>> HIV, the virus the government says causes AIDS.
Davon C. Enigl said:
>Scientists...first said HIV causes AIDS, not "governments." ...The
governments only
>adopted what the scientists proved via the peer review process.
Robert Gallo and his employer, the Department of Health and Human Services held
a press conference on April 23, 1984, more than a week BEFORE Gallo's papers
were to be
printed in the journal Science. The Secretary of HHS, Margaret Heckler,
sponsored this
huge event and introduced Gallo to the press. Backed by the prestige of the
government,
she officially declared this virus was the probable cause of AIDS. Before
any paper had
been published in a peer reviewed journal. Before any other scientist could
review and
comment on Gallo's claim, the government had decided the matter. Had other
researchers
been free to examine Gallo's papers for themselves, they might have pointed
out that some of his AIDS patients had never been infected by the virus.
They might have pointed out that no virus had been found in ANY of Gallo's
AIDS patients, but only antibodies
against it.
>Using Koch's postulates HIV was shown to cause AIDS. The "dissidents" have
not shown
>the contrary.
Hardly. Leading AIDS researchers have acknowledged that HIV fails Koch's
postulates as the cause of AIDS. For example: Gallo, R.C.,
Virus-Hunting-AIDS, Cancer and the Human Retrovirus: A Story of Scientific
Discovery, Basic Books, NY 1991; or Blatner, W.A., R.C. Gallo, and H.M.
Temin. HIV causes AIDS. Science 241 (1988):514-515; or Weiss, R. and H.
Jaffe. Duesberg, HIV and AIDS. Nature (London) 345 (1990) 659-660.
Nevertheless, they have argued that the failure of HIV to meet Koch's
postulates invalidates these postulates rather than invalidating HIV as the
cause of AIDS. For example, Gallo in his 1991 book said:
"Rules were needed than, and can be helpful now, but not if they are too
blindly followed. Robert Koch, a great microbiologist, has suffered from a
malady that affects many other great men: he has been taken too literally
and too seriously for too long...Koch's Postulates, while continuing to be
an excellent teaching device, are far from absolute in the real world
outside the classroom." (Gallo, Virus-Hunting...page 277)
But Koch's postulates consist of elementary logic. Whereas technology is
continually being outdated, logic is permanent. Koch's rules, after all,
simply restate the germ theory itself in experimental terms. Gallo never
tries to explain how logic would change over time, nor does Gallo offer any
rigorous scientific rules to replace Koch's Postulates.
Koch's 1st postulate is that the microbe must be found in all cases of the
disease.
Robert Koch explicitly said a casual germ would be found in high
concentrations in the
patient and distributed in the diseased tissues. If HIV were actively
infecting T-cells then cell-free virus particles, called virions, should be
easily found circulating in the blood. This is the case with all classical
viral diseases: Patients with Hepatitus B will have about 10 million free
virus particles per milliliter of blood; Flu-like symptoms will appear only
in the presence of 1 million rhinovirus particles per milliliter of nasal
mucous. HIV, like other retroviruses, can achieve high levels of virus when
first infecting the body (up to 100,000 particles per milliliter of blood),
but in most people HIV is then permanently inactivated by the antibodies
generated against it.
Retroviruses do not typically kill their host cells. In 1984, in Science,
Gallo said HIV kills T-cells and that is the cause of AIDS. Yet HIV is grown
in cultures of T-cells where, away from the antibodies to inhibit it, it
reaches levels of 1,000,000 virus particles per milliliter without killing
T-cells. If it doesn't kill T-cells then, how is it going to do it when it
is suppressed to nearly undetectable levels by antibody?
Pathogenic virus typically cause disease as a consequence of infecting,
replicating in, and killing more cells than a host can regenerate or spare.
Complete proviral HIV has only been demonstrated in one in several thousand
peripheral blood monocular cells (in both asymptomatic and symptomatic
persons), and HIV RNA is detected in 1 tp 10,000 to 1 in 100,000 such cells
(Simmonds et al., J. Virol. 64:864, 1990). Yet 5% of the body's
T-cells are regenerated in the two days it takes HIV to establish an
infection (Guyton,
Textbook of Medical Physiology, 1987, WB Saunders, Phil.).
Viruses typically cause disease shortly after infection, before the immune
system of their host can respond. There is no other example of a viral
pathogen which causes primary disease only after long and unpredictable
latent periods, and only in the presence of neutralizing antibodies, as HIV
is said to do.
Koch's second postulate: The microbe must be isolated from the host and
grown in culture. This postulate was designed to prove that a given disease
was caused by a particular germ, rather than by some undetermined mixture of
noninfectious substances. HIV has been isolated and is now grown
continuously in HIV research labs. This rule therefore has technically
fulfilled, but only in some instances.
Since free virus is rarely found in AIDS victims, HIV can be retrieved only
from the great majority of them by reactivating the latent form of the
virus. Millions of white blood cells must be taken from the patient and
grown in culture dishes for weeks, during which time chemical stimulants
that shock cells into growing or mutating are added to awaken any dormant
HIV from within its host cells. Given enough patience and plenty of
repetition such procedure, a single intact virus can eventually be
activated, at which point it starts infecting the remaining cultured cells.
Yet even this powerful method does not yield active virus from many AIDS
cases that have confirmed antibodies against HIV.
Koch's third postulate: The microbe must reproduce the original disease when
introduced into a susceptible host. This condition can be tested in one of
three ways: infection of laboratory animals, accidental and natural
infection of humans, or by vaccination experiments. HIV fails all three
tests. (data available upon request, check "Inventing the AIDS Virus" by
Duesberg, page 182)
Duesberg argues that AIDS is not infectious. Gallo and the CDC says it is.
Based on common characteristics of all orthodox infections, infectious AIDS
would be predicted to:
1. Spread randomly between the sexes.
2. Cause primary disease within weeks or months after infection, because
infectious agents multiply exponentially in susceptible hosts until stopped
by immunity. They are self-replicating, and thus fast-acting, toxins. Slow
pathogenicity by a neutralized virus has never been experimentally proven.
3. Coincide with a common, active and abundant microbe in all cases of the
same disease. (Inactive microbes or microbes at low concentrations are
harmless passengers,e.g. lysogenic bacteriophages, endogenous and latent
retroviruses, latent herpes, etc.. Hibernation is a proven microbal
strategy of survival, which allows indefinite coexistence with the host
without pathogenicity.)
4. Lyse or render nonfunctional more cells than the host can spare of
regenerate.
5. Generate a predictable pattern of symptoms.
By contrast noninfectious AIDS, caused by tozins, would be predicted to:
1. Spread nonrandomly, according to exposure to toxins.
2. Follow intoxication after variable intervals as determined by lifetime
dosage and personal thresholds for disease.
3. Manifest toxin- and intoxication-site-specific diseases, e.g., cigarettes
causing lung cancer and alcohol causing liver cirrhosis.
AIDS is incompatible with classical criteria of infectious disease:
1. Unlike conventional infectious diseases, including venereal diseases,
American/European AIDS is nonrandomly (90%) restricted to males, although no
AIDS disease is male specific.
2. HIV is said to cause AIDS only after a peculiar latent period. There is
no precedent for an infectious agent that causes primary diseases on average
only 10 years after transfusion in adults and only after 2 years in
children. The diversity of these latent periods is inconsistent with one
infectious agent and their magnitude is characteristic for diseases caused
by chronic exposure to toxic substances.
3. There is no common, predictable pattern of AIDS symptoms in patients of
different risk groups. Instead, different risk groups have their own
characteristic AIDS diseases.
In response to these arguments, Goudsmit, a proponent of the HIV AIDS
hypothesis, confirmed "AIDS does not have the characteristics of an ordinary
infectious disease. This view is incontrovertible." (Goudsmit, J.,
Alternative View on AIDS. Lancet 339 (1992):1289-1290.) Likewise,
epidemiologists Eggers and Weyer conclude that "the spread of AIDS does not
behave like the spread of a disease that is caused by a single sexually
transmitted agent." (Eggers, H.J. and J.J. Weyer. Linkage and independence
of AIDS Kaposi disease: the interaction of HIV and some coagents. Infection.
19(1991):115-122.
>HIV causes AIDS is scientifically supportable....
HIV=AIDS violates many established principles of virology, including Kochs
postulates and Farr's law. You mention that you are a microbiologist. When
the government announced that HIV was the probable cause of AIDS, they said
they would have a vaccine in 2 years. A vaccine would give you antibody to
HIV. Today, if I walk into a doctors office and test positive for antibody
to HIV, it is bad news. If the government developed a vaccine, and then I
walked into a doctors office and tested positive for antibody, would that be
good news or bad? How would the doctor know if the antibody I had was from
the vaccine (presumably good news), or the antibody that today is bad news?
Best Regards,
Pat Fallon
pfallon@bigfoot.com