"HIV...Not Guilty?"

This is the text of an article that appeared obscurely in The Miami Herald of December 23, 1990. It is being reproduced here, as it carries an important message to the Gay community. Not only does this situation demonstrate the science research on HIV may be wrong, but the social pressure exerted to find a cure may be resulting in "headline" research that sounds good and allays fears, but has no basis for results. This article is fully copyrighted by Elinor Burkett of the Miami Herald is being transcribed here for informational purposes only. Due to the length of the article, I will have to type it in several sessions, please excuse the typos.......

"HIV...Not Guilty?" by Elinor Burkett/Miami Herald

The theory that a single virus is the cause for a deadly world epidemic has been carved in stone. Now the stone is beginning to crack. The frightening possibility: The REAL fight against AIDS may not even have begun.

Margaret Heckler stood behind the podium in the auditorium of the Hubert H. Humphrey Bldg. in Wash. DC. Lights flooded her face, cameras rolled, reporters clutched their notebooks expectantly.

"Today we add another miracle to the long honor roll of American medicine and science," announce the Sec. of Health and Human Svcs. " Today's discovery represents the triumph of science over a dreaded disease. Those who have disparaged this scientific search - those who have said we weren't doing enough -have not understood how sound, solid, significant medical research proceeds."

It was April 23, 1984. Almost 2000 Americans were dead of AIDS. More than 100 new cases were being reported each week.

For the first time since the plague began, the govt was offering shreds of hope to the dying: The virus causing the disease had been isolated. An end to the nightmare was finally in sight: Within six months a blood test would be available, Heckler said; within 2 years a vaccine would be ready for testing.

As Heckler made here dramatic appearance on national TV, Dr. Peter Duesberg sat in his cluttered office in Berkeley, CA., bewildered.

Duesberg is one of the world's foremost authorities on viruses. He was the 1st person to map all the gene strands that make up a retrovirus, the very type of clever, hard to fight bug Heckler said was causing AIDS.

To Duesberg, Heckler's announcement just didn't make sense. If her HIV virus was indeed the cause of AIDS, it violated the laws of virology. He decided to withhold his applause and wait for the proof.

6 years and 90,000 deaths later, he is still waiting. And there is still no vaccine.

In the 6 years since Heckler's surprise announcement, the federal war against AIDS has become a desperate $3 billion a year battle against HIV - Human Immunodeficiency Virus. In the most intensive disease hunt in the history of mankind, scientists have cross-sectioned and spliced HIV, They have cultured activated and mapped it. They have figured out how it reproduces. They can draw you a picture of it. But they are missing one important part of the puzzle: "We do not know how HIV causes AIDS," Dr. John Coffin of Tufts Univ., a member of the international committee that named the virus, told the delegates to the 6th International Conference. on AIDS last June.

It is that missing link that nags at a growing number of the world's best known scientists. They have begun to suggest a frightening explanation. HIV alone may not cause the disease - OR, it may have nothing to do with it at all.

The Doubters

By 1987, 3 years after the HIV discovery was announced, retrovirologist Duesberg's doubts hardened into certainty that something was wrong.

For one thing, the numbers weren't adding up. Each year since Heckler's announcement, the Fed. Center for Disease Control has projected the number of people expected to turn up with the HIV infection. Initially, scientists were confident their projections would prove accurate. They knew from years of experience how quickly a toxic new virus spreads in a human population. But, the predictions were wrong. At the end of each year the CDC was forced to revise its estimates DOWNWARD dramatically. In 1986, for example, the CDC estimated that 1 - 1.5 million Americans were infected with HIV. A yr. later, they cut that estimate in half. HIV is not spreading at anywhere near the rate expected of a newly introduced sexually transmitted virus. Why?? No one knows.

There were other nagging problems with the HIV hypothesis:

- 2 healthy people can have sex with the same HIV-infected person, and one of them will come down with the infection after a single encounter, while the other will still not have it after 500 encounters. Why?? No one knows.

- The vast majority of those known to be HIV-infected remain healthy for years.

- and there is no proof that they will not live a normal life span. Why?? No one knows.

- Diseases presumed to signal AIDS are cropping up in individuals without any trace of HIV. Why?? No one knows.

- How could a virus found to be active in only minute quantities in the bodies of even the sickest AIDS patients devastate the immune system as HIV purportedly does. Why?? No one knows.

While most researchers say such apparent contradictions are to be expected in the early stages of research into a new disease, others aren't so certain.

"There are too many shortcomings in the theory that HIV causes AIDS," says Luc Montagnier.

In June, when Montagnier, a French AIDS researcher announced his rejection of the established theory, he should have provoked a sensation. After all, he discovered HIV in the first place.

Montagnier now believes that HIV is a "peaceful virus" that becomes a killer only when combined with another bug - a bug he has already isolated and identified. This finding received none of the attention of his original discovery. The same reaction - which is to say no reaction - had greeted Robert Gallo, Montagniers American co-discoverer of HIV, when he also suggested in print 2 years ago that HIV might need a co-factor to cause AIDS. Now Gallo does not even discuss the matter.

Montagnier, however, persists - and has discovered what earlier dissenters have found out over the years. Its no fun to challenge common wisdom.

Peter Duesberg, the retrovirologist, has been liked to obsessives who believe AIDS has extra-terrestrial origins. He is, CDC researcher Robin Weiss wrote in a British medical journal, "a flat-Earther bogged down in molecular minutiae and miasmal theories of disease."

2 other dissenters, Robert Root-Bernstein, winner of a MacArthur "genius grant" and Shyh-Ching Lo, director of AIDS pathology at the Armed Forces Inst. of Pathology, have been accused of quackery and endangering the public health of the nation by key AIDS policy makers for their insistence that HIV is not the sole cause of AIDS.

Even when they present evidence that their dissent might be justified, nothing happens.

Montagnier was not the 1st one who found a 2nd organism that may be essential to produce AIDS. A yr. ago this month, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease - the agency in charge of the war on AIDS - convened a panel of scientists to examine Shyh-Ching Lo's discovery of an extremely toxic micro-organism in AIDS patients. When the organism - the same mycoplasma that Montagnier would report 4 months later - was injected into experimental animals, the animals quickly sickened and died. That does NOT happen with HIV. Panel members quizzed Lo for 3 days and concluded that he was on to something important.

A year later, of the $1.8 billion in federal funds NIAID spent on AIDS research, not one dollar has been budgeted to pursue that finding.

Whodunit The official version of AIDS:

In the beginning, there is HIV (a type of virus called a retovirus) that hits the bloodstream with a burst of fury, looking for one of its favourite cells - a T cell, an essential part of the body's immune system. HIV attacks the T cells, but, initially, does not destroy them. Most newly infected people feel nothing. Some might suffer swollen glands or a mild fever, like a case of flu or touch of mononucleosis.

The symptoms quickly disappear. Most scientists believe the virus lies almost dormant in a small number of cells, often for years, until it somehow becomes activated Then the infected cells suddenly mass produce new viral particles that float through the bloodstream, attaching themselves to previously uninfected cells. This in itself doesn't necessarily mean disaster. Healthy bodies harbor dozens of viruses and other bugs that never cause any noticeable harm. But , in the case of HIV, most scientists believe the virus suddenly stops cohabitating with T cells - as is has done for years - and kills them instead.

When T cells are killed off, the body is left wide open to disease. Bacteria, other viruses and bugs that wouldn't hurt a soul under normal circumstances suddenly run riot. When that begins to happen, an HIV infected person has AIDS.

In the absence of any drug that can kill HIV without killing the body that harbors it, scientists leading the fight against AIDS see the result as inevitable: Once you are infected, your body cannot kill the virus. The virus eventually destroys your immune system. You die.

If this were a murder case, the official case against HIV would be entirely circumstantial. Nobody can see HIV destroying the immune system, or even say how it does it.

But it isn't just the lack of proof that bothers critics of HIV orthodoxy. They understand that in science, there isn't always a smoking gun. Sometimes inferences are all you get. But in this case, they argue, even the circumstantial evidence has gaping holes in it.

Robert Koch was a German scientist who had a peculiar obsession with proof. Koch was born in 1843, 3 years after Fredrich Henle made the stunning assertion that organisms too small to see with the naked eye could cause disease. Koch became one of the 1st disciples of the new science of bacteriology, and he considerably advanced it: He discovered both the organisms that causes tuberculosis and cholera - eventually winning the Nobel Prize for Medicine.

It is difficult to grasp, from the late 20th century, what an astounding feat Koch's was. When scientists first began studying the world through a microscope, they found it to be teaming with micro- organisms. There was no way to watch them operate in living organisms. So, how could the scientists tell which were harmless and which were killers?

Koch, who served as a field surgeon in the Franco-Prussian War, became an ace detective. He developed all kinds of new investigative technique, including what was to become the basic rules for what constitutes definitive proof that a specific germ causes a specific disease:

1. You have to find the germ in every case of the disease. 2. You must be able to isolate it from the body and from other germs. 3. It must cause sickness when injected into a healthy host. 4. After it does, the same germ must be retrieved from the newly diseased person.

Koch was flexible, he understood some cases wouldn't fit neatly into his set of rules. In those cases, however, he insisted that a simple association should not be confused with causation. In other words, just because everyone in your neighborhood with measles has blond hair does not mean that blond hair causes measles.

Koch - whose principles are still taught to every student of epidemiology - isn't very popular among AIDS researchers these days: HIV fails his test on 3 of 4 counts.

HIV can be isolated, both from the body and other germs, but only with difficulty, because even the sickest AIDS patients simply don't have much virus to be found. With run-of-the-mill viruses, scientists can find, at the very least, a million units of virus particles in a milliliter of bodily fluid of a sick person. With HIV, finding event 1/10 that many is extremely rare.

HIV fails the other tests outright. The virus cannot be found in every case of AIDS. in 3% of diagnosed AIDS cases, NO HIV antibodies have been found. No one has tried injecting HIV into a healthy person, but all kinds of mice, rats, monkeys and chimps have been stuck with it, and none of them got anything resembling human AIDS.

All this doesn't necessarily disprove the HIV hypothesis, as dozens of scientists have pointed out in attacking Duesberg, the HIV doubter who insists on reminding everyone of Koch's postulates as often as possible. HIV's failure of Koch's tests can be easily explained:

- The virus, or its antibodies, are not being found in all AIDS cases because tests for it are not yet sensitive enough.

- Some germs are specific to a single species, says Dr, peter Drotman, a CDC medical epidemiologist. HIV may not give other animals AIDS because it cannot live in the bodies of most other animals.

But the most powerful argument against the doubters is also the foundation of HIV orthodoxy: In almost every case of the condition called AIDS - a cluster of diseases frequently accompanied by weight loss, blindness, incontinence and dementia - they find anti-bodies to HIV. That is just too much of a coincidence to pass up.

To Robert Root-Bernstein, the number of people with AIDS who are HIV+ is not as interesting as the number of people who are HIV+ who don't have AIDS." Root-Bernstein, the MacArthur grant winner, was working on immune disorders in Jonas Salk's laboratory when the discovery of HIV was announced. Given the incredible variety of evils that were included in the definition of AIDS - from diarrhea to dementia - Root-Bernstein was skeptical that a single virus could be blamed for them all. Now he has another cause for skepticism: fewer then 5% of HIV infected Americans have AIDS. Most AIDS researchers say that the rest will eventually get sick. It just takes time. When HIV was first discovered, scientists at the Center for Disease Control suggested that most of those infected would begin to fall ill within 12-18 months of infection. They didn't. So the CDC did what it would do again and again: It raised the projected incubation time - first to 5 years, then 7 then 10 and now 15. In the late 70's, blood samples were drawn from 6875 sexual active gay men in San Francisco. Scientists had never heard of AIDS or HIV when they froze the blood for research on hepatitis B. But in 1985, when the HIV antibody test was licensed, all that 6 year old blood from the highest AIDS risk group in the nation suddenly became critically important. Sure enough 67.3% of the samples turned out to be HIV+. Its now been 11 years since the first blood samples were taken. Only half of the infected have been diagnosed with AIDS. That figure, Root-Bernstein argues, suggests that HIV alone is a poor explanation for AIDS. But it gets even more complicated: Almost all the frozen blood samples were from men who also had hepatitis B, syphilis, gonorrhea or herpes. Their immune systems were already in chaos from the massive onslaught - which makes them terrible predictors of how HIV would operate in healthier blood. Even the CDC's Peter Drotman admits it is "a nonrepresentative sample." Nonetheless, it is the basis for the current 15-year CDC estimate of the median HIV incubation period. "Look, " says Root-Bernstein, "if they keep going at this rate, we're going to have people who live to 90 who were infected with the virus at 15 and they will still be arguing that HIV causes AIDS." But there is another glitch in the AIDS epidemiology that Root-Bernstein finds even more disturbing: An increasing number of people coming down with infection typical of AIDS patients are turning out not to have HIV. Four leading scientists at the CDC recently suggested in a British Medical Journal that Kaposi's Sarcoma - a form of cancer that before AIDS had only been found in elderly men - is turning up in young gay men who indisputably do not have HIV. They concluded that KS - one of the diseases that has always been part of the definition of AIDS - may be caused by an as yet unidentified infectious agent, transmitted mainly be sexual contact. The HIV- KS group differs from the 3% of "AIDS patients" who do not test positive for HIV antibodies in that they have been given the sophisticated, extremely expensive tests for the virus itself, and come up negative. This is a stunning development, because the very existence of AIDS was originally hypothesized to explain why young men had diseases like KS.If HIV was not responsible for the outbreak of KS, then something else is. What? No one knows. "Maybe these are anomalies", Root-Bernstein says, "but everyone in science knows that the anomalies are the keys. They are nature's way of telling you that something is wrong with your dogma. Look at Copernicus, Galileo, Einstein. That is what they keyed in on. If we insist that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS, then if we have people who aren't infected developing the same symptoms as AIDS patients, we are forced to conclude that we have a second epidemic, or a third or a fourth."

A Murderous Microbe??

Every American adult should have a small scar on his upper arm or thigh, it is a smallpox vaccination. Smallpox once was a deadly scourge - killing millions. Vaccinations have virtually wiped it out. Its an ingenious concept: You introduce a minuscule amount of the weakened or dead disease causing bugs into the human system. The body responds by producing antibodies - a natural antidote that neutralizes the invading bug. Once you have the antibodies, you are immune. So why is it such devastating news when a person test positive for HIV antibodies. Shyh-Ching Lo, the researcher in charge of AIDS programs for the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, doesn't believe it should be. The presence of the antibodies to HIV - far from being a sign of doom - is proof the body is capable of coping with the virus, Lo contends. Nobody is able to explain how the dormant HIV particles manage to suddenly whip the antibodies. "There is no good explanation for why and how the virus breaks out of the antibody protection," says Lo. "I'm not saying that HIV plays no role in AIDS - the data shows a clear correlation with disease. But AIDS is much more complicated than HIV." Lo, an obscure microbiologist, with no grants or establishment support, went looking for a new explanation. In 1986 he announced that he had found it: a previously unknown organism that - together with HIV - causes AIDS. For nearly 3 years his theory was ignored. Shyh-Ching Lo's research was turned down for publication almost a dozen times before the Journal of Tropical Medicine, available in few hospital libraries and on no major electronic databases, agreed to print his findings. His attempts to find funding have failed. Even the presentations he has given at professional meetings have gotten him nowhere; his colleagues don't even show up. The problem was that Lo was using a complex new research technique he had devised himself to come up with a revolutionary finding. Given the stakes, no one was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Until last December , when an official at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases decided Lo's work merited at least a closer look. The agency brought a dozen specialists together to look at his data. Experts in AIDS and other infectious diseases flew into San Antonio, TX, expecting (or so they admitted) to demolish Lo. Lo laid all his cards on the table. He had detected an organism, similar to a bacteria, called a mycoplasma, in cells taken from AIDS patients. He could find the organism in cells of healthy individuals. When he injected the organism into 4 silvered leaf monkeys, 3 quickly developed low-grade fevers. All four lost weight. All 4 died within 7 to 9 months of infection. When they were autopsied, there was Lo' Mycoplasma in their brains, liver and spleens. Lo also reported finding the mycoplasma in the damaged tissue of 6 HIV- human beings who had died from unspecified causes after suffering from suspiciously AIDS-like symptoms.

© 2005 LINQ Communications