred about 3.5 times as often as opportunistic disease: a total of 89 patients experienced any type of opportunistic disease; by contrast, a whopping 321 patients experienced grade 4 events.

Even more shocking is the following: out of all 85 patients who died, more than 5 times as many experienced grade 4 events as compared to opportunistic diseases, because 37 of the 85 patients who died experienced grade 4 events, compared to only 7 who experienced opportunistic diseases.

Opportunistic diseases did occur about 3.5 times as often in the DC (drug conservation) group as in the VS (viral suppression) group (69:20), but only 7 of these 89 patients died (8%), 4 from the DC group and 3 from the VS group. By contrast, grade 4 events occurred slightly more often in the DC group as in the VS group (173:148), but 37 of these 321 patients died (12%).

This also means that out of all patients who died, between 41 and 48 patients (48-56%) died due to causes that were either unknown or not related to either opportunistic diseases or grade 4 events. I wonder why the researchers didn’t stop to ponder this incredibly bizarre finding.

Let’s put these numbers into perspective: We have a study on giving ARV to HIV patients, and 5 times as many have drug reactions as AIDS defining illnesses, and this fact doesn’t even register with the authors of the paper? HALF of all deaths have nothing to do with AIDS or ARVs, and this bizarre fact doesn’t register with the researchers either?

The half of all deaths having nothing to do with AIDS or ARVs is several times higher than the average national mortality rate for all Americans among that age group. Why are they dying so much? They can’t blame their low CD4 counts, because their deaths weren’t AIDS related. They can’t even blame the drugs! Obviously, simply being told you’re HIV positive and have a low CD4 count greatly increases your probability of dying from things that have absolutely nothing to do with HIV or CD4 counts… very strange.

Never mind that the whole explanation why this study supports “continuous” therapy is prima facie absurd. The reasoning goes something like this: After controlling for other factors, lower CD4 counts and higher viral load were associated with higher risk of adverse events, and so the reason the patients on “interrupted” therapy had more adverse events was because they weren’t getting enough ARVs to keep HIV viral load in check, to keep their CD4 counts high enough to stave off the adverse events caused by the ARVs in the first place.

Try wrapping your mind around that one!

WHO SAYS that WE’VE BEEN VERY WRONG about HIV and AIDS? (Clue: WHO = World Health Organization)

“A 25-year health campaign was misplaced. . . . there will be no generalised epidemic of AIDS in the heterosexual population outside Africa. . . . outside sub-Saharan Africa [the threat of AIDS] . . . was confined to high-risk groups including men who have sex with men, injecting drug users, and sex workers and their clients.

… the threat of a global heterosexual pandemic has disappeared. . .

Ten years ago a lot of people were saying there would be a generalised epidemic in Asia . . . That doesn’t look likely. . . .

In 2006, the Global Fund for HIV, Malaria and Tuberculosis . . . warned that Russia was on the cusp of a catastrophe. . . . it is unlikely there will be extensive heterosexual spread in Russia. . . .

the factors driving HIV [are] still not fully understood. . . .

In the US , the rate of infection among men in Washington DC is well over 100 times higher than in North Dakota, the region with the lowest rate. . . . How do you explain such differences?”

No, these are not statements and questions from “deniers”, “dissidents”, “denialists”, rethinkers, or other outsiders. They are from Dr. Kevin De Cock, head of the World Health Organization’s department of HIV/AIDS (Jeremy Laurance, “Threat of world Aids pandemic among heterosexuals is over, report admits”, Independent.co.uk, 8 June 2008 [’ve changed the British usage, “aids”, to “AIDS” throughout]).

Not only does De Cock hold that authoritative position at WHO, he has been in the forefront of HIV/AIDS research from the very beginning. Indeed, he is at the forefront of those who are demonstrably culpable for promulgating a notion that underpins the whole HIV/AIDS house of cards, namely, the notion of a “virus out of Africa” which was created on the basis of zero evidence as well as high implausibility.

As the Chirimuutas* pointed out long ago, the conceit that 1980s outbreaks in a few American cities stemmed from a virus brought back to the United States by tourists ignores the fact that Africans had been transported to the United States long before that; that people from many parts of Africa had been visiting and residing in the United States for many decades; that the back-and-forth people traffic between Africa and colonial European powers had been far more intense, and had gone on far longer, than between Africa and America, so that an imported-from-Africa virus would have done its first damage in Europe, not America. And, after all, none of the early 1980s AIDS victims had ever been to Africa.

Furthermore, De Cock’s explanation, for why AIDS was not noticed or identified in Africa before it traveled to the United States, ignorantly indicted African medicine for incompetence in diagnosis of even such endemic diseases as malaria. De Cock also suggested that Africans had adjusted physiologically in some way to cope with the disease better than Americans could, which hardly explains why AIDS supposedly devastates Africa but not America or Europe.

The book by the Chirimuutas, chock-full of citations of peer-reviewed literature, is a stunning exposé of how early Belgian researchers in Africa—Peter Piot as well as De Cock—laid the groundwork for decades of misguided research through their thoroughly incompetent activities. More recent articles make many of the same points: “Is AIDS African?” (1997); “AIDS and Africa: A case of racism vs. science? AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean 1997”

Piot has been Executive Director of UNAIDS since its creation in 1995 as well as Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations. Given his and De Cock’s role in creating it, perhaps HIV/AIDS should be known as “the Belgian disease”.

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Reality has now intruded so forcibly that De Cock can no longer avoid the fact that AIDS epidemics have not happened, those epidemics that he and his cohorts prophesied with such overweening confidence for more than two decades. But— cognitive dissonance once again!—he also cannot recognize that this fact undermines the whole HIV/AIDS scenario. De Cock describes as “four malignant arguments” some certifiable truths cited by critics: that official data have inflated all HIV/AIDS estimates and that HIV/AIDS has diverted funds from such obvious needs as malaria prevention and the provision of clean water and food, building infrastructure, and sensible public-health programs; even then, plain reality forces De Cock to admit that there are “elements of truth” in these criticisms.

Nevertheless—recall what cognitive dissonance involves, HIV/AIDS ILLUSTRATES COGNITIVE DISSONANCE, 29 April 2008 —De Cock still asserts that AIDS “remains the leading infectious disease challenge in public health” , even as he knows that it is no threat outside Africa and in the face of at least equally authoritative assertions by others that malaria and malnutrition kill far more Africans than “AIDS” does (A SMALL HITCH IN THE BANDWAGON?, 29 May 2008; WHY UNAIDS SHOULD BE DISBANDED, 31 May 2008 ).

De Cock’s muddled state of mind manages only to recognize that something doesn’t fit:

“The biggest puzzle was what had caused heterosexual spread of the disease in sub-Saharan Africa—with infection rates exceeding 40 per cent of adults in Swaziland, the worst-affected country—but nowhere else. . . . Sexual behaviour . . . doesn’t seem to explain [all] the differences between populations.”

Yet having acknowledged that sexual behavior isn’t the explanation, he resorts to sexual behavior as an explanation:

“more commercial sex workers, more ulcerative sexually transmitted diseases, a young population and concurrent sexual partnerships. . . . Even if the total number of sexual partners [in sub-Saharan Africa] is no greater than in the UK, there seems to be a higher frequency of overlapping sexual partnerships”.

Regarding that shibboleth about multiple concurrent overlapping partnerships, not only is there no evidence for such multiple overlapping concurrencies, there is strong evidence against the assumption; see earlier posts, in particular RACE and SEXUAL BEHAVIOR: STEREOTYPE vs. FACT, 27 May 2008.

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The epidemiology is so clear that even such insiders as James Chin++ and Kevin De Cock can’t make it jibe with HIV/AIDS theory. And since— remember, cognitive dissonance—they cannot admit to themselves that they have been utterly and entirely wrong, so too can they not find a way to admit publicly that they have been utterly and entirely wrong. But their attempts to cope with the evidence inevitably become more and more absurd, and the whole enterprise begins to crumble, as insiders from specialties that compete with them for funds begin to raise their voices (A SMALL HITCH IN THE BANDWAGON?, 29 May 2008; WHY UNAIDS SHOULD BE DISBANDED, 31 May 2008 ).

* Richard and Rosalind Chirimuuta, AIDS, Africa and Racism, Free Association Books (London), 1989 (2nd ed., revised). Rosalind Harrison (Chirimuuta) is a diplomate in Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, specialized in ophthalmology, and presently a consultant with the British Health Service

++ Re Chin, see for example B***S*** about HIV from ACADEME via THE PRESS, 4 March 2008

Acknowledgment: Many thanks to the several people who alerted me to the article in the Independent.

TALKS SCHEDULED: HIV does NOT cause AIDS

On Monday next, 9th June, 11 am to noon Eastern time, I’ll be talking with George Whitehurst Berry about my book

The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory

and additional evidence that “HIV” is not the cause of AIDS. The talk can be heard at hearitonline: click on the pink box, top right, “HEAR IT ONLINE! Listen to CRASH!…”.

I plan to mention the data on deaths from “HIV disease” and from HIV tests that show

(1) There is no sign of life-extending effect of antiretroviral treatment

(2) There is no sign of a “latent period” between “HIV infection” and symptoms of AIDS followed by death.

Those data are in my blog post of 19 March 2008, “HIV DISEASE” IS NOT AN ILLNESS, and form the basis a forthcoming talk, “Disproof of HIV/AIDS Theory”, at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Scientific Exploration, Boulder CO, 26-28 June.

UPDATE: MORE SPONTANEOUS SEROREVERSION

According to HIV/AIDS dogma, testing “HIV-positive” denotes infection by “HIV” which is permanent and ineradicable. One of several independent proofs that HIV/AIDS theory is wrong is the fact that people do spontaneously revert from “HIV-positive” to “HIV”-negative, perhaps most notably and frequently, babies born “HIV-positive” and reformed drug abusers (p. 96 ff. in The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory). But whenever spontaneous reversion happens to be noticed, it’s treated as the secular equivalent of a miracle (HIV “INFECTION” DISAPPEARS SPONTANEOUSLY, 22 January 2008). Here are a couple more instances:

“BEIJING, Dec. 3 (Xinhua) — A farmer in northeast China’s Jilin Province has tested HIV negative, six years after being diagnosed as HIV-positive, according to the provincial Center of Disease Control (CDC).
Wen Congcheng . . . first tested HIV positive in 2001 [during testing of blood donors]. . . . Late in 2003, he was re-confirmed to have HIV/AIDS as a result of another test . . . . However, in July this year [2007], Wen received a negative test result at the No. 1 Clinical Hospital of Beihua University in Jilin. Wen decided to seek another opinion and went to the First Hospital of the China Medical University and another three hospitals for HIV tests, which all proved to be negative. The Jilin municipal CDC carried out a follow-up test which confirmed the negative result, and later the provincial CDC also confirmed the result.”

But, of course, the white-coated gurus refuse to accept this, and have questioned the original positive result, while the lab that made the diagnosis sticks by it.

“ ‘I am pretty sure there are no problems with the blood samples and the tests,’ said Liu Baogui, former director of the HIV/AIDS and STD Section of the CDC of Jilin City. . . . Professor Wu Min, a member of the HIV/AIDS experts’ committee under the Ministry of Health, is sceptical about the validity of the original positive test result. ‘I can not believe that such miracle could have really happened,’ he said. ‘Some patients appear to be free of the virus after effective treatment, but the HIV anti-body is always there, so the test result will still be positive.’ Wu said the inaccuracy rate of tests by the provincial CDCs is lower than 0.01 percent. ‘But it is possible that the person’s name and blood sample was mixed up at the Chuanying District CDC where Wen tested HIV positive for the first time,’ he said.
. . .
In 2003, Andrew Stimpson, a 25-year-old Briton, tested HIV-negative 14 months after testing positive in May 2002. The case has never been scientifically explained.”

And here’s more detail about Andrew Stimpson:

“Doctors baffled as HIV man ‘cures’ himself” (Sophie Kirkham, Sunday Times, 13 November 2005)

“A MAN who tested positive for HIV, the virus that causes Aids [sic, British usage], has subsequently shown up negative for the disease in a case that has mystified doctors. It was claimed last night that Andrew Stimpson, 25, may have shaken off the virus with his own immune system after contracting HIV in 2002.
If proved, the NHS has said the case would be ‘medically remarkable’. … The Chelsea and Westminster Healthcare NHS trust, which treated Stimpson, has said he needs to undergo more tests before it can be established how he apparently conquered HIV. ‘These tests were accurate and they were his, but what we don’t know at the moment is why that has happened, and we want him to come back in for more tests… It is potentially a fantastic thing.’ Stimpson was tested three times in August 2002 … and the results showed he was producing HIV antibodies to fight the disease. Stimpson … contracted the virus from his boyfriend, Juan Gomez, 44. He began taking vitamins and other dietary supplements to keep his body healthy in the hopes that this might fend off the development of full-blown Aids. In October 2003, after impressing doctors with his good health, Stimpson was offered a new test, which came back negative. Further tests in December 2003 and March last year also proved negative. … ‘I couldn’t understand how anyone could cure themselves of HIV . . . I thought it had to be wrong because no one can recover from HIV, it just doesn’t happen.’ The tests were re-checked by the Chelsea and Westminster Healthcare NHS Trust when Stimpson threatened litigation believing there must be a mistake, but the results confirmed all the tests had been accurate. In a letter understood to be from the NHS Litigation Authority in October this year, Stimpson was told: ‘The fact you have recovered from a positive antibody result to a negative result is exceptional and medically remarkable.’ The trust said there had been several other cases of claimed ‘spontaneous clearance’ of the virus worldwide, although it is not believed any have been proved. A spokeswoman added that the trust had urged Stimpson to return for tests, but that so far he had not done so.”

If I were Stimpson, I too would decline further tests administered by people who would love to be able to tell me that I do, after all, have an incurable and fatal illness. Stimpson’s case is readily explicable by Tony Lance’s intestinal dysbiosis hypothesis [WHAT REALLY CAUSED AIDS: SLICING THROUGH THE GORDIAN KNOT, 20 February 2008] or by the Perth-Group view that testing HIV-positive merely denotes oxidative stress. It was not that Stimpson “contracted the virus from his boyfriend”, but that they shared a lifestyle conducive in some manner to oxidative stress or intestinal dysbiosis.