Nexus - 0222 - New Times Magazine-pages

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Many studies have shown that the average se T-cell count for a non-HIV tested person can AIDS-defining illnesses vary from as low as 200 up to 2,000. There | AIDS is usually characterised by a number of ‘opportunistic' diseases, which are many instances of people with fewer than | can become active in a body whose immune system has been severely compro- 50 T-cells who remain perfectly healthy. In | mised. These include Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) and candidiasis a recent BBC File on Four documentary, | (both fungal parasites present in all humans), tuberculosis, toxoplasmosis, Professor Ian Weller, who coordinated the | cytomegalovirus and herpes virus disease. In addition, AIDS patients can suffer British arm of the Concorde AZT trial testing | from other illnesses not caused by immune-deficiency, including lymphoma and the drug on healthy HIV-positive volunteers, | Kaposi's sarcoma (two forms of cancer), dementia and wasting disease. If AIDS commented: "The thing we have to remem- | were caused by a virus, it has a strange proclivity for giving certain groups certain ber about CD4 (T-cell) counts is they are | types of diseases. For instance, Duesberg points out: very variable. They can vary in an individual | * American homosexuals have Kaposi's sarcoma 20 times more often than all over the time of day...lower in the morning | other American AIDS patients. Less than one per cent of haemophiliacs and and higher in the evening. They can be | about the’same percentage of Africans get KS. Studies have linked KS with anal affected by things that you do such as walk- | intercourse and "poppers’—amy!l nitrite. ing to the clinic, as opposed to riding a} » Intravenous drug users tend to get tuberculosis. bike,..the amount of sunshine can affect | « "Crack" users get pneumonia, in addition to tuberculosis. 2 them. Smoking as wail, ® Haemophiliacs favour opportunistic infections, three-quarters of which ar Another variable which can seriously f Pr F Opp i 2b are ungal, plus viral pneumonia. affect the outcome of CD4 testing is the : phe: 5 sheer inaccuracy of laboratory process. For | * Blood transfusion recipients get pneumonia. that same programme, a volunteer elected to | * AIDS babies tend to get bacterial diseases and dementia. have blood taken for T-cell counting. * Ninety per cent of African AIDS patients, who are evenly divided among Two samples taken from the same vein at | males and females (unlike the West), get fever, diarrhoea, tuberculosis and "slim the same time with the same needle were | disease"—all long-established diseases of the continent. Africans do not get PCP sent to two different laboratories. The result- | and candidiasis, even though both parasites exist in all humans including ing CD4 counts varied by 33 per cent! Once | Africans. an otherwise healthy patient has tested HIV- positive, has a low CD4 count and is exhibiting stress-related problems, virtually all doctors working in the field reach for the prescrip- tion pad and offer prophylaxis. The idea is to give the patient a drug on the assumption that this just-in-case medication will stop the disease before it starts. In the case of the main anti-HIV dmg AZT, this assumption was demolished with the recent publication in The Lancet of the Concorde Trial results, which showed that AZT was of no benefit to HIV-positive individuals who remained asymptomatic (The Lancet, 9 April 1994). Besides there being no rationale for their use, a patient with no symptoms given these drugs begins to exhibit all the problems associat- ed with the side-effects of the drugs—side-effects that bear an uncanny resemblance to the list of symptoms doctors describe in HIV 7 Tai infection or full-blown AIDS. The Kamikaze Cell A recent study concluded that prophylaxis As Duesberg and Eleopoulos point out, HIV is one of some 100 to 150 latent} with the antibiotic Septrin against PCP is far retroviruses in humans, all with the same genetic structure. In the early 1980s,] morc likely to cause the patient to develop both Robert Gallo from the US National Cancer Institute and Luc Montagnier from| oral candidiasis, wasting syndrome, the Pasteur Institute individually isolated a retrovirus from homosexual patients} cytomegalovirus and M. avium complex dis- believed to have AIDS. According to the original Gallo/Montagnier theory, this] ase—all commonly considered AIDS ill- retrovirus is a virus whose own RNA {short genetic code instructing each cell how| nesses—than in patients who don't take the to reproduce) is transmuted by a particular enzyme (reverse transcriptase) into| drug (New England Journal of Medicine, 23 DNA, the long double helix of complete coded cell information. According to the} December 1993). single-cause theorists, HIV can ‘break into’ an immune system T-cell and attach} The action of both this drug and AZT itself to the cell's DNA, feeding off it. Once the cell replicates, the virus itself] destroys or inhibits entrobacteria in the gut replicates, too. Once a patient has full-blown AIDS, the virus supposedly will} including £. coli, thus causing an over- have devoured these cells, leaving the body without defence to any sort of dis-] growth of Candida and other unwanted bac- ease. teria which cut off the body's ability to man- With all the giant holes in this theory, the AIDS ‘revisionists', including co-dis-| ufacture intrinsic factor required for the coverer of HIV Montagnier, have attempted to salvage the HIV hypothesis with| absorption of vitamin B12. The final symp- the proposition that HIV needs one of a number of co-factors, such as mycoplas-| toms of end-stage B12 deficiency are identi- ma and other viruses to induce cell death. Or, in some way unique to the history | ¢al to the final stages of terminal AIDS. of infectious disease, HIV can talk the immune system into reacting against itself] | Editor's note: Jody Wells, who was diag- or committing suicide. nosed as HIV-positive 11 years ago, remains Duesberg points out that many retroviruses exist in every cell, not simply in a] healthy without the use of drugs. He is few, as HIV does. And most of the AIDS risk groups have a high number of anti- | founder and editor of Continuum, a maga- bodies to many human parasites which have been accumulated through high-risk | 2ine for AIDS and HIV survivors. For more behaviour (such as drug use), contaminated transfusions or high promiscuity. He| information, write to PO Box 2754, London and Eleni Eleopoulos propose that HIV may be an undistinguished "innocent| NW10 8UF, United Kingdom. Phone: +44 microbial passenger", Hence, although HIV may be perinatally transmitted to} (081) 961 1170. oo babies, it could be harmless. Lynne McTaggart is Editor of What Doctors Don't Tell You newsletter. eo NEXUS ¢ 13 OCTOBER - NOVEMBER 1994