VIRUSMYTH HOMEPAGE

BLINDING ME WITH SCIENCE
Deconstructing the HIV=AIDS hypothesis

By Sarah Klipfel

Westchester Co. Weekly 8 Oct. 1998

The first article I ever wrote was a profile of a Brooklyn painter who rolled around in his own urine, blood and semen.

As I began the project, I thought I would be clever and write a tongue-in-cheek piece about yet another work of extremist art. But when I actually saw the paintings and spoke to the gallery owner about them, I started to understand why the artist resorted to such shocking media. The painter had switched from using paint to body fluids shortly after losing five friends in one year to AIDS. Not much older than I, he also came of age in an era when sex was seen not as a symbol of freedom or revolution but as something that could kill you.

I was still convinced of this reality last summer when I showed up for my first day of work at The Valley Advocate, the Weekly's sister paper in Massachusetts' Pioneer Valley. (For a look at the complete package of articles and interviews conducted by the Advocate, go to valleyadvocate.com/hiv-aids.)

I was hired as an intern to organize and find speakers for a public debate on the controversy over AIDS and HIV. "What controversy?" I asked myself and my friends when I first heard the details of my job. No one had heard of any controversy. And when I met with staff writer Mark Anderson on my first day at work, I was completely unprepared for what he threw at me.

"There is a growing number of scientists," he said, "who don't believe that HIV causes AIDS."

HIV and AIDS -- they're the same thing, aren't they? I thought.

As an urban studies/architectural history student nearing my final year at Brown, my AIDS education consisted entirely of what I'd been taught by health educators and the media -- an average amount of knowledge on the subject. In fact, I'd never known anyone with AIDS or HIV and generally ignored the topic as depressing. More recently I had been paying attention to reports that drug treatments were effective in forestalling the progress of HIV, but I had never heard the idea that HIV didn't cause AIDS.

Suddenly, I found myself trying to make sense of two, radically different views of what is most often described as the "AIDS epidemic." The view that I found most familiar, of course, was the one based on the commonly accepted belief that HIV causes AIDS. The other view -- the dissident view -- is based on the assertion that the central hypothesis on which nearly all AIDS research is built has never been proven and is, most likely, false.

In addition to the work I needed to do to begin to understand the two opposing positions, I also faced the task of enticing one or two of the majority of scientists who adhere to the HIV=AIDS hypothesis to attend a formal debate with a few of the heretical scientists who seek to challenge conventional wisdom on AIDS -- a task I approached with the somewhat naive assumption that serious scientists, regardless of their stand on the issue, would feel a responsibility to publicly defend their positions.

The issue, it seemed, was one of unparalleled importance to the public: If the dissidents were right, billions of dollars of public money was being misspent and hundreds of thousands of people have put their lives in the hands of a medical establishment that has based nearly all its research and treatment programs on an unsubstantiated assumption. If the dissidents -- though relatively few in number -- were wrong, their efforts to subvert accepted approaches to treatment were dangerous and potentially lethal.

***

First, I had to understand the basics of the dissident arguments and how they are perceived by the medical establishment. I began by perusing the leading work that challenges the orthodox theory, Dr. Peter Duesberg's 1996 book Inventing the AIDS Virus.

Duesberg, I later found out, was one of the world's top virologists in the 1980s when HIV was first identified by Dr. Luc Montagnier's research team in France.

Montagnier is perhaps best known to Americans as the French scientist who was cheated by the Alan Alda character in the TV movie And the Band Played On. The Alda character was Dr. Robert Gallo, a researcher with whom Duesberg once worked in trying to find a viral cause of cancer. Before he made his mark on the world of AIDS research, Gallo had in fact unsuccessfully attempted to link several "retroviruses" (a recently discovered subcategory of viruses) to leukemia.

As Duesberg writes, "By 1975, [Gallo's] lab had finally isolated a retrovirus from human leukemia cells. To Gallo's dismay, however, he faced humiliation when he presented the finding at the Virus-Cancer Program's yearly conference. Other scientists had tested his virus and discovered it to be a mixture of contaminating retroviruses from woolly monkeys, gibbon apes and baboons. Gallo tried to save his reputation, speculating wildly that perhaps one of the monkey viruses caused the human leukemia. This excuse did not fly, and he later described the event as a 'disaster' and 'painful,' admitting that it placed 'human retrovirology, and me with it, at a very low point.'"

I later spoke to Dr. Kary Mullis, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist. He said that linking cancer to a retrovirus was originally Duesberg's idea. "Peter ... said about a year later, 'Yeah, you know what, that was a dumb idea, and here's why,'" Mullis recalled. "But by then, he had already launched a bunch of people on a new career and they didn't want to come back and investigate a new hypothesis."

Mullis said this situation repeated itself when Duesberg initially worked on the HIV=AIDS hypothesis, only to break with it in 1987 by writing the first "dissident" scientific paper in the journal Cancer Research. By the time Duesberg raised his objections, though, billions of dollars of medical funding had been dedicated to the theory.

Perusing the main ideas of Duesberg's book was not an easy thing to do -- with its 722 pages of arguments, appendices and indexes. Simply put, he believes that so-called "AIDS" is an attempt to create a blanket term for a "new cause of 30 old diseases"; it arose from a series of unproved hypotheses made during the initial research on the syndrome.

Part of Duesberg's argument seemed at least plausible. I could believe that the medical establishment might respond to frantic public demand by creating onename for 30 diseases (and the hope for one comprehensive cure).

I found it more difficult to accept Duesberg's theory that AIDS is caused by drug use.

The "incidence of AIDS diseases among HIV-positive intravenous drug users [is] only 5 percent among those who stopped injecting drugs," Duesberg said. Such a cause-and-effect relationship between drugs and AIDS seemed absurd to me. First, not all AIDS patients are drug users. Second, drugs (alcohol, opium, etc.) have been around a long time, and we've never seen them have this sort of effect on people. True, many of today's drugs are chemically more powerful (how many of our grandmothers have tried heroin-laced ecstasy or "poppers?") but the drug-theory was still hard for me to swallow.

I would later discover that drug use is only one possible cause of injury to the human immune system that might produce the symptoms of AIDS.

***

Dissident ideas center around two major problems with the HIV=AIDS orthodoxy. First, since the press conference in 1984 when Gallo introduced the idea that HIV is the cause of AIDS, the medical establishment has run with the hypothesis with little or no scientific proof to support the assumption.

Second, the tests for HIV are dangerously flawed.

When I first interviewed Christine Maggiore, an activist and author of What If Everything You Thought You Knew About AIDS Was Wrong, I asked her for the main dissident points of contention. She gave me a list:

• the reliance on antibody tests to diagnose infection, when the antibody test can't do that

• the inaccuracy of the antibody test to diagnose what is supposed to be a fatal illness

• the false claim that HIV has been proven to be the cause of AIDS

• the use of chemotherapy treatments such as AZT and other experimental chemicals such as protease inhibitors that all focus on eradication and inhibition of HIV as a treatment for an already suppressed immune system.

As it turns out, there are two diagnostic tests for HIV, the Western Blot test and the ELISA test. Both test for antibodies.

But antibodies to what?

"The notion that you can use an antibody test to somehow tell if a person is infected with something is obtuse," said Maggiore. "[T]here is no such thing as one antibody specific to any disease, so an antibody test in and of itself is inaccurate."

With a non-specific antibody, an individual might test positive for HIV when what's really been identified is an antibody for some number of other diseases, such as the flu. Which is why, according to this view, a supposed HIV-positive individual might get different results from a later test.

I gathered from what Maggiore said that the medical establishment has viewed the faulty testing for HIV as a fairly minor problem. Yet surely any test that produces a certain number of false positives -- even if HIV were the cause of AIDS -- can have dangerous consequences. As both dissidents and drug manufacturers point out, if a person who tests false positive begins one of the AIDS drug therapies, the treatment can produce the very symptoms that are associated with AIDS.

For the past few years, the media have reported that it is primarily the success of these drug therapies that allows patients with HIV to live longer. Dissidents disagree. They say the drugs are actually hurting people.

"People show improvement with all kinds of things," said Maggiore, citing the placebo effect as a possible explanation. "And the people who are feeling better are few. The news reports tend to emphasize these [apparent success stories], but if you talk to people in real life, a lot of people believe that they're doing better because their, quote, 'viral load' counts are down.

"But the compromises are that they have diarrhea, their hair is falling out, they develop buffalo humps, liver failure, sudden death. Even if you look at the ads for the drugs, they don't even say anything good [in] the fine print."

Maggiore's assertions, however, don't square with the first-hand experiences of some people who have been diagnosed with AIDS, people who believe drug therapy is saving their lives.

I asked WBZ radio talk show host David Brudnoy to respond to Maggiore's denunciation of the drug therapies. Brudnoy is an HIV-positive homosexual who nearly died before starting treatment with the so-called "drug cocktail." Although he was interested in Duesberg's ideas initially, his personal experience brought him to accept the orthodox hypothesis.

"There will always be enough to support the Duesbergian theory," Brudnoy said. "I just think it doesn't sustain itself. In other words, [Duesberg] thinks there's almost a conspiracy of AIDS researchers to dwell on AIDS. Well, I've met these people, I work with them on an almost daily basis -- the finest doctors in America -- and they're demonstrating that lowering of HIV in the blood improves well-being in the people.

"In other words: less HIV, better health; more HIV, worse health; lots of HIV, and you die. And I can't buy Duesberg anymore. I think he means well. I think he's a great scientist. We know he's not some crackpot. But on this area, I think he errs."

***

The dissidents' claims raised one question in particular that I found difficult to get beyond: If HIV isn't making people sick, what is?

One possibleanswer to that question came in reading the work of Dr. Roberto Giraldo in New York and the work of Australia's "Perth Group," adissident research team based at the Royal Perth Hospital in Western Australia.

Giraldo attributes the symptoms of AIDS to what he calls "immunological stressors." Left unchecked, these stressors can lead to a complete failure of the immune system and eventually to death.

In his book AIDS and Stressors, Giraldo writes that AIDS is "a severe acquired immuno-deficiency due to multiple, repeated, and chronic exposure to immunological stressors." These stressors can be broken down into five different types: chemical (street and pharmacological drugs), biological (semen, blood, poor sanitation), mental (stress, anxiety, depression), physical (physical pollution), and nutritional (excess of fats, malnutrition).

Giraldo emphasizes that these stressors should not be looked at merely as an agent that causes HIV to progress into AIDS, but as the cause of AIDS.

Although the Perth Group does not emphasize what causes AIDS to the degree that Giraldo does, it has been consistently working toward proving that HIV does not cause the disease. The Perth Group's Dr. Valendar Turner is fond of quoting author Robert Pirsig, who wrote in his novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that "The real purpose of scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn't misled you into thinking something you don't actually know."

As Turner writes in the British dissident publication Continuum, even the latest round of AIDS drugs -- called "protease inhibitors" or "PIs" -- may ultimately do more harm than good, since they're all based on the incorrect assumption that HIV is a deadly virus.

"Various HIV/AIDS experts are now proclaiming that PIs, like AZT from the earlier days, are doomed to failure. ... Given all the hope (and hype) made over these drugs at various times, perhaps there may at last be a catalyst to a denouement. The more one reads, and the more one studies the vast HIV/AIDS literature, the more it becomes apparent that the data are far better explained without recourse to an HIV. I reiterate our group's earlier position: HIV is the greatest single obstacle to overcoming the problem of AIDS. In the '60s Bob Dylan put it all in a song: 'How many deaths will it take till he knows that too many people have died?' Reprehensibly, the answer is still the song."

The Perth Team's work focuses on why the orthodox methods Gallo used to look at HIV and AIDS were inconclusive. The team leader, biophysicist Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, not only argues that there is no proof that HIV causes AIDS but that there is no proof that HIV exists. In an interview with Continuum in August 1997 (available at www.virusmyth.com/aids/data/), Papadopulos-Eleopulos said that Gallo's early research on AIDS failed to follow the decades-old scientific method of isolating a retrovirus and making sure it can replicate itself. In other words, if HIV does exist, it violates the central rules of virology. To establish presence of a virus or retrovirus, "You have to prove that whatever particle you nominate can actually make copies of itself. No replication, no virus.

"I'm sorry," Papadopulos-Eleopulos said, "but this is an extremely important point. No one, especially virologists, can afford to ignore it."

***

To check the idea that HIV doesn't cause AIDS with someone from the orthodox side, I spoke with Dr. Gary Reiter, a local physician who wrote to the editor in response to one of Anderson's articles on the dissident movement. I asked him if the HIV virus had ever been isolated.

"Of course," Reiter said. "We can grow it in culture. ... I've cultured it out of people myself."

You have? I asked.

"Not myself, but I've ordered it," he said. "It's possible that the lab is, you know, lying. The point is that the people who have been actively involved in this, and have been doing this for years and years, there's no doubt in their minds."

Despite the confidence of Dr. Reiter's arguments and his evident experience in the field, he was not wholly convincing. He seemed to be saying, "I believe because everybody else believes." Though I asked repeatedly for something more solid, more scientific, he didn't provide it.

I was now conveniently -- for purposes of objectivity -- stuck in the middle.

Also, I was finding an increasingly common reaction to my questions that would explain why I was having trouble convincing members of the medical orthodoxy to speak at our debate: They thought what I was saying was crazy.

Dr. Max Essex, chairman of the Harvard AIDS Institute, told me that "the Duesberg position ... has long-since [been] dismissed by serious scientists and public health officials."

As such, he said, a debate like the one I was tryingto organize "may have entertainment value for the uninformed, but one must weigh potential damage to health education and treatment efforts."

To me, the strength of his refusal belied his confidence in the HIV-AIDS hypothesis.

When I spoke with dissident activist and former medical student Paul Philpott, he told me such reactions to dissident ideas are not uncommon. After viewing a PBS interview with Duesberg while in college, Philpott brought Duesberg's ideas to his superiors.

"Each of them dismissed the view out of hand," Philpott said in aninterview earlier this year. "They refused to look at the papers and labeled Duesberg crazy." Philpott then distributed flyers to the faculty that said: "HIV is Harmless; AIDS is not Contagious," a provocation by which he hoped to provoke someone to debate him on the subject. Instead, the head of health services at the school dismissed him as a threat to public health, "a danger and a menace."

Philpott had better luck getting the public to listen to his ideas when he and Todd Miller, a biochemist, were asked three years ago to debate representatives from the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control at Florida A&M University. I spoke with Miller about the organization and outcome of this debate.

As far as Miller was concerned, he and Philpott won the debate, although having "won" was a relative notion. Basically, he said, just being able to publicly air dissident ideas was a victory in itself, but the debate never produced any illuminating discourse for the audience or the panelists.

Miller then turned the interview around on me, and asked how I was doing in getting people together for our debate.

"We had no trouble in arranging for people to argue the dissident side, but ..."

"You can't get people from the establishment," he said before I could finish.

Over the course of the summer, as I spoke to various researchers and physicians from the medical establishment, each had an immediate answer for why it would not be worth his or her time to debate the dissidents.

"It's like having to tell people the earth is round," said one. Or, said another: "Saying that HIV doesn't cause AIDS is like claiming that the sun rises in the north. We just call it the east."

Astronomical analogies were popular.

Miller suggested that I narrow the scope of the debate so that each side had something specific to argue. Otherwise, Miller said, "the whole thing just kind of turns into a free-for-all. You just kind of lose control of it."

***

On July 12, an article appeared in New York Times Magazine titled: "The Berlin Patient." It described a young HIV-positive man who abandoned his drug therapies and failed to get sick despite his doctor's warnings. Without any sort of chemical inducements, his immune system began to repair itself and his T-cells rose to a normal level.

I was shocked to see the mainstream press discussing something that, on its face, bolstered the dissident view. Perhaps, I thought, the discovery would establish some common ground between the orthodoxy and the dissidents.

Although neither would admit to having so much in common, both the dissidents and the orthodoxy agree that HIV-positive individuals must no longer fear an imminent death. Both say HIV-positive individuals can survive by cleaning up their lifestyle and helping their immune systems repair themselves.

The only disagreement is whether or not to attribute this miracle of health to drug therapies that purportedly reduced HIV.

Dr. Eric Rosenberg is a researcher at Mass General Hospital in Boston, where he is studying the success of people like the Berlin patient, whom he calls "long-term non-progressors." The study focuses on these people in an attempt to identify what it is about them that differs from the patients who develop the symptoms of AIDS.

These long-term non-progressors, says Rosenberg, "have certain immune responses which we believe are really critical in helping these people to stay so healthy. ... Why they have them is still a big mystery. I think it might be that some people who have them may have a defective virus. Other people might have a genetic predisposition that helps them out."

I asked him if he had ever considered that HIV may be harmless and that the progression in some patients could be based on factors other than the virus.

"Well," said Rosenberg, "there are definitely other immuno-suppressive conditions which give people illnesses that people with AIDS get. ... But those people don't have what we would call AIDS. They are just immuno-compromised."

Doctors only call it AIDS, he said, in the presence of HIV.

I don't know if Rosenberg was aware of how close he came to sounding like a dissident.

***

Toward the end of my internship, I spoke with Joseph Roye, a gay man in Dallas who tested HIV-positive for two and a half years but now tests HIV-indeterminate. He attributes his own impaired immune system to the use of poppers.

"Those of us that were in the gay party life in the 1970s and '80s ... basically, you can't do bad things to your body, continuously, without paying a price," he said.

A friend of Roye's named Ron McDermott, who started a chapter of Health Education AIDS Liaison, or HEAL, in Dallas, introduced him to dissident ideas. When Roye tried to check these ideas with a physician, his doctor refused to continue treating him -- because of Roye's "constant intellectual questioning."

Roye described his doctor's reaction to his questions: "I tried to pin him down. I said, 'What is my diagnosis? What is my opportunistic infection? What's wrong with me?' And he said: 'Oh, well, it's just all that virus floating around in there.' Which is ridiculous. I've never heard of such a thing, even if you do subscribe to the HIV-causes-AIDS theory."

Then Roye was forced to re-examine his position when McDermott died. "He refused to go to a hospital," said Roye. "His lungs had collapsed, and from what his brother told me, it was just irrecoverable. But he was so adamant, and so hard against taking any more of these AIDS poisons, that he was afraid that if he was back in a hospital that they'd start putting that stuff back in him."

Roye himself was beginning to wean himself off the drug therapies when we spoke. I asked him if McDermott's death affected his belief in dissident ideas. "Oh yeah," said Roye. "That was quite a stunner for me. I said to myself, 'Well, [I've] converted to your side and now you died.' My position still is that you can have AIDS without HIV. I mean, if you think about it: acquired immune deficiency syndrome. Many diseases have as their origin an immune deficiency ...

"I have no doubt that my health is in a precarious position. Because my T-cells are very low, and that sort of thing. But the question is, what's causing all of this? I do not believe that it is HIV."

Sadly, it seems unlikely that Roye and people like him can count on the medical establishment to clear up his confusion any time soon. At this point, the lines between the orthodoxy and the dissidents continue to harden. Efforts to bring respected scientists together to debate the HIV=AIDS hypothesis -- including my own -- have failed because the medical establishment that accepts the hypothesis continues to view nearly all dissenting views as counterproductive.

If someone asked me to, I would be hard-pressed to accept fully either the orthodox view of AIDS or the dissident view. That HIV causes AIDS is not as black and white as the establishment would have the public think. But neither is the orthodox evidence uncompelling.

Ultimately, I came to feel a tremendous sympathy for HIV patients. Whether they have a strong understanding of the two views or not, choosing the right view is, quite likely, a matter of life and death.

Imagine reading the dissident literature to find that the drug therapies may be causing your horrible illness. And then imagine being told by your physician that if you abandon these drug therapies you will die. Talk about a Catch-22.

VIRUSMYTH HOMEPAGE