Public Health Service of Italy accepts work of Ruggiero et al.

On 12 July 2009, this blog published a press release reporting the acceptance (on 3 June) by the journal Medical Hypotheses of an article by Professor Ruggiero and co-workers at the University of Florence pointing out that official policies of the Italian Ministry of Health implied a lack of necessary connection between HIV and AIDS [“Official Italian data: no causal connection between HIV and AIDS”, 12 July 2009].

Consternation ensued among HIV/AIDS vigilantes that so well established, indeed distinguished a research group had produced such a publication. AIDStruthers and other vigilantes organized a letter-writing campaign urging Elsevier — the current publisher of Medical Hypotheses — to withdraw this article which had already been posted on the journal’s website as “in press”. At the same time the letter-writing HIV/AIDS campaigners urged the withdrawal of an article by Duesberg et al. that had been accepted by Medical Hypotheses on 11 June, which pointed out that official South African statistics recorded AIDS deaths at about 12,000 annually while an article in JAIDS had alleged 25 times that number; Duesberg et al. noted too that JAIDS had refused to publish their rebuttal of the flawed article.

The HIV/AIDS vigilantes also sent letters to the National Library of Medicine urging that MEDLINE no longer abstract Medical Hypotheses.

Elsevier’s stated reasons why articles in press might nevertheless be withdrawn include “potentially libelous” content and “potential threat to global public health”. I invite anyone and everyone to judge for themselves whether either of those potentialities exists in those articles, and moreover to ponder what is common to those articles other than questioning HIV/AIDS theory on the basis of substantive evidence; and what about the articles warrants withdrawal after acceptance, by comparison to the 200+ articles still posted at the Medical Hypotheses website as “in press”.

Professor Ruggiero has now been able to point out that the Italian Ministry of Health has actually found helpful the work that he and his students have published, since they have revised some of their policies accordingly. Moreover, the Italian Public Health Service has officially recognized the work by making dissertations available from its website.

**********************

From Professor Ruggiero:

“The theses of Drs. Simone Scarpelli, Matteo Prayer Galletti, and Elda Muca, previously discussed and approved by the University of Firenze, Italy, received official recognition by the Italian Public Health Service and they are now available at the Center for Study and Research on Drug Abuse and AIDS, a Department of the Public Health Service.
It is worth noting that the thesis of Dr. Matteo P. Galletti (now available at request at http://www.cesda.net, in Italian with an English abstract) was the starting point of the article in Medical Hypotheses (M. Ruggiero, M. P. Galletti, S. Pacini, T. Punzi, G. Morucci, M. Gulisano, “Aids denialism at the ministry of health” (doi:10.1016/j.mehy.2009.06.002), as stated in the article.
We are grateful to the Region of Tuscany and the Department of drug abuse of the Public Health Service for providing official recognition to the results.”

Screen shots of the relevant Web pages are attached below: click them (or double-click, depends on browser) for a full-size image. There is at the end a downloadable pdf of this blog post.

Here is a PDF of this blog post.

Public Health Service of Italy accepts work of Ruggiero et al.

On 12 July 2009, this blog published a press release reporting the acceptance (on 3 June) by the journal Medical Hypotheses of an article by Professor Ruggiero and co-workers at the University of Florence pointing out that official policies of the Italian Ministry of Health implied a lack of necessary connection between HIV and AIDS [“Official Italian data: no causal connection between HIV and AIDS”, 12 July 2009].

Consternation ensued among HIV/AIDS vigilantes that so well established, indeed distinguished a research group had produced such a publication. AIDStruthers and other vigilantes organized a letter-writing campaign urging Elsevier — the current publisher of Medical Hypotheses — to withdraw this article which had already been posted on the journal’s website as “in press”. At the same time the letter-writing HIV/AIDS campaigners urged the withdrawal of an article that had been accepted by Medical Hypotheses on 11 June, by Duesberg et al., which pointed out that official South African statistics recorded AIDS deaths at about 12,000 annually while an article in JAIDS had alleged 25 times that number; Duesberg et al. noted too that JAIDS had refused to publish their rebuttal of the flawed article.

The HIV/AIDS vigilantes also sent letters to the National Library of Medicine urging that MEDLINE no longer abstract Medical Hypotheses.

Elsevier’s stated reasons why articles in press might nevertheless be withdrawn include “potentially libelous” content and “potential threat to global public health”. Professor Ruggiero has now been able to point out that the Italian Ministry of Health has actually found helpful the work that he and his students have published, since they have revised some of their policies accordingly. Moreover, the Italian Public Health Service has officially recognized the work by making dissertations available from its website.

From Professor Ruggiero:

“The theses of Drs. Simone Scarpelli, Matteo Prayer Galletti, and Elda Muca, previously discussed and approved by the University of Firenze, Italy, received official recognition by the Italian Public Health Service and they are now available at the Center for Study and Research on Drug Abuse and AIDS (www.cesda.net), a Department of the Public Health Service.

It is worth noting that the thesis of Dr. Matteo P. Galletti (now available at request at http://www.cesda.net, in Italian with an English abstract) was the starting point of the article in Medical Hypotheses (M. Ruggiero, M. P. Galletti, S. Pacini, T. Punzi, G. Morucci, M. Gulisano, “Aids denialism at the ministry of health” (doi:10.1016/j.mehy.2009.06.002), as stated in the article.

We are grateful to the Region of Tuscany and the Department of drug abuse of the Public Health Service for providing official recognition to the results.”

Screen shots of the relevant Web pages are attached below. The difficulty of sizing these for the blog while retaining clarity made it desirable to extract screen shots of the relevant items. Reproductions of the full web pages follow, and finally there is a downloadable pdf of this blog post in which the full web pages are in legible form.

Here is a PDF of this blog post.

***************************************************************************

Categories:  HIV does not cause AIDS,  HIV skepticism,  Legal aspects

Tags Italian Public Health Service, Marco Ruggiero, University of Florence, Italian Ministry of Health, Medical Hypotheses, Elsevier, Elsevier withdraws already accepted articles, HIV/AIDS vigilantes pressure Elsevier, HIV/AIDS vigilantes pressure National Library of Medicine, AID deaths in South Africa, Simone Scarpelli, Matteo Prayer Galletti, Elda Muca, S. Pacini, T. Punzi, G. Morucci, M. Gulisano, Joshua M. Nicholson, David Rasnick, Christian Fiala