Posted on 11/04/2001 5:19:38 AM PST by Pharmboy
TALKING TRUTH ON AIDS DATA
By RICHARD JOHNSON with PAULA FROELICH and CHRIS WILSON
CELIA Farber, among the few who challenged the many myths about AIDS in a series of columns for Spin magazine, is crowing now that Rolling Stone has seen the light. The article, "AIDS in Africa: In Search of the Truth" by famed South African writer Rian Milan, charges that researchers regularly inflate statistics about the lethal disease.
Milan, the author of "My Traitor's Heart," spent a year looking for proof of the soaring death rates cited by AIDS organizations in South Africa.
Frustrated by conflicting data, Milan even studied coffin sales in Johannesburg, trying to find evidence of the supposed pandemic. Instead, he ends up debunking exaggerated numbers put forth by groups like the Swiss-based UNAIDS (the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS).
"As he gripped each thread of questioning, expecting AIDS orthodoxy to resolve his growing anxiety with solid answers, he only ran into more questions," Farber e-mailed us. "He wound up - commendably - with an entirely different story than the one he pitched to Rolling Stone.
"Suffice to say, AIDS professionals will be aghast," Farber declares. "Unless, of course, they've decided to take their cash and their ribbons and helicopter off to their chalets where they can hope to live out their days in anonymity."
Milan's findings debunk myths that the scientific community has been spreading for 20 years. "The mind boggles at the bizarre notions that have held sway for decades," Farber said. "The Pulitzer Prizes that have been awarded for unadulterated hogwash."
Farber also notes, "In other media breakthroughs, the AIDS magazine POZ ran a cover story this month, that, for them, was very brave. It was titled ‘The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS.' It demonstrates, I think, the long-known fact that HIV [antibodies] have never traveled from women to men. It is simply a dead end.
"This ties nicely into Milan's quest for truth about AIDS in Africa. How is it, one might ask, that African people manage to spread this HIV so rampantly in ways that people in New York haven't managed in 20 years?"
A Rolling Stone spokeswoman said the Jann Wenner music mag - usually a repository of politically correct thought - was proud of the provocative AIDS piece.
"Rian Milan is fantastic, and he spent a year in Africa researching this," she said. "It might raise questions, but I think there are unanswered questions and things don't match up."
The epdiemic of PC-ism has probably more responsible for the spread of disease than any other factor these days.
You got that right. Remember when the gummint refused to limit the immigration status of HIV positive people back in the '80s? They would not act that way for any other fatal infectious disease.
So they'll all get it? You've got a double-negative going on there. You mean to see hardly any girl scouts (at least while still girl scouts) will ever get AIDS, right?
I thought the article was just saying this is overblown? It's not like HIV is Ebola, or even airborne. It's reasonably difficult to get and reasonably easy to avoid. Does that mean we shouldn't research how to defeat it? Absolutely not. The research has done quite a lot to advance modern medicine, out understanding of immunity, our understanding of viri, etc.
It's funny, perhaps ironic, that you and AIDS-activists seem to agree on something: that the Reagan Administration was 'ignorant' when it came to deal with the "AIDS crisis."
I know nothing about the magazine POZ, but "the long-known fact that HIV [antibodies] have never traveled from women to men" is a very dangerous, irresponsible and false claim to be making. It's just one of those scapegoating efforts (the subtle implication is gays are to blame for heterosexual HIV infection), one of those attempt to deny reality (that members of either sex can be and are sexually irresponsible).
I suppose they are alledging that, as a possible example, Magic Johnson got HIV from drug use or a homosexual encounter and not all those female groupies he slept with? Did he ever say 'how' he thinks he got it?
For this to work, only men would have affairs, only men would have anonymous sex, only men would leave their spouse's sides to find another at the local park for sex. Right? It's all MEN'S fault. Women are clean, virginal and pure. Men are vile. Hmm, interesting how feminism and 'old fashioned sensibilities' both agree men are the great corruptors, the animals.
This is the main theory on why heterosexual transmission is rare in the west, but not uncommon in Africa: many Africans (evidently) engage in sex even if they have lesions present. We tend not to do that.
But, after twenty years, if there was going to be any leap of HIV into the hetero community, it would have happened. The media and many in the gay community hoped for it, but disappointment is all they got.
The first epidemic in history that kills less people then before it!
The following was written by Kary Mullis for the introduction to the book "Inventing the AIDS Virus" by Peter H. Duesberg (Regnery Publishing, INC; Washington DC, 1996):
In 1988 I was working as a consultant at Specialty Labs in Santa Monica, CA, setting up analytic routines for the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). I knew a lot about setting up analytic routines for anything with nucleic acids in it because I invented the Polymerase Chain Reaction. That's why they hired me.
Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), on the other hand, was something I did not know a lot about. Thus, when I found myself writing a report on our progress and goals for the project, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, I recognized that I did not know the scientific reference to support a statement I had just written: "HIV is the probable cause of AIDS."
So I turned to the virologist at the next desk, a reliable and competent fellow, and asked him for the reference. He said I didn't need one. I disagreed. While it's true that certain scientific discoveries or techniques are so well established that their sources are no longer referenced in the contemporary literature, that didn't seem to be the case with the HIV/AIDS connection. It was totally remarkable to me that the individual who had discovered the cause of a deadly and as-yet-uncured disease would not be continually referenced in the scientific papers until that disease was cured and forgotten. But as I would soon learn, the name of that individual – who would surely be Nobel material - was on the tip of no one's tongue.
Of course, this simple reference had to be out there somewhere. Otherwise, tens of thousands of public servants and esteemed scientists of many callings, trying to solve the tragic deaths of a large number of homosexual and/or intravenous (IV) drug-using men between the ages of twenty-five and forty, would not have allowed their research to settle into one narrow channel of investigation. Everyone wouldn't fish in the same pond unless it was well established that all the other ponds were empty. There had to be a published paper, or perhaps several of them, which taken together indicated that HIV was the probable cause of AIDS. There just had to be.
I did computer searches, but came up with nothing. Of course, you can miss something important in computer searches by not putting in just the right key words. To be certain about a scientific issue, it's best to ask other scientists directly. That's one thing that scientific conferences in faraway places with nice beaches are for.
I was going to a lot of meetings and conferences as part of my job. I got in the habit of approaching anyone who gave a talk about AIDS and asking him or her what reference I should quote for that increasingly problematic statement, "HIV is the probable cause of AIDS."
After ten or fifteen meetings over a couple years, I was getting pretty upset when no one could cite the reference. I didn't the ugly conclusion that was forming in my mind: The entire campaign against a disease increasingly regarded as a twentieth century Black Plague was based on a hypothesis whose origins no one could recall. That defied both scientific and common sense.
Finally, I had an opportunity to question one of the giants in HIV and AIDS research, DL Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute, when he gave a talk in San Diego. It would be the last time I would be able to ask my little question without showing anger, and I figured Montagnier would know the answer. So I asked him.
With a look of condescending puzzlement, Montagnier said, "Why don't you quote the report from the Centers for Disease Control? "
I replied, "It doesn't really address the issue of whether or not HIV is the probable cause of AIDS, does it?"
"No," he admitted, no doubt wondering when I would just go away. He looked for support to the little circle of people him, but they were all awaiting a more definitive response, like I was.
"Why don't you quote the work on SIV [Simian Immunodeficiency Virus]?" the good doctor offered.
"I read that too, DL Montagnier," I responded. "What happened to those monkeys didn't remind me of AIDS. Besides, that paper was just published only a couple of months ago. I'm looking for the original paper where somebody showed that HIV caused AIDS.
This time, DL Montagnier's response was to walk quickly away to greet an acquaintance across the room.
Cut to the scene inside my car just a few years ago. I was driving from Mendocino to San Diego. Like everyone else by now, I knew a lot more about AIDS than I wanted to. But I still didn't know who had determined that it was caused by HIV. Getting sleepy as I came over the San Bernardino Mountains, I switched on the radio and tuned in a guy who was talking about AIDS. His name was Peter Duesberg, and he was a prominent virologist at Berkeley. I'd heard of him, but had never read his papers or heard him speak. But I listened, now wide awake, while he explained exactly why I was having so much trouble finding the references that linked HIV to AIDS. There weren't any. No one had ever proved that HIV causes AIDS. When I got home, I invited Duesberg down to San Diego to present his ideas to a meeting of the American Association for Chemistry. Mostly skeptical at first, the audience stayed for the lecture, and then an hour of questions, and then stayed talking to each other until requested to clear the room. Everyone left with more questions than they had brought.
I like and respect Peter Duesberg. I don't think he knows necessarily what causes AIDS; we have disagreements about that. But we're both certain about what doesn't cause AIDS.
We have not been able to discover any good reasons why most of the people on earth believe that AIDS is a disease caused by HIV.
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