Agere_Contra says:
There is a real, undeniable mystery about the HIV Hypothesis, which is - why does anybody continue to believe it?The HIV Hypothesis is that there exists a virus, HIV, that causes the disease/diseases we call AIDs. This hypothesis leads to certain conclusions: one of which is that AIDs spreads like a virus. Let's examine this.
When looking at what causes a disease there are a number of "usual suspects". Pathogens (bacteria or viruses) are a likely cause. Toxin exposure is also a likely cause. Deficiency (not enough vitamins, not enough food) is a third.
To tell which one we are dealing with (pathogen or toxin/deficiency) we look at the epidemiology of the disease (epidemiology - how a disease spreads).
AIDs has stayed within the defined at-risk sectors of the population (e.g. drug users, homosexual men) and hasn't expanded exponentially into the general population. Despite Oprah's dire warnings (remember those?), heterosexual non-drug users (at any rate, those who eat properly and who have no significant toxin exposure) have not in fact been ravaged by AIDs. Prostitutes who don't do drugs and have no other catabolic stresses haven't been ravaged by AIDs.
But viruses just do not behave like this. They are little bits of nucleic clockwork. They are obligatory parasites - they infect, and they have to infect. They expand exponentially into populations and then die off as the population achieves resistance. The epidemiology of AIDs is non-infectious, and so AIDs must be non-viral.
The epidemiology of AIDs is instead similar to that of toxin exposure or nutrition-deprivation. A good analogy is with long-term smokers or heavy drinkers: people with heavy exposure to toxins for a long period tend to develop diseases: those who aren't exposed, don't. You don't catch lung cancer or cirrhosis of the liver by touch, you get them from toxin exposure.
In the early cases of AIDs (GRID = Gay Related Immune Disease/Disorder) there was an obvious toxic cause: the inhaling of amyl nitrite to assist anal intercourse. Inhaling of amyl nitrite is a lethal habit, and a demarcated homosexual phenomenum. Therefore – this form of AIDs appeared amongst gay men only, and stayed in the gay population.
But the vast majority of AIDs deaths were not and are not caused by nitrite poppers. Hardly. Poppers merely began the AIDs furore. Nowadays the classic popper-induced disease (Kaposi's Sarcoma, a dangerous cancerous lesion in the lungs) is no even longer defined as an AIDs disease - as the gay community drastically cut back on popper consumption in the early AIDs era. (However nitrite consumption is growing back again. By 2009 I predict that Kaposi's Sarcoma will be back on the CDC's list of AIDs diseases. You read it here first)
The real killer in AIDs (the real toxic cause) was and is iatrogenic poisoning: by which I mean the treatment for HIV infection itself causes the disease. AZT - the old wonder drug for AIDS - is an extremely toxic chemotherapy drug: 1000 mg of AZT a day for months or years would kill anyone. 90% of all those thousands of AIDs deaths in the AZT days were caused by toxic liver failure, NOT by one of the CDC’s AIDs-defining diseases. Go figure.
These days doctors don't use AZT, or use less of it. They use cathepsin inhibitors. These aren't as poisonous as AZT, though they're still poisonous. Hence less patients are dropping dead, and so the HAART cocktail treatments have been hailed as miracle cures.
But my point would be - a cure for what? The only reason someone is given these sublethal AIDs “cures” is that they have reacted positively on a HIV test. They are assumed to be infected, even if they are symptomless, and therefore they come under a lot of pressure, both legal & moral, to comply with treatment. The treatment is poisonous (in the case of pure AZT extremely so) and so the patient tends to get worse. Result - you have an epidemic-by-diagnosis. You get diagnosed with the virus, and some time later you get sick.
But surely if an HIV test says you're infected, you're infected?
Well, no. The HIV tests (ELISA, Western Blot) have not been calibrated against the isolated virus itself. This is known as "gold standard calibration" - without such calibration, a serological test for viral antibodies has no business being used in medical practice. Without calibration you don’t know if your test is giving you a false-positive result or not.
There are over fifty conditions that have been documented to cause false positives in HIV tests. Some are probably statistically irrelevant (e.g. leprosy). But most are highly relevant. Tuberculosis, flu vaccination, recent tetanus vaccination, herpes, renal failure, pregnancy (second or later pregnancies particularly), rheumatoid arthritis, "sticky" blood (in Africans), "sickle cell" (in Africans), being African, organ transplants, malaria, hepatitis, haemophilia and antibodies to sperm have all known to create false-positives in HIV tests. Without calibration we don't know that anybody who's ever shown up positive on an HIV test actually had the virus - it could have been a false positive.
I repeat: without calibrating an HIV test against the virus itself it is impossible to use the test to indicate presence of the virus. The HIV tests react to proteins in the blood. To prove that they’re interacting with HIV proteins, you must have an isolate of HIV and be able to determine what the HIV proteins are.
So why not calibrate the tests already? Answer: you need an isolate of the virus to do this, and ... the HIV virus has not yet been isolated. There is a Nobel prize waiting for the first person who can isolate HIV. No-one has done it. After twenty years we are entitled to ask if the virus is actually there to be isolated.
Without an isolate of the HIV virus there's no proof that HIV actually exists. There’s no proof of sexual transmission, no proof of pathology. The epidemiology is non-viral.
So - why are we sticking with the HIV hypothesis? Does it have any predictive value? Has use of the HIV theory allowed us to cure anybody, as opposed to the thousands of people doctors have killed with AZT?
{Ed: after being presented with a series of pictures said to be of HIV, and ask to explain them, the author responded: }
Some of these are micrographs of heterogenous mixtures taken from the 1.16 mg/l density band of culture. If they're not from this band then they are not relevant - retroviruses must be of this density.
But there are a whole raft of cellular debris, microvesicles etc with this characteristic density, and you need to know what you are looking at when examining these micrographs.
The little black dots are endogenous (they come from inside the cell). They are sometimes called endogenous retroviruses, and are thought to play a role in trauma repair and in response to catabolic stress. Living cell lines express loads of this stuff under mitogenic (cell growth) conditions. Which BTW are the standard conditions of culture. As per my post to Gatun.
An exogenous virus (a real virus) would have spikes of GP 120 protein. Otherwise it could not breach the cell wall. These would be clearly visible on this scale as little spikes or knobs.
More importantly you show no micrographs of viral isolate here (the top one is a clip from a larger picture which shows a heterogenous mixture including microvesicles). Without isolation you do not have provenance for RNA baselining (you cannot use RNA tracking methods to track the progress of the "virus"), and you cannot do experiments to prove pathology and infection.
If you cannot prove infection and replication, all you have is dots with hopeful arrows marked "HIV". These are not stills from films. No-one has seen those little black dots crawling into the cell. Being endogenous, they budded OUT of the cell.
So...show me a viral isolate. The three steps are as follows:
A) Create an isolate. i.e. create a culture from putatively infected material and take a micrograph from the 1.16 density band showing ONLY particles with the correct characteristics of an exogenous retrovirus. No smooth black dots mixed with cell debris need apply.
B) Prove that what you have is viral. You must be able to take your isolate, infect something with it, grow more virus, and be able to get another picture of isolate.
C) Claim your Nobel prize. They will give one of these to the first person to isolate HIV (as opposed to taking pictures of debris). Its been twenty years, so you have to wonder what the hold-up is.
{ed: notice the lack of references. They may exist, but I don't have them. If you do, please use the form below to add them. }
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