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HIV/AIDS "denialist" scientists

HopkinsMedStudent

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Saw a PBS Frontline documentary on HIV/AIDS last night.

They spent a good segment of the program talking about Peter Duesberg and his HIV denialist platform. Ignoring the science is one thing, but what makes Duesberg much more dangerous than a traditional quack is the following:

1) First off, Duesberg is a respected scientist, or at least he was before going off on his HIV tangent. He's well respected in his field, and is tenured faculty at UCSF which is a very prestigious academic medical institution in the USA.

2) Presidents of nations have used Duesberg's position as a platform for denying that HIV causes AIDS. Most notorious is Thabo Mbeki, president of South Africa, who has refused outside funds to attack HIV/AIDS, insisting that its not a transmissible virus, but instead an environmental condition linked to poverty.

Duesberg's position is indirectly responsible for the death of millions of South Africans.

From what I can tell, the last of Duesberg's HIV "denialist" research papers was published in 1995. This makes me wonder if he has changed his erroneous ideas, finally admitting that he was wrong? Or does he continue to ignore the scientific evidence and stick his head in the sand?

Duesberg is not the only prominent HIV denialist. Kary Muller, inventor of the PCR method, is in the same camp as Duesberg, claiming that its impossible for a virus to cause AIDS. I dont think Muller has published any papers backing up his claims, but nevertheless as a famous scientist his claims have more perceived credibility than other unknown scientists.
 
Maggiore allowed her child to die after listening to him. One wishes he could be charged for all the deaths he is causing.

How can they deny HIV causes AIDS? The virus takes over T cells. There's pictures of the virus taking over the T Cell, manufacturing more of itself, and taking T cell cytoplasm with it when it leaves the cell to infect more cells. The T cells get destroyed, and cannot do their job while infected. It's undeniable how HIV destroys the immune system.

How can they deny that??

Let me guess, not having T cells is GOOD for the body???
 
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Is that idiot trying to say only people who use recreational drugs get HIV?

From what little I could stand to read, he also minces words up about the fact that HIV is not the ONLY cause of AIDS. No kidding. We already knew that and no one has ever said otherwise.
 
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His position is that compromised immune systems and subsequent infections are misdiagnosed as AIDS. For the industrial world he makes a correlation between drug use (poppers) and homosexual activity. In third world societies endemic poverty, lack of sanitation and malnutrition lead to misdiagnosis of traditional conditions as AIDS. His contention is that HIV is an epidemiological marker, but that it is an inert bystander, perhaps a result of immunosuppression, but not the cause.



edited to add- I'm not defending him, just relating what I understood about his position
 
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Understood.

His arguments fall flat in the face of evidence. He denies that evidence, and his so called credibility has gained him followers.

Inert bystander my @ss. Lame story, but people are listening to him.

What is his claim about reverse transcriptase? If HIV didn't need the TCells to replicate, then why would they make it? How does he propose HIV does infect the body? or Does he pretend the viruses are not able to infect the human body?? Why would they survive so long in the human body then?
 
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Raphael said:
His position is that compromised immune systems and subsequent infections are misdiagnosed as AIDS. For the industrial world he makes a correlation between drug use (poppers) and homosexual activity. In third world societies endemic poverty, lack of sanitation and malnutrition lead to misdiagnosis of traditional conditions as AIDS. His contention is that HIV is an epidemiological marker, but that it is an inert bystander, perhaps a result of immunosuppression, but not the cause.



edited to add- I'm not defending him, just relating what I understood about his position
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How does he rectify this view with the fact that HAART (highly active anti-retroviral therapy) essentially reverses AIDS? All the drugs used in HAART are explicitly antivirals. There are no "immune boosters" or drugs of other classes in that group.

If AIDS was not caused by HIV or some other virus, then there's no way those antivirals should work at all.

Does he even address the success of HAART at all, or does he just pretend that it does not exist?
 
Hmmm, wonder if anyone could address these questions to duschbag.

His followers sure don't care if he can answer them. They have their own reasons for just citing him.
 
The issue of AIDS denialism was topical about 6 months ago when Maggiore's daughter died of AIDS, and was covered on JREF. Recently it was thrust into the spotlight again when Harper's magazine published a piece by an AIDS-denialist journalist, Celia Farber.
This has been extensively rebutted.

Robert Gallo's response to Farber was published in the May edition of Harpers, along with others.
I was dismayed to read Celia Farber's article in Harper's Magazine, a publication I have trusted for its high standards. Her topic--namely, the difficulties and dangers of doing a clinical trial involving HIV/AIDS in a developing country- could have led to an important analysis of why such trials are needed. Unfortunately, Farber has chosen to include her own misinformed view that HIV does not cause AIDS. I will not dwell on the innumerable other problems of fact and interpretation in Farber's article. I will only say this: There is more evidence that HIV causes AIDS than there is for the cause of any other single human disease caused by an infectious agent, past or present.


A few scientists claim that HIV/AIDS researchers have not fulfilled the postulates laid down by the nineteenth-century German bacteriologist Robert Koch, who described what must be done to prove the cause of
a human disease. HIV has fulfilled not only Koch's postulates but also additional criteria that have been developed through the advent of new scientific methods. That HIV is the single cause of AIDS has been
concluded by every single qualified group that has studied the question, including the U.S. National Academy of Sciences; the U.S. Centers for Disease Control; the U.S. Institute of Medicine; the U.S. National Institutes of Health; the American Medical Association; the Canadian Centre for Infectious Disease Prevention and Control; the Pasteur Institute; and the World Health Organization:

In 1984, when my colleagues and I were first to claim--and in my view demonstrate--the linkage of HIV to AIDS, we showed that we could isolate HIV from forty-eight individuals who had AIDS. Characteristics
of the virus told us that, like the disease, it was new in the human population. We showed that the virus primarily targeted immune-system cells (now known as CD4+ T-cells), precisely the same cells that decline
in the presence of AIDS. Thirdly, we developed a blood test based on finding specific antibodies against HIV in infected persons. With an antibody test, we were able to carry out much larger surveys, which showed that within an otherwise healthy population HIV antibodies were present at a rate approximating one "healthy" American in every 1,000 to 2,000 people surveyed, as well as in certain high-risk groups.
clinical study of those "healthy" HIV-infected persons showed they bore evidence of declining CD4 T-cells, the harbinger of future AIDS risk. These results alone were sufficient to convince that HIV causes AIDS.

At the time we published our first results, newer results obtained in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control showed that we could pick out patients with AIDS or pre-AIDS within blind coded samples from
patients whose only risk factor was having received a unit of contaminated blood. From this we were also able to identify their infected blood donor, who, without fail, went on to develop AIDS. Later, we
showed that we could isolate HIV every time we found a patient with antibodies. No test in medicine is perfect, but done correctly and with a confirmatory second test, the HIV blood test developed in our
laboratory comes close. Today, transfusion-associated AIDS has all but disappeared where current generation blood-screening approaches are employed.

More importantly and completely misrepresented by Ms. Farber is the history of HIV therapy. She aligns herself firmly with the strange logic of a few dangerous people who say that these medications are harming people or may be themselves causing AIDS. This is sheer lunacy. The current antiretroviral treatments have converted AIDS from a terminal illness to a
chronic treatable disease with which many people can live to a reasonably normal age, and specific therapies aimed at pregnant mothers have all but ended pediatric AIDS in the developed world. Here again, this evidence alone could prove that HIV is the single cause of AIDS.

In the mid-1980s, my colleagues and I had the experience of working near several laboratory technicians who accidentally infected themselves with
HIV. In every case, these heroic individuals went on to develop AIDS. This is more evidence than Robert Koch ever had before he claimed a microbe caused a disease.
I am sorry that, more than twenty-five years after the discovery of HIV as the cause of AIDS, there are those who still refuse to accept this overwhelming body of evidence. Ms. Farber's article mirrors a disturbing
rise in anti-science opinion that has permeated important public-health and public-policy debate. It is surprising that Harper's Magazine has embraced this point of view, especially given the tragic consequences of the anti-HIV nihilist rhetoric in lives lost. This is not about Harper's Magazine, or about Celia Farber, Bob Gallo, or the rest of the AIDS
scientific and medical community. This is about preserving human lives. In this, there is no room for the propagation of shallow and sensationalist
thinking.
Robert C. Gallo, M.D.
Director, Institute of Human Virology
University of Maryland
Baltimore, Md.
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Another detailed rebuttal can be found here, in a response by the TAC (a South African group)
 
Thabo Mbeki update (NOT from his spokesperson)

Just an up-date from South Africa: President Thabo Mbeki has now slightly amended his position, and no longer publicly states that HIV does not cause AIDS. In fact, he very rarely makes any public comments on HIV at all. It is quite frustrating, because while he now denies that he ever said that HIV does not cause AIDS, he refuses to clearly and unambiguously state that HIV does cause AIDS and that ARV drugs work.

Most recently, in an interview with the USA media, he refused to answer a direct question on his own beliefs on HIV, and merely stated that South Africa's response to HIV is based on "the premise" that HIV causes AIDS. Our government is now rolling out ARV treatment at state hospitals, but far too slowly.

The lack of clear political leadership in the context of one of the worst HIV epidemics in the world has been literally fatal. I personally had a friend who died unnecessarily of an HIV-related illness. He refused to take ARV medication, and right up to the last said that "HIV doesn't exist, even the President says so."
 
Is it much better than the presidents and religous leaders that pretend condoms dont prevent it?
 
Some politicians genuinely think condoms don't protect against HIV.

Mr Zuma's testimony that he did not use a condom during the encounter, despite knowing the woman was HIV-positive, caused dismay among local Aids activists.
Before being sacked as deputy president last year, Mr Zuma headed the government's National Aids Council and the Moral Regeneration Campaign.
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But then he is a South African politician, and they seem to think HIV does not exist, al la Deusberg
 
Thank you for posting that link. I had tried to explain this situation at work, but everyone thought I was blowing the HIV/AIDS denial out of proportion. I had hoped they were right, but now I see things haven't improved at all in South Africa, and although I'm saddened, I can now help raise awareness about this problem.
 
If time and time again the science re HIV is proven factual, one can only conclude that there is some other motivation to deny the appropriate treatment:

a. Religious : “serves them right if they break Gods commandments”
b. Political : “can’t afford it, besides if their poor it’s their fault anyway”
c. Racial/Tribal : “It’s the others who are catching it, so good riddens to bad rubbish”
d. Genocide : by spreading misinformation, the gullible take up my cause by default.

e. Rights/thin end of wedge/government interference : a mask for one of the above?



Ok am I being too harsh on my fellow man?
 
I really don't understand the motivations. Are these guys laughing all the way to the bank? I can't help but think so. They are selling their crap to the gullible in heaps.
 
Deetee, thank you for mentioning Gallo's response re: Koch's postulates. These are the basis for the huge advances we've made in understanding and treating infectious diseases.

They are simply:

1.) The causal pathogen must be associated with the disease.
2.) The causal pathogen can be grown in pure culture.
3.) When a healthy susceptible host is infected with the causal pathogen from culture, symptoms of the original disease develops.
4.) The causal pathogen must be re-isolated from the infected host.

Most of those who deny the HIV/AIDS fact get hung up on #2. We have simian models, but no way to purely culture HIV mainly because it's a virus. But, these same folks wouldn't deny leprosy is caused by a mycobacterium... or would they? (You have to "culture" leprosy in armadillo foot pads.) And, let's not even get started on prions...

Still, I would invite anyone who denies the HIV/AIDS connection to put their money where their mouth is and agree to be infected by isolated HIV. They can serve as their own control. No subsequent HAART. No treatment whatsoever. Let's see what happens then.

In other words, put up or shut up.

-Dr. Imago
 
Dr. Imago said:
Deetee, thank you for mentioning Gallo's response re: Koch's postulates. These are the basis for the huge advances we've made in understanding and treating infectious diseases.

They are simply:

1.) The causal pathogen must be associated with the disease.
2.) The causal pathogen can be grown in pure culture.
3.) When a healthy susceptible host is infected with the causal pathogen from culture, symptoms of the original disease develops.
4.) The causal pathogen must be re-isolated from the infected host.

Most of those who deny the HIV/AIDS fact get hung up on #2. We have simian models, but no way to purely culture HIV mainly because it's a virus. But, these same folks wouldn't deny leprosy is caused by a mycobacterium... or would they? (You have to "culture" leprosy in armadillo foot pads.) And, let's not even get started on prions...

Still, I would invite anyone who denies the HIV/AIDS connection to put their money where their mouth is and agree to be infected by isolated HIV. They can serve as their own control. No subsequent HAART. No treatment whatsoever. Let's see what happens then.

In other words, put up or shut up.

-Dr. Imago
Click to expand...

No, that's not their issue with #2. We culture viruses all the time. The 'tissue' culture was flasks of propagating white blood cells. My thesis involved over a year of feeding these bastards.

The issue that critics have with #2 is the 'pure' part: they challenge researchers' assertion that the culture is free of other pathogens. ie: they assert that when we were isolating HIV to inoculate the cultures, we inadvertently get some of the *real* pathogen in every sample. No, they don't know what that is. No, they don't know how to identify the contaminant. No, they don't feel obliged to carry the burden of proof.

Last I checked, there are two more challenges:

1. The Huw Christie Memorial Prize: Pound(UK)100,000 Reward for 'HIV', Offered by Alexander Russell 13th June 2002. http://www.altheal.org/isolation/prize.htm (may no longer be valid - the contact information provided in the news release does not respond to inquiries, and the website is gone)

2. Perth Group: The Jody Wells Memorial Prize: $(US)25,000 Reward for demonstrating Koch's Postulate applies to HIV. http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/award.htm

Here's a skeptical examination of these challenges:
http://www.aegis.com/topics/hiv_exist.html



Consequently, this gives them to very convenient 'outs':

1. Since we can't prove that any isolation of HIV is, in fact, pure, they're off the hook for their offer to be injected with HIV. After all, they don't want to be injected with the 'real' pathogen by accident.

2. They're left looking smug with the burden of proof placed on HIV researches to 'prove' that there's no other cause. ie: proving nonexistence. Whole threads in the forum have been dedicated to whether this is even a reasonable expectation.
 
blutoski said:
The issue that critics have with #2 is the 'pure' part: they challenge researchers' assertion that the culture is free of other pathogens. ie: they assert that when we were isolating HIV to inoculate the cultures, we inadvertently get some of the *real* pathogen in every sample. No, they don't know what that is. No, they don't know how to identify the contaminant. No, they don't feel obliged to carry the burden of proof.
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What about infectious DNA? That can be made to a high purity and used to re-infect fresh cultures or does the DNA rather than the virus not count?
 
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