It’s interesting how many here seem to think that Marshall’s experience was the irenic, objective process of science. Their own quotes show how resistant scientists can be to what the data is showing:
The parallels are eerie.
Sorry, been spending time at AIDS Myth Exposed … and again, if the SMON debacle cannot make you even question if the same thing is happening with HIV, I guess nothing will.
There are many types of religion …
Just in case this was glossed over:
… The results of [Marshall’s] work with Warren were published in the respected British medical journal Lancet **and research by other scientists supported the association **between H. pylori and inflammation of the stomach lining. Most physicians, however, remained unconvinced.
Scary. The power of orthodoxy, of groupthink. And in the case of AIDS, also wanting to be politically correct … it’s unacceptable to some that risky behaviors could be the cause … it’s just not PC … it would be “intolerant.”
I’m not sure what the problem is, but yes, I would be willing. My qualification is that it must be verified, purified HIV.
For all your alleged familiarity with the other side of the argument, you apparently are completely unaware that this has in fact been done. Rasnick has also offered, with the condition that a dogmatist agrees to take life-saving protease inhibitors.
And yet…The fact that you didn’t know of this speaks volumes, n’est ce pas?
Trueskeptic
You have me bang to rights. Proof once again that alcohol and electrons don’t mix. I was indeed unaware of this and stand corrected. Could you provide a linky-poo?
Aha! Got you again! Alcohol and electrons DO mix! Do you really think I am unaware of this important fact?
I know it won’t do any good, but here’s one linky-poo anyway on Rasnick …
… and one on Duesberg …
and another more explicit statement by Duesberg:
Some other scientist actually did it, but he died of a heart attack two years later, I think.
I think the key is “if he would be convinced by our action.” In spite of all the calls to put one’s money where one’s mouth is, I don’t think it would actually change your mind one bit … or would it? Perhaps with the help of alcohol? 
ambushed, sorry for the wait.
“The few cases who allegedly contracted AIDS from studying blood samples of AIDS patients appear to be all from the laboratory of the virus researcher Robert Gallo at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda (Cohen, 1994a; O’Brien & Goedert, 1996; O’Brien, 1997). However, until their AIDS diseases and their anti-AIDS treatments are described they cannot even be considered anecdotal cases.” Duesberg, 1998, Genetica
Regarding a virus that causes PCP after 68 months … sounds kind of familiar coughSMON*cough.
Additionally, the use of T-cell count and viral load as proof of infection is one of the topics in dispute, since there is no “normal” T-cell figure.
Re: the CDC reports: “However, in the non-scientific literature, the CDC claims 25 ‘possible occupationally acquired AIDS’ cases among all the American health care workers who have treated over 650,000 AIDS patients over 17 years (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1997). The CDC did not identify the gender, nor the age, nor the AIDS-defining disease of the 25 health care workers with AIDS. Moreover, the CDC did not provide any evidence that the 25 ‘possible occupationally acquired AIDS’ cases were indeed occupational. This may be difficult to verify since the primary, nonoccupational AIDS risk is illicit, recreational drug use, which is not compatible with a medical license. Above all, the CDC did not determine or disclose whether the 25 HIV-positive health care workers had been treated with anti-HIV drugs, which cause immuno-deficiency and other diseases (see below). But even if all of these uncertainties could be resolved, 25 disease cases among 650,000 disease contacts in 17 years are hardly convincing evidence for contagiousness.” (ibid.)
This problem also remains: “Almost 90% of the over 800,000 American and European AIDS patients are men, and only 10% are women (Adams, 1989; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1995; World Health Organization, 1995b; AIDS Zentrum im Robert Koch Institut, 1996; Hodgkinson, 1996; Fiala & Lingens, 1997). In epidemiology, this is as different as day and night from the common 50% distribution between the sexes of **all known infectious diseases **(Evans, 1982; Evans & Feldman, 1982). Despite widespread heterosexual prostitution, AIDS has remained a male epidemic (Fiala & Lingens, 1997).”
Myths, Scams and Flat Out Lies?
Here’s the truth:
" AIDS: The Failure of Contemporary Science" by Neville Hodgkinson. This book seems to be a promising, in-your-face read, and it calls a spade a spade right on the jacket. This book was published in 1996! Why hasn’t anything changed?
Quote from the back cover:
"AZT, once hailed as the gold standard of AIDS treatment, harms more than it helps. It received its license on the basis of a single, grossly flawed study.
"Predictions that 'HIV' would put at risk all sexually active people have proved completely ill-conceived. Even female prostitutes do not get Aids unless they are also heavy drug users.
"'HIV' is not a virus, but a collection of gene products that can appear when immune system cells are chronically stimulated in the laboratory. No two identical 'HIV's have been isolated, even from the same individual.
"The 'HIV' test has never been scientifically validated. Positive results are triggered by a wide variety of conditions and different test kits produce widely differing results.
"The antibody proteins detected by the test are not specific to a particular microbe, but an indication that the immune system has been challenged by one or more of a variety of stimuli. When that challenge is removed, the risk of Aids recedes dramatically."
I'm going to be doing some reading!! I think that you should too, Astro...I thought this thread had finally died out. Oh well.
trueskeptic:
You are attempting to at least use the scientific literature (Duesberg’s papers and the CDC website), so I’ll come out of retirement.
Why is it so hard to believe that a serious disease may be difficult to contract? That it is very ineffecient at infection but still harmful? The two are unrelated. An example is Neisseria meningitis. It doesn’t infect easily – prolonged exposure in confined spaces (army barracks, high schools, prisons) is needed. But once it is contracted, it is one of the few bacteria that can kill a healthy teenager in 24 hours from initial presentation. Other examples are TB, Mycoplasma pneumoniae, and Legionella (just off the top of my head).
Herein lies the problem with the HIV-inoculation study. HIV doesn’t take all that well, even in repeated exposures, even in direct blood-to-blood contact. This has absolutely nothing to do with the severity of the disease that it causes. Sure, Rasnick and Duesberg can get inoculated. The key is not just seroconversion (which is a flawed measure) – it is contracting of the HIV infection, in which the person is antibody and PCR or Western positive after 6 months (and continues to be positive). I can totally see Duesberg getting a solitary fingerprick with a needle dipped into a vial of HIV (never mind that there has never been one reported case of a solid-bore needlestick linked to HIV transmission) and 10 years later crowing about how he was “infected” with HIV and has not developed AIDS.
Why is it so hard to believe that a virus can cause disease at prolonged time intervals? This is exactly the course of other well-researched viruses like the Hepatitis B and C Viruses. They cause an acute hepatitis (which may be subclinical and go undiagnosed, just like the Acute Retroviral Syndrome of HIV infection), and then can go on to cause chronic hepatits years later, which leads to sclerosis of the liver and eventual required liver transplant. Other examples are Varicella zoster (chicken pox to shingles) and the polio virus (acute paralytic poliomyelitis followed by post-polio syndrome), again just off the top of my head.
Nitpicking the details of a study doesn’t change the fact that lab workers infected with HIV went on to develop clinical finding indicative of progression to AIDS, and in one case actual AIDS. Nitpicking details about gender distribution is totally worthless when sociologic factors (male homosexual promiscuity in the early 1980s) explains it completely.
I would guess that the amount of health care workers who have developed HIV infections is significantly higher than 25. The amount who have developed AIDS (if 25 is the correct number) represent those who not only who have contracted HIV but did so far enough before 1996 (when HAART came along) that they developed AIDS, or are ones who have had treatment failures since 1996 (i.e. drug noncompliance leading to multiple resistance). Given that we are talking about medical professionals, it is no wonder that the number is so small.
Recreational drug abuse is unfortunately not uncommon amongst health care workers. The overall drug and alcohol abuse rate mirrors the general working population, while rates of benzodiazepine and opiod abuse are five times higher. Some specialities are particularly prone, due to access. I have known three anesthesiologists who have died due to self-administered overdoses. There is no reason to think that if AIDS is a drug related, we should see it at any rate lower than the general populace.
You still haven’t given us a single piece of evidence linking drug abuse with AIDS. Just stuff taking attempting to diminish the HIV-AIDS link. You have presented an alternative hypothesis (AIDS is a disease of lifestyle and drug addiction), but have given us little apart from AZT toxicity and male-slanted distributions that would support that. There are several hundred thousand papers out there explaining how HIV causes AIDS. Hundreds of them explain the male-slanted distribution. Hundreds of them explain the exact toxicity of AZT as used in patients (not in cell culture, like Duesberg showed), ways around it, and other much more effective treatments than AZT monotherapy.
Give us some current data (post 1996). Give me an hypothesis of how protease inhibitors in HAART act to treat AIDS if the polymerase inhibitors (the other 2/3 of HAART) are actually the causitive agents of AIDS. Give me an hypothesis of the molecular mechanism of an illicit drug in causing a specific CD4+ T-cell lymphocytopenia. Give me data to support these hypotheses.
Dr. Stefan Lanka Exposes The “Viral Fraud”
Does vaccinating make sense?–Dr Stefan Lanka and Karl Krafeld
This is the translation of the flyer by the society of which Dr Stefan Lanka and Karl Krafeld are presidents of. They are actually encouraging people to write to the government to be shown actual proof that viruses exist, since so much scientific ‘evidence’ is based on it.
[Edited material posted from another site. – MEB]
We’ve about beat this issue death by now. That those proposing that HIV does not cause AIDS have to flog old fringe literature like Neville Hodgkinson’s tome written almost eight years ago in a field where discoveries and technology are moving so fast that even three to four years ago is nearly horse and buggy days, is telling. Beyond this, holding up “reporter” Neville Hodgkinson who is a anti-Darwinian, new earth proponent who was finally booted from the Times in 96 for being an irresponsible crackpot, and has spent the last 7 years writing his anti-HIV screeds in the back pages of second and third tier newspapers and magazines is absurd. He is not someone any reasonable person is going to look to for scientific rectitude.
The bottom line is that the latest research overwhelmingly supports the hypothesis of HIV as a direct causative precursor of AIDS. The contrarians present nothing but old, discredited, musty crackpot musings combined with lots of energetic hand waving in the hope that this will make for a powerful and persuasive argument in the absence of doing any kind of meaningful current science addressing their hobby horse contrarian hypotheses
The scientific community that actually works on AIDS rightfully regards the contrarian community as mainly composed of incompetent crackpots, charlatans and a large contingent of credulous, easily gulled scientific ignoramuses who find the contrarian agenda resonates with their larger emotional and moral agendas
If you boys are so enamored of tilting at the big HIV=AIDS windmill please get up off your collective contrarian asses and put your money where your mouth is and cut some big checks to fund meaningful scientific research, using real live scientists, regarding your hypotheses using the latest tools, methodology and hardware, which are orders of magnitude more sensitive and powerful than those available just a few years ago.
The onus is on the contrarians to prove what “big science” takes as a near fact at this point is not the case. Please, be my guest and get this research started instead of flogging decades old and largely discredited studies. Surely, it’s worth a few thousand apiece to you to get this stuff going. Fight the power and cut that check! You show us that big science arrogance will not stand!! Please!!
aliengraves2003:
Copying and pasting whole blocks of text from other websites is frowned upon here. If you have an argument or a beef, please succintly put it into your own terms. Just a word of advice.
Stefan Lanka, PhD, has not published since 1995. He has 3 papers listed in PubMed on a virus which infects a marine brown alga.
If you want to talk about anti-vaccination movements, please start a new thread. HIV has little to do with this movement.
I have made it a point only to discuss primary scientific peer-reviewed literature. There is too much shit out there to go around debunking every claim made on every website thrown up by someone who thinks he knows something.
trueskeptic and others have held up Marshall of Helicobacter pylori fame as an example of how “Big Science” “ridicules” “dissenters” with “ridiculous” views. What the Marshall case actually demonstrates is the precise opposite. Marshall presented an unorthodox view. This view received some criticism from the community. We wouldn’t be scientists if we didn’t have skepticism, and skepticism dictates that unorthodox views are held to high standards. Marshall’s theories held, though – he was able to publish them in a top-notch, peer-reviewed medical journal, Lancet. The science was unassailable, and became dogma. That’s how science works. There is no entrenched “Big Science” keeping the truth-preaching lone visionaries down. In this case, and many others, “Big Science” was only too willing to roll over once there were a few good pieces of data which supported the unorthodox view.
The only thing the HIV-AIDS crowd needs to do the exact same is a few pieces of unassailable data. Give 'em to me, in the form of peer-reviewed science, and I will be convinced. Methinks I will be waiting for a bit.
from astro:
Yet when we do find well-credentialled scientists questioning the dogma, you simply label them “crackpot,” which seems to be defined as “doesn’t follow the majority.”
How “late” the research is does not matter if the methodology is fundamentally flawed, i.e. counting viral load of otherwise almost invisible HIV; using surrogate markers because HIV cannot be detected; etc.
“Old” seems to be a big non-seller with you (note: General Relativity is older). Discredited? Heh.
It’s interesting that it’s the dogmatists who seem to have the larger emotional and moral agendas … imagine admitting you’ve been killing patients by mistake for decades. The emotional fallout will be catastrophic. Moral? Yes, sacrificing gays, "HIV+"s, in the name of political correctness, not wanting to offend anyone … what a scandal that will be. At least you meant well, I guess.
Ah, and here we have it - your side has the money. Interesting how you have taken this bullying stance - knowing that the costs are too high for unsponsored dissidents and their supporters, you rub it in their face - and you think it’s an argument!
Hey, how much do you all personally donate to fund “mainstream” AIDS research? Just curious.
Robert Gallo basically stole from Montagnier, skipped peer review, announced his theory by press release, and patented an HIV test the same day. I’ll go with Lanka.
If by “some criticism” you mean “ridicule”, sure.
And, as in the case of SMON, orthodox views are held to low ones?
I might have gotten this wrong - no big surprise - but I think he was ridiculed and disbelieved even after publishing in Lancet … and even after some other scientists published confirming research. Your sentence, “The science was unassailable” needs a much bigger gap full of name-calling and nose-thumbing before “and became dogma.”
OK, I’ll bite … what would convince you?
If you start with an incorrect premise, what is there to debate?..why would I waste my time?
-Allen
Well there’s the rub don’t you see. Look in the mirror - You’re contrarians. Look again. Yep still a contrarian!
People with contrarian hypotheses have to either make a compelling case to be funded in some form or fashion like real scientists with contrarian hypotheses do (see Marshall and Pruisner) or self fund. Your “case” is largely composed of rhetorical tap dances, and while amusing in their small way, are not going to get even the most broad minded real scientists to recommend to financial gate keepers that you get funding.
I mean for God’s sake, if you can’t even defend your paradigm effectively on a little message board what hope do have when professionals who do this specific research for a living look at your case? If your data is that compelling, there’s got to be at least one well regarded AIDS researcher currently doing high level research specifically on AIDS that would give your hypothesis the time of day. Fame and glory would be theirs, the Nobel Prize even! And yet not a single, well respected AIDS researcher currently doing cutting edge AIDS research gives your views any credence. To them, your arguments are ignorant to the point of irrelevance, as they contine to develop more and more effective anti-viral suppression therapies that confirm their working HIV>AIDS hypotheses even more strongly, and render your arguments ever more inane.
Moderator’s Note: allengraves2003, please review our rules on posting copyrighted material. (We also don’t like mass copy-and-pasting from other websites due to the “spam” factor.) If you want to refer to another web page, just include a link, a description of what the page you’re referring to is about, and perhaps brief excerpts.
I have edited one of your posts above accordingly.
Let’s face it…ALL of the cause(s) of "AIDS ", and all of the cure(s) are known!
In the beginning, widespread use of ‘Poppers' ( nitrites ) caused KS and PCP. That was the first "AIDS ". Then a lunatic conned the world into believing that he had isolated a new virus, and without peer review of his ‘findings' , he called a news conference, and all the rules changed. And changed, and changed again, over the years.
They dragged AZT off of the shelves in Dr. Frankenstein's sub-basement vault, and began killing people. Then, when it was getting close to being figured out, they sold the company and ran for the hills. In 1993, while actual numbers of sick people were declining, finally, thanks to the reduction in prescribing AZT, the definition was changed to include perfectly healthy people. They invented ‘medications' that interfered with the life cycle of the cell, a vital life-sustaining process, and started killing people a little bit more slowly. And STILL blamed it on "HIV".
Now "AIDS" is virtually every disease known to man. Especially, the iatrogenic ones...'vaccinations' that have injected massive amounts of the popluation with unknown toxins ( NOT ‘viruses', as is commonly believed ), antibiotics that cripple the immune system, circling, in-your-face "bone-pointers" who insist you are dying and do everything they can to prove it to defend their belief system, their jobs, and the status-quo that created them. Play by their rules and you lose.
Everything toxic to the body, in one form or another, from man-made environmental toxins to fungi, bacteria and parasites are blamed on the "HIV" fiction. There is NO sample of isolated HIV anywhere. There aren't even any "retroviruses", or "oncoviruses" or whatever side-step they've taken in terminology to disguise the original mis-understanding of Revererse Transcription being naturally present in many biological processes.
The tests are bad science, and used to prove their own validity. The "HIV Antibody" test can't detect "HIV" (which is really only cellular debris), nor can it even detect actual antibodies!. T Cell counts IN THE BLOOD vary widely among different people and CANNOT be taken as a measure of health. PCR does not count active virus.
"AIDS " ( whatever that might be in each individual case ) is cured very simply with anti-oxidants, vitamins, and other natural, healthy substances, like clean FOOD and prevented with a return to a healthy, natural lifestyle. NOT "life-extending" Phama-Toxins that only maim and kill more slowly.
"AIDS" really stands for "Acquired Intelligence Deficiency Syndrome", to quote Lanka, and should be renamed "Acquired Energy Deficiency Syndrome". Which is what many activists seem to have acqured...get the word out! Get OFF the DRUGS...which is anything that NATURE ( or God, depending on your belief system, which is what sustains you and which is really the most important issue to address ) didn't create. "AIDS " is over, but the WAR on HUMANITY isn't.
-Allen
Your idea of “argument” seems to be mainly making religious claims and ignoring refutation of those claims: “You’re a contrarian”, “crackpot”, “Debunked”, “old,” etc.
I didn’t really expect you to respond to the question, do you put your money where your mouth is? as you ridiculously proffered as a test of which theory is better. I can only hope this means you’ve learned from that mistake, and I invite you to respond to my points rather than rattle off another frothing tirade.