Roberto Giraldo's Life

January, 2019
David Crowe

Roberto Giraldo, a member of the board of Rethinking AIDS, was recently taken from us. A man with a lot of knowledge, and a lot of love, who used his knowledge for the betterment of humanity rather than the betterment of his bank account.

He graduated as a Medical Doctor, specializing in Internal Medicine with a major in Infectious Diseases from the University of Antioquia, Colombia, in 1969. In 1975 he graduated with distinction from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University of London, with a Masters of Science in Clinical Tropical Medicine.

He spent decades dedicated to clinical, academic, and research activities regarding different aspects of infectious, tropical, and immunological diseases, in various regions of Colombia, the United States, Europe, and Africa.

Much of his research was in the field of secondary or acquired immune deficiencies, especially those occurring in developing countries. In 1967 he studied Toxoplasma gondii and Pneumocystis carinii infections, as surrogate clinical markers for human immunodeficiency, with Professor Jacob Frenckel at the Kansas University Medical Center as well as opportunistic fungal infections with professor Donald Greer at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Kansas City. During 1974 and 1975, at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, he studied the main risk factors for endemic Kaposi’s sarcoma, as a surrogate clinical marker for immune deficiency in African countries. This was obviously relevant to the declaration of Gay Related Immune Defiency (GRID) in 1981, later called AIDS.

From 1979 until 1987 he worked as a clinician at a remote, rainforest region of Colombia. Here had the opportunity to work shoulder to shoulder with indigenous traditional healers, exploring ways to address medical issues related to poverty, malnutrition, immune deficiencies, parasites, and infections.

Due to his background, he started to study AIDS in 1981 and had several publications, including a 1997 book— "AIDS and Stressors: AIDS is neither an infectious disease nor is sexually transmitted. It is a toxic-nutritional syndrome caused by the alarming worldwide increment of immunological stressor agents", also published in Spanish.

He was forced to leave Colombia due to his skepticism of the mainstream theory that a previously unknown virus, HIV, was the cause of the syndrome AIDS. His colleagues thought he was mad and tried to commit him to an insane asylum, obviously against his will.

Starting in 1993, he worked as a technologist in the Laboratories of Clinical Immunology and Molecular diagnosis at the New York Presbyterian Hospital, Weill Cornell Medical Center, in New York City. Here had the opportunity to run and know in detail the Elisa, Western blot and PCR (viral load) tests for HIV. While there he reported on unofficial experiments with HIV-negative blood. He discovered that when blood was not diluted 200 times, as is required for HIV testing, that all blood tested positive. This indicated that HIV tests were reacting to the quantity of antibodies in the blood, not to specific proteins. Unfortunately, due to the climate of the times, doing this research officially would have been impossible.

In 2000 he was invited to be a member of the South African Presidential AIDS Advisory Panel and a panelist during its meeting. He was also an advisor to several African countries concerning nutrition and diseases related to poverty. In 2003 he presented to 14 Ministers of Health of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) the scientific bases for this proposal: “Nutritional therapy for the treatment and prevention of AIDS.” Unfortunately, the lure of billions of dollars of money based on acceptance of the HIV=AIDS dogma overwhelmed his attempts, and those of other dissenters, to look for the real reasons why so many people around the world acquired immune deficiency.

He was a former president of Rethinking AIDS: The International Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of AIDS, and a board member until his death. He was also a member of the Board of Directors of Health Education AIDS Liaison (HEAL New York) and of the Art and Science Foundation of Medellin, Colombia. He was a scientific advisor for several non-government organizations in Mexico, Nicaragua, Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia and Spain.

In 2004 he went on tour in South America, giving many talks to groups around the continent. In 2006 he wrote an article, "HIV Tests Cannot Diagnose HIV Infection", in defense of Celia Farber and her article in Harpers magazine. In 2009 he was a panelist at RA 2009.

I only knew him from about 2006 on, when I first got involved with Rethinking AIDS, but enjoyed spending time with him at an RA meeting in 2006, at RA 2009, as well as at a conference for Monarcas, in Lima Peru, in 2010. He was warm, and funny, and very irreverent at times. Despite his mainstream education, he understood that health was not just pathogens and pills, but involved the environment around people, and the environment within people, and that included the psychological state of people, a state that is still rocked to the core every time a person is diagnosed as HIV-positive, and told that it means that they are infected with a deadly virus.

The world has lost a voice of sanity.