Correction Cecil!!!!!

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
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That’d be Crandolph with a -ph.

The thread diverged in this direction because I referenced a kuru criticism from a piece co-authored by Dr. Duesberg, who was dismissed out of hand as a quack. I think this is unfair to Duesberg, and beyond that not a very good way to do science. (No one has touched the fact that Steadman’s anthropological criticism of the kuru hypothesis would seem to complement Duesberg and Ellison’s criticism of same.)

The exact words used to criticize Duesberg seem to be putting words in his mouth or thoughts in his head that I haven’t seen expressed by him. I wanted to clear that up as best I could.

“We” references our society. “We give people X medication.” is a similar sentence to “We keep cats as pets.” or “We trade money for goods and services.” I don’t understand the problem there.

I’m not going to pretend to know the precise current proscribed protocol under which people are supposed to be getting anti-retrovirals in May 2005 in the US. I will say that I know this has changed over the past 25 years depending on factors such as what country you’re in, what drugs were invented or reassigned to HIV at the time, which diseases comprised the component list of AIDS-defining (this list has been periodically expanded by the CDC in the US, and the list compiled by WHO for the Third World is strikingly different) at the time, and so forth. There have even been many cases in which people were taking anti-retrovirals for years before subsequent testing had them turning up HIV-negative (link to a few instances that made the news). Presumably there’s no logical way that these people could have “had AIDS” before taking the meds if we assume that HIV is causal. As I noted before, fetuses are getting anti-retrovirals in utero. A blanket statement such as “people don’t start taking anti-AIDS medication until they have AIDS” is demonstrably false, and certainly hasn’t been true in all cases over the past couple of decades. And it is even directly contradicted in one of the links posted to contradict Duesberg’s assertions (needle sticks).

As noted in the link I posted on the Acer case, the people who investigated it most closely reached no conclusions as to what happened. We just don’t know what any presumed route of transmission was. I don’t think that my pointing this out constitutes “dangerous bullshit.” Making the positive assertion that “a dentist” was injecting people “with HIV” when we can’t say for certain what transpired seems to be sloppier fact reporting than what I’ve done. (One wonders how Acer kept the virus alive if he injected people with his blood if the virus can’t survive outside of the body for more than tiny amounts of time. The CDC appears to estimate a 1 in 3000 chance of becoming infected via needle stick at that.)

As far as the latency period “Huh??”: if you look at the assumptions about HIV in mainstream medical lit, both the formal scientific papers and the public health materials drawn from that, the length of time a person could expect to live before the onset of AIDS (without medication) has grown quite a bit between the 1980s and now. In the '80s you were pretty well handed a death sentence within a couple of years (hence the aggressive AZT treatments), now the literature claims you go possibly go a couple of decades before becoming ill.

I don’t necessarily have to have extensive virology credentials to understand the patient explanations in the popular science writing done by respected researchers such as Drs. Mullis, Duesberg and Papadopulos-Eleopulos have been doing for years. If we’re going to start getting high and mighty about “posting on a site that is supposed to be dedicated to the straight dope,” we could stop using “appeal to authority” argument against me (not meaning this as a put-down - honestly - but is anyone posting here in any position to use this on Nobel laureate Mullis or Nat’l Academy of Science member Duesberg?) and “ad hominem” against anything Duesberg says.

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As far as the latency period “Huh??”: if you look at the assumptions about HIV in mainstream medical lit, both the formal scientific papers and the public health materials drawn from that, the length of time a person could expect to live before the onset of AIDS (without medication) has grown quite a bit between the 1980s and now. In the '80s you were pretty well handed a death sentence within a couple of years (hence the aggressive AZT treatments), now the literature claims you go possibly go a couple of decades before becoming ill.

As I recall, the latency periods quoted are not from HIV to AIDS but from AIDS to death and the main reason this has increased is the improved medication

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My frustration - leading to the phrase: “dangerous bullshit” - is that some of the misstatements and over-simplifications (and some of the questionable internet links) made in earlier posts lead to the kind of thinking that causes some people with HIV to avoid or delay treatment with drug therapies that can be life-saving. It is a frightening diagnosis, still, and some people, when faced with it, grasp for anything that might refute the common wisdom (that this is an incurable and infectious viral infection, but there is treatment that can prolong and improve quality of life for those infected).

I have worked in HIV/AIDS (as an educator, community organizer, epidemiologist for many years - in the Caribbean and in the US - and now as a clinical researcher) since the beginning of the epidemic. I watched ten people drop dead a day in the early 1980s in the US and now see many fewer deaths and many infected people on medication who are living quality lives. One of the earlier studies I worked on analyzed the reasons why infected persons delay testing and treatment, and - especially now - these are delays we really want to avoid.

HIV is not “latent” for 20 years. People progress at various rates to symptomatic illness, but the virus is more or less active from the time of infection. People with HIV usually are not treated with highly active antiretroviral therapies (which have become much more effective, better tolerated and easier to take than in the past) until their CD4 counts drop to 350 or below or the patient is symptomatic (not just with a yeast infection). Almost everyone infected with HIV becomes ill way before 20 years.

It would not be that difficult to take a syringe of HIV-infected blood and to infect another person, which Acer is theorized to have done. This cannot be compared to statistics on infections from occupational exposure via accidental needlesticks for a variety of probably obvious reasons (whether there is blood - and how much - in the needle, likelihood that subject patient is infected with HIV, type of needle, type of accidental injury, etc. etc.). When a health care provider is “dosed” (as Crandolph calls it) following such an injury, it is not for HIV treatment, but for prophylaxis (to prevent infection). These are very different things. The data show that preventive treatment with antiretroviral meds is pretty effective. Treating pregnant women with antiretroviral drugs is also highly effective at preventing transmission from mother to child.

The fact is that a LOT is known about HIV; the virus and what it does once it gets inside a human body. Although we probably aren’t close to a vaccine or a cure, more is learned all the time about how to interrupt the lifecycle of HIV in the body. When I hear people say, “we don’t know that much about this,” it sounds a little to me like the kind of talk you hear from anti-evolution people.

I could dispute or present evidence to counter other points made earlier in this thread, but I think most people know or have access to this information. My concern is that some of the inaccuracies posted here can lead to confusion at best and a delay in seeking care for those infected at worst.

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Abso-bleedin’-lutley

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This is all interesting information. However, I think that the debate on AIDS can and probably should continue in another forum.

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I, for one, am very skeptical of your cites. Both have parent sites that are rather close to the fringe if not hanging right over the edge.
Don’t believe everything you read… I’m just sayin’

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Thank you for that. “I normally believe everything I read.” ( :confused: Isn’t the alleged problem here supposed to be that I haven’t been believing everything I’ve read?)

There are plenty of hard copy resources which lay out the questions people have asked about kuru from both anthropological and biological standpoints. I just linked to some of the same info online as was convenient. Throwing out all of the info on a website out of hand is as bad as accepting all of it without question from a logical standpoint.

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Looking at all the legitimate sources I have on communicable disease, kuru is pretty much accepted by experts in the field to be spread by ritual cannabilism, and cases are/were limited to that one tribe in New Guinea that practiced this. When they stopped, cases went down.

http://www.who.int/zoonoses/diseases/prion_diseases/en/

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… although you can find convincing arguments on the internet against most “accepted” theories. For example, the Flat Earth Society

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That link says the following (and nothing else) about kuru:

Some tribes, plural. So that makes two links referenced in this thread which indicate through use of the plural that kuru was evident in more than one tribe. I’ve read that Gajdusek is the only person who claims to have had kuru samples (without isloating a virus) and the only westerner to claim to have any evidence (which he doesn’t share with anyone, substituting photos of pork eating) of cannibalism. Absent any competition, seeing as the disease has apparently now disappeared, I’m not surprised that this has made it into standard references in an abbeviated form without mention of contraversy.

Are we saying that the anthropologist Steadman is also a quack (or whatever the equivalent term is for someone in his field)?

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Look it up in the “Control of Communicable Diseases” manual, an official report of the American Public Health Association that is updated every five years or so. There is a big editorial board of international experts involved in the compilation of this book, which is considered a bible in the field. I would trust this source more than most of the websites you have linked to. In this book, kuru is described and it says that it occurred among women and children of the Fore language group (so I suppose that could be more than one tribe, I don’t know). It says that kuru was transmitted by traditional burial practices involving intimate contact with infected tissues and included cannabilism. There is no mention of any debate about other causes. I have found descriptions of kuru and what is known about its cause and spread in other books about epidemiology and communicable diseases and none of them mention other theories. So unless it’s a conspiracy or something…

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I am not an expert in any of these areas, but have enjoyed the slightly confusing debate. I will just interfect with the fact that the tribe in concern seems to have been studied quite widely by anthropologists, and that cannabilism has been widely reported by the tribe itself.

“Anthropological evidence gathered in 1962 by Glasse and Lindenbaum indicated
that kuru was of recent origin and that many people could provide vivid
accounts of their first encounter with the disease. According to the Fore, kuru first
entered the Fore region from the north some time in the early 1920s, arriving in the South Fore in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and in some border areas as late asthe 1940s (Glasse 1962). Ethnographic research also suggested that the arrival of kuru was related to the earlier adoption of the consumption of deceased relatives, which began in the north at the turn of the century, and at later moments in thesouth (Glasse 1963, 1967, Lindenbaum 1979). Accounts of the consumption ofthe first kuru victims in a certain location also described cases some years later among those who had eaten the victim (Mathews et al 1968, Klitzman et al 1984)”.

from arjournals.annualreviews.org/ doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.anthro.30.1.363 (pdf)

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fixed link http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.anthro.30.1.363

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An Australian medical team apparently apparently arrived in PNG shortly after Gajdusek and proposed the hypothesis that kuru might be genetic, in which case that would also explain things along familial lines.

The following article would be useful but I don’t have access to it via the web:

"American Anthropologist
Volume 84, Number 3, 1,982

Kuru and Cannibalism? Kuru: Early Letters and Field-Notes from the Collection of D. Carleton Gajdusek . Judith Farquhar D. Carleton Gajdusek
Lyle B. Steadman, Charles F. Merbs
(doi: 10.1525/aa.1982.84.3.02a00060)"

:rolleyes: There are any number of reasons that a misconception or one view of a somewhat obscure occurance could get into general reference works without reference to an even more obscure contraversy over it. Conspiracy isn’t necessary & I’m not about to nibble at that bait. Offhand I know of dord and the spinach decimal point flub.