Strange Trip back to the future

 

 

Officially, the AIDS epidemic began in the U.S. in 1981. Recently, however, researchers jolted the medical community with evidence that the disease may have made its first appearance in the U.S. almost 15 years earlier. In a front-page article in the Chicago “Tribune”, they related the extraordinary saga of Robert R., a 16-year-old black Missourian who, they believe, died of AIDS in 1969. The case may represent the earliest documented instance of AIDS in North America. Predating that of Gaetan Dugas, a Canadian flight attendant. Dugas, who contracted AIDS before 1980 and died in 1984, was publicly identified as “Patient Zero” only quite recently. Tissue samples from Robert R. may eventually reveal what caused the virus to spread.

Two researchers, microbiologist Memory Elwin-Lewis of Washington University in St. Louis and Marlys Witte, a professor of surgery at the University of Arizona in Tucson, told of a black teenager who showed up at St. Louis City Hospital in 1968 with chronic genital swelling. The youngster, then 15, admitted that he was sexually active; laboratory tests disclosed that he has a severe case of chlamydia, a common but curable venereal disease. Doctors prescribed several antibioyics and put him on a low-salt diet. Nothing worked. His muscles wasted away, and his lungs filled with fluid.Robert R. died on May 15, 1969. An autopsy revealed the distinctive purplish lesions of AIDS-related Kaposi’s sarcoma.

Hoping at the time that medical advances might someday solve the mystery of his affliction, Elwin-Lewis and Witte, then both at Washington University, froze samples of Robert R.’s blood, brain, and other organs. In June 1987, four years after the AIDS virus was first isolated, Witte sent some of the frozen samples to Tulane University, where they were definitely analyzed by Virologist Robert Garry. “There’s no question that the tissue was positive for AIDS”, Garry states. In fact, Robert R.’s blood reacted to all nine markers used in the highly sensitive Western blot test for AIDS antibodies. Why didn’t the researchers have the samples tested earlier? “We waited until the chance of documenting the infection was more likely.” Witte explains.

Robert R.’s case is even more intriguing because he never visited New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles, the current AIDS epicenters. In fact, he told his doctors, he never left the Midwest. That is not surprising, says Dr. James Curran, director of the AIDS program at the Center for Disease Control. “It’s just not logical that AIDS entered the country only once,” he says. I think that there were several entry points but that most of them occurred in the late 1970s.”

Other presumptive cases are emerging from the past. In New York City in 1959, for example, a 49-year-old Haitian-born shipping clerk fell victim to what today would be a telltale disorder:

“Pneumocystis carinii” pneumonia. “It was so unusual at the time”, recalls Dr. Gordon Hennigar, who performed the postmortem and now is chairman of pathology at the Medical University of South Carolina. “AIDS is such a strong possibility that I’ve often thought about getting the samples and testing them.”

Indeed, the history of AIDS in the U.S. may have a much longer prologue than was once suspected. “What we’re saying is that AIDS has been around for a long time but just wasn’t recognized”, Elwin-Lewis explains. It is possible, Tulane’s Garry speculated, that the AIDS virus mutated and became more lethal in the 1970s. To test that hypothesis, he plans to spend much of the next year or so attempting to reconstruct viral genes from Robert R.’s tissue. “We know that the virus was not epidemic in 1969, so we might be able to identify the changes between then and now that enabled it to spread, Garry says. If scientists can figure out how the AIDS virus might have changed, the puzzling case from the past might shed light on the future of the epidemic.

 

 

A STARTLING CLAIM about the AIDS Virus

 

Twenty years ago, Peter Duesberg had a reputation as one of the world’s most respected virologists. In 1969, when he was just 33, he demonstrated that the flu virus has a segmented genome, which explains its unique ability to change. One year later he isolated the first cancer gene. When reading his academic biography, one encounters the word “first” quite a number of times. But Duesberg’s primary subject was retroviruses; he is arguably the scientist who discovered their structure. He received Investigator Grants from the National Institute of Health for seven years in a row. In 1986, he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences and was considered a probable candidate for the Noble Prize. Next year, his career crashed. In 1987, Duesberg published an article in which he claimed that the HIV retrovirus doesn’t – and cannot possibly – cause AIDS.

Colleagues branded his views not only wrong but dangerous. Scientific magazines stopped publishing his articles and most harmfully, the financing of his research was cancelled. The scientific community all but set up a boycott of the reckless scientist. If Duesberg had admitted his mistake, everything would have been back to normal. But he always had a reputation as an uncompromising scientist. 18 years later, Duesberg still argues that HIV is a harmless passenger virus, while AIDS is caused by completely different factors. He explained his views in the following interview for ‘The Moscow News’.

Q. Can you explain your point of view that HIV does not cause AIDS?

The distinctions of an infectious epidemic are:

1) Random spread in a population; 2) Exponential increase over weeks or months followed by exponential decline over same period due to anti-microbial/viral immunity or death of susceptible individuals; 3) Latent periods from contact/infection to disease of days to weeks corresponding to generation time of virus/microbe; 4) Virus/microbe is very active and abundant during course of disease; 5) Virus- or micro-specific disease.

By contrast,

1) AIDS in the US and Europe is more than 80% male, of which 1/3 are intravenous drug users and 2/3 are male homosexuals using psychoactive/aphrodisiac and anti-HIV drugs – unlike any microbial epidemic in history. 2) The AIDS epidemic in the US and Europe has increased slowly during the decade from the early 1980-s to the early 1990-s and has since declined slowly – unlike any new microbial epidemic in history. But very much like chemical epidemics such as lung cancer from smoking or tuberculosis from cocaine. 3) Since the ‘AIDS virus’ replicates in 24 hours, just like other human virus – the latent period for HIV-caused AIDS should be the same as that of other viruses, like flu or measles, namely days to weeks. But it is 5-10 years – just about equal to the ‘latent periods’ for lung cancer from smoking or liver cirrhosis from drinking. 4) HIV is undetectable in AIDS patients. See Gallo (US) and Weiss (UK) scandals of misappropriating Montagnier’s virus, because they could not find it in hundreds of AIDS patients! Only anti-bodies against HIV are detectable in patients – classical certificate of vaccination! 5) There is no HIV-specific disease. More than 26 AIDS-defining diseases are simply old diseases under new names, e.g. tuberculosis, dementia, diarrhea, weight loss, yeast infection, pneumocystis, etc.

 

Q. How did you come to your conclusions about HIV/AIDS?

1) HIV is claimed to cause AIDS by killing T-cells. But, at the same time mass production of HIV in immortal T-cell lines was patented in 1984 as source of HIV proteins for ‘AIDS tests’ by Gallo/NIH, Weiss/Burroughs, Wellcome (UK), and Montagnier (Pasteur). These infected cell lines are still producing HIV 21 years later! Thus HIV does not kill cells, just like all other retroviruses.

2) HIV is latent and neutralized by antibody, when it is said to cause fatal AIDS. I have studied virus for 25 years, and I don’t know one example of a fatal disease caused by a virus that is neutralized by antibodies and only detectable indirectly via antibodies.

Once I realized that HIV-AIDS hypothesis was paradoxical, because viruses are not pathogenic if they are latent and neutralized by antibodies, and retroviruses don’t kill cells (the reason why they are considered cancer viruses), it was clear that something was wrong with the HIV-AIDS hypothesis. But, there are no paradoxes in nature, only flawed hypotheses.

 

Q. Why do most of modern scientists think that HIV causes AIDS?

This is a non-scientific, perhaps political question and I have no ‘scientific’ answer. But based on my anthropological experiences, to ‘think’ that HIV causes AIDS is politically correct, socially attractive, and very fundable if you are a ‘modern scientist’ in need of a grant and a publication, and is beneficial for a merit increase, and for an award and for a company. None of these benefits are available to ‘non-conformists’ – even ‘in the freest of all countries’(US). On the contrary, non-conformists are excommunicated at all social and scientific levels available in ‘free’ countries.

 

Q. If HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, what does?

 

Based on the American/English AIDS establishment from before 1984, when HIV was discovered, AIDS was a ‘lifestyle’ disease (a euphemism for addiction to recreational drug). So logic led me more and more to the chemical-AIDS hypothesis, which proved to be a consistent theory to this date. Once I became suspicious, all I had to do was to look up the literature on the pathogenic effects of long term drug use, to see the chemical AIDS theory. More recently I had to include into the chemical AIDS hypothesis the DNA chain-terminators like AZT and protease inhibitors, prescribed to HIV-antibody-positives as anti-HIV drugs, for a complete case for chemical AIDS and against viral AIDS.

 

Q. Why is AZT dangerous? As far as I know, it’s used to cure cancer?

All chemotherapy is ‘dangerous’, ideally less dangerous than cancer – but certainly always less dangerous than a latent retrovirus that cannot kill cells. The principle of chemotherapy is to kill growing cancer cells chemically. However, since no chemical can distinguish between normal and cancer ells, billions of normal cells are killed together with cancer cells. The strategy is to kill the cancer before you kill the cancer before you kill the patient! This is the best we can do against cancer now. But it would be a disaster if we were to use this inevitably toxic treatment against a virus that in all likelihood does not cause AIDS.

 

Q. CDC says that there is a very strong statistical correlation between HIV and AIDS. Can you comment on that?

Even a 100% correlation is no proof. According to Koch’s postulates, the correlation must be 100% with the microbe – NOT antibody against it; the virus/microbe must be isolated from potential competitor microbes; and the pure virus must cause the disease.

Over 150 chimpanzees have been infected over the last 22 years, but not one has developed AIDS. And from over 40 million HIV-positives, the World Health Organization has not registered more than 2 million AIDS patients in 20 years. This is less than the normal mortality of 20 million people in 20 years. However, there are plenty of noncorrelations. In one study published in 1993 I listed 4,621 HIV-free AIDS cases described in the literature by the HIV-AIDS establishment at that time.

 

Q. But CDC claims that Koch’s postulates have been fulfilled by HIV. What do they mean, and how can you comment on that?

They mean that infection with HIV is sufficient to cause AIDS. However, according to the peer-reviewed literature, not one American doctor has ever contracted AIDS from more than 929000 American AIDS patients in 21 years, although several got infected by HIV. Likewise, no American scientist ever developed AIDS from studying and mass producing HIV. And according to the World Health Organization, 40 million people on this planet are HIV-positive, but have no AIDS! So HIV can not be sufficient to cause AIDS.

 

Q. Can you comment? Your opponents argue that Koch’s postulates don’t have to be fulfilled by HIV because they were invented before the discovery of retroviruses.

Algebra was invented before computers were made. Does this mean that computers don’t have to follow the laws of algebra?

 

Q. What level of financing does your research require?

My research budgets prior to AIDS run between 4,250,000 and 4,500,000 per year in current $ equivalents. Now I am studying the role of aneuploidy in cancer with support from private foundations for about $100,000 per year.

 

Q. How long could it take for the scientific establishment to understand their mistake about HIV (if they are wrong)?

It took the highly established and affluent catholic church 400 years to ‘understand’ Galileo. Since the NIH/CDC bio-establishment is the church of the 20/21 century and just as affluent as Rome it may take up to 400 years too – at least as long as everything that confirms the HIV/AIDS hypothesis gets funded and polished in the professional and public press and all alternative interpretations are censored in the ‘freest of all countries.’

 

Q. Your opponents insist that your statements are irresponsible and thousands of people can die if they believe you. Doesn’t it bother you?

For a scientist, scientific truth is the only ‘responsibility’ that matters. The rest is for politicians and philosophers. Fortunately, I am not scientifically responsible for prescribing DNA chain-terminators – developed exclusively to kill human cells for cancer chemotherapy over 40 years ago – to 450,000 HIV-positives in the name of a hypothesis that has not been proved in 21 years.

 

СОДЕРЖАНИЕ

1. Тексты для аналитического чтения

Lack of appetite …………………………………………………………………

Anemia in children………………………………………………………………

Blood Disorders…………………………………………………………………

Rickets…………………………………………………………………………

Vitamins and their significance…………………………………………………

Obesity…………………………………………………………………………

Crack comes to Nursery…………………………………………………………

AIDS and children: coping with a calamity

Additional grammar exercises…………………………………………………

II. Самостоятельная работа

А. Тексты для письменного перевода со словарем

Pediatric as a science …………………………………………………………

Some notions of Therapeutics………………………………………………

Medical and nursing care……………………………………………………

Preventing Iron Deficiency Anemia…………………………………………………….

Telemedicine in practice……………………………………………………

Banking on cord blood………………………………………………………

Blood………………………………………………………………………

Hepatitis……………………………………………………………………

Allergic manifestation in children…………………………………………. Hemophilia……………………………………………………………………

В. Тексты для устного и письменного тезирования

AIDS patient given baboon bone marrow……………………………………

Alcohol’s youngest victims…………………………………………………

Vita means life……………………………………………………………… Vitamins……………………………………………………………………………

Hemochromatosis?……………………………………………………………

Anemia…………………………………………………………………………

C. Тексты для чтения без словаря и передачи содержания на русском языке

Sleep. Pain in the head…………………………………………………………… Strains and sprains………………………………………………………………

Watch your back………………………………………………………………… Croup……………………………………………………………………………

Common Infections……………………………………………………………

D. Ориентирование в тексте

Quitting smoking……………………………………………………………

Why do you smoke…………………………………………………………………

Ask your doctor quitting smoking ……………………………………………

Don’t push your kids too hard …………………………………………………

Living out loud ………………………………………………………………

E. Лексические тесты

Sleeping(1).Sleeping(2).Blood. Hygiene………………………………………

F. Тексты для самостоятельного чтения

A brief over view of AIDS ………………………………………………

The epidemiology of AIDS in the U.S……………………………………………

Risk of HIV infection……………………………………………………………

HIV infection: The clinical picture……………………………………………

Strange Trip back to the future …………………………………………………… A Startling Claim about the AIDS Virus…………………………………………