AIDS: The Myth that's to lucrative to die

From an op/ed in today's NYT's...

Despite widely available testing, about a quarter of the Americans infected with H.I.V. don't know it. Those who are unaware of their infections can spread then unknowingly. They also miss out on powerful drug therapies that have been shown to extend lives, while protecting infected people from the diseases to which H.I.V. makes them prone.

Rapid AIDS tests — which have cut the waiting time for results to 20 minutes from as much as two weeks — have greatly helped the outreach effort. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will take another important step forward this summer when it offers new guidelines for AIDS testing. The proposed recommendations are a sea change in the testing regimen, suggesting that doctors offer the tests not just to people at risk, but as part of routine medical care for all patients ages 13 to 64.

Except there's a serious problem with this. There is no accurate AIDS test. As two Members of the South African Presidential AIDS Advisory Panel, Roberto A. Giraldo and Etienne de Harven, point out...

The primary tests for the diagnosis of HIV infection are two antibody tests, the ELISA and Western blot, and a genetic test, the PCR or “Viral Load” test. However, the ELISA and Western blot tests only detect antibodies against what are erroneously accepted to be HIV proteins or antigens. Similarly, the PCR or Viral Load test for HIV only detects copies of fragments of RNA that have arbitrarily been regarded as the nucleic acid of HIV. None of these tests detect the HIV virus itself, nor do they detect HIV particles.

The pharmaceutical corporations that manufacture and commercialize these test kits acknowledge the inaccuracy of the tests. This explains the seemingly surprising statement included in the kit inserts: "Elisa testing alone cannot be used to diagnose AIDS, even if the recommended investigation of reactive specimens suggests a high probability that the antibody to HIV-1 is present" (Abbott 1997).

The insert for one of the kits for administering the Western blot warns: "Do not use this kit as the sole basis of diagnosis of HIV-1 infection" (Epitope Organon Teknika).

There still exists no treatment for AIDS that itself isn't the cause of many, if not most, of the symptoms associated with AIDS. A self-fulfilling diagnosis when a false positive leads to a treatment that itself produces the symptoms of the alleged disease.

The two conclude...

If AIDS were indeed caused by a retrovirus, how can we explain that more than 25 years of considerable research efforts, based exclusively on that single hypothesis, have failed to isolate the responsible exogenous retrovirus? How can we explain that after more than twenty-five years we still have no curative treatment, no vaccine, and no verifiable epidemiological predictions? Obviously, time is pressing us to courageously ask the essential question, i.e., is the HIV=AIDS hypothesis correct? We must realize that it is possible to view AIDS differently, entirely outside the fields of infectious diseases and retrovirology.

Rather than being viral and infectious, AIDS could more likely be a toxic and nutritional disease caused by multiple, chronic and repeated exposures to immunological stressor agents, which can have a chemical, physical, biological, mental, or nutritional origin.

That the CDC has used AIDS as a justification for an enormous amount of government spending would certainly account for it.

Posted by Danny Carlton at May 15, 2006 8:01 AM