Note: Published letter to The Australian, December 19th 1994.

WITH HIV, 2 + 2 MAKE 5

Unfortunately, as Catherine Armitage's review (Features, 2/12/94) of Hiram Caton's book "The AIDS Mirage" amply illustrates, HIV/AIDS protagonists continue to proselytise by asserting that only people with HIV develop AIDS. If only Science were that simple. If one resists the temptation to go beyond the data, the best one can say is that there is a correlation between the presence of antibodies that react with the so called HIV proteins (this is what a positive "HIV antibody" test actually means) and the future development of AIDS (but only in the high risk groups). This is neither proof that patients with AIDS are infected with HIV nor that HIV is the cause of AIDS. There is still no scientific proof that "HIV antibodies"="HIV infection". AIDS patients have high levels of "other" antibodies and all antibody tests are plagued by the fact that antibodies react with agents other than those they were made against in the first place. It is not possible to diagnose an infection solely by the chemistry of an antibody reaction, if you think you can then you would have to accept some absurd notions. For example, patients with glandular fever, caused by a virus, develop antibodies that react with the red blood cells of horses (this is basis of the antibody test used for laboratory diagnosis). Do AIDS experts also assert that patients with glandular fever are infected with horse blood and that horse blood is the cause of glandular fever? What is needed, before all patients with positive tests are religiously told they are infected with what AIDS experts regard as a lethal retrovirus, is verification of the authenticity of the test against the presence of the virus itself, that is, verification against the yardstick of HIV isolation. To date, this most basic requirement has not been met and thus there is no scientific basis whatsoever for labelling an "HIV antibody" positive person "HIV infected". Even if this evidence did exist, and there was proof beyond all doubt that all AIDS patients were infected with HIV, so what? Correlation is not causation. The rooster crows and the sun comes up. 98% of haemophilia AIDS patients are infected with hepatitis B virus. Does hepatitis B virus cause AIDS or does it cause haemophilia? Of course not, and likewise, evidence cited about relationships between AIDS, unproven antibody tests and epidemiology lack the scientific competence necessary to prove causality. *

Dr. Valendar F. Turner