AIDS: Scientific or Viral Catastrophe? - part 2

Similar high hopes, followed by disillusionment, accompanied a "hit hard, hit early" policy introduced in 1996 – a policy of attacking the virus with cocktails of several antiviral drugs, including a group called protease inhibitors. Stories abounded of AIDS patients rising from their sickbeds like Lazarus, and there were proud boasts that HIV was on the run at last. But as with AZT, this was more wishful thinking than sound science. People with AIDS suffer many viral and other infections, and the drug cocktails gave relief to some of these, but giving the drugs to people simply on the basis of their “HIV” positivity was to prove another disaster. For several years it was left to the dissident network to report unexpected deaths on the drugs, but eventually the “hit hard, hit early” policy was reversed in February 2001 US Government guidelines acknowledging "unanticipated toxicities".[77] Drug companies were also ordered to stop advertising their antiviral drugs with images that imply they cure AIDS (such as photographs of “robust individuals engaged in strenuous physical activity”) or reduce its transmission. This reversal came a year after an article by American journalist Celia Farber that began, "In 1996 a scientist claimed he'd found a way to defeat AIDS. In the wave of euphoria that followed, a batch of new drugs flooded the market. Four years later, those drugs are wreaking unimaginable horror on the patients who dared to hope. What went wrong?"[78] The article was reluctantly accepted as accurate by veteran AIDS activist Larry Kramer, previously a strong advocate of the anti-viral drug approach as a means of tackling AIDS.

Treatment guidelines published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in July 2002[79] acknowledge that “The future of antiretroviral therapy rests with the development of new drugs that will result in simpler, more effective, and less toxic regimens along with development of an improved understanding of innate immune system responses.” The authors assert in the first paragraph of this document that “potent antiretroviral therapy has resulted in dramatic reductions in morbidity and mortality, and health care utilization”, and offer three references to this claim. But according to Dr David Rasnick, an organic chemist who worked in the US pharmaceutical industry for more than 20 years, all three references are to observational studies and not to actual clinical trials. “This is crucial,” he writes. “Only clinical trials can show whether or not drugs actually work. To date, there are no drug clinical trials that show people taking the anti-HIV drugs live longer or at least better lives than a similar group of HIV-positive people not taking the drugs.”[80]

Some of the most experienced mainstream AIDS researcher/clinicians, as well as dissidents such as Rasnick, had long predicted that “hoopla” over antiviral drugs could lead to disappointment and danger. Jay Levy, M.D., a professor in the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, commented in 1996: “…get any virologist aside and they’ll say this is not how we are going to win, it’s high time we look at the immune system”.[81] Two years later he wrote: “These drugs can be toxic and can be directly detrimental to a natural immune response to HIV. This effective antiviral immune response is characteristic of long-term survivors who have not been on any therapy.”[82] Donald Abrams, professor of medicine at San Francisco General Hospital, revealed in a 1996 interview: “In contrast with many of my colleagues, I am not necessarily a cheer-leader for anti-retroviral therapy. I have been one of the people who’s questioned, from the beginning, whether or not we’re really making an impact with HIV drugs and, if we are making an impact, if it’s going in the right direction…I have a large population of people who have chosen not to take any antiretrovirals. They’ve watched all of their friends go on the antiviral bandwagon and die, so they’ve chosen to remain naïve [to therapy]. More and more, however, are now succumbing to pressure that protease inhibitors are ‘it’. We are in the middle of the honeymoon period, and whether or not this is going to be an enduring marriage is unclear to me at this time.”[83] The marriage should by now have been annulled but it is immensely hard for physicians to acknowledge that they could have been harming their patients, and it is also difficult for “HIV” experts to lose such an important plank in their defence of the beleaguered virus theory of AIDS.

Alive & Well AIDS Alternatives is a support and research organisation founded in the US by a group of people diagnosed HIV-positive “who live in health without AIDS drugs and without fear of illness”.[84] Christine Maggiore, the founder, a former awareness educator for prominent AIDS groups, began to scrutinize AIDS science after a series of tests she took fluctuated between HIV-positive, negative, and indeterminate. In line with Abrams’s observation, she had also noticed that her ill and dying colleagues were the ones following doctor’s orders. She says that carefully considered choices “keep me and hundreds of other unmedicated HIV positives defiantly alive and well”.[85] The organisation supports a growing network of groups and affiliates in America, Brazil, Canada, Kenya, Namibia, Nigeria, Mexico, South Africa and Zambia.

A face-saving shred of benefit for the HIV belief system seemed to have been found when it was shown that use of AZT in pregnancy could cause fewer children to be born testing positive. However, since we do not know the meaning of "HIV" antibodies, we do not know what this means in terms of the babies' health. Rasnick, who for several years has been the most active of the US AIDS “dissidents”, told President Mbeki’s inquiry into AIDS science in South Africa in July 2000 that he had "scoured the literature" for evidence of tangible benefit, with zero results.[86] Several studies have shown harm, including a major Italian survey which found that children born to mothers treated with AZT in pregnancy were more likely to get severely sick and die by the age of three than those whose mothers were left untreated.[87] AZT’s proven toxicities include severe muscle pain, weakness, and atrophy; heart muscle changes and malfunction; bone marrow suppression, with consequent anemia and loss of all types of blood cells; liver failure; and broad-ranging and sometimes irreversible loss and poisoning of mitochondria, the energy factories within our cells. The drug also leads to permanent DNA damage, and studies in mice and monkeys have raised concerns that babies exposed to AZT will face an increased risk of cancer later in life.[88]

Nevirapine, the other antiviral drug heavily promoted by AIDS activists in Africa as essential in curbing mother-to-child transmission of HIV (and by others who sought to batter President Mbeki when he questioned orthodox thinking on HIV and AIDS) has similarly not been shown to have any clinical benefits, and has been shown to carry a high risk of toxicity.[89]

Triumph or Tragedy? Scientifically, the HIV Theory Has Failed to Deliver

In scientific terms, the HIV hypothesis has failed to deliver. The predictions of spread to which it gave rise have not materialized, and the drug treatments it spawned have disappointed, despite billions spent on research. It is not known how HIV harms the immune system, and there is uncertainty over its very existence. The blood test is non-specific (although serendipitously, its very non-specificity has helped protect blood supplies against the broad range of pathogens that can cause “HIV” antibodies to become elevated), as are the “viral load” tests. The search for a vaccine is never-ending despite (or possibly because of) a commitment of hundreds of millions of dollars in US federal monies. Over the past 15 years, worldwide, more than 30 candidate vaccines have been tested in early-phase trials involving about 10,000 people. Out of these, only two are proceeding to phase III trials, and these are beset with difficulties. According to the WHO, the main stumbling blocks are lack of information about how best to measure protective immunity, the variability of HIV strains and lack of a good animal model.[90] According to Eleopulos, “a vaccine is never going to happen. It can’t, because without HIV isolation, you do not know what you are dealing with.”[91]

In social terms, the HIV theory has produced some real benefits. The democratising of the threat of AIDS brought the world together in a way that has been profoundly beneficial for gay men, now considerably more accepted and valued in society than they were 20 years ago. Along with the red ribbon, "HIV/AIDS" has also become a symbol of unity and compassion. Perhaps it even served the West by providing a diffuse "enemy" against which to focus hostile energies released following the fall of the Soviet Union.

As Eleopulos acknowledges, the condom and clean needle campaigns will also have had value. Lifestyle changes implemented within a certain section of the gay community, previously at great risk, probably lie behind the huge diminution in AIDS in most of Europe, along with greatly reduced dosages and increased awareness of the toxicity of AZT. Whatever the cause of AIDS, many studies have demonstrated clear risks attached to anal intercourse and needle sharing. Animal studies show that transmissible AIDS-like diseases can be induced - without any exogenous infection - when the immune system is thrown into confusion through certain immunisation procedures (these have involved injecting female mice, previously mated with genetically distinct males, with lymphocytes from those males).[92] There may be a genetic mechanism in AIDS akin to the "jumping genes" phenomenon, but involving transfer of genetic information out of the cell and in exceptional circumstances, from person to person.

To Rudolf Werner, professor of biochemistry at the University of Miami Medical School, such studies support the idea that AIDS is essentially an autoimmune disease.

"We still know very little about autoimmunity and how it works," he says. "Introduction of foreign protein into someone else's system quite clearly upsets that person's immune system. We need to learn much more about immunological tolerance and autoimmunity."[93] Anti-lymphocyte autoantibodies are present in 87% of HIV-positive patients and their levels correlate with clinical status.[94] Werner agrees that although AIDS drugs have been credited for the reduction in AIDS deaths, “there is no scientific evidence that these toxic drugs prolong life.” In a letter published by The Miami Herald (July 18, 2002) headed “Does the HIV virus really cause AIDS?”, he points to a study showing that the time between becoming HIV-positive and the time of death was identical in a Uganda group who received no AIDS drugs and a US group who did. “Since most people in the Uganda study were malnourished and multiply infected, doesn’t that suggest that antiretroviral drugs reduce life expectancy? … Unfortunately, the government suppresses alternative explanations of AIDS. This dogmatic approach certainly will lead to a medical disaster.”

The exclusion of research into other possible causes of AIDS that accompanied the establishment of the HIV paradigm may already have cost many lives, through failure to provide more effective advice on prevention and treatment. The efforts of those calling for a scientific reappraisal of the "HIV" hypothesis have usually been met with indifference and on occasions, abuse. In common with Duesberg, I have been called a "pariah of my profession" for broadcasting flaws in AIDS science to the public, bypassing the silence on this subject maintained by most mainstream scientific and medical journals and their supporters in the mainstream media. When Duesberg persisted in challenging the HIV theory he was derided by former colleagues, refused renewal of a $350,000 “outstanding investigator” award from the National Institutes of Health and “all but exiled from American science”, as Rasnick puts it. Rasnick, who is perhaps the most persistent as well as articulate of the US dissidents, wrote in 1997: “As a scientist who has studied AIDS for 16 years, I have determined that AIDS has little to do with science and is not even primarily a medical issue. AIDS is a sociological phenomenon held together by fear, creating a kind of medical McCarthyism that has transgressed and collapsed all the rules of science, and imposed a brew of belief and pseudoscience on a vulnerable public.”[95]

The Perth group has also suffered pervasive censorship, in which the AIDS mainstream has simply refused to enter into any discussion of their work. They were given satellite symposium time to present their case at the 1998 International AIDS Conference, in Geneva, as a result of intense lobbying by patient advocates, and against the wishes of the scientific committee; out of about 12,000 delegates, some 15 attended. That was at least an advance on the behaviour of organisers of the Berlin conference four years previously. "Dissidents" who persisted in setting out their literature on an unused table were ejected from the conference, and told that they would be arrested and deported from Germany if they returned.

However, the biggest tragedy arising from the HIV paradigm has been the marketing and acceptance worldwide of an unvalidated diagnostic test, represented as demonstrating infection with a lethal virus. Millions are suffering the stigma and fear associated with this "HIV disease" diagnosis. Continents and sub-continents are being encouraged to switch scarce resources into fighting what may be a mythical enemy. As Papadimitriou remarked to me, of AIDS in Africa, "Why condemn a continent to death because of HIV when you have other explanations for why people are falling sick?"

WHO experts are so convinced of a pandemic that they multiply the AIDS cases registered with them many times over to reach an estimate of the "actual" level. Furthermore, the multiplication factor has been regularly increased, as discovered by Christian Fiala, an Austrian physician who has spent years researching AIDS epidemiology, including a fact-finding mission to Uganda and Tanzania. In 1996, reported cases in Africa were multiplied by WHO statisticians by 12 to reach estimated totals; in 1997, by 17; and over an 18-month period in 1997/1998, by 47.[96]

UNAIDS, which brings together seven United Nations agencies, including WHO, in a joint programme on AIDS, is doing work with huge potential for helping Africa by campaigning for debt relief and other forms of emergency aid. But it risks destroying the value of its efforts by tying them exclusively to the HIV/AIDS paradigm, increasingly questioned within Africa itself. By urging African finance ministers to devote more domestic funds to AIDS activities, "notwithstanding the weak fiscal situations in many of the worst affected countries in Africa",[97] it may exacerbate the real problems, which as South Africa's Thabo Mbeki has indicated are mostly related to poverty. UNAIDS has actually spelled out that it wants resources programmed for welfare, education, rural development and other health purposes to be redirected into HIV/AIDS care and prevention.

In the South African context, this would be particularly disastrous. Dr Sam Mhlongo, professor of primary health care and family medicine and chief family practitioner at the Medical University of Southern Africa, Pretoria, a member of Mbeki's Advisory Panel on AIDS, points out that 50 years of apartheid have left half the population of South Africa with no access to sanitation and clean drinking water. Sub-standard housing, shacks and overcrowding favour the risk of massive infection and re-infection with tuberculosis (added to AIDS-defining criteria in 1993). Starving and malnourished children are particularly susceptible to respiratory and gastro-intestinal infections and septicaemia. "Long before Luc Montagnier's HIV/AIDS 'discovery', Professor John Reid of the Durban Medical School noted that 50% of black children in rural areas of South Africa died before the age of five," Mhlongo writes.[98] "The commonest causes of death amongst these black infants were recorded as bronchopneumonia, dehydration and diarrhoea."

"Apartheid conditioned people not to see; when it comes to AIDS many still will not open their eyes," he says.[99] What Mhlongo sees, in eastern and southern Africa, is chronic protein deficiency, a breakdown in civilian services, rising incidence of TB and malaria, declining prices for agricultural output, high inflation and unemployment, displacement by civil violence, and cutbacks in government services due to economic adjustments mandated by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. "There is no need to conjecture the mysterious antics of some retrovirus from the rainforest that supposedly jumped from monkeys to humans."

In the earlier years of AIDS, after US, British and French scientists successfully marketed the "deadly new virus" concept and the tests and treatments that went with it, the perception that there was a public health emergency made it hard for dissenting views to be expressed. Today, the silence may owe as much to the power of commercial interests, along with embarrassment over the failures of AIDS science, as to any altruistic motives. Perhaps also it is easier on the West’s conscience to keep blaming an epidemic of a deadly new virus for an increase in immune deficiency in less-developed countries than it is to acknowledge the effects of worsening poverty consequent on economic restructuring,[100] crippling debt, and the after-effects of decades of socially destructive policies towards black people such as under the apartheid regime.

A reasoned response from the scientific community to the full range of evidence that has mounted against the HIV theory is overdue.

Notes:
[1] Global Voices on the AIDS Catastrophe, British Medical Journal, 7331: 180-186

[2] Johnson, J.A. (2000). AIDS Funding for Federal Government Programs: FY1981-FY2001, report no. RL30731, Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, Washington DC.

[3] Retroviruses use an enzyme, reverse transcriptase, to convert their ribonucleic acid (RNA) into deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), enabling their genetic material to become integrated within the DNA of a host cell.

[4] Gallo, R. (1991). Virus Hunting, BasicBooks (HarperCollins), pp.193-194

[5] Quoted in Crewdson, J. (1989). The Great AIDS Quest, Chicago Tribune, Section 5, Nov 19, 1989.

[6]Crewdson, ibid

[7] Editorial, 1993, Gallo on the Rack, Nature, 361: 1.

[8] Crewdson, ibid

[9] Popovic, M. et al (1984). Detection, Isolation, and Continuous Production of Cytopathic Retroviruses (HTLV-III) from Patients with AIDS and Pre-AIDS, Science, 224: 497-500. Also pp.500-508.

[10] Callen, M., PWA (People With AIDS) Coalition Newsletter, December 1987.

[11] Maddox, J. (1992). More on Gallo and Popovic, Nature, 357: 107-109.

[12] Gallo, R. (1991). Virus Hunting: AIDS, Cancer and the Human Retrovirus, Basic Books.

[13] Duesberg, P.H. (1996). Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery Publishing, Washington, D.C., p.164.

[14] Duesberg, (1996), op cit, pp.163-4.

[15] Duesberg, P.H. (1987). Retroviruses as Carcinogens and Pathogens: Expectations and Reality, Cancer Research 47: 1199-1220.

[16] Duesberg, P.H. (1989). Human Immunodeficiency Virus and Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome: Correlation but not Causation, Proc. Natn. Acad. Sci. USA, 85: 755-764. See also Duesberg (1996), Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery Publishing, Washington, DC.

[17] See “The Dynamics of CD4+ T-cell Depletion in HIV Disease” by Joseph McCune in Nature, April 19, 2001: "We still do not know how, in vivo, the virus destroys CD4+ T cells [T4 cells] or whether, in quantitative terms, cell loss is due to direct destruction by virus or to other indirect means. This ignorance, arising in large part because it is difficult to study the immune system in living human beings, hinders the discovery and development of effective vaccines and therapies. Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain the loss of CD4+ T cells, some of which seem to be diametrically opposed."

[18] http://www.rethinkingaids.com

[19] Hodgkinson N. (1992). Experts Mount Startling Challenge to AIDS Orthodoxy, Sunday Times, London, April 26, 1992, pp.1, 12 and 13

[20] Sunday Times, March 23, 1993, p2.

[21] Papadopulos-Eleopulos, E. et al. (1993). Is a Positive Western blot Proof of HIV Infection? Bio/Technology 11: 696-707.

[22] Montagnier himself admitted in a 1997 interview with Djamel Tahi, a French TV journalist, that "we did not purify" the virus and added that he did not believe Gallo had done so either.

[23] Eigen, M. and Biebricher, C.K. (1988). Quoted in Emerging Viruses, ed. S.S. Morse, Oxford University Press, New York, 1993, pp.219-225.

[24] Wain-Hobson, S. (1995). Virological Mayhem, Nature, January 12, 1995: p.102

[25] Marx, J.L. (1988). Science 241: 1039-1040.

[26] Papadopulos-Eleopulos, E., et al (1996). The isolation of HIV: has it been achieved? Supplement to Continuum 4, no 3 (Sept-Oct 1996). See http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/perthgroup/index.html.

[27] Kurth, R. and Norley, S. (1996). Why don't the natural hosts of SIV develop simian AIDS?, Journal of National Institutes of Health Research 8: 33-37. See Weiss, R. (2001), Gulliver's Travels in HIVland, Nature 410: 964.

[28] Associated Press report, San Francisco Examiner, 30 Aug– 1 Sept, 2002, p18A

[29] Personal communication.

[30] Bermas, B.L. (1994). AIDS Res Hum Retroviruses 10, 1071-1077.

[31] Hässig, A., et al. (1998). Fifteen Years of AIDS, Continuum, vol 5, no 3: 32-37.

[32] Giraldo, R.A. (1998). Continuum, vol 5 no 5: 8-10.

[33] Johnson, C., Factors Known to Cause False-Positive HIV Antibody Test Results, Zenger's magazine (San Diego, California), September 1996.

[34] Zuck, T.F. (1987). AIDS: The Safety of Blood and Blood Products (Wiley Medical Publication on behalf of the World Health Organisation), Ch. 21.

[35] Giraldo (1998), ibid

[36] For an extensive review of this evidence, see Chapter 9 of my book AIDS: The Failure of Contemporary Science (London: Fourth Estate, 1996).

[37] See Sheppard, H. et al (1993), Viral burden and HIV disease, Nature 364: 291: “The high level of plasma virus observed by Piatak et al was about 99.9 % non-culturable, suggesting that it was either neutralized or defective. Therefore, rather than supporting a cytopathic model, this observation actually may help explain the relatively slow dissemination of the infected cell burden and thus the relative ineffectiveness of therapy with nucleoside analogues which target this process…The results presented are equally consistent with the conclusion that higher viraemia is a consequence of, rather than the proximate cause of, defective immune responses.”

[38] Personal communication.

[39] Ditto

[40] Correspondence, September 2000.

[41] Letter in Continuum magazine, vol 5, no 2.

[42] Armstrong, J.A., and Horne, R. (1984). Follicular Dendritic Cells and Virus-like Particles in AIDS-related Lympadenopathy, Lancet II: 370-372.

[43] O’Hara, C.J. et al, (1988). The ultrastructural and immunohistochemical demonstration of viral particles in lymph nodes from human immunodeficiency virus-related lymphadenopathy syndromes, Hum. Pathol. 19: 545.

[44] Papadopulos-Eleopulos, E., et al, HIV antibody testing: autoreactivity and other associated problems (unpublished).

[45] This group’s treatment recommendations are available at http://www.virusmyth.net.

[46] See Sonnabend, J.A. and Saadoun, S., The acquired immunodeficiency syndrome: a discussion of etiologic hypotheses, AIDS Research 1, no. 2 (1984): 107-120. This article pointed out that semen and sperm were well documented as a cause of immune system abnormalities in anal intercourse, when the proteins involved permeate the colon's thin lining and enter the bloodstream. (In vaginal sex, the vagina’s thick walls restrict such invasion to its intended target, the womb.) There are antigens expressed on cells in the ejaculate that are shared by cells of the immune system, raising the possibility that repeated exposure could set up a reaction in the body against one's own immune cells. Anal sex has been around a long time, of course, but the Gay Liberation years brought exceptional exposures. A Centers for Disease Control study of the first 100 gay men with AIDS found that their median number of lifetime sexual partners was 1,160; a subsequent group boasted 10,000 or more partners. See also Robert Root-Bernstein, Rethinking AIDS: The Tragic Cost of Premature Consensus (New York: The Free Press, 1993), 115-120.

[47] Kremer, H. (2001). Die Stille Revolution der AIDS und Krebsmedizin (The Silent Revolution in AIDS and Cancer Medicine). See Raum + Zeit magazine interview, March 2002, on http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/index/hkremer.htm.

[48] Duesberg, P. (1996), ed. AIDS: Virus- or Drug-Induced? Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands.

[49] See also Hodgkinson, N. (1996), “Drugged”, in AIDS: The Failure of Contemporary Science, pp 69-99, Fourth Estate, London.

[50] One of the best examples of this phenomenon was a study by Maurizio Luca Moretti of the Florida-based Inter-American Medical and Health Association, who collaborated with colleagues in Italy on a study of 508 former intravenous drug abusers. [Robert Root-Bernstein, Rethinking AIDS: The Tragic Cost of Premature Consensus (New York: The Free Press, 1993), 359-360.] The men, all HIV positive, were voluntarily confined to a rehabilitation centre where their lives were under the daily management of staff. Most were found to be severely malnourished on arrival, 397 of them chronically so. Their nutritional status was returned to normal, their drug use ended, and their sex lives were curtailed (the centre is a monastery, where patients sleep in small groups under supervision). Among 139 individuals who had been using heroin daily for an average of more than five years, all were still free of AIDS symptoms after an average of more than four years since they had first tested positive. This is a phenomenal success rate compared with the US, where a third of HIV-positive addicts develop AIDS within two years and more than half within four years.

[51] Blood , vol 73 (1989), pp.2067-2073.

[52] Seremetis, S., et al., (1993). Three-year Randomised Study of High-Purity or Intermediate-Purity Factor VIII Concentrates in Symptom-Free HIV-Seropositive Hemophiliacs: Effects on Immune Status, Lancet 342: 700–703. Also De Biasi et al., (1992). The Impact of a Very High Purity Factor VIII Concentrate on the Immune System of Human Immunodeficiency Virus-Infected Hemophiliacs, Blood 78, no. 8: 1919–1922.

[53] Darby, S.C. et al (1995). Mortality Before and After HIV Infection in the Complete UK Population of Hemophiliacs, Nature 377: 79-82.

[54] Editorial, More Conviction on HIV and AIDS, Nature (1995), 377:1. Also Horton, R. (1995). Will Duesberg Now Concede Defeat?, Lancet, 346:656.

[55] Papadopulos-Eleopulos, E. (1995). The Hemophilia Connection, Continuum, vol 3, no 4: 17-19.

[56] Counseling Weakens HIV's Attack, Study Finds, Christine Morris, Miami Herald, March 3, 2001.

[57] Hardy, A.M. et al. (1985). Incidence Rate of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome in Selected Populations, Journal of the American Medical Association 253: 215–220. Also J. W. Ward et al. (1989). The Natural History of Transfusion-Associated Infection with Human Immunodeficiency Virus, New England Journal of Medicine 321: 947–952, quoted in Duesberg (1996), p. 285.

[58] The Plague That Isn't, Canadian Globe and Mail, March 14, 2000.

[59] Kashala, O. et al. (1994). Infection with HIV-1 and Human T Cell Lymphotropic Viruses among Leprosy Patients and Contacts: Correlation between HIV-1 Cross-reactivity and Antibodies to Lipoarabinomannan, Journal of Infectious Diseases, 169: 296-304.

[60] World Health Organisation (1996). TB/HIV: A Clinical Manual.

[61] Nunn, P. (1992). The impact of HIV on the diagnosis and treatment of tuberculosis in developing countries. Paper delivered at multidisciplinary plenary session on HIV and TB, World AIDS Congress, Amsterdam, July 21 1992.

[62] Mulder, D.W., et al. (1994). Two-year HIV-1-associated mortality in a Ugandan rural population, Lancet, 343: 1021-1023.

[63] Connor, S., Independent on Sunday, London, November 14, 1993.

[64] Mihill, C., Guardian, April 22, 1994.

[65] Connor, S., Independent on Sunday, London, November 14, 1993.

[66] Koliadin, V. (1998). HIV and Mortality in Africa: Does It Prove that HIV Causes AIDS? At http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/index/vkoliadin.htm. See also Koliadin, V. (1996). Critical Analysis of the Current Views on the Nature of AIDS, in AIDS: Virus- or Drug-Induced? ed. P.H. Duesberg, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands, pp.69-88

[67] Saxinger, W.C., et al (1985). Evidence for exposure to HTLV-III in Uganda before 1973, Science, 227: 1036-8.

[68] Papadopulos-Eleopulos, E. et al (2001). Mother to Child Transmission of HIV and its Prevention with AZT and Nevirapine – A Critical Examination of the Evidence, Appendix XI, p 188. This is a 204-page document published by the Perth group to help prompt a reappraisal of data interpreted as proof of mother-to-child transmission of HIV. Appendix XI, headed “A Critical Examination of the Evidence for the Existence of HIV”, includes summaries of many studies demonstrating the non-specificity of the “HIV” antibody tests.

[69] De Fries, F., Study Group for AIDS Therapy, felix.defries@bluewin.ch. See also http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/index/hkremer.htm

[70] Stewart, G., (2000). Epidemiological and Statistical Aspects of AIDS, a review for the Royal Society, UK (unpublished).

[71] ibid

[72] ibid

[73] Craven, B. et al, (2001). HIV and AIDS in Schools – The Political Economy of Pressure Groups and Miseducation, Institute of Economic Affairs Occasional Paper 121. The final total for the year 2000, as reported more recently by the Public Health Laboratory Service (http://www.phls.co.uk), was 294; the provisional total for 2001 was 230.

[74] Stewart, G. (2000). The Durban Declaration is not accepted by all, Nature 407: 286.

[75] Stewart, G. (1999). A paradigm under pressure: Censorship of AIDS research is as weird, and as dangerous, as the disease itself. Index on Censorship, 28:3, 68-72.

[76] Concorde, MRC/ANRS Randomised double-blind controlled trial of immediate and deferred zidovudine in symptom-free HIV infection, Lancet 343: 871-881.

[77] Guidelines for the Use of Anti-Retroviral Agents in HIV-Infected Adults and Adolescents, February 2001, at http://www.hivatis.ord/guidelines/adult/Feb05_01/text/index.html.

[78] Farber, C., Science Fiction, GEAR magazine, March 2000.

[79] Yeni, P.G. et al (2002). Antiretroviral treatment for adult HIV infection in 2002: updated recommendations of the International AIDS Society-USA Panel. JAMA 288: 222-35.

[80] Internet correspondence. rasnick@mindspring.com

[81] AIDS surrogate markers, is there truth in numbers? JAMA 276: 161-2

[82] Levy, J. (1998). The Lancet, 352: 982-3.

[83] Tanaka, M. (1996). Abrams cautious on use of new AIDS drugs, Synapse, vol 4, pp 1 & 5.

[84] http://www.aliveandwell.org.

[85] Letter to Newsweek, September 18 2000.

[86] Presidential AIDS Advisory Panel Report, March 2001, at http://www.polity.org.za/govdocs/reports/aids/aidspanel.htm.

[87] Rapid disease progression in HIV-1 perinatally infected children born to mothers receiving zidovudine monotherapy during pregnancy, AIDS 13 (1999): 927-933.

[88] Brink, A., Debating AZT: Mbeki and the AIDS Drug Controversy (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: Open Books, 2000). This is an extensive review of AZT by a South African advocate (arbrink@iafrica.com).

[89] Mhlongo, S. (2002), Issues concerning perinatal nevirapine treatment, evidence to Medicine Control Council, South Africa; Brink, A. (2002), The Trouble With Nevirapine (arbrink@iafrica.com). 

[90] WHO (2001). Bulletin of the World Health Organisation 2001, 79, 1133-7.

[91] Personal communication.

[92] Ter-Grigorov, V. et al (1997). A new transmissible AIDS-like disease in mice induced by alloimmune stimuli, Nature Medicine 3, no 1: 137-41

[93] Personal communication, June 1998.

[94] Bonara, P., et al, Anti-lymphocyte antibodies and progression of disease in HIV-infected patients, VII International AIDS Conference, Florence, 1991:149. Also Tumietto, F., at al, Anti-lymphocyte autoantibodies: evaluation and correlation with different stages of HIV infection, VII International AIDS Conference, Florence, 1991:149.

[95] Rasnick, D., Blinded by Science, Spin, June 1997.

[96] Fiala, C., Dirty Tricks Over AIDS Figures, New African magazine, April 1998.

[97] AIDS, Poverty & Debt Relief, newsletter no. 4, UNAIDS, June 2001; http://www.unaids.org/debt/index.html.

[98] Mhlongo, S., AIDS and Poverty, New African, July/August 2001, p.11.

[99] Mhlongo, S., et al, letter, Sunday Independent, Johannesburg, March 11, 2000.

[100]A lead letter in the British Medical Journal (324: 1034; 27 April 2002) commented: “HIV has gained the biggest foothold in poor countries with rising unemployment and declining health and educational services. Over the past 20 years the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have conducted a massive social experiment in poor African countries. It is called structural adjustment…Africa urgently needs a realistic evaluation of the continuing effects of debt and neo-liberal economic prescriptions on the health of its people.”

NEVILLE HODGKINSON
Nuneham Park,
Nuneham Courtenay,
Oxford OX44 9PG, UK
neville@bkwsugrc.demon.co.uk