Item #52: Non-HIV Causes for AIDS

Given that the evidence for HIV is coincidental, a number of research avenues suggest themselves, yet orthodox AIDS researchers have failed to demonstrate, using large-scale controlled studies, that the incidence of AIDS-defining diseases is higher among individuals infected with HIV than among the general uninfected population. Consequently, it could very well be the case that HIV is a harmless passenger virus that infects a small percentage of the population and is spread primarily from mother to child, though at a relatively low rate. (This hypothesis would tend to explain the fact that the estimated number of HIV-positive Americans has remained constant at about 1 million since 1985.) Nor have large-scale controlled studies been carried out to directly test the AIDS-drug hypothesis, which holds that many cases of AIDS are the consequence of heavy drug use, both recreational (poppers, cocaine, methamphetamines, etc.) and medical (AZT, etc.).14 Nor have controlled studies been carried out to prove that hemophiliacs infected with HIV die sooner than those who are not infected. Such studies might be expensive and tedious, but expense has never been a serious objection to AIDS researchers, who have spent many billions of dollars in the last twenty years on HIV research and practically nothing on alternative causes or even cofactors. (Even Luc Montagnier, the discoverer of HIV, has stated repeatedly that the virus cannot cause AIDS without contributing causes.)
Attempts to rigorously test the ruling medical hypothesis of the age are met not with reasoned debate but with the rhetoric of moral blackmail: Peter Duesberg has the blood of African AIDS babies on his hands. Duesberg is evil, a scientific psychopath. He should be imprisoned. Those who wish to engage the AIDS research establishment in the sort of causality debate that is carried on in most other branches of scientific endeavor are tarred as AIDS “denialists,” as if skepticism about the pathogenicity of a retrovirus were the moral equivalent of denying that the Nazis slaughtered 6 million Jews. Moral zeal rather than scientific skepticism defines the field. It has been decided in advance that HIV causes AIDS; consequently all research and all funding must proceed from that assumption. Similarly, it was known in advance that AZT was a “magic bullet” against HIV; the word was out that it was a “life-saving drug” before anyone could possibly verify this, and so scientific controls were compromised. Journalists (myself included) who reported at the time that the drug apparently was killing patients were labeled “AZT refuseniks” and even “murderers.”
The nevirapine debate follows the same histrionic, antiscientific pattern. Because of his concerns about the toxicity of this and other antiretroviral drugs, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa was pilloried in the international press as pharmaceutical companies and their well-funded “activist” ambassadors repeated their mantra about “life-saving drugs.” So, too, was Jonathan Fishbein, who never questioned the premise that HIV causes AIDS, tarred and feathered for pointing out that the NIH flagship study on nevirapine was a complete disaster. Fishbein's failure to fall into line, his failure to understand in advance of experimental proof that nevirapine was too important to fail, meant that the AIDS bureaucracy's neutralizing antibodies had to be activated to destroy them.

Farber proceeds from column 2 to the end of column 3 to postulate other causes of AIDS and makes various statements about the demographics of AIDS. No sources are cited for her ponderings. This is a particularly poorly researched and fact-checked part of the article.

Not a single credible peer-reviewed article published in a credible scientific journal since 1990 offers any support for what she says here. Instead of a complete point-by-point explanation, some critical comments are offered:

(1) HIV does affect the heterosexual population in the US, not just gay men80 . The US population in which HIV infection is now spreading most rapidly is African-American women. Poverty (where untreated sexually transmitted infections, lack of prevention knowledge, lack of power of women to negotiate condom use, increased frequency of transactional sex are more likely than in wealthier populations), unprotected anal sex (due to greater risk of abrasions), blood transfusions, intravenous needle reuse and exposure to multiple partners. all increase risk of HIV transmission and explain the demographic aspects of the disease with which Farber fumbles.

(2) In contrast to Farber's implication that proposed causes of AIDS other than HIV have not been tested, they have â– in great depth. These studies have found that in the absence of HIV none of recreational drug use, poverty, malnutrition and homosexuality can predict the onset of AIDS. Footnote 14 is consequently false too. There is no evidence that recreational drug use is the cause of AIDS. We quote an NIAID rebuttal to this myth:

“[I]n a prospectively studied cohort in Vancouver, 715 homosexual men were followed for a median of 8.6 years. Among 365 HIV-positive individuals, 136 developed AIDS. No AIDS-defining illnesses occurred among 350 seronegative men despite the fact that these men reported appreciable use of inhalable nitrites ("poppers") and other recreational drugs, and frequent receptive anal intercourse (Schechter et al. Lancet 1993;341:658).

Other studies show that among homosexual men and injection-drug users, the specific immune deficit that leads to AIDS -a progressive and sustained loss of CD4+ T cells -is extremely rare in the absence of other immunosuppressive conditions. For example, in the Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study, more than 22,000 T-cell determinations in 2,713 HIV-seronegative homosexual men revealed only one individual with a CD4+ T-cell count persistently lower than 300 cells/mm3 of blood, and this individual was receiving immunosuppressive therapy (Vermund et al. NEJM 1993;328:442).

In a survey of 229 HIV-seronegative injection-drug users in New York City, mean CD4+ T-cell counts of the group were consistently more than 1000 cells/mm3 of blood. Only two individuals had two CD4+ T- cell measurements of less than 300/mm3 of blood, one of whom died with cardiac disease and non- Hodgkin's lymphoma listed as the cause of death (Des Jarlais et al. J Acquir Immune Defic Syndr 1993;6:820).“81 The use of some recreational drugs, such as metamphetamines, can place individuals at greater risk of acquiring HIV infection by lowering inhibitions and increasing the probability of engaging in, e.g., unsafe sexual practices. This does not mean that “drugs cause AIDS”.

(3) Farber's claim that researchers have failed to demonstrate a higher incidence of AIDS in people with HIV is false. See the above studies. There are many more. Here is a further tiny sample of such studies, including some from Africa:

(i) The Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study (MACS) and the Women's Interagency HIV Study (WIHS) consisted of 8,000 participants in the US. It demonstrated that participants with HIV were approximately 1,100 times more likely than people without HIV to get a disease associated with AIDS. 82

(ii) A one-year South African study of 1,792 HIV-positive and 2,970 HIV-negative gold miners found that miners with HIV were nearly three times more likely to be hospitalised and nine times more likely to die than HIV-negative ones. 83

(iii) Researchers at Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital in Johannesburg looked at deaths of HIV-positive and HIV-negative children between 1992 and 1996. They found that deaths increased among HIV-positive children but decreased among HIV-negative ones. 84

(iv) A study in Uganda of nearly 20,000 people found that HIV-positive people had a death rate more than twenty times higher than HIV-negative people. 85 Incidentally, in this study, educated people and civil servants were more likely to die, which is inconsistent with poverty being the cause of AIDS (though it certainly is an exacerbating factor).

(v) In Cote d’Ivoire, HIV-positive people with TB were 15 times more likely to die within six months than HIV-negative people with TB. 86

(vi) A study in Rwanda found that death was 21 times higher for HIV-positive children than for HIVnegative children. 87

(vii) A study of pregnant women at King Edward Hospital in Durban, South Africa found that those with HIV had a ten times higher rate of turberculosis than those without.88

(viii) A study of over 6,000 people with haemophilia in the United Kingdom found that those with HIV had a much higher death rate. The death rate amongst HIV-negative haemophiliacs stayed stable during the analysis period (1977 to 1991). The death-rate amongst haemophiliacs who contracted HIV rose dramatically from 1984 to the end of the study period. 89 This disproves Farber's assertion that no studies have been carried out to determine if haemophiliacs infected with HIV die sooner than those not infected.

(ix) As explained by the NIH “Similar data have emerged from the Multicenter Hemophilia Cohort Study. Among 1,028 hemophiliacs followed for a median of 10.3 years, HIV-infected individuals (n=321) were 11 times more likely to die than HIV-negative subjects (n=707), with the dose of Factor VIII having no effect on survival in either group (Goedert. Lancet 1995;346:1425).”90 Factor VIII is Duesberg's proposal for higher mortality in haemophiliacs with HIV. This study debunked this notion. See Cohen (1994)91 for a more detailed discussion.

For further examples showing more illness and death among people with HIV, see NIAID (2003). A diligent search on Medline will elicit even more examples.

(4) Farber provides no reference for her claim that HIV is a harmless passenger virus. The claim is false and disproven by the evidence presented in this document.

(5) Farber provides no reference for her claim that HIV is primarily spread from mother-to-child. The claim is false. Most HIV transmission is through heterosexual sex. (6) In footnote 14 Farber claims that the majority of Kaposi's sarcoma patients are heavy users of nitrate inhalers. She gives no reference. Assuming she's right, if a sizeable minority are not, then nitrate inhalers cannot be the cause of Kaposi's sarcoma.

Once infected with HIV, recreational drug use and poverty are factors in the progression of HIV to AIDS, but HIV progresses to AIDS in sufficiently large numbers of well-off people who do not use recreational drugs to disprove that drugs or poverty are the cause of AIDS.

To respond to the major points:

1. The Gallo document does not provide a reference for its assertion that “The US population in which HIV infection is now spreading most rapidly is African-American women”. Based on CDC annual surveillance reports for 1999 through 2004 [1] it can be seen that the number of AIDS diagnoses among black women were 6,784 in 1999, 6,545 in 2000, 7,023 in 2001, 7,353 in 2002, 7,329 in 2003 and 7,586 in 2004. This is a decrease of 3.5% from 1999 to 2000, then an increase of 7%, an increase of 4.7%, a decrease of 0.3% and finally an increase of 3.5%. This is an average annual increase of 2.2%. Furthermore, given that most AIDS diagnoses by 1997 were in healthy people (based on low CD4 cell counts and positive HIV tests, but no disease) it is highly unlikely that that the majority of these people were even sick. Other factors, such as IV drug use and more intensive testing of women for HIV, could have artificially inflated these figures (e.g. cases of diseases like Tuberculosis might have previously been classified as Tuberculosis rather than AIDS but, once a woman is diagnosed with HIV, would be classified as AIDS).
2. HIV is associated with AIDS for a number of reasons. One of them is purely a tautology (circular reasoning). Because HIV is required for an AIDS definition, HIV is required to turn a disease like pneumonia or tuberculosis into AIDS. With a negative HIV test, the disease would retain its old name. Another factor is that HIV-positive people are the only people encouraged to take AIDS drugs, and the manufacturers admit that AIDS drugs can cause AIDS. A recent product monograph for AZT stated that “It was often difficult to distinguish adverse events possibly associated with administration of RETROVIR® (AZT™) from underlying signs of HIV disease or intercurrent illnesses”. AZT is still used in most AIDS drug combinations, and when not used another drug in the same class (nucleoside analog) is usually used instead.

   Another way to consider this question is to examine whether, if HIV is the sole cause of AIDS, and AIDS is composed of almost 30 different diseases (ignoring the people diagnosed without disease for the moment), whether this means that HIV is the sole cause of each of those diseases. If so, then HIV is the sole cause of tuberculosis and many other infections that have been known for a long time. This is clearly ridiculous, and exposes the tautology at the heart of the dogma that “HIV is the only cause of AIDS”.

3. The Farber article is not completely clear on the issue of whether HIV has been proven to cause AIDS. We believe that what the author meant was that HIV has never been proven to cause AIDS when all other risk factors, such as drug abuse, exposure to immuno-suppressive substances such as blood transfusions, and the use of AIDS drugs are adjusted for. In many of the studies cited by the Gallo document the measurement is just sickness or death, not specifically AIDS. For example, the Sewankambo study in Uganda that the Gallo document cites in another section does show that HIV-positive people were much more likely to get sick and die, but fewer than 10% of those deaths were due to AIDS. Clearly an HIV test can sometimes indicate a higher risk of disease, but is that because it correlates with other factors, or because it is, as the Gallo document claims, a reliable indication of a virus that is the only cause of the associated disease? The latter claim is hard to accept when a positive HIV test is associated with an excess of non-AIDS diseases, as in the very large Sewankambo study (20,000 participants).
4. Point number 4 (“Farber provides no reference for her claim that HIV is a harmless passenger virus. The claim is false and disproven by the evidence presented in this document.”) is a claim without specific evidence. It is mere hand-waving to say that the evidence is elsewhere without any clue as to what that evidence is.
5. The claim that “Most HIV transmission is through heterosexual sex.” (presumably the Gallo document is referring to Africa here) is not universally accepted. Farber notes the possibility of mother-to-child transmission of a virus that she infers is harmless. A group of scientists led by David Gisselquist has pointed out many flaws in the evidence for heterosexual transmission in a series of papers starting in 2002. Their first paper [3] stated “An expanding body of evidence challenges the conventional hypothesis that sexual transmission is responsible for more than 90% of adult HIV infections in Africa. Differences in epidemic trajectories across Africa do not correspond to differences in sexual behaviour. Studies among African couples find low rates of heterosexual transmission, as in developed countries. Many studies report HIV infections in African adults with no sexual exposure to HIV and in children with HIV-negative mothers. Unexplained high rates of HIV incidence have been observed in African women during antenatal and postpartum periods. Many studies show 20%-40% of HIV infections in African adults associated with injections (though direction of causation is unknown). These and other findings that challenge the conventional hypothesis point to the possibility that HIV transmission through unsafe medical care may be an important factor in Africa's HIV epidemic.”

   Other scientists, including the ‘Perth Group’ of Australian scientists, challenge the accuracy of HIV tests and note that they have never been validated against the gold standard of virus purification. They provide evidence that the tests may just be identifying a situation of oxidative stress, which can be caused by malnutrition or several common African diseases. [4]

1. HIV/AIDS Surveillance Report for 1999 through 2004. CDC. cdc.gov/hiv/topics/surveillance/resources/reports/past.htm#surveillance
2. Retrovir product monograph. GlaxoSmithKline. 2005 Sep 21.
3. Gisselquist D et al. HIV infections in sub-Saharan Africa not explained by sexual or vertical transmission. Int J STD AIDS. 2002 Oct; 13(10): 657-66.
4. Papadopulos-Eleopulos E et al. Mother to child transmission of HIV and its prevention with AZT and Nevirapine: A critical analysis of the evidence. The Perth Group. 2001 Oct.