The AIDS-HIV hypothesis-Background

[Guest guest]

- Arnoldgore

The AIDS-HIV hypothesis-Background

From Michael Ellner:Hi All,Below find Liam Scheff's outstanding article questioning HIV.Please send it far and wide and ask that folks take a few minutes to send a letter to the editor to support it's publication. FYI - Any one can submit aletter to the editor that's not for publication - just to let the editor andwriter know that you support their courageous reporting. It can really makea difference!Please send you letters to: lettersThanks,Michael EllnerReprinted from the Boston Dig, May 7, 2003http://www.weeklydig.com/dig/content/3168.aspxPrologueIn 1984, Robert Gallo, a government cancer-virologist, called aninternational press conference to announce that he'd found the probablecause of AIDS. He claimed that a retrovirus called HIV was destroying theimmune systems of young gay men and IV drug abusers, leaving them open to avariety of both viral diseases and cancer.According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, AIDS is not asingle disease, but rather a category of 29 unrelated, previously-knownconditions including herpes, yeast infections, salmonella, diarrhea, fever,flus, TB, pelvic cancer in women, pneumonia and bacterial infections. TheCDC also designates HIV- positive people who aren't sick, but have a T-cellcount below 200, as AIDS patients (T-cells are a subset of white bloodcells). The only thing that separates an AIDS diagnosis from any of theseconditions is a positive HIV test, which itself is based on Robert Gallo'sresearch. Gallo's HIV theory, however, was not the only AIDS theory, and according toa growing number of concerned scientists, researchers and activists, itwasn't the best. For 70 years before Gallo, retroviruses were known to be anon-toxic part of the cell, and no single virus could simultaneously cause aviral disease like pneumonia, in which cells are destroyed, and a cancerlike Kaposi's Sarcoma, in which cells multiply rapidly.These scientists argue that Gallo's unified HIV/AIDS theory is flawed andthat treating 29 unrelated diseases with extremely toxic AIDS drugs like AZTand protease inhibitors is at best irresponsible and at worse medicalgenocide.They may have a point. Ninety-four percent of all AIDS-related deaths in theUS occurred after the introduction of AZT, according to CDC statisticsthrough the year 2000. And according to the University of Pittsburgh, theNo. 1 cause of death in US AIDS patients today is liver failure, aside-effect of the new protease inhibitors.The questions arise: Did Gallo truly solve the AIDS riddle, and are wetreating AIDS humanely and effectively?To answer these questions, I spoke with three prominent AIDS researchers.Dr. Peter Duesberg is a chemist and retroviral expert. Duesberg discoveredthe Oncogene (cancer gene) and isolated the retroviral genome (of which HIVis one) in 1970. He is professor of molecular biology at UC Berkeley.Dr. David Rasnick is a protease specialist and has been in AIDS research for20 years. He and Duesberg work in collaboration on cancer and AIDS research.Rasnick was an advisor on President Mbeki's South African AIDS panel.Dr. Rodney Richards is a chemist who worked with Amgen and Abbot labs,designing the first HIV tests from Robert Gallo's HIV cell line.The interviews were conducted separately and integrated into a dialogue.Individual points-of-view belong to individual speakers.How did you get involved with AIDS research?Rasnick: I'm a chemist and protease enzyme researcher. I design andsynthesize inhibitors to stop tissue-destroying viruses and cancers. WhenRobert Gallo announced HIV caused AIDS, I wanted to work on inhibitors thatwould stop it.In '85 I was at a research meeting where HIV was being discussed. An AIDSspecialist was asked how much HIV was present in an infected AIDS patient.He was asked, 3What's the titer of HIV?2The titer is the number of infectious virus particles in a blood or tissuesample. A titer of live virus is easily obtainable from the particulartissue that the virus infects. If you have herpes, the sample comes from acold sore; if it's polio, it's from the intestine; if it's smallpox, it's apustule; if it's a cold, it's the throat.When you're infected with a virus, it infects and kills about 30 percent ofthe specific tissue that it targets before you get any symptoms. You cantake a titer of any infected area, put it under a microscope and seemillions of living viruses.So, the virologist was asked, 3What's the titer?2He answered, "Undetectable. Zero."I thought, how is that possible? How can you be made sick from somethingthat isn't there? With polio, researchers threw away a hundred virusesbefore they found the right one. I assumed Gallo had simply gotten the wrongvirus, and we'd have to start over.By 1987, there were 30,000 cumulative AIDS cases. Numbers were not growingas predicted; and AIDS hadn't left its original risk groups. Six years afterthe first AIDS cases, 95 percent of infections still occurred exclusively inmen - 2/3 gay men, and 1/3 IV drug users. Additionally, each AIDS risk groupsuffered from specific diseases.Viruses don't cause different diseases based on gender, sexual preference orlifestyle. Viruses have unique but limited genetic structures, whichmanifest in a limited but identical set of symptoms in all patients. Theherpes virus makes herpes lesions, but never a sore throat. The chicken poxvirus always produces skin sores, but never paralysis.Viral epidemics spread exponentially in the first months and years, killingeveryone who can't survive long enough to develop immunity to it. HIV wasn'tgrowing; it remained in its original risk groups, and it caused differentdiseases in each. It clearly wasn't acting like a contagious virus.In 1988, I came across an article written by Peter Duesberg in the sciencejournal Cancer Research. The article was on retroviruses in general, and HIVin particular. Gallo claimed AIDS was caused by a retrovirus, HIV. Duesbergwas the world's preeminent retrovirologist. He'd studied and mapped theretroviral genome in the '70s. Duesberg's knowledge of retroviruses wasunparalleled. In the article, he laid out, point for point, whatretroviruses are, and what they can and can't do.HIV is a retrovirus; what are retroviruses?Rasnick: Retroviruses are a subset of viruses that are not toxic to cells.They were discovered in the early 20th century. They're one of the firstidentified cellular particles. There are about 3,000 cataloguedretroviruses. They exist in every animal: dogs, cats, whales, birds, rats,hamsters and humans. Retrovirologists estimate that one to two percent ofour own DNA is retrovirus.Retroviruses are RNA strands that copy themselves into our DNA using anenzyme called reverse transcriptase. Retroviruses are passed downmatrilineally - from mother to child. They're not sexually transmissible.Lab animals do not exchange retroviruses with each other, no matter how muchthey mate. But babies always have the same retroviruses as their mothers.Current research strongly indicates that they're simply a naturallyoccurring part of us. In 50 years of modern lab research, no retrovirus hasever been shown to kill cells or cause disease, except under very speciallaboratory conditions.Peter Duesberg: In 1987 I was invited by Cancer Research to discuss whetherretroviruses, including HIV, could cause disease or immune deficiency. I wasinvited because of my experience with retroviruses.In 1970, I was working in UC Berkeley's virus lab. The big program invirology at the time, which we were part of, was to find a virus that causedcancer. There was also a large government cancer-virus program at theNational Institutes of Health. Robert Gallo was one of the scientistsworking on that project.We began looking at retroviruses because of their unique qualities. Typicalviruses kill cells. Their strategy is to enter the cell, kill it and move onto the next one. However, with cancer, cells aren't killed; in fact, theymultiply very rapidly. Therefore a virus couldn't cause cancer.Retroviruses, however, don't kill cells. This quality made them anoutstanding candidate for a cancer virus.In 1970, I made a discovery that got a lot of attention. I isolated aretroviral gene from a cancer cell, and infected other cells with this gene.The cancer virologists were very excited. They thought this might be thething they'd been looking for - a retrovirus that could infect other cellsand cause cancer. I was suddenly famous. There were job offers; I was giventenure at Berkeley and admission into the Academy of Science.Of course, if a virus, or a unique retrovirus, caused cancer in the realworld, then cancer would be contagious. But nobody 3catches2 cancer. A "caseof cancer" doesn't go around the office. However, such fundamental thoughtswere not on the minds of the virus hunters. Scientists likeimpressive-sounding proofs, regardless of what we know is true in the realworld. The retroviral cancer-gene was just a lab artifact. It didn't existin humans or animals in nature. We created it in the lab, and that's whereit stayed. It was purely academic.As part of the cancer-gene experiment, my associates and I mapped theretroviral genome. We made the maps that today are used as the blueprintsfor all retroviruses, including HIV.What do retroviruses do?Duesberg: In terms of disease, they do nothing. They're transcribed into theDNA in a few cells, and they hang around there for the rest of your life aspart of your genome. Nevertheless, cancer-virus hunters continued to lookfor a cancer-gene using the technology we created and the retroviral maps wemade. Rasnick: In the mid-'70s, Robert Gallo claimed he'd found acancer-retrovirus in the cells of a leukemia patient. He called it HL23V. Hefound it the same way he would later find HIV - not by finding theretrovirus in the blood - but by looking for antibody and enzyme activitythat he claimed stood in for the actual retrovirus.By 1980, his claim was refuted by both the Sloan-Kettering Cancer ResearchCenter and the National Cancer Institute. Gallo's supposed HL23V antibodiesweren't the result of a cancer-virus, but rather the result of 3exposure tomany natural substances2 which create antibodies in humans. Today nobody,not even Gallo, claims HL23V ever existed.In 1980, he tried again. Gallo claimed to have a new cancer retroviruscalled HTLV-1, which caused a kind of leukemia in which T-cells multipliedinto fluid tumors. T-cells are one of many subsets of white blood cells.Once again, the proof was less than convincing. Less than one percent ofpeople who tested positive for HTLV-1 ever developed leukemia. It was aless-than-successful validation for his theory.How did Gallo move from cancer to AIDS research?Rasnick: In the early '80s, gay men were showing up in emergency rooms witha variety of simultaneous illnesses and infections. At the time, medicaljournals speculated that the diseases were drug-related. Gay men had beenabusing toxic, immune suppressing and even carcinogenic drugs like poppers,cocaine and amphetamines on a daily basis for the better part of the '70s.In 1983, Luc Montagnier, a French scientist at the Pasteur Institute,claimed to have found a new retrovirus in AIDS patients. But nobody paidattention, because he hadn't isolated a virus, and he hadn't found a singleviral particle in the blood - remember the titer was zero, undetectable.Seeking some academic support, Montagnier sent a cell sample to Robert Galloat the NIH. Gallo took the cell-line Montagnier sent him and modified itslightly. Then he did something strange. He stole it.In 1984 Gallo called an international press conference and together withMargaret Heckler, the head of the Department of Health and Human Services,announced that he'd discovered the 3probable cause2 of AIDS. It was a newretrovirus called HTLV-III, (later re-named HIV). Later that same day, hepatented the modified cell-line he'd originally gotten from Montagnier. Hehadn't published a single word of his research. Gallo, a government-backedscientist, simply announced that a retroviral-epidemic was on its way.He sold the cell-line to Abbot Labs, a pharmaceutical company that makes HIVtests. The French government asked that all patent rights be returned toMontagnier. Gallo refused, claiming it was all his work. In 1987, Gallo andMontagnier were forced by President Reagan and French Prime Minister Chiracto meet in a hotel room to work out the HIV patent rights. In 1992, Gallowas officially convicted of theft by a federal scientific ethics committee.Rodney Richards: At first Gallo claimed he invented the whole process. Nowhe claims his sample might have been 3contaminated2 by Montagnier's.Duesberg: The NIH itself ran a two-year investigation of Gallo's HIV claim,and they couldn't come up with any convincing evidence that he came up withit on his own.What did Abbot labs do with Gallo's cell line?Rasnick: Abbot labs makes HIV-antibody tests out of it. Abbot's madebillions selling HIV tests, and Gallo's made millions from his patent.So when we're given an HIV-antibody test, we're tested based on what Galloand Montagnier claim to have found. How did Luc Montagnier find HIV?Richards: First he looked in his patients' blood, but he couldn't find itthere. In fact, no one has ever found HIV in human blood.Right, the titer was zero - so where did he look?Richards: Montagnier took tissue from the swollen lymph node of a gay manwho was a suspected AIDS patient. In an infected person, the lymph tissuewill presumably be littered with infected cells.Montagnier attempted to perform a cell culture with that tissue. This is thelab technique used to isolate viruses like herpes and mononucleosis. In acell culture, infected cells are mixed with uninfected cells in a petridish. Separated from the body's immune system, viruses that are beingsuppressed can surface. The virus travels from the infected cell to theuninfected cell through the liquid in the dish. The scientist collects thisliquid, concentrates it, and spins it through a sucrose density gradient toisolate the virus. A sucrose density gradient is a tube of layered sugar solutions of specificdensities. The layers become thicker from top to bottom. The cell liquid isgently placed on top of the sugar solution. This is spun in a centrifuge formany hours to force the viral particles to descend through the densitylayers. Cellular particles, including retroviruses, have known densities.The known density corresponds to a layer in the test tube. The descendingparticles stop when they find a density equal to their own. This layer isphotographed with an electron microscope. In cultures from virally-infectedpatients, the photo plate is filled with millions of identical viralparticles.Finally, a new cell culture is performed with the isolated viral particlesto see if they are indeed infectious. Once again, the cell fluid isseparated, spun and photographed to verify that the same virus appears. Thisis what's known as viral isolation.Is this what Montagnier did?Richards: He tried to, but it didn't work. Montagnier took lymph tissue froma suspected AIDS patient, mixed it with cells from a healthy blood donor andperformed a cell culture. He removed the liquid and spun it in a centrifuge,but he found no virus. That didn't stop him. Montagnier repeated theexperiment but added a crucial new step.He took the suspected AIDS tissue and mixed it with a variety of cells in aculture, including cells from an umbilical cord. Then he added powerfulchemicals called Mitogens that artificially force cells to replicate. Hefound, after 2 or 3 weeks, evidence of an enzyme called reversetranscriptase, a sign of possible retroviral activity.But he hadn't found any virus?Richards: No. He found an enzyme that retroviruses use. But reversetranscriptase is found in many other microbes, cellular components andprocesses, including umbilical cells, and forced replication. Montagnierthen separated the mitogenically stimulated fluid from the culture andpoured it into another dish of healthy cells and again found reversetranscriptase activity.He put this through a sucrose density gradient and found reversetranscriptase activity at the density layer where retroviruses were known topurify. What he did not find was a virus. When he looked through theelectron microscope at that same density gradient, he found nothing - but hedidn't acknowledge that until years later.That's what's known as isolation of HIV.How does this prove that an infectious virus was making people sick?Richards: It doesn't. This is insufficient evidence to prove that HIV or anyinfectious virus exists, let alone that it causes disease.How did Gallo use Montagnier's cells to prove HIV existed and caused AIDS?Richards: Gallo cultured the cells, but didn't find enough reversetranscriptase activity to convince him that Montagnier had found aretrovirus. So Gallo added another step. He mixed cells from 10 AIDSpatients together; then he added those to leukemia T-cells from his HTLV-1retrovirus experiment. At that point, Gallo found enough reversetranscriptase activity to convince him that there was indeed a retrovirus.That's how he claims to have found HIV.But Gallo had already found reverse transcriptase activity in the leukemiacells. How did he prove that there was a new retrovirus - HIV?Richards: Many scientists don't believe that he did prove it.You said Gallo used a T-cell line to grow HIV. Isn't HIV supposed to killT-cells?Richards: That's what Gallo initially claimed, but Abbot labs grows its HIVin human T-cells. It's even called an immortal cell line, because theleukemia cells don't die. To date, no researcher has demonstrated how HIVkills T-cells. It's just a theory that keeps money flowing into thepharmaceutical approach to treating AIDS.Rasnick: Gallo patented the leukemia T-cell mixture the very same day heannounced he'd found the 3probable cause2 of AIDS.What do HIV tests do?Rasnick: They look for antibodies in your blood to proteins that are takenout of this mixture. Your body produces antibodies as a response to allforeign material - germs, yeasts, viruses, even the food you eat. Virusesare DNA or RNA wrapped in protein building blocks. Antibodies grab ontothese proteins, immobilizing and destroying the virus. When these antibodiesencounter different viral proteins in the future, they'll very often grabonto them, too. This is called cross-reactivity.Duesberg: Viruses are only dangerous the first time you encounter them. Onceyou've made antibodies to a virus, you have immunity for the rest of yourlife, and the virus can't get you sick anymore. This is the opposite of HIVtheory, which states: You become infected; you don't get sick; you makeantibodies; and 10 years later, you get sick and die.Rasnick: There are two common HIV antibody tests. One is the Elisa, in whicha bunch of proteins from the T-cell mixture are stuck in a series of littleplastic wells on a test plate. The other is called Western Blot. In thistest, the proteins are separated onto individual paper strips. Your blood isadded, and if antibodies from your blood stick to proteins from thismixture, you're said to be HIV positive.They're assuming the proteins are from HIV; but they never isolated HIV, sohow can they say these tests can diagnose HIV-infection?Rasnick: They can't, and they don't. None of the proteins in the Elisa andWestern Blot tests have been proven to be specific to HIV or any retrovirus.For this reason the FDA has not approved a single test for diagnosingHIV-infection.Richards: There are at least 30 tests marketed to test for HIV. None of themare approved by the FDA to diagnose the presence or absence of HIV. Not theElisa, not viral load, not Western Blot, not the P24 antigen test. The FDAand manufacturers clearly state that the significance of testing positive onthe Elisa and Western Blot test is unknown.AIDS researchers admit that the tests contain at least 80 percentnon-specific cellular material - they're, at best, 20 percent effective. Butin my scientific opinion, they contain no HIV at all. The medical literaturelists at least 60 different conditions that can register positive on theHIV-test. These conditions include candidas, arthritis, parasites, malaria,liver conditions, alcoholism, drug abuse, flu, herpes, syphilis, other STDsand pregnancy.Rasnick: It's very simple to see how you can get false positives. Antibodiescross-react. The more viruses and germs you're exposed to, the moreantibodies you'll produce, the greater risk you'll test positive on anon-specific antibody test. If you live in a country without clean water orsanitary living conditions, you're going to have constant microbial andparasitic infections that produce antibodies.You carry antibodies to all the colds, flus, viruses and vaccinations you'veever had. If you're pregnant, you're producing antibodies that will reactwith Abbot's Elisa test. Pregnancy is a known cause of false positives onthe HIV test.Different races have different ranges of naturally-occurring antibodies.That's why blacks have a nine times greater chance of testing positive thanwhite Europeans, and a 33 times greater chance than Asians. It doesn't haveanything to do with infection or health. In one study, a tribe of SouthAmerican Indians was given Elisa tests. Thirteen percent of them testedHIV-positive, but nobody was sick. They just had antibodies that reactedwith the test.If the tests aren't specific, and we can't find HIV in the blood, then whatis AIDS?Richards: According to the CDC, AIDS works like a formula: If you have anAIDS-indicator disease like salmonella, tuberculoses, pneumonia, herpes, ora yeast infection, and you test HIV-positive, then you're said to have AIDS,and you're treated with toxic AIDS drugs. If you test negative or don't knowyour HIV status, you're spared the toxic drugs and simply treated for thedisease you have. In 1993 the CDC expanded their definition of AIDS to include people who arenot sick at all but who test positive and have a one-time T-cell count under200. Based on this new criteria, by 1997, about 2/3 of all AIDS cases wereperfectly healthy people. As it happens, '97 was the last year the CDC toldus how many people were healthy and how many were sick. Now they just counteveryone who's HIV-positive as an AIDS patient, whether they're sick or not.Let me clarify this. When people die of AIDS, they actually die of a knowndisease. But if their blood reacts with an HIV-antibody test, they're nolonger said to have the disease, they're said to have AIDS?Rasnick: That's how it works. And the sick people who test HIV-positive areput on the most toxic drugs ever manufactured and sold.What about AIDS in Africa?Rasnick: It's the same story, even worse. Fifty percent of Africans have nosewage systems. Their drinking water mixes with animal and human waste. Theyhave constant TB and malaria infections, the symptoms of which are diarrheaand weight loss, the very same criteria UNAIDS and the World HealthOrganization use to diagnose AIDS in Africa.These people need clean drinking water and treated mosquito nets [mosquitoescarry malaria], not condoms and lectures and deadly pharmaceuticals forcedon pregnant mothers.We've put 20 years and $118 billion into HIV. We've got no cure, no vaccineand no progress. Instead we have thousands of people made sick and evenkilled by toxic AIDS drugs. But we can't just treat them for the diseases weknow they have because if we do, we're called 3AIDS denialists.2 Treatingthem for the diseases they actually have would be more humane and effectivethan forcing toxic drugs down their throats, and it would also save billionsof tax dollars. It's a multi-billion dollar industry. There are 100,000professional AIDS researchers in this country. It's as hard to challenge asbig tobacco at this point.What does Luc Montagnier say about this?Rasnick: In 1990 at the San Francisco AIDS conference, Montagnier announcedthat HIV did not, after all, kill T-cells and could not be the cause ofAIDS. Within hours of making this announcement, he was attacked by the veryindustry he'd helped to create. Montagnier's not a liar. He's a so-soscientist who's in over his head.Afterword: In a 1997 interview, Luc Montagnier spoke about his isolation of HIV. Hesaid, 3We did not purify [isolate] ... We saw some particles but they didnot have the morphology [shape] typical of retroviruses ... They were verydifferent ... What we did not have, as I have always recognized it, is thatit was truly the cause of AIDS.2Robert Gallo hasn't made such large concessions. He has, however, amendedhis AIDS death sentence. He now believes that it's possible to live with HIV3for 30 years until you die of old age,2 as long as you live a healthylifestyle and avoid immune-compromising substances.In 1994 Gallo quietly announced that the major AIDS defining illness in gaymen - Kaposi's Sarcoma, was not caused by HIV but was likely caused by amylnitrite poppers, a drug that had been popular in the gay community. Somehow,this didn't make headlines.Gallo also said that Peter Duesberg's research into a drug-based AIDS modelshould be funded. Duesberg's funding has all but evaporated since hepublicly challenged the HIV/AIDS model.Sandy Mintzhttp://www.vaccinationnews.com http://www.vaccinationnews.com/Scandals/past_scandals.htm "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." - Wendell Phillips (1811-1884),paraphrasing John Philpot Curran (1808) http://www.909shot.com http://www.redflagsweekly.com