The following information is mostly taken without permission from “Science Sold Out” by Rebecca Culshaw, North Atlantic Books. I have necessarily simplified her well researched and rigorously presented material. As a result some slight inaccuracies may have slipped in. All such inaccuracies are my own responsibility and not Rebecca’s, and I apologize in advance for them. Please read the book yourself and get the undiluted truth.
AIDS is not a disease. It is a syndrome which is defined as a menu of possible symptoms. The symptoms included in the AIDS syndrome has continually expanded and changed over the years. Thus by definition the “epidemic” has to grow.
If you have pneumonia and are HIV- then you have pneumonia. If you have pneumonia and are HIV+ then you have AIDS. If you have tuberculosis and are HIV- then you have tuberculosis. If you have tuberculosis and are HIV+ then you have AIDS. Etc., etc. If you have AIDS-like symptoms but you are HIV- then you DONT have AIDS. Sort of a self-fulfilling theory that HIV causes AIDS if it is defined that way, isnt it?
In Massachusetts, no matter what one dies of (suicide, car accident, etc.) if one is HIV+ then the death is counted as an AIDS death.
In many states babies born to HIV+ mothers are forced to undergo anti-retroviral therapy with very toxic drugs like AZT. Pregnant women are encouraged to get HIV tests and then if positive, to take anti-retroviral drugs even though pregnancy is acknowledged as a common cause of false positive HIV tests.
The side effects of AZT are all common AIDS symptoms: wasting, anemia, bone marrow suppression, and fulminating white-blood cell death.
Some symptoms that used to be considered part of the AIDS syndrome are no longer included in the definition, like Kaposi’s sarcoma. The definition of AIDS in Africa is different than that in Europe and North America. Go figure.
In 1993 a low CD4+ T-cell count was added to the list of factors that is included in the definition of AIDS. This caused a doubling of reported AIDS cases overnight. But it is known that CD4+ counts can vary dramatically within a normal healthy individual from time to time for many reasons. But any single low test can now be used to diagnose AIDS. This increased the number of “healthy AIDS patients” who of course, did well on anti-HIV drugs, and thus made them seem like successful drugs. The proportion of AIDS cases that resulted in death dropped greatly in 93-94. Any surprise?
There are no significant studies that demonstrate the statement that “anti-HIV drugs stop AIDS”. There is little evidence that HIV protease inhibitors extend life or decrease morbidity. Few studies of them have control groups. The leading cause of death among medicated HIV+ people is no longer AIDS-defining diseases but rather liver failure, a well-documented averse effect of protease inhibitors.
The prevalence estimates of HIV in the US population and all other populations studied has been roughly constant from 1985 until the most recent estimate in 2005. The prevalence in Africa is higher but also has remained constant It has remained about one million people in the US since they started making estimates. How can that be if the AIDS incidence curve continues to rise and HIV is supposed to be the cause and yet the “latency period” between infection and onset of AIDS has been increasing!?
HIV+ tests show regularity across lines of race, gender, age and geographic location utterly unlike what one would expect from a sexually transmitted infection.
There is still (more than twenty years after HIV was announced at a press conference as the cause of AIDS) considerable debate among scientists about how a virus present in such minute quantities can cause CD4+ T-cell death and thus the debility of the immune system. Lots of theories have come and gone over the years. One of the latest theories is that other substances “trigger” HIV to act. Couldn’t those “triggers” actually be the cause of AIDS? We may never know because researchers like Duesberg can’t get funding for these lines of research.
Retroviruses, including HIV, do not kill the cells that they infect unlike most pathogenic viruses.
Nobel prize winning retro-virologist Dr. Peter Duesberg has documented all the reasons that HIV cannot possibly cause AIDS and his criticisms have never been refuted in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Yet he is often cited as being discredited. The only refutations to his arguments are found in non-peer reviewed anonymous documents that have themselves been refuted, such as an NIH publication and the Durban Declaration.
Science behind the use of PCR (Polymerase chain reaction) to measure “viral load” has been debunked on mathematical and immunological grounds but it is still being used for clinical case management of AIDS. The inventor of PCR, Nobel prize winner Kary Mullis says that this is an improper use of PCR. As he says “Quantitative PCR is an oxymoron.”
There is no FDA approval for the use of the HIV tests to diagnose HIV infection! HIV tests have never been validated against HIV isolation. There is no evidence that HIV has been isolated in an acceptable manner. Isolation has never been demonstrated with the publication of clear electron micrographs.
There are two major HIV tests. They test for anti-bodies in the blood, not for the presence of the HIV virus itself, which is long gone from the blood stream. These are supposedly HIV-specific antibodies, but if these tests were run on undiluted blood _everyone_ would test positive! The blood must be diluted 50 to 400 times before the tests are run. There are ten or eleven different proteins that are tested for but there is cross-reaction with many other proteins un-related to HIV! The results of the test are not a yes-no polarity. It is a sliding scale of reactivity that must be identified by the judgement of the lab technician and the cutoff between positive & negative results varies from lab to lab in different locations!
“ELISA testing alone cannot be used to diagnose AIDS” – Abbot Labs test kit, 1997
“Do not use this kit as the sole basis for HIV infection” – Epitrope Western Blot kit, 1997
Viral load has never been verified against the gold standard of HIV isolation.
And finally there is no scientific paper that proves HIV causes AIDS.