|
|
|
|
so, WAKE UP PEOPLE... ::-)
25 million dead people can't be wrong. Or can they?
Hendrik Gout,The Age Newspaper
Source: http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/25-million-dead-people-cant-be-wrong-or-can-they/2007/02/10/1170524347092.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap2
Twenty years ago, Andre Chad Parenzee, then 15, arrived in Australia from Cape Town, South Africa. He grew up, became a chef and settled in Port Pirie, South Australia's fourth-largest city, known more for its lead smelters and industrial plants than its fine dining. The future looked good — until 1998, when he had a blood test.
He was told he carried the human immunodeficiency virus — HIV.
He told his fiancee he had cancer, and she believed him. They married. He often had sex with her, unprotected sex, knowing he had been diagnosed with the virus. Then he had sex with two other women.
Of course, he had a reason for not telling, which was good enough for him: "It was just the fact that I didn't know how she would react to me telling her. I thought she would leave me like everyone else."
She did eventually leave him because Parenzee's secret stayed a secret no more. It was revealed after one of the three women had a blood test and found, to her horror, she also showed signs of the virus. In came the Director of Public Prosecutions. In came the Supreme Court. In came the jury's verdict: "Guilty, guilty, guilty!" to three counts of endangering lives. Fifteen years, said the judge.
That was last year. This year, Parenzee is arguing for leave to appeal on the grounds that AIDS doesn't exist, and neither does HIV. If it doesn't exist, he should be free to walk and continue to have sex — without warning his partners.
Parenzee sits impassively in the dock, staring into the middle distance, stroking his goatee. If the chef understands the scientific arguments raging around him — and because of him — about retroviruses, blots, mathematical deviations and statistics, his face doesn't show it.
This is believed to be the first case in any jurisdiction, in any court, in any country, where AIDS itself is on trial.
That's why the eyes of the world are now on the handsome sandstone Court of Criminal Appeal in central Adelaide, where judge John Sulan is deciding whether there is enough scientific controversy about the existence of HIV and AIDS to give Parenzee another shot at freedom.
It may seem that 25 million dead are some sort of proof. That's how many people are alleged to have died of AIDS-related causes in the past 25 years. And the toll keeps rising. It's now 3 million a year, victims of what could be the greatest mass epidemic of all time. Could all these corpses really be lying?
Yes, say experts. Not all experts, of course, but enough to occupy the witness box at the District Court for a week. That's right — experts arguing in a court of law that unprotected vaginal intercourse with a suspected HIV carrier is safe. In fact, the climax of last Tuesday's testimony was an exchange between prosecutor Sandi McDonald and defence witness Eleni Papadopoulos-Eleopoulos. "Would you have unprotected vaginal sex with a HIV-positive man?" McDonald asked. "Any time," Papadopoulos-Eleopoulos replied.
Papadopoulos-Eleopoulos, a slight, middle-aged bachelor of science and a medical physicist at Royal Perth Hospital, knows the importance of her evidence. Another witness for the defence is emergency doctor Val Turner, from the same hospital.
Seldom did Parenzee look at Papadopoulos-Eleopoulos as she was giving the evidence he hopes will save him.
He continued to stare at the opposite wall and slowly stroke his beard.
The first the world knew of HIV was when a virologist at the world-renowned Pasteur Institute in Paris was trying to find the cause of a new disease then sweeping the Western world. No one knew what the disease actually did and, at that stage, it did not even have a name. But its name was death. It was AIDS, a syndrome rather than a specific disease.
US doctors noticed it among gay men around the San Francisco area, and even then it seemed to be a collection of other diseases and infections. Healthy people have a healthy immune system, so when a virus or bacteria invades, the body throws its formidable defences at the intruder. But with AIDS, the body's natural defences seem terminally, hopelessly damaged. People with AIDS can die of any number of diseases that most people would shake off. Many, in fact, die of candida, which everyone knows as the common fungal irritant thrush.
So what caused AIDS? No one knew, but one Parisian researcher, Dr Willy Rozenbaum, thought it might be caused by a virus. He asked virologist Luc Montagnier for help. In 1983, Montagnier announced he had discovered the signature of a new virus. He said it was the AIDS culprit.
Viruses, like humans, have protein in their DNA. Tests for HIV look not for the virus itself but for evidence of its proteins, or the human body's cellular reaction to it. It's like identifying a tiger by its footprint or a dog by its fleas. But how to test if someone has "full-blown AIDS"? Well, HIV is thought to attack the body's T-cells — the ones that fight infection. The test for AIDS essentially counts your T-cells.
Papadopoulos-Eleopoulos says that's not good enough.
"I am a scientist, I look for science — I do not look for consensus," she said in evidence.
In that, she is right — the number of people who believe something is no indication of its truth. After all, there was a time when most people believed the world was flat. So why isn't her minority scientific opinion more widely debated? Papadopoulos-Eleopoulos and her colleagues believe it's partly because of money.
US researcher Robert Gallo also claimed to have found evidence of the virus around the same time as the French team. The dispute about who "discovered" it was eventually settled at a meeting between, of all people, US president Ronald Reagan and French prime minister Jacques Chirac. At stake was not just honour. It was hundreds of billions of dollars.
The fight against HIV and AIDS is wallowing in money, brimming with it. Researchers might still be labouring in the scientific salt mines were it not for AIDS money. Some are now fabulously rich and famously famous. The money available in the field is unimaginable. Australia shares some of the $1.4 billion that Bill Gates gave away for AIDS research. And that's just one donation. After the historic Reagan-Chirac handshake, the US and France shared patent rights to mass-marketed blood-screening tests for HIV, tests worth billions. Royalties fund the world's richest private research centres. Then there are the drug companies. Plus reputations, personally the most valuable thing of all.
Which is why it's not just the ordinary public in the gallery at the District Court in Adelaide. State, federal and international government health authorities as well as tens of thousands of medical researchers are poring over the transcripts. For the defence is Kevin Borick, one of South Australia's best-known and most expensive QCs (working pro bono on the appeal application). On the other side of the table is experienced Adelaide-educated prosecutor Sandi McDonald.
Now the big guns have been brought in to fire for the Crown — among them the director of the Australian National Centre for HIV, Professor David Cooper AO, his deputy, Professor John Kaldor, Emeritus Professor Peter McDonald from Flinders University, Dominic Dwyer, the eminent medical virologist and infectious diseases physician at Westmead Hospital, and next week the biggest gun of all, the man partly credited for finding the virus, Robert Gallo himself. The prosecution says it's unprecedented.
People are in jails the world over because their fingerprints have been found at the scene of the crime. Courts regard fingerprints as incontrovertible proof. They are no longer in debate. As long as Parenzee's witnesses convince the court that there is legitimate scientific debate about the existence of HIV, he may be back on the streets.
There is still no cure for HIV, no magic inoculation as there is for polio or smallpox. There is still no way of giving the body back its ability to fight common infections, which most people shake off with a few days in bed but which are fatal to AIDS sufferers.
But if AIDS doesn't exist, what's killing them?
Papadopoulos-Eleopoulos says AIDS is a disease caused by the inside of the body becoming oxidised following repeated exposure to semen through passive anal intercourse. It cannot be transmitted from one person to another during vaginal sex.
Yet thousands of people have shown signs of the virus after receiving contaminated blood. So are the HIV doubters visionaries like Galileo or lunatics like the Flat Earthers?
Doubters of HIV and AIDS are despised by their opponents. Experts called by the Crown were emphatic — HIV is a specific virus, and vaginal sex passes it on. From the public gallery, though, Parenzee's supporters — his mother has reportedly spent $250,000 on the defence — saw even professors make some concessions under Borick's penetrating cross-examination.
At least a few scientists are in the anti-HIV camp.
"If there is evidence that HIV causes AIDS, there should be scientific documents which either singly or collectively demonstrate that fact, at least with a high probability," Nobel prize-winning chemist Dr Kary Mullis said in 1993. "There is no such document."
Even University of California's Dr Harry Rubin, professor of molecular and cell biology, has expressed doubts. "It is not proven that AIDS is caused by HIV infection, nor is it proven that it plays no role whatever in the syndrome," he said in 1994.
The judge can decide this case only on the evidence before him. The court cannot call on William of Ockham, the 14th century philosopher who said that in any question, the simplest answer which relies on the least supposition is probably the correct one.
That principle is now known as Ockham's Razor, and in this case it suggests HIV will lead to AIDS.
Malaria was once thought to be caused by bad air. Leeches were once the preferred treatment for a dozen ailments — in the 1800s, French and English hospitals used 13 million a year. Ulcers were believed even a few years ago to have been caused by stress or spicy foods.
Will a virus-caused immune deficiency go the same way?
Or will Ockham's razor slice through the dissenters?
The case continues.
Copyright © 2007. The Age Company Ltd.
(\\__/) And if you don't believe The sun will rise
(='.'=) Stand alone and greet The coming night
(")_(") In the last remaining light. (C. Cornell)
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
timmy
|
 |
Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13796
|
|
|
While it is clear that there is not a 100% causal link between unprotected sex with an HIV+ person and acquiring HIV there is sufficient statistical evidence to make this a probable infective route.
There are exceptions. There are partnerships where unprotected sex is the norm and one partner is HIV+ and the other partner fails to acquire it.
There are cases of needle sharing and blood transfusion.
Occam's Razor is pretty straightforward here. The simplest infective route is an exchange of body fluids in such a manner that they are absorbed by the uninfected party from the infected. That is the most likely answer.
We know HIV exists and we know it is not, of itself, an ailment.
We know AIDS exists, and, despite people promoting the term "HIV/AIDS" as though they are synonyms, we know that being positive for HIV does not necessarily lead to AIDS (which is not an ailment of itself, but a description for a collection of body phenomena)
We also know how much better it is to work in well funded than badly funded research. So we do, of course, have conspiracy theorists. And we have nutbars on both sides of the discussion.
For now let's just have safe, protected sex and let the politics roll on. But I do object to the term "HIV/AIDS". They are not synonyms at all.
[Updated on: Mon, 12 February 2007 01:02]
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
I admit I am very surprised that anyone could think that AIDS and HIV are not related, or that AIDS does not exist. As far as I can tell, the only odd thing about it is that anyone can believe that they have a strong enough case to argue in court. Otherwise it's a non-issue.
The only quotes in the article that don't completely disregard the idea out of hand are more than 12 years old, and they are not supportive, only non-committal. There has been plenty more research into the causes of AIDS since then, though I don't pretend to know the subject at all well, which pretty much prevents me from presenting a scientific analysis of the subject (and I would imagine the same applies for most other people here). But I would only be worried if the outcome of the appeal contravenes logic or is radically surprising, and (from my quick reading of that article alone) I don't see anything to suggest it will be.
What thoughts are you looking for, E.J.? Can you supply some yourself?
David
[Updated on: Mon, 12 February 2007 02:56] |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Well, some initial thoughts:
> This year, Parenzee is arguing for leave to appeal on the grounds that AIDS doesn't exist, and neither does HIV. If it doesn't exist, he should be free to walk and continue to have sex — without warning his partners.
I fail to understand this - there is certainly a syndrome of greatly-reduced resistance to opportunistic infections, which has a set of unique characteristics (such as reduced T-cell counts), which was noticed considerably in advance of the isolation of HIV (formerly called HTLV). This syndrome has been labelled AIDS
There is also certainly a family of viruses of different strains, which are currently called HIV. This is an incontravertible fact. Claims that HIV doesn't exist are ludicrous. It's a physical demonstrable virus which has been gene sequenced. Modes of transmission and replication of the virus are documented.
However, there are a small and decreasing number of people who do not accept that HIV is the causal agent for AIDS. However, alternative explanations for AIDS lack both a plausible mechanism, and a plausible mode of transmission.
> .. how to test if someone has "full-blown AIDS"? Well, HIV is thought to attack the body's T-cells — the ones that fight infection. The test for AIDS essentially counts your T-cells.
Because of the very strong correalation between T-cell count and vulnerability to opportunistic infections, T-cell count is used instead of delaying treatment to allow people to become ill or dead of such infections, and then conclude that they had "full-blown" AIDS. In the early days - before anti-retrovirals / HAART, this correalation was well-established, and fits well with the current (incomplete) understanding of the body's defence mechanisms. It would, of course, be completely immoral to withhold anti-retrovirals, and allow people to develop life-threatening opportunistic infections, in order to confirm a diagnosis of AIDS ... and there's no need to: the thousand of people every day dying in Africa constitute a large enough sample to be statistically valid, if further validation is required. Such further studies are not (as far as I know) being undertaken, because those working in the field regard the link as completely proven.
> The fight against HIV and AIDS is wallowing in money, brimming with it. Researchers might still be labouring in the scientific salt mines were it not for AIDS money.
This is all unfortunately true. Most of the research money has gone into drug therapies suitable for the western world, which need to be taken on a life-long basis, and have a high profit margin. Although some good work has been done on possible routes to vaccines against HIV infection, these have been less favoured by the drug companies - continuing sales would obviously be far less profitable. This is common for many infections, not just HIV.
> Papadopoulos-Eleopoulos says AIDS is a disease caused by the inside of the body becoming oxidised following repeated exposure to semen through passive anal intercourse. It cannot be transmitted from one person to another during vaginal sex.
Frankly ludicrous. Babies are - unfortunately - often born with HIV infection and (whether causally linked or not) develop AIDS in their very early years. I simply don't believe that all of these infants have been repeatedly brutally buggered. Neither does this facile pretence at an explanation account for the sudden emergence of the syndrome known as AIDS, nor the way in which its spread follows fairly closely a typical infectious pattern. Buggery did not start in the late 1970s - I can attest to this of my own personal knowledge!
>
> Yet thousands of people have shown signs of the virus after receiving contaminated blood. So are the HIV doubters visionaries like Galileo or lunatics like the Flat Earthers?
>
> Doubters of HIV and AIDS are despised by their opponents. Experts called by the Crown were emphatic — HIV is a specific virus, and vaginal sex passes it on.
This really cannot be doubted by anyone who has followed developments over the past 30 years. It is NOT connected with the discussion about whether HIV causes AIDS, and the way the article seeks to conflate the two issues is lamentable.
Overall, the way in which the article mixes up statements about HIV with statements about AIDS is either very sloppy journalism, or a reflection of a very poorly-prepared and ill-argued case. It does no-one any credit, neither the very few scientists working in the area who have reservations about the causal connection between HIV and AIDS, nor the standard of advocacy in the court which seems to rely on obfuscation and emotive confusion rather than clear statements.
The bottom line, though, is that the guys I knew in the mid-1980s who were HIV positive had all died by 1990. The HIV+ guys who I knew in the mid-1990s, and who were put onto HAART, are all still living full and active lives. The medical treatments we have, based on the principle that HIV attacks the immune system, causing (among other things) a reduction in T-cells, and an increased vulnerability to opportunistic infections, has produced life-saving therapies. I believe that the burden of proof lies firmly on those who challenge the current broadly-accepted model, and that this burden must be met by producing treatment regimes for those who are HIV+ that have equally successful outcomes.
"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. ... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night devoid of stars." Martin Luther King
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
I don’t think it can be expressed any more succinctly than NW post. There is a lot of variation from person to person how our bodies react to the virus, but generally as has already been said if one test positive, which in truth is a test for remnant of the protein of the virus cell, the end result is that ones T cell count will diminish to the point where you can not fight off opportunistic infections, i.e. AIDS.
This is not to say that I don’t have questions even after all this time. At this point in time the only thing we can do is interfere with the replication process. Why does it ravage the endocrine system when it requires the T cells that the endocrine system produces to replicate? I mean I’ve known people that were so sick that they had no viral load because they had no T cells, there are also people that have the virus that are not effected at all. I even know survivors that have had the virus for more than twenty years, I even know some that only take their HAART meds form time to time and have done so for many years and are very healthy.
I guess the point to all that I have said is that in reality for most of us the end result without the meds is death within a few years at most. So the argument against HIV with AIDS being the end result is a very moot point. I do know that the way MY body reacted was for my body’s ability to generate T cells kept dropping, I never even had a huge viral load, no more than about 10,000 when I knew people who had viral loads in the hundreds of thousands and still had a viable T cell count. Sorry I digress, it’s taken almost ten years on meds for my T cell count to go from 99 to 587, which is considered “normal” quite a milestone, it’s taken years for me to get to this point, so this argument that has been going on since they earliest days of this pandemic does nothing to further the goal of finding a cure. Sadly, I do indeed believe there are opportunistic people that will use situations like this for their own profit, but for the time being it is the consciences of the medical community that it is the HIV virus which in the end causes AIDS and death. It’s idiots like this guy and the people (who’s motives I don’t understand at all) that are giving him any kind of grounds to stand on to avoid spending time in prison, actually he reminds me of a kind of Typhoid Mary that really need to be sequestered from society all together. The rates of infections are once again going up, we are not only getting complacent, do we need denial to add to the mix. I gotta tell ya I could have reacted with a lot of vitriol to this subject, LOL your lucky today.
Use protection, get tested, if you’re active, and most of all love the one you're with.
Peace
[Updated on: Mon, 12 February 2007 10:49]
People will tell you where they've gone
They'll tell you where to go
But till you get there yourself you never really know
Where some have found their paradise
Other's just come to harm
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
arich wrote:
> The rates of infections are once again going up, we are not only getting complacent, do we need denial to add to the mix. I gotta tell ya I could have reacted with a lot of vitriol to this subject, LOL your lucky today.
>
> Use protection, get tested, if you’re active, and most of all love the one you're with.
Arich, I completely agree with all of that!
NW
"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. ... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night devoid of stars." Martin Luther King
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
An extremely good critique of the theory that "HIV does not cause AIDS" can be found on http://www.anaesthetist.com/icu/infect/virus/Findex.htm#index.htm It is written from a "philosophy of science" viewpoint, and I find it convincing.
"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. ... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night devoid of stars." Martin Luther King
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
timmy
|
|
Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13796
|
|
|
Even if one is sceptical one cannot ignore the Occam argument.
So far as we know, most people who are HIV+ develop ailments that fall into the category of AIDS related illnesses. While we accept that some do not, the causal link is so clear as to be proven. Those who do not are a normal statistical anomaly.
Note that it appears that no-one has developed AIDS style symptoms so far without first being HIV+, though similar syndromes existed before the existence of HIV was postulated. I had an aunt die in this manner after a blood transfusion.
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
NW, I found this article to be very interesting, thing is I don’t know if I would agree on the whole that we should be grateful to these “dissidents.” Other than for academes it only causes confusion, angst and needless delay.
The whole discussion has been going on for sooo many years. LOL I know you are aware of how heated this whole debate was a decade or more ago. I thought it had faded well into the background, or at least had hoped. This article does address the subject in a very cogent way and since this whole “dissident” thing hasn’t gone away this article would be a good link to have for interested people.
As always, thanks NW, good stuff!
People will tell you where they've gone
They'll tell you where to go
But till you get there yourself you never really know
Where some have found their paradise
Other's just come to harm
|
|
|
|
|
Goto Forum:
|
] 
A Place of Safety
Search
Help
Register
Login
Home
