Posted on 01/17/2002 12:38:00 PM PST by Outraged At FLA
There is no agreement as to what disease caused the great plague at Athens, and it may be a disease that no longer exists.
Quite correct, and in its favor is that some of the symptoms reported in the current disease aren't reported by Thucydides, who was an eyewitness (specifically the buboes, although these are not present in pneumonic or septicemic forms of the plague either). I checked a couple of sources here at home and the general agreement is that it was either plague, typhus, or some unknown disease. Let's hope it wasn't the latter, because diseases don't often die out completely - the recent smallpox panic is testimony to that. I wouldn't like to be reintroduced to whatever it was, if it was indeed something other than plague!
I'd still argue that Central Asia was the original source, if only based on what we do know about how it acted once it reached North America. The rapid initial die-off reported in the prairie dog populations is more consistent with an unexposed population than one in which the disease had been endemic for (it would have to be) centuries.
Again, thanks.
MORE!!!!
Hope you're still logged in - that was an excellent question. The biggest problem they've had in AIDS research to date is that there isn't a good animal model for the disease, or rather there wasn't until they discovered SIDS (which is "simian immune deficiency syndrome"). Because up until recently AIDS was invariably fatal, you couldn't refine the suspected disease agent, the HIV virus, and give it to a subject to replicate the disease. That's Koch's Fifth Postulate, by the way, and it's the classical last step in proving that a particular agent causes a particular disease. Those convinced that AIDS is caused by something other than HIV make much of the fact that Koch's Fifth Postulate is yet to be demonstrated for that particular etiological agent. In fact, (1) no research ethics board would have approved it, (2) the subject would have ended up dead, and (3) the researcher would have ended up in prison for murder. Kinda big problems when you're looking for a grant.
A particularly brave researcher could have sacrificed his life to prove this, of course - Walter Reed did something nearly that foolhardy with yellow fever - but even now, with the disease mostly treatable if not curable, you'd never get this experiment approved anywhere other than, say, Dachau.
Even with an animal model you still can't prove that HIV causes AIDS because you're dealing only with a similar disease and a similar etiliogical agent. So, still no Koch's Fifth Postulate. But what an animal model does give you is the ability to test possible treatments on something less ethically risky than an actual human being. Hence if you can find a successful treatment for SIDS (such as antiretroviral therapies, protease inhibitors, etc) then it's a big step in "ramping up" to a treatment for the human form of the disease, AIDS. That's the reason this line of research is valuable.
I found the Cosby comment about halfway through this article, he said he thought AIDS was "man-made" and that "if it wasn't created to get rid of black folks, it sure likes us a lot."---October 1992 interview on CNN.
The Secret Plot to Destroy African Americans Link
From virus-carrying mosquitoes to government biological warfare, the community is clamoring with theories about why blacks are hit hardest by AIDS -- and what to do about it.
By Leroy Whitfield
On December 19, 1998, a month after President Clinton declared AIDS a crisis in black America -- a hard-won concession by the Congressional Black Caucus and a handful of determined African-American advocates -- Reverend Al Sharpton and a dirty dozen of community activists assembled for an AIDS assault of a different kind in Harlem.
They were responding to the same crazy reality: African Americans, who constitute only 13 percent of the U.S. population, then made up 32 percent of PWAs, a ratio that crept to 33 percent in 1999. But unlike Mario Cooper, whose Leading for Life campaign twisted the arms of African-American leaders to take on AIDS, or Maxine Waters, the empathetic Caucus chair who led the charge on Capitol Hill, Sharpton's six-hour-long meeting took aim at the reeling statistics with a whirlwind of theories. These theories, about why exactly AIDS shows such a strange affinity for blacks, have been blowing across America for more than 10 years now, stoking fires that no one's figured out how to put out.
One burning voice belongs to Boyd Ed Graves. Sitting at a well-polished dining room table at his home in Cleveland's black, solidly middle-class Mount Pleasant neighborhood, Graves offers an explanation for those numbers: genocide, plain and simple. In fact, he's suing the U.S. government for using tax dollars to secretly develop HIV in a lab and then deploy it as a biological weapon to kill blacks. It's ethnic cleansing, he says, and in the end not a single black soul will remain.
For the record, Graves, who was diagnosed with HIV in 1992 (and now has an undetectable viral load on HAART), concedes it's possible that he contracted the virus through unprotected sex. But more likely, he believes, he was the victim of a stealth dart gun, a "micro-bio- inoculator" that can tag unsuspecting victims from 100 feet away without so much as a prick, a product of the U.S. government's biological warfare program. Or, he imagines, he may have been one of thousands of unlucky African Americans infected through a bite by a virus-distributing mosquito bred by government contractors at an island facility off the shores of Manhattan. Or: "The HIV virus is the result of a century-long hunt for a contagious cancer that selectively kills." "If they didn't want me to discover the true origins of AIDS," Graves says, cutting a glare in my direction, "they shouldn't have given it to me."
Graves has an encyclopedic mind. He can pull numbers out of the air from reports he read 20 years ago. In 1976, he says, the U.S. Navy deemed him so competent that during his duty as a cryptography officer, he was one of only a few aboard the guided-missile destroyer on which he worked who were privy to nuclear launch codes. Later, Graves graduated from Ohio Northern University law school with honors.
His case against the government stemmed from a discrimination suit he filed against his first employer out of law school, a federally funded agency serving the disabled, which laid him off in 1995 shortly after he disclosed his HIV status. That suit was settled out of court for $48,000, he tells me, but in the process of building his extensive argument, Graves uncovered a document that would spark a lifelong obsession. It was the transcript of a 1970 Congressional hearing on defense appropriations during which a certain Dr. Donald MacArthur of the Pentagon mentioned a "biological agent...for which no natural immunity could be acquired...that could be developed within 5 to 10 years." That document was soon joined by hundreds of others to form the basis of Boyd Graves vs. the President of the United States, which Graves filed in federal court last January.
He pulls out a copy of the MacArthur transcript for me and begins reading highlights, then stops himself midsentence and looks up. "Do you want to hear me read it in my Nixon voice?" he asks. Nixon, I'll soon discover, is just one of Graves' dozen impersonations. He also does the hostile AIDS outreach worker, the annoyed relative and the impatient bureaucrat, all of whom he's encountered on his hell-bent mission and whose voices repeat inside his head.
A district court, calling his claims regarding the transmission of HIV "completely baseless and delusional," threw his case out a month after it was filed. But Graves continues to appeal, and in March, a higher court granted a review.
Among Cleveland's AIDS leadership, Graves has earned a nickname: Crazy Eddie. He has spread his gospel to every AIDS agency in this Corn Belt town; he's caused such a stir that some compare his impact in the Midwest to that of ACT UP/San Francisco AIDS dissidents in the West. Jon Darr Bradshaw, executive director of the Xchange Point, a program that does street outreach in Cleveland's toughest neighborhoods, says that Graves' theories have created such doubt among his clients that some have begun refusing condoms and clean needles, suspicious that the supplies are tainted with HIV.
Such incidents have only earned Graves more credibility in the eyes of some African Americans. Last March, he was named one of the 25 most influential people in Cleveland by Cleveland Life, Ohio's largest African-American newspaper. That followed a December 1999 editorial by the paper's then-news editor, Daniel Gray-Kontar, in which he wrote: "Is what Boyd Ed Graves saying accurate? I would respond with another question: If we would have been told about the experiments with blacks in Tuskegee with the syphilis virus, would we have believed the crier then?"
The long history of slavery and Jim Crow set the stage for African Americans to suspect an AIDS conspiracy, and, for many, evidence of other plots clinches the case. Two episodes famously surfaced in the 1970s: Tuskegee, where government researchers withheld syphilis meds from unsuspecting black southerners, and COINTELPRO, an FBI program that surveilled and harassed black radicals. Equally disturbing facts came out in an August 1996 San Jose Mercury News piece, later partly retracted, which suggested a CIA role in allowing crack to be sold in LA's South Central to profit Nicaraguan contras. A June 1998 Los Angeles Times article documented germ-warfare techniques planned against South African revolutionaries, including Nelson Mandela. As one woman said at an LA town meeting convened by Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) after the Mercury News piece ran, "Black men are in jail for selling drugs the CIA brought to our community the same way they brought the guns here for us to kill each other. If they don't get you that way, government doctors will stick you with AIDS. One way or another they'll destroy us."
The sister's not alone in her thinking. According to a 1999 study funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), one out of four African Americans surveyed said that they believed HIV was created by the U.S. government to eliminate blacks. That study echoed the findings of an earlier one by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which found that 54 percent of blacks surveyed viewed HIV testing as a ploy to infect them with the virus. Look at those numbers and the truth stares back: Belief in conspiracies is far from fringe.
Just stroll into an Afrocentric bookstore in any of America's urban centers and you'll find plenty of reading to reinforce even the slightest doubts about HIV, from white right-winger William Campbell Douglass' AIDS: The End of Civilization to black agitator Curtis Cost's Vaccines Are Dangerous: A Warning to the Black Community, which argues that HIV is a man-made biological weapon created to wipe out blacks. Cost's 1991 book is still a steady seller, recommended by the Universal Zulu Nation, a 12-city hip hop fraternity that discourages condom use and claims that HIV doesn't cause AIDS. Recently, Cost did a complete 180 on HIV. As his latest, unpublished book will show, the Bronx resident tells me, "There's no such thing as AIDS," and we're all dupes of a misinformation campaign.
Cost, as a new AIDS dissident, was a key organizer of that well-attended December 1998 Harlem AIDS forum convened by Rev. Sharpton. There, Phillip Valentine, a self-described "natural healer," who believes blacks should abstain from all meds, even herbs, shared the podium with a dozen speakers, only one of whom thought HIV caused AIDS -- and that speaker argued that the virus had been intentionally transmitted to blacks through World Health Organization vaccine programs. Later, during an animated conversation, Valentine told me that it's the medicine, not the virus, that kills: "The only time you start getting sick is when you go to see a doctor." Valentine advises HIVers to stay away from meds under any circumstance. When a newly diagnosed friend of Valentine's called him in tears seeking advice, Valentine invited him over with his bag of prescriptions. "I asked 'What did they give you?' He named all the drugs. We prayed. After a brief ritual, I helped him pour them down the toilet."
While Graves, Valentine and Cost peddle their conspiracies on the ground, prominent African Americans have validated these ideas from the airwaves. Nation of Islam (NOI) head Louis Farrakhan has long maintained that AIDS was made in a government lab just outside Virginia, a message he spreads through his speeches and the NOI's organ, The Final Call. Several black entertainers have endorsed these views as well. In a 1990 appearance on The Arsenio Hall Show, rapper Kool Moe Dee stated that he thought AIDS was a part of a "clean up America campaign" intended to hit gays and minorities. Director Spike Lee seconded the notion in November 1991 in Rolling Stone, and in an October 1992 interview on CNN, media giant Bill Cosby said he thought AIDS was "man-made" and that "if it wasn't created to get rid of black folks, it sure likes us a lot." Though statements like these are less common of late, megastar Will Smith speculated in the July 1999 Vanity Fair that "possibly AIDS was created as a result of biological-warfare testing." These messages leave many African Americans caught in a life-or-death struggle between advice from their doctor and words from public figures they respect.
Forty miles northeast of Montgomery, Alabama, where Rosa Parks touched off the civil rights movement, lies a town whose very name has come to symbolize government malevolence: Tuskegee. I took a trip down to the scene of the crime last May, on the occasion of an AIDS training for black church leaders, to see with my own eyes the rooms where federal researchers watched, probed and tested 399 African American men as many slowly died, untreated and uninformed, from syphilis. The windows at the old John A. Andrew Hospital were broken and boarded. I came upon an open side entrance and, once inside, found retired medical equipment, a wall calendar that had collected dust since 1958 and, everywhere, the buzzing of hornets. Standing in a dim corridor, I tried to imagine 1932, back when the hospital was busy with black men waiting in chairs for treatment they never got. After 40 years, the study was finally halted and the hospital eventually closed, but somehow, standing in that place, the men's fears and misplaced hopes lingered.
Pernessa Seele, executive director of Balm in Gilead, which organized the training, said she chose to bring black church leaders into this haunted town because "healing the legacy of Tuskegee will help us to ensure that black people begin to demand and use services from our nation's health care system." Seele was trying to challenge not only Tuskegee, but all these notions of conspiracy that steer blacks away from AIDS care. "I was raised in black America, and I understand how people feel around these conspiracies," she says, "but that shouldn't prevent us from taking an HIV test and getting information about our health. It is dangerous for any African American with HIV to not be in medical care, or to have HIV and not know it." Every one of the eight African-American AIDS leaders I spoke with expressed deep empathy with black fears of the medical establishment. But each hoped to leverage those fears into AIDS self-defense.
A. Cornelius Baker, the African-American executive director of the Whitman-Walker Clinic in Washington, DC took the matter so seriously that he campaigned to make President Clinton apologize for Tuskegee, which he did in May 1997. "There was no way to have an honest discussion in the black community about HIV if that experiment was not addressed," Baker says. "But, at some point, the real issue isn't whether our government has acted in a way we don't like, but what do we do to fight against it."
One night during the training, I had dinner out on a patio with Karen Washington, an AIDS ministry lay leader at Friendship Baptist Church in Dallas. Washington, 37, tested positive at 23, but avoided taking HAART until three years ago because, she says, "I didn't want to be a guinea pig." She found out about her status while stationed on a U.S. Air Force base in London in 1987. "At the time I didn¹t even know what the disease was," she says, though she noticed that other blacks -- but not whites -- on her base were experiencing the same thing. "People in the government are always working on things that we'll never know about. I thought that I might have gotten AIDS because something went wrong in the lab." Williams says her mistrust of the government only grew in the '90s after she heard reports of the mysterious symptoms of Gulf War Syndrome. She only went on HAART, years later, out of respect for her increasingly worried mother. For now, she's doing well: Her CD4s are just shy of 500, and her viral load is undetectable.
As Washington and other PWAs at Tuskegee opened up to me about their postdiagnosis searchings, I found myself identifying with their fears, and with their basic suspicion about the disease and the drugs. As an African-American AIDS journalist, I have access to cutting-edge treatment information, and yet I haven't been to a doctor in a year and a half. Maybe the truth is I've examined every crackpot theory from Tuskegee to Cleveland with an open mind because, quietly, I hope I can believe one of them. When you're asymptomatic like I am, you really want to believe that AIDS can't happen; if Valentine and Cost are right, and AIDS isn't real, then I could distance myself from the virus in my blood.
Three months after the conference, I trek up to Columbia University at the edge of Harlem, to sit down with African-American scholars Mindy Fullilove, MD, a psychiatrist, and Robert Fullilove, EdD, a statistician and theologian, whom I met in Tuskegee. After 17 years of marriage and 14 years of partnered community research, the Fulliloves have their routine down pat. Today, she fields calls while he answers my questions. "As we've talked to people who are HIV infected, but are not interested in getting treatment, who have a completely different worldview about their illness and what they ought to do about it, it becomes very clear that saying 'Trust your doctor' is not enough to make them accept advice," Fullilove says. "They simply don't accept science as the final word on anything to do with AIDS, and certainly not as the final word on what they should do about their health."
In published essays and in many of the the 70 studies they've co-authored, the Fulliloves have examined myths about the origins of HIV, government intent with regard to AIDS, why African Americans are at greater risk, and why they avoid mainstream treatment. "Time isn't enough to heal every wound," he says, "or to resolve a worldview that made slavery possible. So there's a tendency on the part of African Americans, founded in their experience, to view everything done by whites with suspicion and mistrust." And to give the benefit of the doubt to solutions that come from within the black community.
Take Bronx resident Andre Cromer, 34. "All the stories I was hearing," he says, his solid gold medallion swaying with every gesture, "was that the medicine kills you, not the disease, and that AZT is poison. I was looking for an alternative." In 1992, six years before he was diagnosed with HIV, he found one. He was sitting in a large crowd at Louis Farrakhan's majestic Mosque Maryam in Chicago when the NOI's health minister, Abdul Alim Muhammad, took the stage. Cromer listened spellbound as Muhammad infused the audience with hope and racial pride, announcing that an AIDS cure, Kemron (a low-dose, oral preparation of alpha interferon), had been discovered in Africa. The miraculous news had been slow to spread, Muhammad said, because the discoverer, a Kenyan, couldn't get black ink in the white press. At the Million Man March in 1995, Farrakhan shared his limelight with Muhammad to bring the same message to the masses; bow-tied Final Call salesmen were pushing the word about Kemron, too, penetrating black communities from Bed-Stuy to Compton.
Muhammad's speech was all that Cromer needed to hear. "After that, I didn't really worry about getting the disease, because I always felt that I knew where the cure was," he says After Cromer ditched condoms and hard-to-keep rules about safer sex, it wasn't much of a surprise in 1988 when, after 10 days in Harlem's North General Hospital with pneumonia, his HIV test was positive. Cromer already knew what to do: He logged on to the website of NOI's Abundant Life Clinic, looking to buy some Kemron.
He found Barbara Justice, MD, who sold him Kemron out of her office in Harlem, not too far from North General, where he had tested positive and was offered his first round of combo therapy. Not too far, either, from the trash receptacle where he dumped the meds he'd been prescribed. Before, in 1992, at the height of Kemron's success, Justice was one of 70 NOI-affiliated doctors nationwide selling the drug, for $1,500 for a six-month supply. Kemron was then so wildly popular that it was even peddled on 125th Street, Harlem's main artery, on the same strip where you could cop a rock or a nickel bag.
Throughout the '90s, the drug was beset by troubles: A buyers' club offered low-dose alpha interferon to PWAs for only $50, a tiny fraction of the NOI price; anecdotal reports of the drug's ineffectiveness accumulated; when, after NOI pressure, the NIH finally agreed to begin clinical trials of Kemron, the agency halted them due to lack of enrollment. While New York City HIV doc Joseph Sonnabend, MD, says the diluted alpha interferon "doesn't hurt anyone," he also says it doesn't help. Some of his patients in the pre-protease era went to Kenya for Kemron, he recalls: "It cost them quite a bit to go there, and they came back and died anyway."
But none of that matters to Cromer, who's only on insurance-reimbursed antiretrovirals now because he's short on cash for Kemron. (On Kemron, he says, his CD4s spiked from 28 to 128, and his viral load dived from 750,000 to undetectable -- a result he's maintained on HAART.) Or at least it wasn't enough to challenge his racial solidarity.
While Cromer's sticking with Kemron, 9-year-old Precious Thomas, of Suitland, Maryland says she's on to the next new thing: goat therapy. Precious had tried Kemron, too, but quit the drug because, her mom Rocky says, it made her feel "listless." Perhaps a testament to the Thomases' continuing faith in black cures, the sixth-grader has since become the poster child for what Tulsa native Gary Davis, MD, aka "the goat doctor," calls "goat anti-human immune globulin." "You see, ladies and gentlemen," the confident child told an audience of 1,500 at 1998's Congressional Black Caucus town meeting on AIDS, "God, Dr. Muhammad and Dr. Davis, my heroes, took my viral load from 180,000 to zero, because of a special medicine called an antibody. Who would have thought something this special could be found in a goat?"
The idea for the serum came to Davis in a dream, and he quickly got to work isolating a goat's antibodies. By his account, he was able to use the substance to stop HIV from infecting CD4 cells in the lab. He put in a new drug application to the FDA in 1996, and when the agency turned him down, Davis cried foul. "I'm a black physician in the heart of the Tulsa ghetto," he told The Washington Post. "I'm not Pfizer. I'm not Merck. Get real. It's hard for you to be accepted within the ruling clique. What you say has to be proven above and beyond the normal expectations." NIH head Anthony Fauci told Fox News in 1998, "Not only is there not any basis for it to work, but there is evidence that it won't work."
Even without human or animal testing, media exposure has made Davis' remedy urban legend. Unlike Kemron distributors, who make a healthy profit, Davis gives his drug away for free, which adds to his appeal. Rocky Thomas was sold; she crossed the country to grab a bottle from his lab for her daughter, who's now been on the therapy for two years. "When she started taking [HAART], she stayed sick," says Rocky. "I asked myself, 'Why am I constantly giving this child stuff that's making her sick?' But her numbers are better now [on the goat serum]. It's the only thing that's truly given me hope."
I asked Robert Fullilove what he thought of these miracle meds, Kemron and goat serum. "We create goat doctors ourselves," he says, "because they fill the vacuum of what is perceived to be a complete disinterest in doing what is necessary to combat this epidemic among blacks. Our failure to be proactive makes people think that they need to find someone else who is."
There's a bit of disagreement among the conspiracy theorists: Graves and Farrakhan say that HIV is a biological weapon, while Valentine, Cost and Davis preach that blacks need to avoid toxic HIV drugs and seek out alternatives. But what binds these black men together is that each has made a successful grassroots push to get his message out into the streets of black communities across the country -- where many better-funded AIDS outreach workers fear to tread. The conspiracists have one up on mainstream African American AIDS advocates, who are often perceived to be pushing the same old message -- wear condoms, get tested, get treated with pharmaceutical meds -- dressed up in "culturally appropriate" garb, a kind of AIDS in blackface. Instead of trying to allay black fears, Graves and company speak directly to them. And they share an electrifying contention that their ideas have been shut out by white America.
At this point, Graves has been shut out for so long that he's almost shrunk into the self-loathing "nigger faggot with AIDS" that he often calls himself. He's earned the cynicism: He lost a job for being positive, got kicked out of the military for being gay and experiences racism every day as he tries to spread the word about his obsession, the government's secret virus program. In the face of all of this rejection, it's probably easier for him to think his life will come to a fiery apocalyptic end, a target of an international plot, than to face his illness day by day, holed up in his teenage nephew's room. Just before I leave him, all his voices are quiet. It's just me and Graves. "There's no hope, my friend," he says, eyes cast to the floor. "The elimination of the black population is well underway. They've got their crosshairs aimed at Africans and people of African decent."
Here are some more numbers for you. According to two 1999 Kaiser Family Foundation reports, African Americans are more than twice as likely as whites to not be taking combination therapy. We're one and a half times more likely to not get preventative treatment for pneumonia. Once in care, 64 percent of us believe that we'll receive worse treatment than whites do. And there are more to these numbers than the entrenched racism of a health care system in which African Americans are less often insured and have less access to health care than most.
As long as black AIDS deaths continue to rise, Crazy Eddie's crew will keep home-court advantage in the black community. "In addition to the threat of the virus itself, many black people think that there are larger questions about which they have very serious doubts," says Robert Fullilove. "These doubts aren't going to be calmed by showering folks with facts and figures or the preaching of noted scientists. If we don't face the fact that this is part of the HIV/AIDS dialogue, our failure to take it into account is going to cost us. The us I'm referring to is not just African Americans, but anyone who's interested in waging an effective battle against the epidemic."
The 4-H Club
Partners in paranoia
African Americans aren't the only AIDS-traumatized U.S. group to harbor suspicions that the disease was no accident. Many gay men, Haitian Americans, drug users and people with hemophilia have also raised eyebrows about HIV's strange affinity for them, saying that their long history of abuse offers good reason to believe that the powers-that-be are hostile to their survival. These suspicions were fueled by the timing of AIDS, which appeared just after Ronald Reagan won the presidency, his way paved by a hate-mongering Christian Right. A parade of conspiracy theories was the result:
Homosexuals. Coming so soon after a spate of local anti-gay ballot initiatives, the epidemic's onset was seen by many gays as a plot. Reflecting his constituents' views, in 1983, Rep. Ted Weiss (D-NY) told a Greenwich Village AIDS forum that, "given the attitudes towards homosexuals by some segments of society, the possible utilization of biological weapons must be seriously explored." By 1985, the Native, a New York City gay paper,reported that 37 percent of gay men polled believed that AIDS was "created by the federal government for political reasons." That year, Larry Kramer's hit play The Normal Heart included a scene about an anti-gay biowarfare plot. In recent years, with better treatments and some victories for queer acceptance, these suspicions have largely dissipated. In some quarters, they've been superceded by the "dissident" view that AIDS is nonexistent, invented by a greedy medical establishment.
Haitian Americans. In the early '80s, Reagan greeted thousands of Haitian refugees fleeing a brutal U.S.-backed dictatorship with either forcible return or jail. As some detainees contracted either AIDS or gynecomastia (the development in men of female breasts), fears caught fire that U.S. authorities had injected the detainees with agents causing both illnesses. After years of litigation, the gynecomastia was linked to improper use of a toxic anti-lice spray. But the continued stigmatization of Haitians as "AIDS carriers" -- aided by a CDC label of "risk group" (a decision revoked after massive protests) -- simply stoked fears that a U.S. biowarfare campaign brought the disease to their community. In 1992-93, when Presidents Bush and Clinton held HIV positive Haitian refugees in filthy barbed-wire camps at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Haitian American fears were reinforced, and their suspicions persist today.
Heroin Users. Long considered by diverse sectors of society as beneath contempt, many IDUs -- particularly people of color -- have seen AIDS as the final effort to wipe them out. Once needle exchange was shown to be effective at stemming HIV transmission, the intense political opposition to its funding -- continuing through three presidencies -- confirmed users' fears. This remains perhaps the only U.S. population about which public figures can get away with saying, "Let 'em die," as Judge Judy did this year.
Hemophiliacs. In 1996, Corey Dubin, president of the Committee of Ten Thousand, spoke for many hemophiliacs when he likened their situation to that of the African-American men of the Tuskegee syphilis study, writing in POZ, "We were considered expendable in the name of both profit and so-called medical progress." He was referring to the negligence of drug companies that until 1985 refused to screen and heat-treat the blood products necessary for hemophiliacs' survival. Congress finally acknowledged responsibility when it passed the Ricky Ray Hemophilia Relief Fund Act to compensate those infected due to government and corporate negligence. Ironically, the AIDS-plot writers most quoted by African-American, gay and other conspiracy advocates are part of the same ultra-right groups that have demonized these communities for years. In the neo-fascists' telling, AIDS biowarfare programs were hatched by a Soviet-controlled UN hell-bent on global domination. And their solutions to this "man-made disease" are a malignant mix of mandatory HIV testing, forced partner notification, and quarantine of HIVers. -- Bob Lederer
I submitted the whole thing as proof of the warpage that permiates the left. They believe what they choose to believe, and if the facts don't support it, the facts are wrong.
AIDS has been the greatest medical blunder of our time fueled by multi billion dollar profits and the political interests of gay 'AIDS charities'.
If you have any doubt seriously read the hundreds of pages of information at: -
Yup, definitely believable.
WORKSHOP ON SIMIAN VIRUS-40 (SV-40):
A Possible Human Polyomavirus
The following statement is an introduction for a more detailed packet on SV-40 and animal viruses in the production of vaccines. Click here to order the complete packet.
The National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), which was founded in 1982 and represents health care consumers and health care professionals concerned about vaccine safety, became actively involved in 1994 in researching reports of contamination of childhood vaccines with animal viruses and the possibility that inter-species transfer of animal viruses into humans via vaccines has had a negative impact on public health. Our concern was that government health agencies and industry had not adequately addressed many of the most important questions that remained unanswered about the contamination of polio vaccines with simian (monkey) viruses.
In June 1994, NVIC sent a letter to HHS Secretary Donna Shalala in which we reviewed documented evidence that polio vaccines have been contaminated with simian viruses and that, not only has the public not been adequately informed of this fact, but little has been done to determine whether this contamination has impacted negatively on the public health. In our letter we reviewed an article published in the March 1992 issue of The Lancet in which attorney Walter Kyle provided evidence that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) may have been created after simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) entered the human population when African green monkey kidney tissues infected with SIV were used to produce polio vaccines. The Kyle article pointed out that scientists at the Food and Drug Administration and within industry suspected as early as the 1950's and knew, by the mid-1970's, that polio vaccine had been contaminated with simian viruses and that at least one of these monkey viruses - SV-40 - was later found to cause leukemia and cancerous tumors in lab animals.
Our June 1994 letter to Secretary Shalala called on the government to conduct genetic testing of all archived lots of polio vaccine for the presence of simian viruses or virus-like particles and asked that this testing be monitored and verified by an independent group of doctors, scientists, and members of the public. In addition, NVIC asked that the government release to the public all data gathered from any previous testing on these and other vaccines and biological products, as it relates to simian virus contamination, including the isolation, identification and genetic sequencing of any virus or virus-like particles, other than polio, which have been isolated and identified in any polio vaccine or other biological produced licensed by the FDA as safe for human use.
In the September 1995 issue of THE VACCINE REACTION published by NVIC, we reported that California pathologist and immunologist W. John Martin, M.D., Ph.D., had published evidence that he had discovered an atypical virus infecting some children and adults, who are suffering from neurological, immune and psychiatric dysfunction, which is genetically linked to the African green monkey. After eight years of work culturing out stealth viruses from patients suffering from immune and brain dysfunction, Martin and his colleagues reported they used DNA sequence analysis to identify one of the viruses as being of African green monkey origin. Dr. Martin subsequently made a presentation at a Vaccine Safety Forum Workshop at the Institute of Medicine in November 1995 expressing his concern about possible contamination of polio vaccines with simian viruses and the need to immediately determine the prevalence of stealth viruses of simian origin in the U.S. population and whether these stealth viruses may be contributing to chronic immune system and brain disorders in children and adults.
In the April 1996 issue of THE VACCINE REACTION, NVIC reported that California microbiologist Howard B. Urnovitz, Ph.D., had provided compelling evidence at the Eighth Annual Houston Conference on AIDS in America that the human immunodeficiency virus Type 1 (HIV-1) is a monkey-human hybrid that was created after more than 320,000 Africans were injected in the late 1950's with experimental live oral polio vaccines contaminated with live simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV). Pointing out that endogenous retroviruses can easily recombine with fragments of other viruses, both human and animal, and form new hybrid viruses called chimeras, Dr. Urnovitz explained how SIV could have recombined with the normal genes of the Africans, who received the contaminated vaccines, and created a monkey-human hybrid now known as HIV-1.
The published research of Illinois molecular pathologist Michael Carbone and other scientists, who have discovered SV-40 genes and proteins in patients with virulent forms of bone, lung and brain cancer, contributes to the urgent need for federal health officials and industry to seriously investigate the growing amount of evidence that contamination of polio vaccines with monkey viruses may be contributing to immune and neurological dysfunction in our population. It is especially important in light of the fact that Dr. Martin's work suggests that stealth viruses of simian origin can be transmitted from human to human; Dr. Urnovitz's work suggests that simian viruses can recombine with human viruses and form deadly genetic-human hybrid viruses that can be transmitted from human to human; and scientists studying the presence of SV-40 in humans suggest that SV-40 can be transmitted from human to human, specifically mother to child.
Due to the obvious lack of past or present technological capability to guarantee that vaccines are not contaminated with unknown monkey viruses, the National Vaccine Information Center maintains that it is scientifically prudent and ethically responsible to stop producing vaccines using monkey tissues in order to prevent the possibility of cross-species transfer of animal viruses into the human population via vaccines. No mother or father wants to risk the possibility that monkey viruses may be put into their child's body, no matter what federal disease control goal is used as justification and regardless of whether or not there is proof that the presence of monkey viruses in the human body causes illness.
The ends do not justify the means. Making the decision that it is appropriate to allow for the possibility that vaccines may be contaminated with unknown monkey viruses without informing the public of that fact is a betrayal of the public trust by public health officials and pharmaceutical companies who should know better.
The National Vaccine Information Center is calling for:
1) no more animal tissues to be used in the production of vaccines;
2) a scientific investigation conducted by independent researchers outside of government and industry into the prevalence of viruses of simian genetic origin in the U.S. population;
3) the creation of retrospective and prospective long term studies conducted by independent researchers outside of government and industry to evaluate whether viruses of simian origin introduced into the human population via vaccines have played a role in the emergence of HIV-1 as well as the rising incidence of immune and neurological dysfunction such as cancer, chronic fatigue syndrome, unexplained encephalopathies and neuropathies, developmental delays, and personality and behavior disorders; and
4) a congressional investigation to illuminate for Congress and the public how the mass vaccination research, development and policymaking infrastructure operates in order to evaluate whether new, independent oversight mechanisms should be created to insure that the public health and safety is not compromised by current and future vaccines.
It is important that these steps and other actions be taken immediately in part so that more complete scientific understanding of the etiology of HIV-1, SV-40 associated cancers and other immune and brain disorders may lead more quickly to the development of appropriate therapies to restore normal immune and neurological function in affected children and adults. With 200 viral and bacterial vaccines in the research pipeline and a new AIDS vaccine being rushed to market, the National Vaccine Information Center maintains that it is particularly important that meaningful action be taken without delay in order to protect the health of not only this generation but future generations of Americans.
If you suspect that you have reacted to a vaccine or may have a vaccine related illness, please use our...
Simian Virus 40, a Deadly Cure?
by Geraldo Fuentes
If you received a polio vaccination in the 50's, you may have gotten more than you know... It was 1956. I was only six years old and attended grade school in Springfield, Massachusetts. I was too young to recollect the first round of polio vaccinations, but I have a few memories. I remember that my first grade class was escorted to the school gymnasium. There was a peculiar smell in the air. I think it was probably rubbing alcohol. And some of the other kids were crying. The shot itself wasn't so bad. I didn't cry, but my best friend did. At the end of the ordeal we all got a lollipop.
A few years later, when we marched again to the gymnasium it was different. There was no crying and no alcohol odor. Instead, there were long tables bearing neat rows of small paper cups, filled about half way with a liquid that tasted like bitter orange juice. White clad Nurses watched as each child drank the vaccine. There was no lollipop and, after we handed back the cup, we simply returned to class.
The government had initiated the mandatory polio vaccination programs in 1955. Prior to this, polio had killed or crippled thousands of children and adults all over the world. Attacking the central nervous system, this viral infection was transmitted by human contact, sewage and even by contaminated milk. Victims who contracted polio would incubate the virus in their intestines, where it would multiply and enter the lymphatic system. Eventually the virus would penetrate the nerves and travel along nerve paths, destroying neurons and rendering the muscles connected to them paralyzed.
The polio epidemic reached its height in 1952. It turned thousands of victims into cripples and confined countless children to large pressure chambers called "iron lungs," which helped them to breath when their diaphragm muscles were stilled. There was and still is no treatment for polio. Aside from attempts to maintain life functions, the disease must run its course.
And so, in 1955, just one year before I received it, Jonas Salk had performed no small miracle when he successfully mass-produced an effective polio vaccine by growing a form of the virus on the kidneys of rhesus monkeys. This virus would be harvested, killed, and given to healthy children like me, who would then develop antibodies which would kill any future invasion of the body by the polio virus.
This happy story of medical marvel has a deadly glitch. And it is especially deadly if, like me, you received your vaccinations in the 1950s, in certain states like Massachusetts.
In 1960, researchers discovered that the polio vaccine distributed to certain states was infected with another virus called "Simian Virus 40." SV-40 is a monkey virus that is not normally found in humans. Unknown at the time, it was present in hundreds of rhesus monkeys that were used to grow and harvest the polio vaccine. Injected into research animals, the SV-40 virus causes brain and lung cancers. Now, some forty years later, its effect on humans is just being investigated.
SV-40 has appeared in 61% of all new cancer patients -- patients too young to have received the contaminated vaccine being administered forty years ago! Michele Carbone, Assistant Professor of Pathology at Loyola University in Chicago, has recently isolated fragments of the SV-40 virus in human bone cancers and in a lethal form of lung cancer called mesotheliomas. He found SV-40 in 33% of the osteosarcoma bone cancers studied, in 40% of other bone cancers, and in 60% of the mesotheliomas lung cancers. Dr. Carbone believes this study explains why 50% of the current mesotheliomas being treated were no longer occurring in association with asbestos exposure, their traditional cause.
Researchers from the Institute of Histology and General Embryology of the University of Ferrara, lead by Dr. Fernanda Martini, discovered SV-40's presence in a variety other tumors. They found the rhesus monkey virus in 83% of choriod plexus papillomas, in 73% of ependymomas, in 47% of astrocytomas, in 50% of glioblastomas, and in 14% of meningiomas.
SV-40 also has been found in 23% of blood samples and 45% of sperm fluids taken from normal individuals! Researchers have determined the SV-40 virus can be transmitted sexually and through blood transfusions.
Even more shocking, SV-40 has appeared in 61% of all new cancer patients -- patients even too young to have received the contaminated vaccine being administered forty years ago! How could this happen?
My second vaccination was from a cup. This was the brainstorm of the FDA. Instead of getting the "dead" virus in an injection, the Federal vaccination policy mandated that children should be given the new live "oral polio vaccine" (OPV). This decision was based upon the belief that the OPV recipient would "shed" the virus through body contact with other non-vaccinated children and adults, thereby spreading the "live" virus throughout the population. Since the infection was extremely small, it would produce the desired antibodies while posing no threat of contracting polio. This, it was thought, would assure the total immunization of America and the eradication of the disease. The public was never informed that this national health strategy was being implemented, despite several cases of polio which were directly attributed to the vaccine.
By 1963, the estimated number of tainted polio vaccinations was estimated to be upwards of 98-million! The SV-40 virus that contaminated the oral polio vaccine quickly spread from child to child and from child to adult, crossing state lines and national boundaries. By 1960, when the virus was first detected, it was already too late to prevent its dissemination throughout the population. The FDA quietly and gradually instituted a program to eliminate rhesus monkeys, who harbor the SV-40, and replace them with African Green monkeys that are free of the virus. By 1963 the monkeys had been replaced but the estimated number of tainted polio vaccinations was estimated to be 98-million!
According to the National Institutes of Health, high levels of SV-40 were identified in polio vaccines in Washington, Oregon, Wyoming, Utah, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Washington DC, Maryland, Delaware, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire. Low levels of SV-40 were found in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, Missouri, Louisiana, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia. Polio vaccines in the other states show no SV-40 present. This revelation has only recently come to public attention. Many people, like myself, were unaware that a potential for cancer had been implanted in their body. Researchers say that, by age fifteen, the virus stops shedding to others. I cannot but wonder how many people I contacted between the age of eight and fifteen... Did I shed the SV-40 virus to my mother, who eventually died of brain cancer? Will I contract brain, lung or bone cancer? Many other people in my age group are asking similar questions. A number of public statements have been made by the National Cancer Institute in the past few months, attempting to put their spin on these disturbing revelations. In an statement published in the January (1999) New England Journal of Medicine, the institute states that there is no evidence of an increase in humans of the types of cancers found in laboratory animals that have been injected with SV-40. But other researchers remind us that SV-40 has already been found in a wide variety of other tumors. It has been shown that individuals who received the tainted oral vaccine demonstrate a higher occurrence of these cancers.
For example: people who lived in Massachusetts and Illinois in the 1950s, and received identified lot numbers of the contaminated oral vaccine, are now contracting osteosarcoma bone tumors at a rate of ten times more than those who received the vaccine free of the SV-40. But the National Cancer Institute has been silent about these facts.
There needs to be more demographic studies to explore the relationship of SV-40 to adult onset cancers. Not surprisingly, the US government and its agencies are reluctant to pursue this matter. In fact, requests to the National Institute for Health for grants to study the SIV and simian cyto-megalovirus (SCMV) were recently denied. Microbiologist Howard Urnovitz, Ph.D., may have an explanation as he stated in the Boston Globe:
"that almost 100 million Americans were exposed (to SV-40) through a government sponsored program, but for over 30 years, there has been virtually no government effort to see if anyone's been harmed by the exposure." He added, "The government will not fund science that makes it look culpable."
Another method used by the National Cancer Institute to divert public concern is to issue statements that "many of the cancers under suspicion were contracted by people who are too young to have received the tainted vaccine in the 1950s." This argument, although true, ignores the potential of spreading the live SV-40 by "shedding" through personal contact. The oral polio vaccine was designed to be transmitted to non-vaccinated individuals by this very method. In fact, this was the reason that OPV was preferred over injection. If SV-40 is still being spread by contact today it is not surprising that these cancers are now affecting younger people.
Regardless of blame, severe damage to world health has already been done by the unsavory practice of growing vaccination products in animals. An example of these horrors was presented by Dr. Urnovitz at the Eighth Annual Houston Conference on AIDS.
Dr. Urnovitz revealed significant evidence that human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) is a monkey hybrid virus which was produced when 320,000 Africans were injected with polio virus contaminated with live simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) in the late 1950's. Apparently, viral fragments combine easily with other viruses to produce these hybrids called "chimeras." Prior to this revelation, health officials were blaming AIDS on the habit of certain Africans to consume monkey flesh. What can be done now? "Make it in anything but animals," said Barbara Loe Fisher of the National Vaccine Information Center, which criticizes vaccine safety.
"We have the technology to make vaccines in human cell lines that are clean," said Dr. Michele Carbone of Loyola University Medical Center, one of the first to discover SV-40 inside human tumors.
Until then we can only hope that researchers continue their work, regardless of the repercussions. Millions of people are already infected with SV-40 and are in danger. Many cancers do not develop until mid-life. Future generations must be protected. We must prohibit any future contamination of the world population, whether for our own good or not, by well-meaning governmental agencies.
The fact is, I heard about Crocksby long before I had to show you that I wasn't the only one. It is a FACT, that the racist, bigoted, idiot Cosby, indeed said these remarks. Perhaps you should prove me wrong..
Dr. Duesberg (the retrovirologist that mapped the genetic structure of retroviruses) and molecular biologist Dr. Bryan Ellison in a response to just such a challenge from Michael Fumento in 1990 had the following to say: both of us would be quite willing to carry out the Fumento test: if he will arrange for sufficient national publicity, if he would be convinced by our action, and if he will thereafter help us bring exposure to our viewpoint, we will indeed be quite happy to have ourselves publicly injected with HIV.
The supposed latency period of HIV (and the equally dubious "genetic immunity" theory) are used to explain away the many healthy HIV positives who show no sign of AIDS. This is why it would prove nothing for anyone to inject him/herself with HIV and survive. If he/she lived for another 50 years and died at 110, HIV science would conclude only that the latency period is sometimes unusually long, or perhaps that he/she was one of the lucky folk with genetic immunity.
Actually we would be quite happy to do so if it proved anything that the AIDS apologists would accept. Dr. Willner toured the World injecting himself with HIV positive blood. As expected he never became sick with AIDS. The establishment always has some excuse, and so this line of attack was not persued.
We have proved by every means possible that HIV does NOT cause immune suppression but with billions at stake the AIDS establishment is hardly likely to admit the blunder and pack up shop.
I have said publicly that I am quite willing to inject HIV positive blood. Doing so, however, would be a waste of time as has been already proven.
To read more about Dr. Willner see the LINKS section of: -
and scroll down to the link to his book.
Post back when you have "real sources." Until then, shaddup.
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