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EXPERTS MOUNT STARTLING CHALLENGE TO AIDS ORTHODOXY

By Neville Hodgkinson

Sunday Times (London) 26 April 1992


Two of the world's experts on viruses are about to launch a startling assault on conventional medical thinking about AIDS.

Professor Luc Montagnier, who discovered the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in 1983, and Professor Peter Duesberg, who first mapped the genetic structure of such viruses, are to challenge the orthodox view that HIV is the exclusive cause of AIDS at an "alternative" AIDS conference in Amsterdam next month.

Montagnier said last week at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, where he heads AIDS research, that infection with HIV did not necessarily lead to AIDS, and that in rare cases AIDS could develop in people who were not infected with HIV. He revealed that several promising lines of research and treatment were being explored, based on a new concept of AIDS. This sees the disease as a process in which cells of the immune system that guard against infection become wrongly programmed and start killing themselves they are not killed by the virus, as had been thought.

But Duesberg, professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California at Berkeley and a member of the American National Academy of Sciences, goes further. HIV is not a new virus, he says. It is perhaps "as old as America". It is carried by a small, fairly constant proportion of the population nd is harmless.

It is present in many AIDS patients because most of them have risk factors in their lives such as drug abuse, sexual behaviour or other shocks to the system that expose them to many microbes.

AIDS is therefore not infectious, Duesberg argues. He thinks the epidemic is the result of an explosion in the use of "recreational" drugs such as cocaine, which badly damage the immune system. He also claims the epidemic is being fuelled by use of the anti-AIDS drug AZT. It is so toxic, he says, that it brings on AIDS-like symptoms in HIV-positive people. Duesberg, once hailed as one of the most brilliant scientists of his generation, has been trying to issue warnings for several years, but his ideas are seen by most mainstream AIDS workers as out of touch with the reality of the disease.

Recently, however, a growing number of experts, having seen Duesberg's predictiAidwould not "explode" into the general population come true, have become uneasy at the emphasis on anti-viral approaches to tackling the disease.

Nearly 50 have come together to form an international body called the Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV launch a newsletter, Rethinking AIDS, to examine the scientific basis for claims made about AIDS and propose critical experiments for testing the HIV hypothesis.

The newsletter's editor, Dr Harvey Bialy, who is also scientific editor of BioTechnology, says that up to now "the virus theory has produced nothing".

Efforts based on this approach had had three results, he said: "A vaccine that doesn't exist; AZT, which is iatrogenic genocide; and condom use, which is common sense." *

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