Nexus - 0604 - New Times Magazine-pages

Page Content (OCR)

The Yin & Yang of HIV The Yin Yang HIV Supporters of the ‘HIV causes AIDS’ hypothesis cannot back up their claims with scientific evidence, yet they continue to reject alternative explanations and promote life- threatening drug treatments. Part 1 of 2 A theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements: It must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations. Tr Ctanhan LI. he notion that HIV/AIDS is infectious and sexually transmitted is based on a relationship between antibodies claimed specifically induced by a retrovirus, HIV, and particular diseases in certain risk groups. However, the HIV theory has been challenged for well over a decade in many scientific publications, principal- ly by Peter Duesberg from the USA and Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos and her colleagues in Perth, Western Australia. Failure of HIV/AIDS to spread beyond the original risk groups and particularly to Western heterosexuals, especially non-drug-using prostitutes, signals that the HIV theory of AIDS is in need of urgent reappraisal. This has serious implications for both the way science has been conducted and for public health policy and planning. The HIV theory has cost billions of dollars and locked in enormous amount of energy in research by thou- sands of scientists worldwide. So far, it has yet to save a single life. There is an urgent need to establish a truly independent and distinguished international committee to review the current theories and those that challenge them. There needs to be a co-operative but urgent reassessment of AIDS. A NOBEL LAUREATE STIRS THE WATERS In 1988, Dr Kary Mullis, the 1993 Nobel Prize winner for Chemistry, was employed by the US National Institutes for Health (NIH) to set up analyses for HIV testing. When preparing his report, he asked a virologist colleague for a reference that HIV is "the proba- ble cause of AIDS". He was told he did not need one. Mullis was surprised.' "I disagreed. It was totally remarkable to me that the individual who had discovered the cause of a deadly and as-yet-uncured disease would not be continually referenced in the scientific papers until that disease was cured and forgotten... There had to be a published paper, or perhaps several of them, which taken together indicated that HIV was the proba- ble cause of AIDS." Otherwise, as Mullis was forced to conclude: "The entire campaign against a disease increasingly regarded as the twentieth-century Black Death was based on a hypothesis whose origins no one could recall. That defied both scientific and common sense." A decade later, Mullis was to write: "I finally understood why I was having so much trouble finding the references that linked HIV to AIDS. There weren't any."” Indeed, an interested non-specialist observer, armed with a few contacts and a good library, merely has to scratch the surface to realise that the HIV theory of AIDS begs many more questions than it answers.'** © 1999 by Valendar F. Turner Department of Emergency Medicine Royal Perth Hospital Perth, Western Australia and Andrew Mcintyre Freelance Journalist Melbourne, Victoria, Australia THE BEGINNINGS OF AIDS The few years leading up to the AIDS era and the discovery of HIV are illuminating. It was a time when a promiscuous minority of young, "liberated" gay men in a few large American cities were increasingly developing previously uncommon diseases such as fatal forms of the malignancy Kaposi's sarcoma and a fungal pneumonia known as PCP. At the time, whilst it was reasonable to implicate an infectious microbe transmitted by and Andrew Mcintyre Freelance Journalist Melbourne, Victoria, Australia JUNE — JULY 1999 NEXUS - 29 — Dr Stephen Hawking