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| Farber | In fact, most AIDS patients have no active HIV in their systems, because the virus has been neutralized by antibodies. (With all other viral diseases, by the way, the presence of antibodies signals immunity from the disease. Why this is not the case with HIV has never been demonstrated.) |
| Gallo | Farber writes: "In fact, most AIDS patients have no active HIV in their systems, because the virus has been neutralized by antibodies". PCR tests demonstrate that HIV is active in people with HIV antibodies. Most of the HIV in the body is located within solid lymphoid tissues, where it is transmitted by cell-to-cell spread. Antibodies are unable to interfere efficiently with this process. Furthermore, whenever effective neutralizing antibodies are generated within the body, HIV responds by mutating to generate resistant variants that are unaffected by these antibodies. 69 |
| RA | The Gallo document claims that “PCR tests demonstrate that HIV is active in people with HIV antibodies”. However, in reality these tests are triggered by probes constituting only a very small fraction of the consensus HIV genome, the tests are not approved by the FDA for diagnostic purposes and PCR counts many thousand times more objects than infectious units as measured by other tests (60,000 times more according to a 1993 paper in the journal Science which compared QC-PCR with quantitative endpoint dilution culture [1]). And Kary Mullis, who won a Nobel in 1993 for inventing the manufacturing techique, is a skeptic of its (mis-)use as a test for HIV. A 1993 paper in Nature, commenting on Piatak's paper, interpreted the results as: “the high level of plasma virus observed by Piatak et al, was about 99.9 per cent non-culturable, suggesting that it was either neutralized or defective.” [2] An earlier paper by the famous AIDS researcher David Ho in NEJM, published in 1989, noted that 99.6% of infected blood cells (PBMC) might express HIV RNA latently (i.e. inactively). And they estimated that a maximum of one out of 400 cells are infected, even latently. [3] Clearly PCR tests do not detect infectious virus. Roche describes their Amplicor test as being intended for the “quantitation of HIV-1 RNA” (not for the quantitation of HIV-1 virus particles). They note that even quantitative culture, a technique that they imply is a way to determine how much infectious virus is present, “has limited utility for monitoring virus levels in infected individuals since only a small fraction of virus particles is infectious in vitro”. [4] A significant percentage of false positives have been detected with PCR, partly because the test is so ultra-sensitive and partly because it never been properly validated on large HIV-negative populations. See rethinkingaids.com/quotes/test-pcr.html for an annotated bibliography on this subject. A 2002 paper in JAIDS indicated that viral load was "strongly correlated to the number of [intestinal worms] excreted and was higher in individuals infected with more than one helminth" indicating that intestinal worms can increase the measured viral load. No results were available from HIV-negative people to see if false positives might result merely from the presence of worms. [5] Believers in HIV/AIDS dogma have interpretations for positive antibody tests with negative PCR (antibodies or drugs have the virus under control) and negative antibody tests with positive PCR (e.g. antibodies have not had time to develop or the immune system has collapsed). This means that there are no combinations that would be accepted by the mainstream as throwing doubt on their cherished central dogma. Therefore, their theories are untestable, and the use of PCR versus antibody tests provides no predictive value. If high ‘viral loads’ result in heavier medication which results in greater toxicity and more illness their theory becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. |
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