The Drug-AIDS hypothesis — a footnote

Peter Duesberg is usually credited with the “Drug-AIDS hypothesis”, namely, that AIDS was not and is not caused by HIV but is caused primarily by “recreational” and antiretroviral drugs [1].

Gordon Stewart had observed in the 1960s that drug addicts showed the same symptoms as were ascribed a couple of decades later to “AIDS” [2].

Nowadays, it is presumed that drug abusers contract “HIV” by sharing infected needles, as though the contents of the needles were harmless. My footnote refers to a review [3] of Breaking Night by Liz Murray: Murray’s parents were lifelong drug abusers who “usually burned through their monthly welfare check within a week, spending the money on cocaine”. Murray’s mother “died of AIDS at 42”. No “HIV” was needed, rather obviously.

So nowadays one cannot die just from drug abuse, it must be “AIDS”.

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[1] Duesberg, Koehnlein, & Rasnick, The chemical bases of the various AIDS epidemics: recreational drugs, anti-viral chemotherapy and malnutrition, Journal of Bioscience, 28 (2003) 383-412
[2] Neville Hodgkinson, AIDS: The failure of contemporary science, Fourth Estate, 1996, p.103
[3] Tara McKelvey, Unsentimental education — review of Breaking Night, New York Times Book Review, 12 September 2012, p. 16

“HIV/AIDS” in Estonia: Demographics and Shibboleths

The role of drugs — the “Drug-AIDS” or “Chemical-AIDS” hypothesis
In an earlier post, Estonian data were cited in support of the view that the majority of so-called “HIV” and “AIDS” cases there — and by extension in much of Europe and Asia — are really cases of people having become ill through abuse of “recreational” drugs. That becoming ill is a plausible consequence of such abuse hardly needs to be proved (except perhaps to aficionados of the HIV/AIDS orthodoxy), but its specific plausibility in the Estonian circumstances is underscored by these facts from Tallinn, capital of Estonia, gathered  because of the brief epidemic of drug abuse in the early 2000s (1):
·    Drug abuse (without injecting) started at an average age of 16.3 (median 16.0, range 9-40)
·    Injecting of drugs started at an average age of 18.7  (median 18.0, range 10-42)
·    Duration of drug abuse  averaged 7.9 years (SD 4.4)
·    Frequency of drug abuse averaged 22 days (median 28) in every 28 days (4 weeks), and >60% injected daily, an average of 3 times per day
·    At least one overdose had been experienced by two thirds of the addicts
·    One third supported themselves and their habit through theft.

It is rather difficult to imagine that this behavior could be rendered health-supporting by the provision of clean needles, which is the approach recommended by HIV/AIDS gurus. After all, 8 years of imbibing drugs, 3 times daily and occasionally at overdose- or near-overdose levels, is not highly recommended even for such non-prescription medications as acetaminophen.

More than 1300 of the new “HIV” cases in Estonia in 2001 were drug addicts, and something like 2000 of the >4400 “HIV” cases (38-63%) from 2002 to 2007. It’s rather remarkable that this led to no more than a total of 212 deaths from “HIV disease” by 2008. Perhaps this high survival rate reflects the very young age at which drug abuse typically started, teenagers and young adults being able to withstand all sorts of physiological insults — for a few years.

The median age for “HIV” diagnoses increased from 20.3 to 27.8 among males, and from 18.4 to 25.6 among females, between 2000 and 2007, consistent with a decreasing proportion of diagnoses being among drug addicts, who started abusing in their teens. Overall, the median age (through 2007) for an “AIDS” diagnosis was just under 30, quite consistent with the ill-health effects of an average of 8 years of drug abuse beginning in the teens (2).

Demographics: Age and Sex
One of the demographic features that had convinced me that “HIV-positive” does not represent an infectious condition is the manner in which the tendency to test positive varies with age and sex in every tested group for which I found data:

The Estonian numbers show (qualitatively or perhaps semi-quantitatively) the same variations: the male-to-female ratio is 1.4 at ages 0-19, 2.5 at 20-24, 3.6 at 25-29, 3.4 at 30-34, and 2.5 for ≥35.

That is surely remarkable, given that the Estonian data come from a population in which drug abusers constitute the majority whereas the American data come from populations where drug abusers comprise a very small percentage only. This supports my hypothesis that the tendency to test “HIV-positive” is strongly influenced by normal variations with age and by sex of whatever the physiological conditions are that stimulate an “HIV-positive” response.

Shibboleths — Synergy of HIV and STDs?
One of the hoary shibboleths of HIV/AIDS lore is that the presence of a sexually transmitted infection makes it more likely that one will contract “HIV” upon exposure, and vice versa (CDC Fact Sheets for trichomonas, gonorrhea, chlamydia, syphilis):
“The genital inflammation caused by trichomoniasis can increase a woman’s susceptibility to HIV infection if she is exposed to the virus. Having trichomoniasis may increase the chance that an HIV-infected woman passes HIV to her sex partner(s).”
“Gonorrhea can spread to the blood or joints. This condition can be life threatening. In addition, people with gonorrhea can more easily contract HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. HIV-infected people with gonorrhea can transmit HIV more easily to someone else than if they did not have gonorrhea.”
“Women infected with chlamydia are up to five times more likely to become infected with HIV, if exposed.”
“Genital sores (chancres) caused by syphilis make it easier to transmit and acquire HIV infection sexually. There is an estimated 2- to 5-fold increased risk of acquiring HIV if exposed to that infection when syphilis is present. . . . Ulcerative STDs that cause sores, ulcers, or breaks in the skin or mucous membranes, such as syphilis, disrupt barriers that provide protection against infections. The genital ulcers caused by syphilis can bleed easily, and when they come into contact with oral and rectal mucosa during sex, increase the infectiousness of and susceptibility to HIV. Having other STDs is also an important predictor for becoming HIV infected because STDs are a marker for behaviors associated with HIV transmission.”

One would therefore be inclined to expect that incidence of “HIV” and of these known STDs would show a distinct correlation. Not in Estonia, however:

In Estonia, “HIV” correlates strongly with the incidence of drug abuse and not with the incidence of sexually transmitted infections.

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Sources:
(1) Prevalence of HIV and Other Infections and Risk Behaviour among Injecting Drug Users in Latvia, Lithuania And Estonia In 2007, http://www2.tai.ee/TAI/PREVALENCE_OF_HIV_AND_OTHER_INFECTIONS_AND_RISK_BEHAVIOUR_eng_2009.pdf, accessed 24 July 2009
(2) Calculations based on Tables 2 and 17 in Report on HIV/AIDS through 31 December 2007, http://www2.tai.ee/uuringud/HIV_AIDS/HIV_AIDS_arvudes_12_06_2008.pdf, accessed 24 July 2009.

Estonian drug addicts don’t have much sex

Actually it’s not only in Estonia, it’s throughout the Slavic world, indeed throughout all of Eastern Europe and as far as northern Asia.

More than a year ago, this remarkable fact was revealed in the specialist literature (Cohen et al., Journal of Clinical Investigation, 118 [2008] 1244-54) by some of the leading experts on HIV/AIDS including Kevin De Cock, director of the World Health Organization’s Division of HIV/AIDS, and several others like Jay Levy who have also been prominent researchers of the “epidemic” since it was first invented. They pointed out [HIV/AIDS ILLUSTRATES COGNITIVE DISSONANCE, 29 April 2008] that in Eastern Europe, about 85% of “HIV-infected” people are injecting drug users, about 5-10% are gay men, and the remaining <10% engage in casual sex. This is in stark contrast to the hotter regions of the globe — in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, fully 50% of “HIV-infected” engage in marital sex; in Latin America and the Caribbean, >60% engage in gay sex but <10% in either marital sex or casual sex.

Of course, these prominent experts expressed the facts in euphemistic form, as though it were that 85% of the “transmission” of “HIV” occurred in Eastern Europe via shared infected needles; but the alert observer will nevertheless have discerned the clear inference that these “infected” drug addicts very rarely have casual or gay sex, since so little “transmission” occurs in that way. (That the categories “MSM” — men who have sex with men — and “Casual sex” were given by Cohen et al. as distinct is no doubt a subtle way of making the politically correct point that gay sex is never casual.)

Through the good offices of a friend in Estonia, I was able to obtain (together with needed translations) data on “HIV” and “AIDS” in that country. Fully confirmed is the finding of Cohen et al. that the “epidemic” of HIV/AIDS is restricted to injecting drug users to such a degree that these individuals must refrain from sex to an extraordinary extent; whether this is because of an altruistic desire not to spread “HIV”, or to the debilitating effects of the drugs, is not mentioned in any of the literature that I have so far seen. The fact, however, is quite clear, and moreover was confirmed by Kevin De Cock when he stated recently that there would never be an epidemic of heterosexually transmitted “HIV” outside Africa:
“A 25-year health campaign was misplaced. . . . there will be no generalised epidemic of AIDS in the heterosexual population outside Africa”
[WHO SAYS that WE’VE BEEN VERY WRONG about HIV and AIDS? (Clue: WHO = World Health Organization), 10 June 2008 ].

At any rate, here are some of the official data from Estonia. Note first, by the way, that if “HIV” is not a threat in Estonia, then it certainly isn’t a threat in Europe or Northern Asia either, because those regions are even less affected than Estonia (1):

In Estonia, “HIV” was absent or negligible until about 2000, and since 2005 the incidence has seemed stable at about 0.05% (~650 in a population of ~1.3 million). The incidence of AIDS is more than an order of magnitude less than that; and deaths from “HIV disease” seem to have been steady in the last few years at less than 50 out of more than 15,000 deaths from all causes — about 0.3% of all deaths, which is roughly half of the rate in the United States.

The great majority of both HIV and AIDS cases have occurred in drug addicts: 111 of the 191 AIDS cases, 1992-2007, and  between 38% (in 2007)  and 90% (in 2001) of new HIV cases (1). Moreover, up to 40% of all AIDS-related  deaths are actually due to TB (WHO 2006, cited in [1]).

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THINK

“HIV” is diagnosed by tests that react “positive” under a great variety of conditions, from as unthreatening as flu vaccination to as threatening as malaria or tuberculosis. Drug abuse is unquestionably a health challenge, to put it at its euphemistically absurd mildest. Which is a more likely explanation for the minuscule rate of “HIV” and “AIDS” in Estonia:

1. “HIV” detected in Estonia is an infectious pathogen spread via blood, sex, and infected needles;
or
2. “HIV” in Estonia represents “positive” tests reflecting everything from vaccination to tuberculosis, but especially (and in most cases) the damage to health caused by drug abuse.

Obviously explanation 2 is far more plausible. In further support, THINK about how shared needling could possibly bring about the sort of brief “epidemic” displayed in the Estonian data. It’s the same sort of situation as I’ve pointed to before in connection with the “outbreaks” of “HIV-positive” babies born to HIV-negative mothers in several places [HIV/AIDS in Italy—and “NEEDLE ZERO”, 11 October 2008; “’Needle ZERO’ again; or, HIV pops up magically out of nowhere”, 15 November 2008]. Where and how did the original infected needle acquire its deadly burden, a burden which cannot long survive outside body fluids?

To my mind, the data supports the “chemical AIDS” hypothesis as an explanation for the great majority of Estonian “HIV” and “AIDS” reports; as does the situation in Italy [HIV/AIDS in Italy—and “NEEDLE ZERO”, 11 October 2008; “Needle ZERO” again; or, HIV pops up magically out of nowhere, 15 November 2008; Official Italian data: no causal connection between HIV and AIDS, 12 July 2009; Italian analysis of HIV/AIDS data, 17 July 2009].

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Sources
(1) Prevalence of HIV and Other Infections and Risk Behaviour among Injecting Drug Users in Latvia, Lithuania And Estonia In 2007, http://www2.tai.ee/TAI/PREVALENCE_OF_HIV_AND_OTHER_INFECTIONS_AND_RISK_BEHAVIOUR_eng_2009.pdf, accessed 24 July 2009
(2) Report on HIV/AIDS through 31 December 2007, http://www2.tai.ee/uuringud/HIV_AIDS/HIV_AIDS_arvudes_12_06_2008.pdf, accessed 24 July 2009
(3) http://pub.stat.ee/px-web.2001/I_Databas/Population/03Vital_events/06Deaths/06Deaths.asp, accessed 24 July 2009

or, HIV pops up magically out of nowhere, 15 November 2008