-Caveat Lector- see this url for the whole document: http://www.virusmyth.com/aids/data/pdpolicy.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- HIV has not been shown to cause disease when injected experimentally into chimpanzees, nor when accidentally injected into human health care workers, even though the virus successfully infects those hosts. If for ethical or other reasons this third postulate cannot be tested from some particular germ, strong alternative evidence has to be provided by specific therapies that neutralize the microbe and thereby prevent the disease; such therapies would include antibiotics or vaccines. However, no therapies or antibodies against HIV have been able to prevent AIDS diseases, although new drugs and vaccines are continually being proposed. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The burden of such proof is therefore on those who claim that HIV causes AIDS, as noted by Beverly Griffin, director of the Department of Virology at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School in London. This burden is especially high for HIV hypothesis supporters in view of the special characteristics that had to be attributed to HIV in order to connect it with AIDS. First, the virus had to be credited with a latent period of several years between infection and AIDS. But when diseases are said to occur only years after infection by a virus, it can be difficult to be sure that other risk factors have not instead caused the disease. Second, because HIV is conspicuously absent form lesions, scientists had to hypothesize that the virus caused disease by indirect means in the body, in spite of a troubling lack of evidence for such notions. Inventions such as these can be used to blame virtually any microbe for any disease. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- A second set of criticisms of the HIV hypothesis concerns the clinical definition of AIDS. This definition involves a list created by the CDC in 1987 of about 25 conventional diseases; if any one of these is diagnosed, and antibodies against HIV can be found in the same patient, a diagnosis of AIDS is made. The list includes not only Kaposi's sarcoma and P. carinii pneumonia, but also tuberculosis, cytomegalovirus, herpes, diarrhea, candidiasis, lymphoma, dementia, and many other diseases. If any of these very different diseases is found alone, it is likely to be diagnosed under its classical name. If the same conditions is found alongside antibodies against HIV, it is called AIDS. The correlation between AIDS and HIV is thus an artifact of the definition itself. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- It is very difficult to understand how HIV would be able to devastate the immune system while never infecting more than a tiny fraction of its cells. Even if every infected cell were killed, the number of T cells lost at any time would be roughly equivalent to the number lost through bleeding from shaving. Such losses could be sustained indefinitely without affecting the immune system, because the body constantly produces new T cells at far higher rates. Virtually no reactivation of the virus occurs when AIDS patients develop sickness, leaving unexplained how the virus could possibly case immune suppression, and then only after years of latency. After the body produces antibodies against HIV, the virus remains at low levels for the rest of that person's life, precisely the same as for all viruses of its class. This would help to explain why transmitting HIV is typically so difficult; antibody-positive people have almost no virus to spread. ----------------------------------------------------------------------A fourth paradox of the HIV hypothesis has been noted by several virologists. HIV belongs to a class of viruses known as the retroviruses, which are very simple in structure and contain much less genetic information than most other viruses. Most types of viruses are lytic, meaning that they kill the cells they infect and thereby cause disease. Retroviruses, on the other hand, do not generally kill cells. Upon infecting cells, they copy their genetic information into the DNA of their new host cells. From that point forward, retroviruses depend on allowing their host cells to continue living, while they slowly produce new virus particles that are ejected from the cell. Retroviruses are therefore poor candidates to blame serious diseases on, particularly fatal conditions involving the deaths of huge numbers of cells, such as AIDS. Indeed, some 50 to 100 latent retroviruses have been found to reside in the DNA of all humans, passed along to each successive generation for as long as human beings have existed. ----------------------------------------------------------------------Bialy also points out the misinterpretations made of animal models. Simian (monkey) AIDS, for example, does not actually resemble human AIDS. The animals do not develop a wide spectrum of diseases, not do they suffer any conditions even remotely similar to Kaposi's sarcoma or dementia. There is no long latent period between infection by Simian Immunodeficiency Virus and the development of sickness. The animals become sick within days or weeks after infection, or not all. The sickness sometimes developed in these animals by such viruses resembles more the flu-like conditions occasionally observed in humans shortly after infection by HIV. Such viruses cause fatal animal only when they are present in large amounts, and only in highly susceptible inbred animals kept in laboratory conditions. ----------------------------------------------------------------------The situation in Africa is even more puzzling and casts further doubt on the HIV hypothesis. Most of the media publicity in America on AIDS in Africa is based on the large extent of HIV infection, not on the extent of AIDS cases themselves. Nonetheless, although HIV infection appears to be extremely widespread, present in many areas in 10 to 15 percent of the population, the total number of AIDS cases so far reported in the entire continent of Africa amounts to merely 41,000. Proponents of the HIV hypothesis often try to argue that this low figure is the result of under reporting of AIDS cases. Even in Uganda, however, which has a reputation for conscientious reporting, 800,000 people are HIV positive, but only 10,000 are reported to have died of AIDS. A paper and accompanying editorial in the July 25, 1987, issue of the British medical journal "The Lancet" argued that AIDS in Africa is actually not a major epidemic; the paper was written by a doctor from Cromwell Hospital in London, Felix Konotey-Ahulu, who had just returned from an extensive investigative tour of the areas of Africa with the most AIDS cases. ----------------------------------------------------------------------A critical question about the role of HIV is how it is associated with the various AIDS diseases. One widespread impression holds that many of the AIDS diseases were extremely rare before 1980, and only began reappearing with the presumed introduction of HIV. In reality, not only have all 25 of these AIDS conditions existed for decades at a low level in the population, but HIV-free instances of the same diseases are still being diagnosed today. These diseases are actually increasing in parallel with their HIV-associated counterparts. A letter by CDC researchers in the January 20 issue of "The Lancet" reports the existence of male homosexuals with Kaposi's sarcoma but without HIV. Robert Root-Bernstein, MacArthur fellow and associate professor of physiology at Michigan State University, also published a paper in "The Lancet", of April 25, in which he reviewed the existing literature on the incidence of Kaposi's prior to AIDS. Since the first recognition of this condition in 1872, a number of cases have been reported each year in the United States and Europe. Many of these were in people under 50 years of age, or even in children-not just in older men, as originally thought. A number of these cases were fatal. Some cases were associated with blood transfusions or with pneumonia, although many were apparently not connected with any other conditions. Root-Bernstein concluded that during the 1970's approximately 100 U. S. cases of Kaposi's per year could have been diagnosed as AIDS. However, Kaposi's sarcoma was not a disease reportable to medical officials before AIDS, and these cases were therefore not recognized. Kaposi's was only noticed once it was found clustered in young homosexual men in 1980-81. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- If a number of scientists and medical physicians do not believe HIV is likely to play any significant role in AIDS, what do they consider the true cause to be? For the most part, the alternative views of AIDS can be grouped together as the "risk hypothesis" of AIDS-that the AIDS diseases are entirely separate conditions caused by a variety of factors, most of which have in common only that they involve risk behavior. This view does not see AIDS as being a transmissible condition at all. Nevertheless, a risk hypothesis must explain the recent increases in the various AIDS diseases, and why these have all been concentrated in particular risk groups. During at least the past decade, the incidence of these 25 conventional diseases has increased dramatically among groups in which they were previously rare. Kaposi's sarcoma may actually be the most clearly understandable of the AIDS conditions. As noted above, it has existed at low levels in the population for as long as it has been recognized. Undoubtedly, various unidentified factors play roles in bringing on this condition. But the relatively recent clustering of Kaposi's in homosexuals may be due to their group-specific use of nitrite inhalants, or "poppers." These aphrodisiac drugs became popular in the active homosexual community during the 1970's. Use of these inhalants began declining after they were suggested as a possible cause of AIDS, and that behavior change has been followed by a corresponding decline in the incidence of Kaposi's. Early tests on animals also implicated these inhalants in Kaposi's. In fact, this evidence of the dangers of nitrite inhalants prompted Congress to ban the nonprescription use of these drugs in 1988. While these nitrites were officially dropped from consideration as a cause of AIDS because they were not associated with all the AIDS diseases, they should be strongly reconsidered as agents specific to Kaposi's sarcoma. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- If the virus-AIDS hypothesis is wrong and the risk hypothesis correct, several important conclusions follow. The most urgent of these concerns the current therapy officially approved for AIDS, the drug zidovudine (AZT). The hope is that AZT, by preventing the copying of DNA within cells, will prevent the multiplication of HIV in the host. However, by doing this the drug also kills all actively growing cells in the patient; chief among these are the cells of the immune system. This becomes deadly in light of the risk-AIDS hypothesis; inhibiting HIV would accomplish nothing, while AZT actually produces the very immune suppression it is supposed to prevent. The effectiveness of AZT at this task is demonstrated by the fact that it was first designed in the 1960s for the purpose of fighting immune system cancers, by killing the rapidly multiplying, cancerous immune cells; AZT was finally shelved because treated leukemic mice in laboratory studies died as quickly as those not given AZT. . Some symptoms of AZT toxicity, such as muscle disease and anemia, resemble those of full-blown AIDS cases. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- see also: http://www.virusmyth.com/aids/controversy.htm ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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