The HIV - AIDS hypothesis, it might be wrong.

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I'm always interested when someone takes on commonly accepted wisdom. I haven't yet taken a side on this, I fear I do not know enough biology, but there is some easily assimilable logic in this documentary that makes the currently accepted view of HIV/AIDS questionable.



TL;DW pointers, not properly formatted, sorry:
- The HIV virus is not active enough or prolific enough inside the body to cause a disease, let alone AIDS.
- One researcher argues HIV is a "dormant passenger retrovirus" (went over my head I admit) without the "capacity or mechanism" to cause something like AIDS. It is not an infectious disease.
- The same man explains that if the HIV viral theory is correct, there is nothing quite like it anywhere else in nature.
- Another group of researchers claim HIV as we understand it does not exist and is not a retrovirus at all, but a series of protein strands or cellular debris misidentified as a malignant presence.
- HIV has never been isolated in a laboratory environment. All "evidence" of the virus is from indirect evidence, eg blood markers, antibodies
- HIV tests are not what you think they are, it isn't a virus present/not present result. There are a variety of different tests that look for a range of blood markers, false positives are common. These blood markers are in all of us right now, healthy or not. HIV status is decided by how many of these blood markers appear and in what quantity, there are an enormous range of conditions (from the common cold to cancer to arthritis) that will increase the presence of these markers. The most common false positive result is found in pregnant women.
- If HIV were an infectious virus, you would expect to find antibodies/markers only in infected individuals. HIV markers can be found in every human on earth, it is their level of presence that decides whether you are HIV positive.

- The AZT drugs used to treat AIDS might have actually killed more than it saved - oops - but all deaths were written down as AIDS.

Here is the most obvious logic failure in currently accepted wisdom:
- HIV has remained confined to the at-risk groups in the West, it has not spread to the heterosexual population and become an epidemic as feared. From this experts have deduced that heterosexual transmission is _incredibly rare_.
- Simultaneously there is apparently an epidemic in Africa.
- There seems to be no reasonable explanation for this, heterosexual transmission rates apparently being what they are, for a heterosexual epidemic to be occurring in Africa, either the average African would have to be having about 1000 times more sex with 1000 times as many different partners or everyone is as gay as the day is long.
- The racists may not have a problem accepting that, but other data does not bear it out. While AIDS incidence is rising in Africa, there is data that shows rates of all the other STDs are dropping at the same time.
- This particular video suggests the problem is one of statistics and lazy science. There are no huge data collection services in African countries counting the number of AIDS victims, it is all estimation and bias. Africa does have a problem with infrastructure, clean water, sewage treatment etc. Many diseases are rampant in countries with those problems, one being Tuberculosis, for which statistics are kept. Western science has decided to write off every tuberculosis infection as AIDS-related, a very lazy thing to do. Another estimation of the African infection rate came from testing post-natal blood samples at a hospital somewhere, as mentioned above pregnant women have the highest false positive rate when taking HIV tests. More lazy science.
- It's quite possible there is no AIDS epidemic in Africa and we are busy throwing condoms and abstinence pamphlets at Africa when what they need is clean water and sewage infrastructure.

So if HIV is nonsense, what is causing "Western AIDS" in the at-risk groups? Some theories put forward:
- Poppers, when used in enormous quantities, have been shown to be immunosuppressive.
- Poppers when combined with anti-biotic drugs (presumably for treating other infections) has been linked with cancer and maybe the cause of what is currently thought to be "AIDS-related cancers"
- Compromised immune systems possibly a cumulative toxic effect of rampant drug abuse and repeated infection by multiple traditional STDs
- HIV appeared at a time when drug abuse in the Western world had reached glorious new heights.

Two curious facts stand out from this list of HIV AIDS Deniers (HADers): few, if any, are highly qualified scientists with degrees from reputable universities and none of them has a background in epidemiology and has been directly involved in HIV or AIDS research. The closest we get to someone actually working in the field is Dr. Culshaw, who has done mathematical models of HIV infection (not in-depth research), Dr. Richards who worked for the company that developed some of the first HIV antibody tests, and Dr. Rasnick, who developed protease inhibitors similar to those used in AIDS treatments. The HADers have come to their positions primarily by drawing inferences from personal experience and anecdotes, or from the published work of others. The first question we should ask is: Why do the HADers have any credibility?

Outside of the tinfoil-hat crowd, there is little credibility being lent to the HADers.

After answering that question, we can then ask have the HADers drawn correct inferences from the anecdotes and data they cite or have they cherry-picked the evidence?

The answer seems to be a resounding "No".

Because of their beliefs, many HADers recommend that AIDS patients be treated with vitamins and herbs, massage, homeopathy, and a variety of unproven remedies. Three of the most outspoken HADers in this area are Gary Null, David Rasnick, and Mathias Rath, who make a living selling vitamins and other supplements.

Clearly, conflict of interest plays a major factor in their claims.

A few years ago, the most significant HADers were Thabo Mbeki, the president of South Africa, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, the health minister of South Africa, and Anthony Brink, head of the Treatment Information Group (TIG), founded to support his contention that antiretroviral drugs are a form of pharmacological genocide. Brink is self-taught in pharmacology. In recent years, Mbeki has distanced himself from Brink. In the past, Mbeki got at least some of his advice from the Internet and novels like The Constant Gardener (Nattrass 2007) and invited the HADers to convene in his country, but recently his party (the African National Congress) has taken the consensus position of the scientific community. Tshabalala-Msimang has some training in medicine, obstetrics, and gynecology, as well as a masters degree in public health from the University of Antwerp. None of the South African HADers have any background in HIV or AIDS research, but all at one time were convinced of the existence of an alleged conspiracy that anti-retroviral drugs were designed to kill people and they recommended things like garlic and beetroot to build up the immune system and fight off AIDS. As far as I know, Brink continues to hold these dissident positions.

So, the HIV AIDS Deniers all seem to be relying on belief, unfounded claims, and conspiracy theories to support their claims, and on the gullibility of the undereducated general public to lend further support.

Don't fall for their crap.

The tubercle bacillus, perhaps, could be similar to the HIV virus in the sense that it can remain dormant for a long period of time.

Nobody makes the claims stated above about tuberculosis medication being a genocidal tool.

I don't disagree, the real battle will always be between scientists and proponents of the counter theory may well have vested interests, but let's not pretend pharmaceutical companies involved in this research do not. That the majority of scientists are on one side is not, on its own, telling, orthodoxy and dogma within science is a real thing. The video even cites a parallel case where a disease in Japan was thought to be infectious by everyone and their mum, but was in fact a toxic syndrome. One pissed off professor had to go through the law courts because the scientific community would not hear him.

I'm probably feeding a troll at this point, but...

... perhaps you ought to leave the subject to someone more knowledgeable, then?

Furthermore, Youtube isn't science. It's entertainment.

If you want to debate the scientific evidence concerning HIV/AIDS, then please provide links to peer-reviewed scientific articles supporting your position, with information including...

- Author(s)
- Year
- Title
- Journal

Here are 3 good sources for surveying the scientific evidence on the subject...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed
http://www.sciencedirect.com/
https://scholar.google.com

No the video makes no conspiracy claims, and nor do I. The claim, if any, is that a mistake was made decades ago when someone decided the disease AIDS was infectious, a mistake that has been made many times before in history. This one mistake has turned medical science into an unstoppable freight train heading in what might be the wrong direction, crushing dissent along the way.

Another historical example, except in a reverse , might be stomach ulcers. For many years doctors would tell young men to relax and lay off the spicy food when a stomach ulcer was discovered. The prevailing theory at the time was high stress jobs and poor diet was causing ulcers that were killing all these young men, until Barry Marshall came along and showed that many ulcers were caused by a bacterium, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize. It isn't _impossible_ that something similar has occured with AIDS.

And just to demonstrate the ignorance in the original post...

Really...?


Source:
Barré-Sinoussi, F., et al. "Isolation of a T-lymphotropic retrovirus from a patient at risk for acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). 1983." Revista de investigacion clinica; organo del Hospital de Enfermedades de la Nutricion 56.2 (2003): 126-129.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6189183

But I suppose it's fair that this study wasn't mentioned in the OP...

...after all, the lead authors (Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier) only got the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A ... mic_career
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luc_Monta ... ery_of_HIV

What next?

- Germ theory denialism?
- Smoking doesn't cause cancer?
- Vaccines cause autism? Sorry... got this one covered, too.

Last edited by GGPViper on 31 Jul 2016, 11:26 am, edited 1 time in total.

And here I thought perhaps you would be impressed by my modesty.



We discussed this is a previous thread, peer-review is not panacea, in fact it may be a whole lot less than that. Why you hold it in such high esteem, when scientific history is filled with cheeky revolutionaries completely overturning and falsifying scientific dogma, I do not know. You might try a more traditional religion, it will last longer.

The Perth Group disagree, as mentioned in the video.

http://www.theperthgroup.com/CONTINUUM/ ... eward.html

This is way over my head, but from what I understand any claim to have isolated the virus is met with the Perth Group questioning the actual methods used then saying "er actually no you didn't".

Anyway this is all a bit of a side track, in usual GGPViper fashion. The main problem with the AIDS theory, bolded in the OP, is the following question: "What the hell is going on in Africa?"

Not yet.

People are being killed for trying to administer polio vaccines to children because people are concerned that it's part of a CIA plot to render Muslim males sterile and/or impotent.

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T minus 97 and counting.

Who is doing this: ISIS?

Where have you been for the last decade?
Source:This article in the Chicago Tribune, dated July 31, 2016.

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T minus 93 and counting.

Last edited by Fnord on 31 Jul 2016, 4:20 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Well....you learn something new every day

Some of us much sooner than others, it would seem ...

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T minus 92 and counting.

HIV causes AIDS. We can construct phylogenies of the virus and trace it back.

There are several similar retroviruses in nature, notably a few in chimpanzees (SIVs). One of these passed to humans somewhere north of Kinshasa in the 50s (there may have been an earlier transmission event in East Africa but that died out).

Transmission rates through vaginal sex are relatively low, but 0.08% is quite high if you have enough sex - a woman who has unprotected sex with a HIV-positive man 100 times will have an 8% chance of contracting it.

If not a blood-borne virus, how else do you explain the virus's prevalence amongst haemophiliacs and heroin users, as well as homosexuals?

Unless a credible alternative (and not "I'm just asking questions") is proposed soon, I will assume the OP is simply trying to agitate and will lock the thread.

Well the people in the video would disagree.



From what I understand this statistic is born out of the strange behaviour of this disease. Here we have a virus we think is infectious, spread by sexual contact and the hetero population despite being relatively promiscuous these days, is not being ravaged by AIDS. Logical conclusion: it is harder to spread through vaginal sex and this statistic is an attempt to measure this phenomenon.
Alternately, and this theory is just as valid given the same data: it isn't sexually transmitted and AIDS is caused by some other factor shared by the risk groups.



As stated in the OP, the alternative hypothesis is extreme and sustained drug abuse perhaps co-morbid or not with repeated infections of regular viruses/bacteria.

Haemophilia comes under one of the many listed conditions believed to cause false positives in the blood markers test. The horrible suggestion being that haemophiliacs were diagnosed wrongly as HIV positive and given those lethal AZT drugs, leading to a lingering death that is then written up as "AIDS related disease" not "Doctors gave me lethal drugs"

Not nice if true.
http://www.virusmyth.com/aids/hiv/cjtestfp.htm

Edit: should also say there could be of course be a factor shared by haemophiliacs and homosexuals and
heroin users. There is something odd about haemophiliacs and HIV, the disease seems not to progress in the same way or in the same timeframe as the other groups, particularly the younger sufferers.