AIDS Patients Face Downside of Living Longer (effects of AIDS drugs "worse than having AIDS")

New York Times ^ | January 6, 2008 | JANE GROSS

[GodGunsGuts]

Those explanations do not satisfy Larry Kramer, founder of several AIDS advocacy groups. Mr. Kramer, 73 and a long-term survivor, said he had always suspected “it was only a matter of time before stuff like this happened” given the potency of the antiretroviral drugs. “How long will the human body be able to tolerate that constant bombardment?” he asked. “Well, we are now seeing that many bodies can’t. Once again, just as we thought we were out of the woods, sort of, we have good reason again to be really scared.”

[tacticalogic]

But what if the AIDS establishment has used its full weight to shut said scientist down. What if they have used their influence to take said scientist’s grants away? What if they have used their considerable influence to deny said scientists right to publish? What if they have used their influence to deny said scientists right of reply to science journal papers that have been published about him? What if they leaned on said scientist’s university to take away his grad-level courses? Where does said scientist to go then?

Lots of speculation there, Chief. What if he was just plain wrong, and just won't admit it?

[GodGunsGuts]

That’s always a possibility. But my brief recounting is not speculation. I can prove it chapter and verse. But you have not answered my question, where does a scientist go when they have been shut down by the establishment? Where would Galileo go in today’s day and age? Where would Dr. Goldberger go? Where would all the other scientists who have figured something out, only to be persecuted and muzzled, go in today’s day and age? Do you really think the editors of National Review, American Spectator, Reason Magazine, World Magazing, and conservative publishers/think tanks like Policy Review and Regnery are that stupid?

[tacticalogic]

Historically, scientists go to other scientists. If his theories are valid, and his methodology sound then the results will be reproducible. Peer review will reproduce the results and support his conclusions. How long has it been since these references were published, and has any subsequent work produced the same results?

[InterceptPoint]

Clinical evidence. HIV+ people who don't take ARVs

I guess I didn't make myself clear. What I'm after is clinical evidence or studies where there are controls in place. Anecdotal evidence, while interesting, is really not of any value. After all, we had lots of anecdotal evidence that the earth was flat. That evidence was wrong.

So I'll restate the question: Do you know of any controlled clinical studies showing the effectiveness of ARV drugs on otherwise healthy people.

And note that you cannot prove effectiveness unless you have a control group that does not take the drug that does worse.

[GodGunsGuts]

But what if the AIDS establishment prevents him from carrying out such studies? What if, for instance, they block him from carrying out a study that controls for drug abuse? For AZT? For cocktail drugs? What does a scientist do then?

[GodGunsGuts]

PS These are not idle speculations. This really happened.

[tacticalogic]

How long ago were these references published? Has there been time to do a peer review, was it peer reviewed, and were the results reproducible?

There have been cases where scientific work has been suppressed by political forces, but it's always a temporary condition. There have always been scientists outside that sphere of influence willing to look at and pursue the work if it proves to be valid.

[GodGunsGuts]

There are many scientists and medical doctors who have sided with Duesberg et al. But they all say the same thing. The massive, federally funded (and protected) political forces that have been arrayed against them are currently preventing their findings from seeing the light of day. Again, what are these scientists and medical doctors to do under such intensely adverse (and potentially career ruining) circumstances?

[tacticalogic]

The massive, federally funded (and protected) political forces that have been arrayed against them are currently preventing their findings from seeing the light of day.

Scientific knowlege is a difficult thing to bottle up in this day and age, and scientists tend to ignore political boundaries where science is involved. What gets suppressed in one place will re-surface somewhere else, out of reach of the political influence. What you're telling me doesn't add up.

[GodGunsGuts]

==What gets suppressed in one place will re-surface somewhere else, out of reach of the political influence.

It’s resurfacing right here. Will you at least give a serious look to the articles I posted from pedigreed conservative sources? Will you at least give a hard look at the scientific papers I posted? That’s all I’m asking. If you still think that this information should be ignored/shut down, I will respectfully agree to disagree agreeably.

[tacticalogic]

Will you answer these questions: How old are these references, and has any work done since they were published validated the findings?

[GodGunsGuts]

How old is too old?

[tacticalogic]

How old do they have to be for you to be asking that?

[GodGunsGuts]

That’s a serious question. If you think truth can become outdated, how old is too old?

[tacticalogic]

That’s a serious question. If you think truth can become outdated, how old is too old?

The age of the research is important in terms of peer review. If it's too recent to have had an opportunity for a decent peer review, then I'm going to be skeptical. If it's old enough that there should be one or more, and there aren't I'm going to be skeptical.

[GodGunsGuts]

OK. I could go back all the way to the 1980s, but how about we start with a paper from 1998 published by Genetica? Will you agree to carefully read a scientific paper from 1998? Here it is:

http://www.duesberg.com/papers/The%20AIDS%20Dilemma.pdf

[jas3]

And note that you cannot prove effectiveness unless you have a control group that does not take the drug that does worse.

Really? Why is that?

Lets assume a child has injested ten times the TD50 of a household poison, and medical professionals rapidly induce vomiting with ipecac, and she survives.

Is it your contention that we cannot prove effectiveness of ipecac to prevent death by poisoning unless we first establish a statistically valid cohort of children who are administered poison and then NOT given ipecac and are instead left to die?

Medicine and medical testing do not proceed the way you may assume or have read.

There are many non-anecdotal methods for establishing proof of efficacy of a procedure or drug without control groups that have been accepted as definitive by medical science for decades and which were developed long before HIV/AIDS.

Additionally there are well established risk profiles for HIV+ patients, which are expressed as a function of CD4 count. ARV effectiveness in controlling risk factors leads directly to reductions in morbidity and mortality which are far more significant than what you presume to be merely a few anecdotal accounts.

Have you read the Swiss cohort study by Steme in Lancet? What were your thoughts on the reported risk reduction?

jas3

[tacticalogic]

How long is it, and has it been peer reviewed?

[jas3]

There is a lot on the web that addresses the questions you ask. Here's some from SDARI:

The Odd Claim of the HIV Dissenters: HIV does not Cause AIDS A critical evaluation of their arguments

By Barbara B. Hemmingsen

Twenty years ago, a new human disease-AIDS-showed up in the United States, Europe and Africa; within a few years a virus was implicated. But not all scientists have accepted the evidence which has been obtained so far, the most prominent being Peter Duesberg, Professor of Molecular Biology at U.C. Berkeley and an expert on retroviruses, the "family" to which HIV belongs. Because of his past high standing in the scientific community-he is a member of the National Academy of Science-his opposing ideas stimulated additional studies. Abundant evidence now shows HIV is the cause of AIDS (Blattner et al., 1988). Yet, in 1998, Duesberg published a lengthy paper reiterating and expanding on his original idea that AIDS has other causes, and adding-he claims-some new evidence in support of his contention (Duesberg and Rasnick, 1998). What is it about his hypothesis that is so compelling that Duesberg and his supporters continue to advance them? What is the evidence that they are right and the majority of experts wrong.

Duesberg published several articles in the 1980s in which he claimed that HIV as the cause of AIDS does not fulfill Koch’s postulates. These postulates are the logical steps to prove that a specific pathogen, in this case HIV, is the cause of particular disease, AIDS. The bacteriologist Robert Koch in 1876 was the first to apply them to prove that the bacterium Bacillus anthracis causes anthrax. The postulates are: (1) the same pathogen must be present in every clinical case of the disease under investigation, (2) the pathogen must be isolated and grown away from the infected host, (3) the cultured pathogen must cause the same disease when injected into a healthy, susceptible host, and (4) the same pathogen must be reisolated from the experimentally infected host. Koch and his successors successfully applied these postulates to diseases caused by bacteria and fungi, microorganisms that can usually be easily cultured away from their host. Koch modified his postulates as more was learned about pathogenic bacteria. For example, people infected with Salmonella typhi, the bacterial cause of typhoid fever, sometimes have no symptoms; hence, postulate 1 must be modified. Also, if a suitable susceptible animal host cannot be found for a human pathogen, then postulates 3 and 4 can not be satisfied as experimentation on humans is unethical.

The discovery of viral diseases also required modifications to Koch’s Postulates (Evans, 1976). Viruses are not cells, rather they are genetic material (either RNA or DNA) surrounded by protein coats in their extracellular state. The genetic material, on entry into a suitable host cell, is sufficient to induce viral replication. Such replication can have deleterious effects on the host cells which cause symptoms in the host. Some viruses are able to integrate their genetic material into that of their hosts, the "latent state". Viruses must be cultivated together with their host cells; thus, postulate 2 must be modified.

Starting in 1981, the Centers for Disease Control began reporting, in its newsletter Morbidity and Mortality Weekly, cases of Pneumocystis pneumonia and cytomegolovirus infections in otherwise healthy adult males. These diseases were previously found only in severely immunocompromised humans. Eventually this profound immunosuppression (as evidenced by an accompanying constellation of diseases) was named Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) because there was no obvious reason for the patients’ profound immunosuppression. Some suggested causes were illicit drug (cocaine, heroin, amphetamines) or stimulant (amyl nitrite) use, but a microbial cause was at the top of the list and efforts were immediately made to culture microbes from persons with AIDS.

These efforts quickly established that neither fungi nor bacteria were likely pathogens. The French virologist Luc Montagnier and his collaborators succeeded in 1983 in culturing a retrovirus from the blood of AIDS victims and not from immunologically healthy people free of the diseases that define AIDS (Barre-Sinoussi et al., 1983; Gallo et al., 1984). This satisfied Koch’s Postulates 1 and 2. Once the virus was available in quantity, it could be compared to other related and better known retroviruses that infect animals. It was also discovered that the virus-since named Human Immunodeficiency Virus, or HIV-preferentially infected white blood cells present in the blood, semen and vaginal fluids. This discovery explained why the delicate virus was spread from human to human via sexual intercourse or by exposure to blood (hemophiliacs, blood transfusion recipients, and injecting drug users). Soon after its discovery, a test was devised to detect antibodies against HIV in blood and blood products, and this method of transmission was denied the virus. Safe sex practices and needle exchanges have also interrupted the spread of HIV, although the conscientious use of the safe sex methods and the sharing of needles in injection galleries remain problems (Des Jarlais and Friedman, 1994).

Despite these successes, the third and fourth postulates could not be satisfied in the 1980s because no experimental animal proved susceptible to infection by HIV except the chimpanzee, a lab animal in such short supply that statistically valid numbers could not be used. Thus, the door was opened for the AIDS dissenters, scientists who interpreted the available evidence in the 1980s to mean that HIV was a harmless passenger virus which just happened to be present in AIDS patients. They claimed that AIDS is a disease of such lifestyle choices as drug and alcohol abuse and of promiscuous sex, especially homosexual sex. However, in the 1990s, the third and fourth postulates were satisfied as the result of a tragic laboratory accident in which 3 lab workers were exposed to concentrated, cloned, pure HIV. None had risk factors for AIDS, yet all 3 developed one or more of the AIDS-defining diseases or severe immunodepression (NIAID fact sheet, 2000). HIV was isolated from all 3 patients and shown, by molecular techniques, to be identical to the original virus. Although Duesberg no longer mentions Koch’s Postulates in his writings, he has not allowed their completion to change his mind about the causes of AIDS.

One of Duesberg’s recent publications (Duesberg and Rasnick, 1998) asks 12 questions which are really statements of his belief that HIV does not cause AIDS. He then attempts to support each of his beliefs. I will focus on just a few of the questions and show that each has been answered, and that the published data, which Duesberg does not cite, clearly support the hypothesis that HIV causes AIDS.

Duesberg and Rasnick (1998) ask: "Why would antibodies against HIV (a positive HIV test) which are so effective that leading AIDS researchers cannot detect HIV in most AIDS patients (Gallo, 1991; Weiss, 1991; Cohen, 1993) not protect against AIDS?" First, I will consider their statement that HIV can’t be detected in most AIDS patients. The three citations in this sentence are to letters or a news report, none of which deal with the detection of HIV in AIDS patients. Research papers published in this same period (Hammer et al., 1993; Jackson et al., 1990) and subsequently (Mellors et al., 1997) report the consistent isolation of HIV from blood, semen and vaginal secretions of patients with AIDS. Why didn’t Duesberg and Rasnick cite these publications? Second, I will consider the statement that antibodies against HIV in the blood should protect against AIDS. Duesberg and Rasnick apparently don’t know that HIV as well as some other viruses are able to hide within human cells thereby escaping the circulating antibodies against them; these viruses persist and may reemerge and cause disease. The most familiar examples are varicella zoster (chickenpox) that reemerges to cause shingles, and herpes simplex that reemerges to cause cold sores. HIV is also able to hide in the cells of the human immune system, well protected from the circulating antibody.

Duesberg and Rasnick (1998) also ask: "Why have doctors and nurses never caught AIDS from over 800,000 American and European AIDS cases, particularly in the absence of a HIV vaccine?" What comes to mind is that very few doctors and nurses expose their skin or mucus membranes to the semen or vaginal fluids of patients with AIDS. However, health care workers do accidently stick themselves with patient blood. Through 1999, 56 documented cases of such HIV infection are known to the CDC; 25 of these have developed AIDS in the absence of other risk factors (NIAID fact sheet, 2000). Why do Duesberg and Rasnick ignore these cases?

Another question posed by Duesberg and Resnick (1998) is: "Why are 9 out of 10 AIDS patients males?" They point out, rightly, that viruses are gender-blind whereas lifestyle choices may be gender specific. However, they don’t acknowledge that a gay man is believed to be the individual who brought the virus to America. From homosexuals, HIV spread to injection drug users, most of whom are male. Because HIV is spread from human to human by unprotected sex or by exchange of blood, it is not surprising that early in the epidemic most AIDS cases (92%) showed up in males. However, more women are now infected with HIV and are developing AIDS. In 1993-1995, about 18% of the 257,262 American AIDS cases reported to the CDC were women; this percentage was 23% for the 1996-2000 period (MMWR, 2001). The populations in Asia and Africa that exchange HIV via heterosexual sex have approximately equal numbers of men and women infected with HIV (UNAIDS, 2000; NIAID fact sheet, 2000). Why do Duesberg and Rasnick ignore these numbers? They are freely available from the Centers for Disease Control.

Although not part of their 12 questions, Duesberg and Resnick support their idea that recreational drugs cause AIDS by stating that "1% of AIDS patients are babies who shared drugs with their mothers before birth." Without doubt, one of the risk factors for being born with an HIV infection is a drug injecting mother who is HIV positive . But let’s look at twins born to such mothers; both fetuses share the same drugs and approximately the same uterine environment. I can refer to 4 such cases described between 1984 and 1993 (Vilmer et al., 1984; Menz-Bautista et al., 1986; Young et al., 1990; Barlow and Mok, 1993). Three of the mothers admitted drug use, the fourth was married to a drug user. All of the mothers were positive for HIV antibody, HIV genetic material, or had AIDS. All four gave birth to a fraternal healthy twin (no sign of HIV or AIDS after 10 months to 6 years) and to a sick twin with evidence of HIV and the development of AIDS or AIDS Related Complex in 3 cases. Did Duesberg choose to ignore this evidence that it is the presence of HIV in the body that leads to AIDS, not the presence of recreational drugs?

It is evident from these examples that the HIV dissenters and deniers, led by their "scientific" guru Duesberg, are ignoring sound scientific evidence and methodology to arrive at their claims. Duesberg believes that HIV is a harmless passenger virus that just happens to be present in persons with AIDS. To arrive at this claim he uses information published in the scientific literature very selectively, ignoring all data and arguments that refute his views, and picking only material which he can interpret to support his ideas. He leans heavily on material from newspapers and popular magazines. When one of his points is challenged by indisputable facts, he simple drops it and goes on to another. This distinctive pattern we know so well from another case of bogus or irrational thinking: the creationists’ argument against evolution. It is troublesome that it is advanced by a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

jas3

[GodGunsGuts]

It’s long enough to cover the major points of Dueberg et al’s alternative theory as to the cause of AIDS. Here is their editorial board:

Editorial Board
Editor:

Pierre Capy
Laboratoire Populations, Génétique et Evolution, CNRS, Gif-sur-Yvette, France

Ronny C. Woodruff
Dept. of Biological Sciences, Bowling Green State University, OH, USA

Associate Editors:

S. Abe, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan; C. F. Baer, University of Florida, USA; P. Batterham, University of Melbourne, Australia; C. Biemont, Université Claude Bernard-Lyon I, France; I. Boussy, Loyola University of Chicago, USA; J.L. Bouzat, Bowling Green State University, Ohio, USA; C.H. Daugherty, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand; Hong-Wen Deng, Creighton University, Omaha, NE, USA and College of Life Science, Hunan Normal University, PR of China; J. Andrew DeWoody, Purdue University, USA; M.S. DuBow, Université Paris Sud, Orsay, France; M.F. Dybdahl, Washington State University, USA; W.J. Etges, University of Arkansas, USA; A. Fontdevila, Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain; P.M. Galetti Jr., Universidade Federal de São Carlos, Brazil; G. Gasperi, University of Pavia, Italy; T. Gerasimova, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA; T. Giraud, Université de Paris-Sud, France; M.-A. Grandbastien, INRA, Versailles, France; X. Gu, Iowa State University, USA; A.J. Hilliker, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada; S. Hoffman, Miami University, Oxford, OH, USA; J.J.A. Holden, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada; M. Itoh, Kyoto Institute of Technology, Kyoto, Japan; R.M. Kliman, Cedar Crest College, Allentown, PA, USA; Artyom Kopp, University of California - Davis, Davis, CA, USA; R.A. Krebs, Cleveland State University, USA; Claire Lavigne, INRA, Avignon, France; F. Lemeunier, CNRS, Gif-sur-Yvette, France; H. Naveira, Universidade de Coruña, Spain; M.E. Orive, University of Kansas, Lawrence, USA; Scott Pitnick, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA; M.B. Ptacek, Clemson University, USA; Leslie Rissler, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, USA; S.H. Rogstad, University of Cincinnati, OH, USA; C. Schloetterer, Veterinärmedizinische Universität Wien, Austria; M.D. Schug, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, USA; Alan H. Schulman, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland; W.B. Sherwin, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; C.S. Sinclair, Towson University, MD, USA; L. Sola, University of Rome “La Sapienza”, Italy; J.N. Thompson Jr., University of Oklahoma, Norman, USA; Irène A. Till-Bottraud, Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble, France; Maud Tenaillon, AgroParisTech, Ferme de Moulon, Gif-sur-Yvette, France; L.J. Weider, University of Oklahoma, Norman, USA; Jun Zhu, Institute of Bioinformatics, Zejiang University, PR of China;