HIV/AIDS Non-Thinkers

An important credential for HIV/AIDS researchers is that they should not think about the wider implications of data or observations, because all too often those conflict with HIV/AIDS theorizing. Two recent examples:

“Swaziland to test entire population for HIV
Published on : 26 July 2011 – 11:24am | By Klaas den Tek
Authorities in Swaziland want to subject the entire Swazi population to an HIV/AIDS screening test. Those eventually found to be HIV positive would then receive antiretroviral drugs (ARVs). It is an ambitious project involving various donors including the Dutch organization, Stop Aids Now! But is it possible to test an entire population? . . .
Nearly 200,000 of Swaziland’s 1.2 million inhabitants are HIV positive, which makes the southern African country the world record holder for HIV prevalence. Moreover, many Swazis have never been tested for HIV before. The number of people living with the virus that causes AIDS could thus be much higher.
HIV/ AIDS expert, Joep de Lange, from the University of Amsterdam, is among the supporters of the project.
According to him, the screening test could lower the prevalence of the pandemic to one percent of the Swazi population” [emphases added].
Commentary:
The CIA Fact Book has the HIV prevalence as 25.9% (estimated, of course). A couple of years earlier it had been estimated to be 38.8% (Deconstructing HIV/AIDS in “Sub-Saharan Africs” and “The Caribbean”, 2008/04/21) . According to the UNAIDS 2008 Global Report, in “Swaziland — HIV prevalence appears to have stabilized at extraordinarily high levels” [my emphasis], namely “the 26%  . . . found in adults . . . in 2006 [which] is the highest prevalence  ever documented in a national population-based survey anywhere in the world (Central Statistical Office [Swaziland] & Macro  International Inc., 2007)” — although among pregnant women, Swaziland had recorded  >40% HIV prevalence in 2004.
So much for official statistics. 200,000 of 1.2 million is 17%; CIA says 26% as does UNAIDS, but CIA had nearly 39% just a few years earlier. Believe what you choose and whatever suits the immediate purpose. But furthermore:
Up to 2004, less than 10% of the “HIV-positive” population was getting the benefit of antiretroviral drugs. “In Swaziland, the Global Fund is financing care and support services for 100 000 children orphaned as a result of HIV (Global Fund, 2008)”.
The CIA Fact Book estimates for 2009, 180,000 Swazis living with HIV/AIDS but only 7000 HIV/AIDS deaths.
The death rate should have been much higher, if HIV/AIDS is as deadly as claimed in absence of life-saving antiretroviral drugs.
The Golden Fleece Award for Outstanding Non-Thinking, though, ought to go to expert Joep de Lange for suggesting that universal testing and antiretroviral treatment could bring the prevalence from ~16% down to ~1%. No one has yet suggested that antiretroviral drugs are a cure, that they convert “HIV-positive” to “HIV-negative”. For prevalence to decrease from 16% to 1%, 15% of the population would have to die — that is, 15 of the 16% “HIV-positive” people, i.e. 94% of those “living with HIV/AIDS” — even as they are all being treated with antiretroviral drugs!? And that’s assuming no new infections in the meantime, of course; taking those into account would require an even higher death rate.
This is far from the first time that HIV/AIDS gurus have made such ridiculous claims about projected or even achieved decreases in HIV prevalence in various African regions, for example, Uganda, decreases that simply do not jibe with birth and death rates let alone claimed new-infection rates.
Joep de Lange is one of the most prominent HIV/AIDS gurus. He is Professor of Internal Medicine at Amsterdam, has been engaged in HIV/AIDS matters for more than 15 years, and has been President of the International AIDS Society. Perhaps he was misquoted in suggesting that Swaziland could reduce its HIV prevalence from ~16% to ~1%? Or then again perhaps not, since he apparently swallowed the claim that Uganda had reduced its rate from 30% to 11% (“De eerlijke aidsbestrijder” — The honest anti-AIDS warrior).
The interview was given to a Dutch reporter, so perhaps de Lange was not misreported.

*                    *                    *                    *                    *                    *

It’s long been well known that HIV is sexually transmitted, and that people who have contracted some other venereal disease (STD) such as gonorrhea or chlamydia are more prone to acquire HIV as well. It’s remained well known even as the data have shown negative correlations between HIV and STDs. It’s remained well known even as the rate of “HIV” among actors in pornographic films has been virtually zero despite the almost total absence of condom use among those performers. Nevertheless, HIV/AIDS gurus and activists have continued to declaim about the dangers of HIV spread among porn performers and that they should be forced to use condoms. For example, the recent article by Goldstein et al. (“High chlamydia and gonorrhea incidence and reinfection among performers in the adult film industry”, Sexually Transmitted Diseases, 38 [2011] 644-8):
“industry standards for protecting adult film performers lag far behind established worker health and safety standards. Adult film performers routinely engage in anal and vaginal sex without condoms, including prolonged and repeated sexual acts with multiple sexual partners over short periods. 3 These practices often lead to rectal and/or vaginal mucosal trauma with exposure to seminal and vaginal fluids, fecal material, and blood, a combination that is ideal for transmission of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), other sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), and fecal pathogens. . . . ‘an average popular male in the industry, through partner-to-partner-to-partner transmission, reaches approximately 198 people in 3 days.’ 7 Although the total population of performers at any one time may appear small, they have a very large sexual network and
serve as a bridge population for STD transmission to and from the general population. 6
. . . .
We focused on repeat infections with CT [chlamydia] and GC [gonorrhea] in this analysis because they are generally indicators of (1) participation in higher sexual risk behaviors; (2) higher risk for HIV acquisition and transmission 15 . . . .” [emphases added].
Now here are the data reported by Goldstein et al.:
“Between 1998 and 2008, 17 HIV cases were reported among performers. 4”
For gonorrhea and chlamydia between 2004 and 2008,

Thus 1294 cases of gonorrhea and 2175 cases of chlamydia in the 5 years from 2004 to 2008, in other words ~260 cases per year of gonorrhea and ~ 435 cases per year of chlamydia.
With HIV, by contrast, there were less than 2 per year, under conditions “ideal for transmission of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)”.

Go figure.

Go think.

We have to do it for ourselves because we obviously can’t rely on the researchers to do it for us.

Rethinking AIDS Conference, Washington DC, December 1-3

Register now for RA 2011! Sign up by July 31st and receive early bird pricing of only $150 for the December 1st-3rd conference in Washington DC, at the Washington Court Hotel, just three blocks from the U.S. Capitol.
Beginning on “World AIDS Day, you will hear many noted AIDS rethinkers, including Peter Duesberg, Henry Bauer, Roberto Giraldo and David Rasnick. Also presenting will be new voices, including MD Matt Irwin, breastfeeding activist Marian Tompson, HIV-positive thriver Raul Ehrichs de Palma, and MD and author Nancy Turner Banks.
The conference will also provide a viewing of Joan Shenton’s new documentary, Positively False: Birth of a Heresy, and opportunities to network with other rethinkers. No event this year will bring together so many experts who question the HIV=AIDS dogma, including scientists, doctors, journalists, lawyers and HIV-positive people.
Go to http://ra2011.org now and register! The first 50 people to register will receive a free, autographed copy of a book by a noted rethinker. You will be able to choose from books by Peter Duesberg, Etienne de Harven, Henry Bauer and several others (we will contact you with the list). You will be able to pick your book up at the conference.

Please note that the Saturday night banquet must be purchased separately from the conference registration. Booking a room at the Washington Court Hotel is also separate but can be done through our website.

We are excited about this conference and are looking forward to seeing you there. Please contact mailto:info@ra2011.org for information that is not on the website or for assistance.

Regards,
David Crowe
Conference Chair
RA 2011
+1-403-289-6609

Hidden in plain sight: The damage done by antiretroviral drugs

What’s plain to those not indoctrinated
evades the consciousness of the HIV/AIDS gurus
“hid these things from the wise and prudent, and
. . . revealed them unto babes” (Luke 10: 21)

One of the features of the HIV/AIDS phenomenon, seemingly astonishing and indeed incredible if one has trust in modern medical science, is that the mainstream literature is replete with documented, reproducible contradictions of standard shibboleths disseminated by mainstream sources.
Weiss & Cowan  point out that there’s no gold-standard HIV test, that there’s no such thing as a “confirmatory” test, that no HIV test can diagnose HIV infection, and that a large number of positive tests are false positives; yet mainstream practice continues to ignore these facts, and public defenders of the faith blather on about the desirability of universal testing.
Jay Levy  has enumerated all the things about HIV/AIDS that are not known — namely, all the central matters like how HIV could possibly do what it’s alleged to do.
And when antiretroviral drugs are mentioned, they are routinely described as life-saving — even though the literature is full of evidence that the drugs are anything but life-saving and instead are highly toxic. The Treatment Guidelines issued by the National Institutes of Health — and which need modification several times a year! — admitted long ago that the majority of “adverse events” experienced by PWAs on antiretroviral treatment are non-AIDS events, namely, organ failures and cancers linked directly to the antiretroviral drugs (see “Death, antiretroviral drugs, and cognitive dissonance”, 9 May 2008). The toxicity of AZT was demonstrated in the very earliest clinical trial, and plaudits to the life-saving benefits of antiretroviral treatment judiciously omitted to claim benefits for the AZT and monotherapy era; yet practice continues to ignore the deadly nature of AZT and its ilk and they continue to be prescribed in the HAART cocktails; albeit not as AZT but as Retrovir or zidovudine or other NRTIs with even more exotic and unfamiliar names.
A very general type of damage done by antiretroviral drugs is to the mitochondria, the energy-producing centers of all our cells. Mitochondria have their own DNA, and damage to them is a life-long burden; it’s irreversible. It’s been known for a long time that the antiretroviral treatment of pregnant “HIV-positive” women, purportedly to prevent transmission of HIV, actually damages the mitochondria of the babies; see for instance the studies cited in “What HIV drugs do” (2007/12/15); “First: Do no harm!” (2007/12/19); “Poison in South Africa” (2008/10/26); “Protease inhibitors cause oxidative stress” (2009/04/25); “Human cancers (≥20% of them) are caused by viruses!” (2010/01/23); “HAART makes things worse: Elsevier journal publishes HIV/AIDS heresies” (2010/11/03).
In my anything-but-exhaustive files I find mention of damage to the mitochondria in many places. The central point is that antiretroviral drugs commonly used in HAART induce “mitochondrial toxicity . . . linked to severe side effects including lipodystrophy, peripheral neuropathy, hepatic steatosis, myopathy, cardiomyopathy, pancreatitis, bone marrow suppression, and lactic acidosis” — Hendrickson et al., “Mitochondrial DNA haplogroups influence AIDS progression”, AIDS 22 (2008) 2429-39; citing
— Kohler & Lewis, “A brief overview of mechanisms of mitochondrial toxicity from NRTIs”, Environmental and Molecular Mutagenesis 48 (2007) 166-72
— Lewis, “Nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors, mitochondrial DNA and AIDS therapy”, Antiviral Therapy 10 (Suppl 2, 2005) M13–27
— Lewis et al., “Antiretroviral nucleosides, deoxynucleotide carrier and mitochondrial DNA: evidence supporting the DNA pol gamma hypothesis”, AIDS 20 (2006) 675-84
—Brinkman et al., “Mitochondrial toxicity induced by nucleoside-analogue reverse-transcriptase inhibitors is a key factor in the pathogenesis of antiretroviral-therapy-related lipodystrophy”, Lancet 354 (1999) 1112-5
— Chapplain et al., “Mitochondrial abnormalities in HIV-infected lipo-atrophic patients treated with antiretroviral agents”, JAIDS 37 (2004) 1477-88
— Brinkman et al., “Adverse effects of reverse transcriptase inhibitors: mitochondrial toxicity as common pathway”, AIDS 12 (1998) 1735-44
Other references in my files to mitochondrial damage by antiretroviral drugs include articles from as far back as 1995, indicting in particular the NRTIs that continue to be part of many HAART regimens:
— Lewis & Dalakas, “Mitochondrial toxicity of antiviral drugs”, Nature Medicine 1 (1995) 417-22
Later articles (including those already cited) indict not only AZT and other NRTIs but other components of HAART as well:
— Donovan (editorial), “A new challenge for the neuroradiologist: MR recognition of mitochondrial dysfunction in children born of HIV-seropositive mothers on antiretroviral therapy”, American Journal of Neuroradiology 26 (2005) 687-9, which cites the following 13 sources from as far back as 1989:
— Blanche et al., “A prospective study of infants born to women seropositive for human immunodeficiency virus type I: HIV infection in newborns — French collaborative study group”, New England Journal of Medicine 320 (1989) 1643-8
— Connor et al., “Reduction of maternal-infant transmission of human immunodeficiency virus type I with zidovudine treatment”, New England Journal of Medicine 331 (1994) 1173-80
— Munoz et al., “Mitochondrial diseases in children: neuroradiological and clinical features in 17 patients”, Neuroradiology 41 (1999) 920-8
— Blanche et al., “Persistent mitochondrial dysfunction and perinatal exposure to antiretroviral nucleoside analogues”, Lancet 354 (1999) 1084-9
— Culnane et al., “Lack of long-term effects of in utero exposure to zidovudine among uninfected children born to HIV-infected women: Pediatric AIDS Clinical Trials Group Protocol 219/076 Teams”, JAMA 281 (1999) 151-7
— Gerschenson et al., “Fetal mitochondrial heart and skeletal muscle damage in erythrocebus patas monkeys exposed to in utero to 3′-azido-3′-deoxythymidine [AZT]”, AIDS Research & Human Retroviruses 16 (2000) 635-44
— Perinatal Safety Review Working Group, “Nucleoside exposure in the children of HIV-infected women receiving antiretroviral drugs: absence of clear evidence for mitochondrial disease in children who died before 5 years of age in five United States cohorts”, JAIDS 25 (2000) 261-8
— Taylor & Low-Beer , “Antiretroviral therapy in pregnancy: a focus on safety”, Drug Safety 24 (2001) 683-702
— Mantovani & Calamandrei, “Delayed developmental effects following prenatal exposure to drugs”, Current Pharmaceutical Design 7 (2001) 859-80
— Barret et al., “Mitochondrial dysfunction in HIV uninfected children”, AIDS 17 (2003) 1769-85
— Shiramizu et al., “Placenta and cord blood mitochondrial DNA toxicity in HIV-infected women receiving nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors during pregnancy”, JAIDS 32 (2003) 370-4
— Poirier et al., “Long-term mitochondrial toxicity in HIV-uninfected infants born to HIV-infected mothers”, JAIDS 33 (2003) 175-83
— Tardieu et al., “Cerebral magnetic resonance imaging in children born to HIV seropositive mothers and perinatally exposed to zidovudine”, American Journal of Neuroradiology 26 (2005) 695-701.
And there are articles more recent than that survey as well, for example
— Saitoh et al., “Impact of Nucleoside Reverse Transcriptase Inhibitors on mitochondria in Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1-infected children receiving Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy”, Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, 51 (2007) 4236-42
— “New chemical tool kit manipulates mitochondria, reveals insights into drug toxicity”, ScienceDaily.

Connoisseurs of how to design clinical trials to get the desired results may notice among these many titles reporting damage the couple that seek to downplay it: Culnane et al. claiming — in 1999!! — “lack of long term effects” for AZT damage to fetuses; and the Perinatal Group’s “absence of clear evidence” in children who died before age 5 [my emphases]. The Culnane study reported only for a median age of 4.2, which is hardly “long term”, and 3 of 122 of those children had already shown “unexplained” adverse ophthalmic or cardiac effects. An important point about the irreversible damage to mitochondria is that it’s irreversible, affects all cells in the body, and is best described overall as premature aging, bringing greater probability of just about every type of non-infectious ailment. Lack of “clear” evidence of harm before age 5 is neither here nor there insofar as mitochondrial damage is concerned. These poor children have been irremediably harmed and robbed of any chance of a long and healthy life.

I’ve cited so many articles for several reasons; it’s easy to do because there’s such a plethora of them. The HIV/AIDS vigilantes’ typical defense, that we Rethinkers cherry-pick the literature, is utterly impossible here. Moreover, the deluge of studies finding the same thing illustrates some of the dysfunction of modern medical “science” and practice. The same things are “studied” over and over again, because the purpose is to “do research”, to earn livings through getting grants and doing research, with the production of useful knowledge to improve medical applications merely an occasional byproduct. Also illustrated is that highly reproducible results do not alter medical practice when those results contradict mainstream dogma.
For a long time, many years if not a couple of decades, it’s been known that antiretroviral treatment causes damage to mitochondria. Nevertheless, untold numbers of people, including pregnant women and babies, continue to be subjected to this iatrogenic harm.
Even in terms of mainstream dogma, this life-long damage is inflicted for absolutely no reason in many cases since the “HIV” tests have so great an incidence of undoubted false positives. (Undoubted even in mainstream terms and accepting mainstream views that HIV is real, see Weiss &Cowan, “Laboratory detection of human retroviral infection”, chapter 8 in Wormser, AIDS and Other Manifestations of HIV Infection, 2004).
It’s as though practice and “research” exist in parallel universes that rarely if ever communicate meaningfully with one another. Indeed, it seems that there’s not much meaningful communication even within the research community, since well known facts continue to be “discovered” and regarded as publishable. Thus Payne et al. appear to have discovered in 2011 that antiretroviral drugs damage the mitochondria: “Mitochondrial aging is accelerated by anti-retroviral therapy through the clonal expansion of mtDNA mutations”, Nature Genetics, published online 26 June 2011; doi:10.1038/ng.863. The 28 references given in this latest discovery of mitochondrial damage from antiretroviral drugs do not include any of those earlier discoveries of this effect that I’ve cited above.
What position does officialdom take? In particular, the Food and Drug Administration which is charged with approving drugs only if they are safe and effective? Does it act to withdraw drugs found to be toxic, to cause irreversible life-long damage that leads to premature aging and early organ failures?
Of course not:
“The problem of mitochondrial toxicity is now sufficiently well-recognized that the FDA recently released recommendations that all new antiviral drug candidates should be screened for toxicity to mitochondria” [emphasis added].
What’s needed, in other words, is more research. For example, to invent a test by which to screen potential drugs for mitochondrial toxicity:
“MitoSciences announces  that it has just been awarded $590,000 by the National Institutes of Health to support the development of companion diagnostic tests for antiviral drugs. . . . Many of these drugs are known to cause toxic side effects, often due to inhibition of mitochondrial function. . . . MitoSciences has demonstrated that its tests can identify drug toxicity early, often before outward signs of the conditions can be observed clinically.”
In the meantime, drugs already known to damage mitochondria continue to be prescribed, and there are even continual calls to make more of them available to people and countries that cannot afford to pay for them.

A **CURE** for AIDS

A simple, inexpensive, non-toxic cure for AIDS that has no negative side-effects has been described by Pacini and Ruggiero at the 6th International AIDS Conference on HIV Pathogenesis, Treatment and Prevention (Rome, 17-20 July 2011).
The basic mechanism involves stimulation of the immune system which increases CD4 counts and corrects CD4/CD8 balance, in “HIV-positive” people and also in HIV-negative people.

Note in particular that Pacini and Ruggiero obtained increases in CD4 counts
of several hundred in a few weeks
whereas the claimed benefits of anti-retroviral therapy
cite increases of only about 90 per year

Recall that AIDS was discovered and defined in the early 1980s as Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, the immune deficiency being specifically a loss of CD4 cells. Later the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defined AIDS as being “HIV-positive” with a CD4 count below 200. Therefore an increase of CD4 above that level constitutes reversion of AIDS to non-AIDS.
That a healthy immune system can withstand HIV has also been emphasized by Luc Montagnier, co-discoverer of HIV, on several occasions. Two decades ago, it was shown in Montagnier’s laboratory that in fact HIV alone is harmless to immune-system CD4 cells but that the latter may be damaged by a mycoplasma that appears to be often present in some patients.
The immune-system stimulation described by Pacini and Ruggiero appears to act in a similar fashion as yogurt-type bacteria that are among (or are similar to) the beneficial microflora found in healthy guts. This work therefore confirms the intestinal dysbiosis hypothesis of Tony Lance which explains why “AIDS” first appeared as Gay-Related Immune Deficiency, restricted to fast-lane gay men, and why gay men still tend to test “HIV-positive” more frequently than others.

Here is the Pacini-Ruggiero presentation

Italy, a new Renaissance, and the need for slower science

In “Medical students in Italy need not fear ‘HIV’ when dissecting cadavers”  I had occasion to write,
“Many centuries ago, the European Renaissance was born in Florence, Italy. The modern renaissance of evidence-based, non-dogmatic medical science may now be incubating there as well, with deconstruction of the misleading HIV/AIDS hypothesis which represents a true danger to global public health.”

Just now I received the latest newsletter of the group, New Concepts in Global Tectonics, and saw that Rethinking of plate-tectonics theory is also being given a hearing at a conference in Italy. Note that the organizers have invited representatives of the mainstream to engage those who are seeking to revive the concept of an expanding Earth as an alternative to movement of tectonic plates (only approximating to movement of continents). Expanding-Earth theory was quite mainstream half-a-century or so ago before being eclipsed by plate tectonics, which seemed to be supported by the discovery of mid-ocean ridges that push apart the sea floor on both sides of the ridges. But, of course, that would also happen if the Earth were expanding and opening cracks in the sea floor. Both theories rely for mechanism on the accepted fact that heat is being generated inside the Earth, partly or wholly because of the decay of radioactive substances. Most substances expand when they are heated. . . .

While I’m singing the praises of contemporary Italy’s open-minded evidence-based approach to science, I might mention too the decade-old Democracy and Science conferences, publications, and website .
Italy has also hosted several meetings on “cold fusion”, now increasingly being called LENR (low-energy nuclear reactions) or CMNS (condensed-matter nuclear science). Italian scientists are among those who have been actively studying this enigmatic phenomena and periodically appearing to have some worthwhile successes, e.g. “Italian cold fusion saga continues with new papers released”.  It is not widely realized how strong is the evidence that LENR is real, albeit not yet defined or fully reproducible. A couple of years ago, the investigative TV program “60 Minutes” featured an independent measurement expert, formerly skeptical about the phenomenon, who judged it to be real after reviewing experiments done in Israel. I’ve been particularly interested in these claims since I was an electrochemist in my former career and had spent a sabbatical year at the University of Southampton, which had one of the leading electrochemistry labs in the world where one of the professors was Martin Fleischmann who had been the first, in 1989, to announce the discovery of “cold fusion”.

The New Concepts in Global Tectonics group is based in Australia. Perhaps serious evidence-based non-dogmatic science will find footholds primarily outside the high-stakes circumstances of the United States. The intense pressure to get research funding, to commercialize, to attain visibility, to do things fast has brought conflicts of interest and dysfunction to the extent that contemporary science has become a matter of dogma and research cartels.  Just a few days ago there were exchanges on the Internet about the need to slow things down, to give science time to attain reliability instead of rushing headlong in thoughtless pursuit of every new fad. Several years ago the Robert Bosch Foundation issued a manifesto to that effect; here is an English translation of that manifesto.
An encouraging aspect of the Bosch Foundation paper is that its signatories cover such a range of intellectual spheres. Within the small academic sect of science studies, these matters have of course been noted for many years. An early essay was by the founder of citation analysis, Eugene Garfield: “Fast science vs. slow science, or slow and steady wins the race”, The Scientist, 17 September 1990,  p. 14 (reprinted in Essays of an Information Scientist: Science Reviews, Journalism Inventiveness and Other Essays, 14 [1991] 380.
John Ziman had pointed out long ago that any research organization requires ‘‘generous measures’’ of
► room for personal initiative and creativity;
► time for ideas to grow to maturity;
► openness to debate and criticism;
► hospitality toward novelty;
► respect for specialized expertise (Prometheus Bound, 1994, p. 276).
The problems stemming from commercialization and other pressures were discussed in my essay “Science in the 21st Century: Knowledge Monopolies and Research Cartels” (Journal of Scientific Exploration 18 (#4, 2004) 643-60)  which also includes my formulation of the progress of science as a knowledge filter that requires time to winnow reliable stuff from the unreliable (see Scientific Literacy and the Myth of the Scientific Method, 1992/1994)
A book-length discussion of all this is in process of publication as Dogmatism in Science and Medicine.