I’m sorry if I haven’t read along very well, but where does this fact come from?
That is, again, from the second link, authored by virologists Duesberg and Ellison:
About 5 to 10 percent of all CJD cases are inherited. These cases arise from a mutation, or change, in the gene that controls formation of the normal prion protein. While prions themselves do not contain genetic information and do not require genes to reproduce themselves, infectious prions can arise if a mutation occurs in the gene for the body’s normal prion protein. <snip>
CJD cannot be transmitted through the air or through touching or most other forms of casual contact. Spouses and other household members of sporadic CJD patients have no higher risk of contracting the disease than the general population. However, exposure to brain tissue and spinal cord fluid from infected patients should be avoided to prevent transmission of the disease through these materials. <snip>
Since 1985, all human growth hormone used in the United States has been synthesized by recombinant DNA procedures, which eliminates the risk of transmitting CJD by this route.
The appearance of the new variant of CJD (nv-CJD or v-CJD) in several younger than average people in Great Britain and France has led to concern that BSE may be transmitted to humans through consumption of contaminated beef. Although laboratory tests have shown a strong similarity between the prions causing BSE and v-CJD, there is no direct proof to support this theory.
Many people are concerned that it may be possible to transmit CJD through blood and related blood products such as plasma. <snip>They do know that, even though millions of people receive blood transfusions each year, there are no reported cases of someone contracting CJD from a transfusion.
This came from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders
We seem to be jumping between slow viruses and prions in explaining both diseases. Gotta pick one.
At the very least in the case of the virus, I don’t know that any actual viral agent was ever located for either. I’m not 100% sure that CJD has been conclusively linked to prions either; my (admittedly limited) understanding is that this is still some cutting edge material which is still under debate.
In any event, Gajdusek went with the virus when studying kuru and prions never entered his experiments. If you want to use kuru as a proof of cannibalism (which is what this was all getting at, hard to recall at this point… 
)
, you have to both prove that Gajdusek had found a viral agent (or otherwise infected tissue), and that it it could be transmitted by eating infected tissue. To my knowledge no one has done that.
oneidcat. You can’t just copy huge passages and paste them here. That’s copyright infringement and it’s illegal. The Chicago Reader(our Host) hopes that people don’t lift material from them, and they don’t want us lifting chunks from others.
I probably should have pruned your post even more, but it’s hard to do without losing the ideas.
samclem, GQ moderator
Duesberg is the quack who for years has been promoting the theory that HIV does not cause AIDS. The article you cited is littered with utter falsehoods.
Duesburg is pretty much considered the father of retrovirology:
You can disagree with the man, but I think “quack” is a bit excessive. There was a second author of the article as well, one Ellison; also a ‘quack?’
Such as…?
Kary Mullis, the guy who got the Nobel for PCR, also promoted that theory. Mullis is crazy, though. 
Duesberg’s theories about HIV and AIDS have been universally opposed by medical experts. He is not a medical doctor and does not treat patients. I say he is a quack because he has encouraged people with HIV to stop taking their medications and has disputed the known risks for HIV infection. There are a number of inaccuracies in the article you cited, but most importantly, here is the evidence that HIV infection causes AIDS. The page you’re looking for isn’t available | NIH: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
My understanding is that MDs get their info on how viruses operate from researchers, not the other way around.
I’m quite sure that Duesberg, Mullis and others - and these are people who have received the highest possible accolades in the field of research, they’re not exactly newbies or pikers - would have some things to say about some of the info in that link, particularly the use of “new technologies” to stretch Koch’s postulates in a more inclusive direction. Regardless, we haven’t been discussing HIV, but kuru, and even if Duesberg were wrong about one he could be right about the other. If you throw away everything the man says about virology in an ad hominem fashion, it really doesn’t help science.
In general Duesberg has been highly critical of slow virus theory, and has used a lot of examples in his writing of when “virus hunters” have been wrong, such as was the case with pellagra and a 1970s “outbreak” of a “rare virus” in Japan which turned out to be a bad batch of over the counter digestive medicine (epidemiology alone in both cases suggested a germ.)
The combination of criticism from both prominent bio researchers and at least one anthropologist familiar with PNG specifically leads me to have some serious doubts as to what kuru was and what caused it.
I don’t mean to hijack this thread into an AIDS debate. But I have to question the use of Peter Duesberg as a source for anything. He is yet another “expert” who irresponsibly speaks outside his area of expertise (not unlike Linus Pauling, - the only winner of two, unshared Nobel Prizes - claiming that a megadose of Vitamin C cures the common cold). Duesberg’s principal research has been in cancer-causing retroviruses in chickens. I don’t know what experience he has in Kuru, but he has little, if any, experience in epidemiology or clinical pathology and no experience in HIV/AIDS.
Duesberg’s theory that AIDS is caused by by recreational drug use and “promiscuous” sexual behavior and not caused by HIV infection is ridiculous and considered unsupportable by virtually the entire scientific community. The evidence that HIV causes AIDS is simply irrefutable and his continuing to shrilly deny this is bizarre and reckless. Yes, he was a respected researcher before he proposed his AIDS theories, but at this point I am dubious about just about anything he says.
Um, nope. Dictionary.com and several other definition sites define Abolish as “To do away with; annul. To destroy completely.” *Outlawing * something almost universally implies a matter of legality. thus the term *law *.
You can try to abolish “something” through the use of laws, thereby outlawing it and making it illegal. But making “something” illegal does not necessarily abolish it. “It” can, and many times does, continue to happen illegally. At the point that “it” no longer happens, it is then abolished.
E.g.:
Recreational alcohol consumption was made illegal in the US by the 21st amendment to the Constitution. From 1920 to 1933, it was outlawed. However, it was never successfully abolished.
Further, the overwhelming success and growth of a small number of fast food franchises have nearly abolished the variety of mom and pop burger joints that existed in the 50’s. We know, however, that the mom and pop burger stands were never made illegal or outlawed.
So, when you state in the OP that cannibalism was “out lawed [sic] in 1950” and your cited source states that,” Western settlers abolished the practice in the 1950s” you are incorrectly using your source. It is possible that, as Cecil stated, the practice was outlawed long before the 1950’s, but that it was not abolished until the more constant contact of the western settlers in the 1950’s.
All of this, however, is a rather moot point, because it appears that the very existence of any sort of cannibalism and the “laughing” disease are now, and have been since as far back as 1986, a highly debatable topic by the experts. It would appear then, that Cecil was very well supported (factually speaking) when he dismissed the notion of kuru caused by cannibalism in the FORE people.
So when you come around, four years after Cecil’s posting, and call him, “Mr Talk-Alot-But-Know-Little” and then state “It costs nothing to ensure you have the correct facts so I suggest you take advantage of that freedom in future!” maybe you should take your own advice “ :wally “.
Well, OK then, I don’t want to do that either. At the same time, I think that this is yet another forum where Duesberg is getting a raw deal.
He is speaking quite well within his area of expertise when he offers opinions on retroviruses in part because he has been so involved in genetic mapping of them since the 1960s and has been a major pioneer in the field. Part of his arguments against some of the supposition as to what HIV, kuru etc. can do is that he doesn’t see how they have enough genetic information to have such complex and elaborate powers. His work with suspected cancer-causing retroviruses has also led him to question their destructive capabilities, in part because lines of cancer cells were replicating rapidly with retroviral passengers, not dying.
I think a lot of the criticism of Duesberg has been from an oversimplification of his AIDS theory. In brief, he thinks that there are actually a number of different factors causing many people to have various diseases which have been lumped into one faulty AIDS category, for which reason he thinks one magic bullet cure for all of them can’t be found.
One problem he sees is people having repeated STD and related infections and overrelying on anti-biotics to counter them, thus undermining the immune system.
Another is a combination of drug abuse and STDs causing the same.
Another is “iatrogenic AIDS,” caused by giving otherwise pretty healthy people large doses of protease chain terminators such as AZT (a failed chemo drug), whose effects are difficult to tell from other wasting diseases.
He suspects that much of the wasting and stunting in Africa is from a combination of infections and malnutrition, both of which tale their tolls on the immune system.
Having read his book I’d say we’re dealing with a very careful scientist who is very much concerned with bad science causing people to take unnecessary and possibly harmful medications. His career has suffered incredibly for that.
Now, no one has to agree with the guy, but dismissing everything he has to say without considering it carefully doesn’t seem very scientific to me. I’d also point out that there are dozens of virus experts in the world who have agreed with Duesberg on many or most of his points. They are a minority, but not as best as I can see not all a bunch of quacks.
It has, in fact, been Duesberg’s nemeses Gajdusek and Dr. Robert Gallo (the supposed discoverer of HIV; he appears to have stolen the work of Dr. Luc Montaigner’s lab at the Pasteur Institute) who have had to answer critics who have accused them of scientific fraud.
From the “virusmyth” website you linked to: [[A growing group of bio-medical scientists claim the cause of AIDS is still unknown. These heretics do not believe in the lethal AIDS virus called HIV. They claim that the virus is indeed harmless. Most of them think AIDS is also not sexually transmitted; it probably has toxic causes. People die because they are poisoned to death by toxic antiviral drugs. Part of the AIDS dissidents even question the existence of a virus entity. These HIV skeptics say that the AIDS virus has never really been isolated, and the AIDS tests are worthless…]] (They are describing themselves in this introductory paragraph)
This kind of paranoid, illogical thinking has caused some people infected with HIV to avoid treatment with the effective new therapies, and that is tragic and unconscionable. I am a clinical researcher, currently conducting a trial of a new class of HIV drugs. The fact that the combination of highly active antiretroviral drugs - specifically designed to block the lifecycle of HIV in the body - have dramatically improved quality and quantity of life of those who are infected with HIV makes it fairly obvious that HIV is the culprit. I think Duesberg and his promoters would be laughable if they weren’t so dangerous.
It’s also interesting that you completely dismiss the contributions of Robert Gallo in your post…
Okay, in the interest of turning this thread back to the topic of Kuru, I’ll drop this point and let you carry on. - Jill
Well, Gallo has faced changes of fraud (I know the link is to a biased source, but the collection of source docs is convenient). Aside from all of that he also faced a lawsuit from a grad student who also claims he stole work. Yet Gallo has received millions in funding since all of this, while Dueberg, who at least no one has accused of fraud, can’t get a grant any longer (he’s had at least 9 grant applications turned down).
This is also quite interesting:
Lots of people have gone to trial, many of them undeservedly. Unless you have something about the results of those trials, I’d have to consider them completely irrelevant.
And in addition to anti-virus therapies being effective against AIDS, there’s also the problem that the transmission of the disease is consistent with a single virus being the culprit, and not consistent with it being caused by overload of other diseases or excessive medication. If overload of other diseases or of non-AIDS medication were the cause, then one would expect to see the disease spontaneously arise independently in separated places and populations, which we don’t, and the notion that it’s caused by the very medications used to treat AIDS is ludicrous, both because people don’t start taking anti-AIDS medication until they have AIDS, and because people with AIDS who take medication for it fare better than those with the disease who do not.
Further, AIDS is known to be transmissable via medical transfusion and through the placenta from a mother to fetus. There was even a case some years back of an AIDS-infected dentist who deliberately infected several of his patients by injecting them with HIV. What cause other than a virus or other germ could explain these routes of transmission?
This sort of thing strikes me as relevant. Personal preference, of course.
Actually it appears in many cases that protease chain terminators, especially AZT, certainly made people violently ill and may have killed.
There are quite a few observations that the wasting associated with AZT was consistent with what one would expect from massive doses of chemo, which is exactly what the drug was invented for. In previous years the latency period between HIV infection and AIDS was thought to be as little as 6 months (the theory has grown this period longer and longer as HIV+ folks have been living for decades now; the latency period is now assumed to be 20 years or more) and people were just dosed as a ‘last-ditch effort’ which I suspect may have done some people in. No matter what actually kills you, you’re an “AIDS death” if you were HIV positive.
That brings us to the other problematic part of this statement; by definition AIDS is not a disease itself, but one or more diseases in addition to being positive for HIV antibodies. Most of those diseases can only be obtained (say herpes or TB) by contact with that germ regardless as to whether the individual is HIV positive or not. Everyone agrees on that much.
That’s precisely what happens. In fact the lists of component definitional diseases differ between, say, the US and Africa even though they are said to be the same illness which should be treated with the same medicine.
This isn’t at all true! As noted, for example, in the link JillGat provided, we dose people with anti-retrovirals after a needle stick long before anyone even does an HIV test. We’ve also been dosing people with no more than swollen lymph nodes or a garden variety yeast infection (or not even) for years now.
People have certainly been doing better since the go-for-broke AZT dosing has stopped. That data can be interpreted in a number of ways.
Certainly HIV is, and Duesberg doesn’t argue that the least little bit (he has in fact argued that as a passenger RNA unit, a certain % of the population will test positive from birth). We’ve also been experimenting with giving anti-retrovirals to fetuses in the womb via dosing their sick mothers.
Do you mean Dr. David Acer in Florida? I don’t well know how he was able to inject people “with HIV” in 1989 in that no one had isolated said virus at the time (has anyone done that now? We’ve mainly been dealing with viral fragments and presumably infected tissue; reading the Perth Group materials on this front is most interesting). It appears that those who investigated the case still aren’t sure what transpired.
Even then we’re talking about “almost identical” viruses in 5 of the 7 cases (the assumption seems to be 2 patients obtained positive results to HIV antibodies in some other fashion). I don’t know what “almost identical” means, but presumably like all viruses HIV would be on a fairly short leash in terms of genetic mutation in order to remain viable. As I understand it, we’re still doing HIV tests based in cell cultures collected over 20 years ago.
You’ll likely poo-poo this link out of hand, but it’s an interesting amount of info on the famously related Kimberly Bergalis case. Apparently she also became severely anemic in the course of her treatment, which isn’t usually ascribed to HIV.
In general there a quite a few very bright, experienced people who have questioned a lot of the HIV research and we shouldn’t toss everything they have to say out the window.
I said I’d bow out, but I feel compelled to comment here that there are a number of errors and extreme over-simplifications in Crandolf’s post about HIV/AIDS. Example:
Huh??
And the Florida dentist, Dr. Acer, didn’t have to “isolate” the virus to inject someone else with it. He could have simply used his own blood, which is what he most likely did.
I could argue with Crandolf’s post sentence by sentence, but - again - it diverges from the point of this thread and I’m not going to waste the time. Crandolf - even more than Duesberg - is clearly speaking way outside his area of expertise here.
Jill
Whoa, one more thing:
Crandolf:
“We”? Who is “we”? Do you even know what the criteria is for beginning antiretroviral therapy in people with HIV disease?
And re. HIV tests being “based in cell cultures from 20 years ago”… have you heard of phenotyping and genotyping? Etc?
I’m sorry, but this is dangerous bullshit to be posting on a site that is supposed to be dedicated to the straight dope. Please go to www.cdc.gov and http://hivinsite.ucsf.edu for more information on HIV/AIDS.
Yeah, wouldn’t want to hi-jack a thread… Start a new thread maybe?