Intestinal dysbiosis theory confirmed again

A key aspect of intestinal dysbiosis theory  has been confirmed: Re-establishment of healthy gut microflora can lead to an apparent defeat of “HIV infection” — an increased CD4 count.

AIDS originally manifested as 3 diseases: candidiasis (thrush; yeast infections), Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), and Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS).
Given that many KS patients are HIV-negative, it has been acknowledged for many years now, even by HIV/AIDS cultist, that Kaposi’s sarcoma is not caused by HIV. A sufficient explanation for the prevalence of KS in the early 1980s, and its increasing rarity since, is that it was caused by excessive use of nitrite poppers (see Death Rush by John Lauritsen & Hank Wilson).
It had not been recognized at first that PCP, like candidiasis, is a fungal infection (and it has been renamed Pneumocystis jiroveci, but I shall continue to use “PCP” since that has been so long and widely used and recognized).
An adequate explanation for the outbreak of AIDS in the early 1980s is the “fast-lane” lifestyle of a small proportion of gay men as part of the irrational exuberance that followed the apparent “gay liberation” of the 1970s: these men were sleeping little and partying much, sharing and spreading the common sexually transmitted diseases, treating those frequent infections with lots of antibiotics, even consuming antibiotics promiscuously as prophylactics (see for example the 2003 TV documentary, When Ocean Meets Sky). Dr. Josef Sonnabend, whose practice in New York included many gay men, predicted even in the 1970s that this lifestyle would lead to a breakdown of health. It did.
But why specifically yeast and PCP? Why specifically fungal diseases?
In conjunction with the hypothesis of intestinal dysbiosis, Tony Lance  pointed out that certain aspects of and practices associated with the fast-lane gay lifestyle seem as if designed to damage the intestinal microflora that constitute the first line of defense established by the immune system, a defense that acts particularly to hold in check fungal organisms that are ubiquitous.

The notion that HIV causes AIDS is disproved by many types of evidence. But that still leaves a conundrum: Why do gay men even nowadays so often test “HIV-positive”? Even gay men who remain in good health for decades without antiretroviral treatment?
Lance suggested that the damage to gut microflora would allow translocation from the gut to the blood of a variety of substances that might cause reactions that could manifest as responding positive on “HIV” tests. That suggestion has been confirmed in recent years as a significant number of mainstream articles have acknowledged an important role for the gut microflora as part of the immune system, and that damage to this mucosal immune-system allows translocation and “immune activation” — the latest hand-waving term that substitutes for a specific mechanism by which “HIV” is supposed to cause damage.

CD4 counts and viral load are the standard measures for inferring the course that “HIV infection” is taking: higher CD4 or lower viral load means the “infection” is being successfully controlled. Now it has been found that probiotic treatment, helping a healthy gut microflora re-establish itself, leads to higher CD4 counts and to a decrease in immune activation — to controlling “HIV infection”, in other words, without recourse to antiretroviral drugs:

Clerici et al., “Nutritional intervention with NR100157 restores gut microbiota in HIV-1-infected adults not on HAART and reduces systemic immune activation”, 18th Conference on Retroviruses  and Opportunistic Infections (Boston, MA,  February 27 — March 2, 2011):
“Background: A compromised gastrointestinal tract can contribute via microbial translocation to the persistent chronic immune activation observed in HIV-infected individuals. Previously, the nutritional concept NR100157 containing prebiotic oligosaccharides was shown to reduce CD4+ T cell decline in HIV-1-infected adults, in the double-blind placebo controlled BITE trial, after 52 weeks intervention. This was associated with decreased immune activation in a subpopulation. . . .
Conclusions: This study shows that nutritional intervention with NR100157 beneficially affects the gut microbiota composition in HIV-1-infected adults. Microbiota changes correlated with CD4+CD25+ T cell changes in a subgroup analysis, implying positive effects of NR100157 on intestinal homeostasis and systemic immune activation.”

The drug business

Here are quotes from a book by a British doctor and medical historian:

The trials . . . compared these new compounds [to AZT] . . . they were not obviously more effective . . . . Nevertheless, in clinical practice there was a wholesale switch from older to newer agents despite up to a hundred-fold increase in cost in some cases. . . . The change stemmed from a mixture of wishful thinking and aggressive marketing. By the 1990s, pharmaceutical companies had discovered that patient activist were often the most effective lobbyists for the new treatments and they had allied themselves with some of the most aggressive patient groups . . . . But the changes that patients and clinicians were witnessing were often the consequences of changing from the equivalent of more than 5,000 milligrams . . . per day to a dose . . .  equivalent to 300 milligrams . . . per day. There were obvious difficulties for clinicians in accepting that even part of the benefits they were witnessing with the new drugs might stem from the fact that they were not now poisoning their patients to the same extent as previously. These difficulties led to a need for myths to disguise what was happening, and marketing campaigns for the new treatments that used the concept[s of idiopathic CD-4 T-cell lymphopenia and immune restoration syndrome] . . . vigorously provided the required mythologies. . . .
How could such a situation arise? . . . The answer has to be that no company stood to make money out of encouraging clinicians to recognize these clinical features. . . . Did it make a difference that clinicians failed to recognize these features? Almost certainly yes: patients were losing their lives because of that failure. . . .
[T]he majority of trials involved a comparison between new and older drugs without a placebo control. The vast majority of these trials did not show whether any of the drugs tested actually worked. . . .
This was a marketplace where companies hired clinical investigators. Previously researchers had told industry what needed to be done, but now companies did not have to approach investigators to design their trials for them, compile the statistics, or write the papers. . . . A process had begun that led to the analysis of trial results within the company and thereafter to the writing up of the results by company personnel. Senior clinical investigators now might be used as figureheads on papers or for presentations at academic meetings, but the clinical presence was increasingly ornamental rather than substantial. . . .
In the 1980s, a new phenomenon, satellite symposia, became increasingly frequent at national and international meetings. These were company-sponsored symposia. [Over a period of 15 years] there had been an increase from $6 million to $86 million in the amount of money spent by the major companies on these events in the United States. In the 1990s, many senior clinical figures, some of whom were notional principal investigators on company studies, could be seen performing in both satellite and regular symposia at meetings, sometimes with a frequency that meant leaving one symposium before it ended to participate in another or in a press briefing.
The proceedings of satellite symposia were published in journal supplements. These were rarely peer-reviewed. Medical communication and public relations agencies sprang up, out-sourced from pharmaceutical companies. The writers in these agencies commonly wrote the drafts of articles that appeared in the journals, as well as producing the slides for speakers. In some cases, the contributions appearing under distinguished names were never even read by their notional authors.
(FOOTNOTE: All of the material in the first part of this paragraph is based on practices I [the author of the cited book] have not only witnessed but engaged in.) . . .
By the mid-1990s [HIV/AIDS meetings] . . . had reached mega-meeting status. In addition to bringing clinicians to these meetings, companies regularly brought journalists and [activists and] held press briefings. What had once been forums for extraordinary intellectual debates had by the 1990s been transformed into little more than trade fairs. . . .
Clinical trials could be designed to demonstrate the proportions of patients who are likely to find a particular therapy both beneficial and acceptable. But no such trials have been undertaken. If science means collecting a full set of data on any phenomenon, then despite its rhetoric, modern [HIV/AIDS practice] . . . would seem to be anything but scientific.

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Alert readers will already have noted that all my editorial insertions in [] refer specifically to HIV/AIDS whereas none of the rest of the text does. That’s because the book deals with drugs used in psychiatric practice. The analogy with HIV/AIDS struck me particularly concerning lowered morbidity when switching drug regimes: mortality improved under HAART because it is less toxic than the earlier monotherapy.
Other points reflect the general state of contemporary drug-centered medical practice. The prevalence of dangerous, injurious conflicts of interest have been widely described, for example in a series of articles by David Willman in the Los Angeles Times of 7 December  2003, about the connections between high-ranking personnel in the National Institutes of Health and pharmaceutical companies. The corrupting stranglehold that industry exerts has been described by insiders in a number of such articles as “Drug companies and doctors: a story of corruption” by Marcia Angell (New York Review of Books, 56 #1, 15 January 2009)   and such books from leading publishing houses as:
John Abramson, Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine,
HarperCollins 2004
Marcia Angell, The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us
                                and What To Do About It, Random House 2004
Jerry Avorn, Powerful Medicines: The Benefits, Risks, and Costs of Prescription Drugs,
Knopf 2004
Peter Breggin, Medication Madness: A Psychiatrist Exposes the Dangers
                              of Mood-Altering Medications, St. Martin’s Press 2008
Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker
                                         and Poorer, Bloomsbury 2007
Merrill Goozner, The $800 Million Pill: The Truth behind the Cost of New Drugs,
University of California Press 2004
Jeremy Greene, Prescribing by Numbers: Drugs and the Definition of Disease,
Johns Hopkins University Press 2007
Gary Greenberg, Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of a Modern Disease,
Simon & Schuster 2010
David Healy, The Creation of Psychopharmacology, Harvard University Press 2002
Jerome Kassirer, On The Take: How Medicine’s Complicity with Big Business
                                   Can Endanger Your Health, Oxford University Press 2004
Irving Kirsch, The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Anti-depressant Myth,
Basic Books 2010
Joanna Moncrieff, The Myth of the Chemical Cure: A Critique of Psychiatric Drug
                                       Treatment,  Palgrave Macmillan 2009 (revised ed.)
Ray Moynihan & Alan Cassels, Selling Sickness, Nation Books 2005
Roger J. Porter & Thomas E. Malone, Biomedical Research: Collaboration and
                                             Conflict of Interest, Johns Hopkins University Press 1992
Marc A. Rodwin, Medicine, Money and Morals: Physicians’ Conflicts of Interest,
Oxford University Press 1993
Robert Whitaker, Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and
                the Enduring Mistreatment  of the Mentally Ill, Basic Books 2010 (2nd ed.)
———-                   Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the                         Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, Crown 2010
Edward Yoxen, The Gene Business, Harper & Row 1983

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The more I learn about the history of medicine (American medicine in particular), the more I realize that the flaws in HIV/AIDS “science” and practice are far from unique, indeed they reflect deficiencies in modern medical “science” and practice overall, most especially of course the recourse to drugs and the associated stranglehold that pharmaceutical industry holds not only over treatment aspects of medicine but also over public policies more widely, given that the drug business contributes disproportionately to campaign contributions of politicians and the employment of lobbyists.

Curing AIDS? Curing “HIV”?

A few days ago Michael Geiger sent an alert about a story in Vienna Review that is remarkably evenhanded about AIDS Rethinking and HIV Skepticism:

The ‘Berlin Patient’: Demystifying AIDS?

Vienna Review is by and for budding journalists, and it is very heartening to see such evidence-based writing in this type of publication.

The Berlin patient had been in the news some time ago, ballyhooed as pointing to a potential cure (!) for HIV/AIDS, albeit at the cost of bone-marrow transplant, which might well be worse — or at least more immediately fatal — than the disease. At any rate, last December David Crowe had written an insightful debunking of that ballyhooing:

HIV Cured with Stem Cells – What about AIDS?

As the title suggests, Crowe points to the need to distinguish between “AIDS”, which does exist albeit in differently defined guises over the years, and “HIV”, which may or may not exist but certainly doesn’t cause AIDS.

That essential distinction is continually and deliberately blurred by mainstream’s vigilantes, perhaps most obviously in their propaganda against “AIDS denialism”.

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An ever-present difficulty is that there’s too much to try to keep up with. I have a  Google Alert set for “HIV”, and it brings about a dozen items a day on average, far too many of which deserve comment. The Alberta Reappraising AIDS Society news page mentions some of the most noteworthy items. The Office of Medical and Scientific Justice (OMSJ) also comments on noteworthy news; and it has very heartening reports on its successes in defending individuals charged with “HIV”-related “crimes”.

But it’s necessary also to keep reading in the tidal waves of the mainstream HIV/AIDS literature whose many inadequacies deserve to be ferreted out. Just now I have a pile of stuff about “treatment” to wade through.

My background in science studies makes me also very interested in the wider context of HIV/AIDS matters. As I learn more about current circumstances as well as continuing trends in medical science and practice, it seems increasingly clear that the flaws in mainstream HIV/AIDS matters are mirrored in much of drug-centered practices in medicine. A correspondent led me recently to start reading about treatments of mental illness, and to look at the psychiatric Bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, now in its fourth edition (DSM-IV). Anyone who has wondered whether perhaps psychiatric practice might be based on pseudoscience will find the answer there, in the resounding affirmative. One reason so many kids are being prescribed Ritalin and the like nowadays is because the criteria for diagnosing “Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder” (pp. 83-85) read like an accurate description of what untutored lay people regard as the normal activity of healthily lively young boys.

“HIV” Epidemiology Disproves HIV/AIDS Theory

I had been reading books by HIV Skeptics and AIDS Rethinkers for about a decade before Harvey Bialy’s scientific bio of Duesberg led me to collate essentially all the published results of HIV tests in the United States. I was stimulated to do that because data in sources cited by Bialy were incompatible with HIV/AIDS theory; and I became increasingly taken aback, and hooked on the quest, because the more sources I looked at, the more certain became the incompatibility with HIV/AIDS theory. The data show that:
— If HIV tests detect a specific agent, then that agent is not infectious.
— If HIV tests are subject to confounds, then the epidemiology of those confounds is the same as the epidemiology of HIV, which is absurdly inconceivable.
Instead, it is quite evident that “HIV” tests respond “positive” to a wide range of physiological conditions, some of them health-threatening (drug abuse, for example, or tuberculosis) and others no threat to health, for example pregnancy or certain vaccinations.
All that is reported in my book, which gained plaudits from every reviewer who is not an HIV/AIDS true-believer.
After the book’s publication I started this blog, and in the several years since then I’ve learned a great deal more, thanks largely to comments and correspondence from many people. It is now clear to me that the issue of “HIV” tests is the central, crucial, decisive one: since “HIV” tests do not detect an infectious AIDS-causing agent, the whole cardboard-castle edifice of HIV/AIDS theory can collapse as soon as the mainstream media allow even a whiff of fresh air to touch the pervasively misleading propaganda perpetuated by official and unofficial organizations.

Several whiffs of fresh air were indeed offered participants at the recent mainstream Conference on AIDS and Retroviruses where Duesberg et al. exploded the myth of hundreds of thousands of AIDS deaths in South Africa, and Ruggiero et al. illustrated the lack of any “HIV” or “AIDS” epidemic in Italy (or any association between those two), and Galletti et al. offered a concise summary of what is wrong with “HIV” tests:

— About half of all “HIV-positive” results are false positives in the sense of indicating no threat to health
— Disregarding the prevalence of these false positives causes HIV/AIDS theory to promulgate absurdly paradoxical conclusions and to foster misguided public policies
— There is no gold-standard HIV test because pure HIV has never been isolated.

PO 89
TOWARD IMPROVEMENTS IN HIV EPIDEMIOLOGY

M. Prayer Galletti* [1], S. Pacini [2], G. Morucci [2], H. H. Bauer [3]
[1] Department of Experimental Pathology and Oncology, University of Firenze, Florence, Italy; [2] Department of Anatomy, Histology and Forensic Medicine, University of Firenze, Florence, Italy; [3] Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, Blacksburg, VA, USA

Considerable efforts are expended for prevention of HIV infections and for treatment of HIV-positive individuals, and it is widely agreed that improvements in both areas would be highly desirable. Observing and understanding the epidemiology of HIV are centrally necessary for the design of strategies for both prevention and for treatment. The way to improvement is to focus not on successes but on gaps to be filled or missteps to be corrected, so we discuss weaknesses of current practices and conundrums, why expected successes have not materialized. The fundamental uncertainty stems from the lack of a gold-standard HIV test. As a result, one cannot accurately compare HIV data from different global regions that use different testing protocols, for example, varying criteria for what constitutes a positive Western Blot or the availability or non- availability of PCR or culture tests, or drawing inferences about HIV infection based on the Bangui definition of AIDS. In addition to uncertainty in cross-country comparisons, lack of the gold standard entails a fundamental inability to detect, analyze, and correct for false-negative and false-positive test-results by direct means rather than indirect inferences. Therefore, considerable effort would seem to be warranted to prepare pure samples of HIV for establishment of a true gold-standard HIV test. The weaknesses in testing practices may well account for at least some of the troubling conundrums and mutually contradictory data that seem inexplicable. These troubling conundrums include: conflicting estimates of HIV infections and of HIV-disease deaths from equally authoritative sources; apparently drastically different primary modes of trans- mission in different geographic regions (primarily among drug injectors in Russia and Eastern Europe, primarily among married couples in sub-Saharan Africa, primarily among gay men and drug addicts in the United States and Western Europe); extreme racial disparities in HIV infection, with Asians and Asian Americans consistently less affected, by about one-third, than white Americans, while black Americans are affected by as much as an order of magnitude more than white Americans. Testing uncertainties doubtless also contribute to the confusion as to whether certain conditions (e.g. lipodystrophy or nephropathy) should be described as HIV-associated or as AIDS-associated. Although it is the time-honoured practice in science that such anomalies or conundrums are quarantined in the expectation that progress will eventually resolve them without research focused directly at the anomalies, it would seem in the case of HIV/AIDS that specific efforts would be worth pursuing to resolve at least some of these conundrums, because a better understanding would improve epidemiological data and understanding and help toward the design of better strategies for prevention and treatment.

No HIV epidemic in Italy

Italy has never experienced an epidemic of AIDS

Nor has Italy ever experienced an epidemic of “HIV”

Those facts are reflected in documents issued by the Italian Ministry of Health. By 2009, the Ministry had not required notification of cases of “HIV” — “HIV” was not regarded as a threat to public heath — and AIDS could be diagnosed in absence of “HIV”. Thus the Ministry did not accept HIV/AIDS theory, and this was described appropriately as “Aids denialism at the Ministry of Health” by Ruggiero et al. in Medical Hypotheses, accepted 3 June 2009 and published on-line shortly afterwards.
Elsevier, however, publisher of Medical Hypotheses, under harassment by John P Moore and other HIV/AIDS vigilantes, could no more countenance this remaining in its journal than it could allow Duesberg to point out that HIV/AIDS true-believers were claiming 20 times as many AIDS deaths as the official South African agency, Statistics South Africa, was actually reporting on the basis of death certifications. Accordingly, the article by Ruggiero et al., like that of Duesberg et al., was withdrawn as “potentially damaging to global public health”:

That the Italian Ministry of Health does not regard something as a threat to public health was evidently seen at Elsevier as a potential threat to global public health.

Elsevier tried to recover from its precipitate, ill-considered withdrawal of the Duesberg and Ruggiero articles through an elaborate set of internal investigations that included “a peer-review process managed by The Lancet editorial team” [an in-house process since The Lancet is also an Elsevier publication].
Even these in-house “investigations” and “peer review”, attempting to justify the unjustifiable, could find nothing seriously wrong with the Ruggiero article — though that did not lead to a rescission of the unwarranted withdrawal. Still, the revised withdrawal notice does not mention any threat to public health, it only implies some failure to be “coherent and clearly expressed”, hardly a legitimate reason for independent reviewers to reject an article outright:

Given that matters of expression and presentation were the only specific faults found with the article, Ruggiero et al. revised the article to make it clearer and more coherent, relying on the expert assistance of a professional writer whose native tongue is English; and the re-submitted manuscript was accepted for Medical Hypotheses by Editor Bruce Charlton. But Elsevier was in process of firing Charlton, and held up publication until a new Editor was on board. That new Editor acted as judge, jury, and executioner, as well as delivering a veritable exemplar of incoherent, unclear writing:

“Reviewers’ comments on your work have now been received. You will see that they are advising against publication of your work. Therefore I must reject it.
For your guidance, I append the reviewers’ comments below.
Your manuscript is not suitable for publication in Medical Hypotheses. The arguments are more or less direct to “the Italian Ministry of Health” and you conclude that they i.e Italian Ministry of Health “seems to be unaware of the existence of an AIDS skeptics movement that could interpret its policies, guidelines, definitions and data as if they supported the thesis that HIV is not the cause of AIDS”
I would NOT like Medical Hypotheses to be channelled as media to discuss polices of Italian Ministry of Health. You should use other means available to you. I would like to keep clear of such topics. I am sorry to have to reject your paper.
Many thanks
Editor
Thank you for giving us the opportunity to consider your work.
Yours sincerely”

[This is the same Editor who marked his assumption of the job by saying that he would “not get into controversial subjects” but will publish “radical new ideas” — Enserink, ScienceInsider, 25 June 2010]

Ruggiero et al. later incorporated the “AIDS denialism” of the Italian Ministry of Health as part of an article pointing out that Italian anatomy students need have no fear of contracting “HIV” even when they dissect cadavers of unknown provenance; that article was published in the mainstream peer-reviewed Italian Journal of Anatomy and Embryology. The work of Ruggiero and his students also gained the imprimatur of the Italian Public Health Service,  which makes available at its website copies of the students’ dissertations.

Data from Italy as a whole, as well as from particular regions, continues to show the lack of any “HIV/AIDS” epidemic (see, for example, “Italy: Demographics of HIV and AIDS”).

These facts were the subject of a contribution to the recent Conference on AIDS and Retroviruses:

PO 87
RESULTS OF EPIDEMIOLOGICAL SURVEILLANCE OF AIDS CASES IN TUSCANY

J. J. V. Branca* [2], S. Pacini [2], M. Ruggiero [3]
[2] Department of Anatomy, Histology and Forensic Medicine, University
of Firenze, Florence, Italy; [3] Department of Experimental Pathology
and Oncology, University of Firenze, Florence, Italy

The Regional Public Health System of Tuscany recently achieved remarkable successes in fighting AIDS with fewer than 10 deaths per year of diagnosis in 2008 and 2009 in a population of almost 4 million residents. Of the many factors that contributed to this success, here we shall focus on results obtained by accurate epidemiological surveillance conducted by the Regional Agency for Health (Agenzia Regionale di Sanita`). It is worth noting that a regional registry of new HIV infections is not yet available; therefore the data reported here refer only to new AIDS cases. However, the very low numbers of AIDS deaths (2 in 2008 and 7 in 2009) seem to indicate that surveillance of new AIDS cases is probably the most effective epidemiological tool in fighting AIDS. In fact, data from the regional registry of new AIDS cases reveals that the male-to-female ratio for the incidence of AIDS has been essentially constant from 1985 to 2008 at ~3.6, whereas the purported mode of transmission changed drastically: from ~8% of HIV being transmitted heterosexually in 1985–1990, to ~44% being transmitted in that way in 2006–2008. Consistent with these data, in recent years (updated to 2009), 44.5% HIV-positive heterosexuals reported being aware of their serostatus before the diagnosis of AIDS, and 17.8% had been treated with antiretroviral drugs prior to the diagnosis of AIDS. Conversely, about 90% HIV-positive intravenous drug users reported knowing their serostatus before the diagnosis of AIDS, and 57% of them were treated with antiretroviral drugs before the diagnosis of AIDS. Regrettably, however, the probability of survival in the HIV-positive intravenous drug user population has been constantly lower than that observed in the other categories since 1996. Drug- associated multi-organ toxicity might have contributed to this phenomenon. Also the age trend for new AIDS cases shows interesting changes that might have contributed to the decline in AIDS mortality in Tuscany. In 1988, the mean age for new AIDS cases was 31 for males and 28 for females, whereas in 2009 the mean ages were 44.5 and 40, respectively. We believe that information strategies focussed on risky sexual behaviours might have contributed to this trend. In fact, a recent survey of teenagers’ sexual behaviour (Indagine EDIT 2008) showed that 43.5% of teenagers had had actual sexual intercourse and only 37.9% (males) and 26.4% (females) teenagers reported more than three partners. Among female teenagers reporting more than three partners, 45% reported using condoms. Taken together, these most recent data are consistent with previous observations on AIDS epidemiology (Ital J Anat Embryol. 2009 Apr–Sep;114 (2–3): 97–108. Oct–Dec;114 (4):179–91), and may suggest that further improvement in AIDS patient survival could be achieved by focussing efforts on reducing or eliminating drug-associated toxicity.