SOME OBSERVERS ARE CRITICAL OF HIV THEORY
and they have a
right to be heard
By Neville Hodgkinson
The Sunday Independent (Johannesburg) 9 July 2000
The huge flaws in the HIV theory go deeper than questions over the
extent to which HIV is the cause of AIDS, or the toxicity or
effectiveness of drugs directed against the virus. Astonishingly, they
challenge the very existence of the virus itself - and thus, the
validity of the HIV test - as well as the multibillion-dollar industry
producing pharmaceutical interventions for AIDS.
Some of the scientists contributing to President Thabo Mbeki's AIDS
Advisory Panel have been trying for more than a decade to demonstrate
these flaws to the scientific community. No one would listen. None of
the mainstream journals would publish their work. There was no
discussion.
From the beginning, powerful political, social and commercial forces
shaped AIDS science, and the possibility that the HIV theory might be
fundamentally wrong soon became scientifically unthinkable.
This is one reason why Mbeki has incurred such incomprehension and
criticism. Few of the doctors and scientists who signed last week's
pro-HIV Durban Declaration know of the criticism to which the HIV theory
has been subjected. There has been an information blackout by leading
scientific journals such as Nature, which helped organise the
declaration.
While scientists are pressing for a reappraisal of the HIV theory, the
most comprehensive critique has been developed by a group of scientists
based in Perth, Australia. Two members of the group, Eleni Papadopulos-
Eleopulos, a medical physicist, and Dr Val Turner, an emergency
physician, were in Johannesburg last week to give evidence to the
advisory panel. They received support from scientists in other fields
of expertise, including epidemiology, virus isolation and HIV diagnosis.
It was on the basis of this evidence that the panel agreed to research
the validity of the HIV test.
This is what the Perth group says:
- Cells of the immune system can become over-stimulated as a result of a
variety of biological assaults. When this happens, they produce
biochemical signals that HIV theorists have misinterpreted as evidence
for the presence of a new virus.
- Triggers for this reaction include exposure to infections, especially
in malnourished people whose immunity is already compromised; heavy
exposure to blood and blood products and other body fluids, including
semen; and heavy drug use.
- The body produces antibodies in response to this reaction, but these
antibodies are to products of the disordered cells, not to a viral
invader.
- Poor people in Africa and elsewhere are especially at risk of testing
positive for these antibodies, but this is not because of the spread of
a sexually transmitted virus. It is because they are more at risk of
being exposed to long-established infections, particularly tuberculosis,
that trigger a positive result with the HIV test.
- People who test positive are at increased risk of becoming ill, and of
dying if no action is taken over the true cause of their illness.
However, this is not because they are infected with a lethal virus. If
the conditions that caused them to test positive are changed, they are
likely to stay well.
- The HIV test is useful in screening blood, because it helps exclude
donations from carriers of TB and other disorders. But it is tragically
misleading to tell individuals who test positive that they have HIV.
- Claims that the tests are accurate in diagnosing the presence of HIV
are unfounded. The tests have never been validated by showing that the
virus is present in those who test positive, and not in those who test
negative. The method used has simply been to show that people in
Western "risk groups" for AIDS are much more likely to test positive
than healthy people. The Perth group agrees that this association is
present, but says it does nothing to prove HIV as the cause.
- The test could not be validated by showing the presence of HIV,
because no such virus has ever been isolated from patients, according to
previously accepted standards.
- When immune cells are heavily stimulated in the laboratory, they can
produce particles and other products of the genes in the cells. From
these, viral tests have been developed, but the same criticism
applies: they have never been validated against isolation of purified
HIV.
In the rush to come first with a viral cause of AIDS, scientists
mistakenly inferred the presence of a unique, new, sexually transmitted
microbe, and have wrongly scared the living daylights out of us ever
since.
In the earlier years of AIDS, when American, French and British
scientists introduced the HIV concept and the test and treatment, the
perception that there was a public health emergency made it hard for
dissenting views to be expressed. Today, the silence owes as much to
embarrassment, and the power of commercial interests, as to any
altruistic motives.
Millions are said to have died of AIDS in Africa, while in Britain, a
nation of 60 million people, cases amount to about 16,000 since the
epidemic began in the early 1980s, and are falling: the total this year
is 300. Anti-viral drugs have nothing to do with this difference,
contrary to the claims in the Durban Declaration. There is not a single
long-term study showing the drugs save lives. On the contrary, there is
evidence that the anti-viral approach kills. Recognition of this fact,
along with increasing awareness of the flaws in the HIV theory, is a
factor contributing to the falling death rate in Europe.
South Africa has been told that a 10th of its people are infected with
HIV, and that about half of all its 15-year-olds will die of AIDS. The
government is surely entitled to listen to previously ignored scientists
who believe these predictions stem from use of an invalid diagnostic
test, for a virus that has never been proved to exist.
Neville Hodgkinson, formerly medical and science correspondent of the
London Sunday Times, is the author of AIDS: The Failure of Contemporary
Science (Fourth Estate, London, 1996). He was an observer at last
week's hearing of the AIDS Advisory Panel.