Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t buy any of this HIV is not the cause of AIDS bullshit.
But I did a PubMed search and found 8 papers by Moretti ML.
Not the one cited by trusceotic, though…
What kind of a PubMed do you use, anyway?
For those lurkers not intimidated by ambushed’s bizarre political agenda and rage-filled psychotic projections, here is a good resource for AIDS free-thinkers, those not brainwashed by the lone gunman theories of the AIDS industry:
http://www.blancmange.net/tmh/hivcont2.html
And it looks like I will have to go into hiding. I am guilty of murder, according to ambushed, and there is a warrant out for my arrest:
"A hornet’s nest of vituperation was stirred up when South African President Thabo Mbeki announced that AIDS-dissident, as well as AIDS-orthodox, voices will be heard at the XIII International AIDS Conference, to be held this July in Durban, South Africa.
From all sides “AIDS experts”, journalists, and “treatment activists” joined in a chorus of denunciation directed at those nefarious infidels who blaspheme against the sacred doctrines and commodities of the AIDS Industry.
Normally, open debate and free enquiry are regarded as fundamental components of Science. Not in the AIDS arena. Dr. Mark Wainberg, president of the International AIDS Society, called for jailing AIDS dissidents, whom he called “HIV deniers” (his explicit analogy to “Holocaust deniers”).
Said Wainberg: “If we could succeed and lock a couple of these guys up, I guarantee you the HIV-denier movement would die pretty darn quickly.”
http://www.blancmange.net/tmh/articles/aidsrealism.shtml
I guess the war on AIDS is just like the war on terrorism. You are either with us or against us.
tomndebb,
I would agree with you that the Piltdown Man is not a good comparison to the HIV/AIDS regardless of how widely accepted it was - I don’t know that anyone is alleging widespread fraud here.
Nonetheless, it would seem to me to be obvious that the scientific community frequently forms a consensus opinion about things which are poorly understood, and with regard to which scientific understanding does not yet justify the certainty with which it becomes accepted. You see examples of this in the medical/nutritional field all the time, the most recent and glaring example being the Atkins Diet.
At least one HIV denialist has done so and is doing well, from the last I saw of it (that being the most recent SDMB debate on the subject). Apparently the counterclaim is that even according to the HIV-causes-AIDS theory, injecting yourself with HIV is extremely unlikely to cause AIDS.
No … not what he means at all, which would be apparent if you’d read the article. Apparently I have to quote:
My interpretation may be incorrect, but I don’t think Mellor meant to say what you think he meant to say.
First thing, a seroreverter is seropositive on presentation but then seronegative on a second test at some point later. This is pretty common in the infant age group tested. Maternal immunoglobulins are found in the child’s blood stream for up to 6 months. And we all know that anti-HIV immunoglobulin is not a depenable signal of infection (which is why it was confirmed by PCR here). So quite correctly, seropositivity with PCR negative is HIV-.
The study asked a simple question. Does a clinical definition of pediatric AIDS, completely independent of HIV infection – established by a 1989 WHO panel for developing countries, where laboratory tests are unavailible – fit with confirmed HIV infection. They found that it only detected 23% of HIV cases in infants, but 98% of those who passed criteria were HIV+.
All of the children were sick with sepsis, and admitted for HIV like symptoms. They were evaluated on several clinical parameters, including the ones in the 1989 WHO classification. Virtually all of the children showing clinical signs of AIDS (according to this 1989 definition) at admission were HIV+. Statistically significant differences were found on nearly all parameters between the HIV and control groups. The HIV children were sicker, required more therapy, smaller, and worse of on nearly all fronts than the non-HIV children.
Too bad that being a factor in a complex multifactorial disease wouldn’t justify a single one of your claims.
Sorry, but epidemiological studies wouldn’t provide a lot of useful arguments, since they in the end will boil down to statistics, and you will pick out those fact you like and ignore the rest.
What matters is the characterisation of the disease on the molecular and cellular level, and the fact that some aspects are not fully understood proves precisely zero -other than that more research is warranted.
IzzyR
HIV has a very poor rate of infection. Even from blood to blood contact, the rate is quite low. It is not very virulent, but virulence has nothing to do with severity of disease. So what we need is someone to establish HIV infection – convert an ELISA and confirm by PCR testing.
I agree with you on the medical/nutritional community and their seizing on hypotheses. This, IMHO, is because it is difficult to do really good science in humans. The numbers, the time period, the variables to control and to counteract, take millions of dollars and decades to work out. I think the Atkins diet is a perfect example of the medical community correcting their mistakes. For a while, the Atkins diet was assumed to be bad for a number of reasons – its unmaintainability, its perceived unhealthiness, etc. – but once some good evidence came out, the medical/nutritional field did an about face. The same is true of estrogen replacement therapy. For forty years or so, doctors seized on the health benefits and menopause symptom relief of giving estrogen. They found that it lowered heart disease, osteoporosis, and some kinds of cancer (while acknowledging a mild rise some kinds of cancer). Only huge, longitudinal studies which took decades to complete managed to show that the benefit of estrogens vanished into the noise. Within a week or so, the entire medical community did an about-face and pretty much stopped routinely giving estrogen therapy.
What Atkins and ERT shows is that the medical field is not entrenched in paradigms. They are willing to listen and believe contrary hypotheses. This is not the case in something as clear cut as HIV. AIDS started cropping up in the early 1980s. It was associated with HIV, and all of the epidemiology and molecular data pointed towards that. Moreover, when highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) came out in the mid-1990s, it completely reversed the course of the disease. We are not dealing with a multi-variable, hard-to-control, lifestyle influenced issue here (like diet and heart disease, hypertension, stress, or psychiatric disease). There is one variable to control for here – HIV infection. HIV infected people develop AIDS without HAART. AIDS is not the only endpoint, though. Before AIDS there is a characteristic slow decline in CD4+ T-cells. With HAART, both this decline and full-blown AIDS is reversed. There is no argument.
Thanks, edwino. However, the rest of the article reports why Duesberg is skeptical. Oops, Roger_mexico beat me to it. But here’s a way to shut Duesberg up:
Now is what Duesberg asks so unreasonable? Why not give it to him and shut him up once and for all?
Because he has already made it clear that he will ignore anything that would suggest he is wrong. You assume that he would indeed shut up, instead of pulling alleged flaws out of his hat. The only thing the study he calls for would show is a correlation, which by definition does not prove a causative connection.
Thus the moniker “ambushed.”
I agree. It’s time the HIV-AIDS hypothesis/dogma was reevaluated. It’s clearly chugging along on “true believism” alone, and it has already cost so many lives.
It’s time to bring science back to HIV junk science. I might have missed it, but does someone know of undisputed EMs of pure HIV, so we can know it actually exists? Otherwise the true believers are spending billions on a phantom.
Ah, sorry, had a busy weekend. And actually you’re doing a better job than I ever could. It’s good to see some scientific defense of the HIV-AIDS theory from edwino, rather than the unproductive name-calling and millions of links to sites ambushed has apparently never even seen.
Roger, I think the problem is somewhat more profound. Reasonable people have to make assessments based on the preponderance of evidence. It may be that you are correct and that HIV is not a direct cause of AIDS, but given the overwhelming bulk of evidence from research scientists and epidemiologists who are directly involved in unraveling the mechanisms and symptomology of AIDS, the current model seems to nail down the HIV-AIDS link.
The vast majority of people posting in this thread (including yourself), with a few notable and appreciated exceptions (edwino and QTM among them), are not medical doctors, epidemiologists or research scientists, but are essentially laymen arguing from authority. To reach the conclusion you do I have to make the assumption that thousands of intellectually aggressive scientists graduating at the top of their medical classes, with access to billions of dollars in corporate and governmental funding and the most powerful research tools and hardware that human science has at it’s disposal, and are otherwise competent to unravel the biological bases of disease based on the currently accepted paradigms, somehow become irrational, sheep like stumblebums when faced with the question of the how the HIV-AIDS relationship works.
I would further have to assume that beyond these mainstream scientists being blinkeredly wrong, that a small group of scientists with an alternate point of view whose research specific to this question is (quite frankly) not that well regarded scientifically or methodologically by the majority of their peers, are correct.
In the normal course of events, assuming scientific good faith on the part of all parties, the more powerful and accurately predictive theories and their encompassing paradigms will out compete their rivals. In this context most scientists see the HIV-AIDS relationship as reasonably and pragmatically air tight from an epidemiological perspective vs. various other explanations.
The problem here is that people with an agenda that has relatively little to do with the epidemiology of AIDS and everything to do with the perceived immorality of homosexual behavior, have latched onto this relatively obsolete contrarian research and make great sport of flogging other laymen with how wrong headed “big science” is on this issue, and that the problem would largely go away if those darn sodomites would just stop buggering each other and get with God.
Take your choice of authorities Roger. Based on your responses to date it is evident neither you nor I have anything approaching the educational background operationally necessary to make a detailed scientific analysis of the data. In the end reasonable laymen have to make a decision as to which group is more reasonably likely to be correct on this issue. I vote for the mainstream researchers based on the bulk of evidence to date. Beyond this, and quite frankly simply based on my lifetime observation of how these mainstream vs. fringe contrarians tussles generally pan out over time, 99.99 percent of the time over the past 40 years or so the scientific fringe contrarians were wrong. Place your bets as you see fit.
Oh, and Roches, as well. Didn’t mean to leave you out.
Yeah, probably they sequenced the genome of a phantom.
It is telling who denialists only accept evidence they like and don’t even want to see any evidence they don’t like.
But yes, everyone knows the Institut Pasteur is a bunch of charlatans.
Since rates of venereal diseases have continued to increase and far surpass cases of AIDS, it’s probably nothing to do with “safe sex” … there are so many known immunosuppressing factors, including psychological ones, it’s hard to know which is primarily responsibel … however, re: AZT, some patients stopped taking it without telling their doctors, so it’s possible that education about the flaws of the HIV-AIDS hypothesis saved some of them.
Some (undocumented) patients stopped taking AZT (according to what you heard) without telling their doctors (as far as you heard), so it’s possible (if you disregard evidence) that the education about the (alleged) flaws of the HIV-AIDS hypothesis saved some of them (on the other hand, it might have called thousands more, but you don’t give a rodent’s posterior about them)
Very true. Still, at the point in time at which the medical community had not yet corrected their mistakes, they were very much in the position that an HIV deniar would claim they are in today with regards to HIV. IOW, it is theoretically possible that the scientific community will yet reverse itself with regards to the HIV issue, providing yet another perfect example of the medical community correcting their mistakes. In which case, the only difference between Atkins and HIV will be timing.
Now I see that in your final paragraph you provide differences between HIV & the other examples. The question is if those who dismissed Atkins as a dangerous quack were any less confident because of the factors you cite (i.e. the lack of good evidence)? Possibly within the bowels of the medical community they were, but the perception I got was of great certainty.
I guess all I’m saying is that from the perspective of the ignorant layman, such as myself, the mere fact that there is currently a broad consensus in the medical community that HIV causes AIDS is not as convincing as one might think it should be.
That there is a consensus is only half the relevant information. The question is what it is built on, and what evidence the dissenters have for their ideas.
Whether a theory is “ancient,” as Einstein’s are by comparison, is not the issue. The Poppers-KS Connection:
"The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) sponsored a high-level meeting, “Technical Review: Nitrite Inhalants”, held outside Washington, DC on the 23rd and 24th of May, 1994. …
"Robert Gallo, as unofficial voice of the AIDS Establishment, disclosed important revisions in the AIDS- paradigm. It is now necessary to consider co-factors. No longer is HIV believed to cause KS by itself; at most it may aggravate KS after it has been caused by something else. No longer is HIV believed to kill T- cells; whatever damage it allegedly does, it does indirectly. …
"The toxicities of the volatile nitrites were well known before the advent of AIDS. In 1980 Thomas Haley, one of America’s leading toxicologists, published a two-page summary of nitrite toxicities, with 115 references listed. …
"Nitrite causes a loss of tone of the vascular bed and pooling and trapping of blood in the veins of the lower extremities, resulting in marked arteriolar constriction and the induction of anoxemia in vital tissues, causing death… The formation of methemoglobin by aliphatic nitrite interferes with oxyhemoglobin, causing anoxia of vital organs… The use of volatile nitrites to enhance sexual performance and pleasure can result in syncope and death by cardiovascular collapse.(5)
"Also in 1980 appeared the first of several studies to demonstrate that the volatile nitrites are powerfully mutagenic.(6) (That is, they cause cells to mutate, they cause damage to the chromosomes.) This is cause for concern, as almost all known carcinogens are also mutagens.
"Subsequent studies, both in vitro and in vivo, have shown that poppers damage the immune system. They cause two kinds of anemia: Heinz body hemolytic anemia and methemoglobinemia. They damage the lungs. They have the potential to cause cancer by producing deadly N-nitroso compounds in interaction with many common drugs and chemicals, including antihistamines, artificial sweeteners, and pain killers.(7)
When the first cases of AIDS were identified in 1981, or the predecessor cases of GRID (Gay Related Immune Deficiency), poppers were high on the list of etiological suspects. Here, after all, was a drug used heavily and almost exclusively by the group of people getting sick. Nevertheless, despite compelling epidemiological and toxicological evidence, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) hastened to exonerate poppers. They did so for two reasons, both of which were spurious. First, the CDC found AIDS patients who had never used poppers; therefore, argued the CDC, poppers could not be the cause. The CDC’s assumption was that “AIDS” constituted a single, coherent disease entity with a single cause. Second, the CDC conducted a brief mice study in 1982-1983, and claimed to find “no evidence of immunotoxicity”. These results are contradicted by several other studies, which did find that the inhalation of nitrite fumes causes immune suppression in mice. The reasons for the negative findings of the CDC mice study were explained at the Gaithersburg meeting by one of the investigators, Daniel Lewis, about which more below."
A lot of detailed claims on that site, and some nice cartoons. Is there a paper which shows the discovery of this mechanism?
Just wondering, since all of the HIV tests warn that they do not prove the presence or absence of HIV, how did he know he was infected?
Has there finally been scientific proof of the existence of this virus? Or just “virus-like particles”? (Note: I think Duesberg believes HIV exists, though he doesn’t believe it causes AIDS.) I want to find out how far behind the curve I am. Never to old to learn. Thanks in advance.