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HIV is a harmless virus and does not cause AIDS
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So you've gone from "HIV is a harmless virus and does not cause AIDS" to
I'm not saying he's right, i'm not saying he's wrong. What i'm saying is that he has had so much to lose taking the stance he has with nothing to gain, that we should at least listen to what he has to say.
And in fairness, I think he's been proven wrong a long time ago and many, many times since by the research.
Any chance answering the questions on the previous page?0 -
Well Duesberg has books to sell too, if that's what concerns you about other conspiracy theories
http://www.duesberg.com/books/index.html
But even if he didn't, it doesn't matter really. You can always find some renegade academic, ideologue or deluded conspiracy monger to support your agenda. Isn't there still a flat earth society? There's a few researchers who doubt the fact of evolution, who think that vaccines are dangerous, fluoride in water is a public health risk, etc.0 -
Yeah. There was one in the 17th century. His name was Galileo. While others secretly agreed with him, they kept their opinions to themselves to avoid the same fate as Galileo.You can always find some renegade academic, ideologue or deluded conspiracy monger to support your agenda. Isn't there still a flat earth society?0 -
Good thing you don't get persecuted for scientific enquiry nowadays then, and scientists are free to dissent from the consensus if they want. Science engages in robust debate all the time and argues internally over evidence and interpretations. When people don't support their theories with good evidence, or become too invested in or attached to some fringe idea that doesn't jive with the current evidence, then they get criticised or marginalised.Yeah. There was one in the 17th century. His name was Galileo. While others secretly agreed with him, they kept their opinions to themselves to avoid the same fate as Galileo.
Here's a blog post you might want to read. Haven't looked at it meself, I just know that the writer devotes alot of attention to AIDS denial...
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=179
Here's a comprehensive website too. Seems to cover alot.
http://www.aidstruth.org/0 -
So has anyone injected themselves with HIV yet?0
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We already know that there are people who got HIV and never got AIDs even after 20 or more years.
We also know that people have been diagnosed with AIDs and who don't have HIV in their system.
Me doing what you said would prove nothing new.0 -
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Not much point arguing with you. You seem to depend on stupid arguments in debating the issue and in making yourself sound intelligent.0
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Are you seriously comparing Galileo to someone who has made money by claiming that AIDS in Africa is a "myth"?Yeah. There was one in the 17th century. His name was Galileo. While others secretly agreed with him, they kept their opinions to themselves to avoid the same fate as Galileo.0 -
We already know that there are people who got HIV and never got AIDs even after 20 or more years.
This sub section of HIV sufferers only accounts for approximately 1-2% of those diagnosed with HIV. I am pretty certain these people hold the key to creating a 'cure' for AIDS but it doesn't prove that HIV does not cause AIDS by any means.We also know that people have been diagnosed with AIDs and who don't have HIV in their system.
Such as?Me doing what you said would prove nothing new.
No, I would suggest the reason you don't want to do it is that deep down you don't really believe what you're saying. You're talking the talk but won't walk the walk, like every other AIDS conspiracy theorist I've talked to.0 -
This chapter did not appear in the original edition of this book, because for fifteen months leading up to September 2008 the vitamin-pill entrepreneur Matthias Rath was suing me personally, and the Guardian, for libel. This strategy brought only mixed success. For all that nutritionists may fantasise in public that any critic is somehow a pawn of big pharma, in private they would do well to remember that, like many my age who work in the public sector, I don’t own a flat. The Guardian generously paid for the lawyers, and in September 2008 Rath dropped his case, which had cost in excess of £500,000 to defend. Rath has paid £220,000 already, and the rest will hopefully follow. Nobody will ever repay me for the endless meetings, the time off work, or the days spent poring over tables filled with endlessly cross-referenced court documents.
On this last point there is, however, one small consolation, and I will spell it out as a cautionary tale: I now know more about Matthias Rath than almost any other person alive. My notes, references and witness statements, boxed up in the room where I am sitting right now, make a pile as tall as the man himself, and what I will write here is only a tiny fraction of the fuller story that is waiting to be told about him. This chapter, I should also mention, is available free online for anyone who wishes to see it.
Matthias Rath takes us rudely outside the contained, almost academic distance of this book. For the most part we’ve been interested in the intellectual and cultural consequences of bad science, the made-up facts in national newspapers, dubious academic practices in universities, some foolish pill-peddling, and so on. But what happens if we take these sleights of hand, these pill-marketing techniques, and transplant them out of our decadent Western context into a situation where things really matter?
In an ideal world this would be only a thought experiment. AIDS is the opposite of anecdote. Twenty-five million people have died from it already, three million in the last year alone, and 500,000 of those deaths were children. In South Africa it kills 300,000 people every year: that’s eight hundred people every day, or one every two minutes. This one country has 6.3 million people who are HIV positive, including 30 per cent of all pregnant women. There are 1.2 million AIDS orphans under the age of seventeen. Most chillingly of all, this disaster has appeared suddenly, and while we were watching: in 1990, just 1 per cent of adults in South Africa were HIV positive. Ten years
later, the figure had risen to 25 per cent.
It’s hard to mount an emotional response to raw numbers, but on one thing I think we would agree. If you were to walk into a situation with that much death, misery and disease, you would be very careful to make sure that you knew what you were talking about. For the reasons you are about to read, I suspect that Matthias Rath missed the mark.
This man, we should be clear, is our responsibility. Born and raised in Germany, Rath was the head of Cardiovascular Research at the Linus Pauling Institute in Palo Alto in California, and even then he had a tendency towards grand gestures, publishing a paper in the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine in 1992 titled “A Unified Theory of Human Cardiovascular Disease Leading the Way to the Abolition of this Disease as a Cause for Human Mortality”. The unified theory was high-dose vitamins.
He first developed a power base from sales in Europe, selling his pills with tactics that will be very familiar to you from the rest of this book, albeit slightly more aggressive. In the UK, his adverts claimed that “90 per cent of patients receiving chemotherapy for cancer die within months of starting treatment”, and suggested that three million lives could be saved if cancer patients stopped being treated by conventional medicine. The pharmaceutical industry was deliberately letting people die for financial gain, he explained. Cancer treatments were “poisonous compounds” with “not even one effective treatment”.
The decision to embark on treatment for cancer can be the most difficult that an individual or a family will ever take, representing a close balance between well-documented benefits and equally well-documented side-effects. Adverts like these might play especially strongly on your conscience if your mother has just lost all her hair to chemotherapy, for example, in the hope of staying alive just long enough to see your son speak.
There was some limited regulatory response in Europe, but it was generally as weak as that faced by the other characters in this book. The Advertising Standards Authority criticised one of his adverts in the UK, but that is essentially all they are able to do. Rath was ordered by a Berlin court to stop claiming that his vitamins could cure cancer, or face a €250,000 fine.
But sales were strong, and Matthias Rath still has many supporters in Europe, as you will shortly see. He walked into South Africa with all the acclaim, self-confidence and wealth he had amassed as a successful vitamin-pill entrepreneur in Europe and America, and began to take out full-page adverts in newspapers.
˜The answer to the AIDS epidemic is here,” he proclaimed. Anti-retroviral drugs were poisonous, and a conspiracy to kill patients and make money. “Stop AIDS Genocide by the Drugs Cartel said one headline. “Why should South Africans continue to be poisoned with AZT? There is a natural answer to AIDS.” The answer came in the form of vitamin pills. “Multivitamin treatment is more effective than any toxic AIDS drug. Multivitamins cut the risk of developing AIDS in half.”
Rath’s company ran clinics reflecting these ideas, and in 2005 he decided to run a trial of his vitamins in a township near Cape Town called Khayelitsha, giving his own formulation, VitaCell, to people with advanced AIDS. In 2008 this trial was declared illegal by the Cape High Court of South Africa. Although Rath says that none of his participants had been on anti-retroviral drugs, some relatives have given statements saying that they were, and were actively told to stop using them.
Tragically,Matthias Rath had taken these ideas to exactly the right place. Thabo Mbeki, the President of South Africa at the time, was well known as an “AIDS dissident”, and to international horror, while people died at the rate of one every two minutes in his country, he gave credence and support to the claims of a small band of campaigners who variously claim that AIDS does not exist, that it is not caused by HIV, that anti-retroviral medication does more harm than good, and so on.
At various times during the peak of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa their government argued that HIV is not the cause of AIDS, and that anti-retroviral drugs are not useful for patients. They refused to roll out proper treatment programmes, they refused to accept free donations of drugs, and they refused to accept grant money from the Global Fund to buy drugs. One study estimates that if the South African national government had used anti-retroviral drugs for prevention and treatment at the same rate as the Western Cape province (which defied national policy on the issue), around 171,000 new HIV infections and 343,000 deaths could have been prevented between 1999 and 2007. Another study estimates that between 2000 and 2005 there were 330,000 unnecessary deaths, 2.2 million person years lost, and 35,000 babies unnecessarily born with HIV because of the failure to implement a cheap and simple mother-to-child-transmission prevention program. Between one and three doses of an ARV drug can reduce transmission dramatically. The cost is negligible. It was not available.
Interestingly, Matthias Rath’s colleague and employee, a South African barrister named Anthony Brink, takes the credit for introducing Thabo Mbeki to many of these ideas. Brink stumbled on the “AIDS dissident” material in the mid-1990s, and after much surfing and reading, became convinced that it must be right. In 1999 he wrote an article about AZT in a Johannesburg newspaper titled “a medicine from hell”. This led to a public exchange with a leading virologist. Brink contacted Mbeki, sending him copies of the debate, and was welcomed as an expert.
This is a chilling testament to the danger of elevating cranks by engaging with them. In his initial letter of motivation for employment to Matthias Rath, Brink described himself as “South Africa’s leading AIDS dissident, best known for my whistle-blowing exposé of the toxicity and inefficacy of AIDS drugs, and for my political activism in this regard, which caused President Mbeki and Health Minister Dr Tshabalala-Msimang to repudiate the drugs in 1999″.
In 2000, the now infamous International AIDS Conference took place in Durban. Mbeki’s presidential advisory panel beforehand was packed with “AIDS dissidents”, including Peter Duesberg and David Rasnick. On the first day, Rasnick suggested that all HIV testing should be banned on principle, and that South Africa should stop screening supplies of blood for HIV. “If I had the power to outlaw the HIV antibody test,” he said, “I would do it across the board.” When African physicians gave testimony about the drastic change AIDS had caused in their clinics and hospitals, Rasnick said he had not seen “any evidence” of an AIDS catastrophe. The media were not allowed in, but one reporter from the Village Voice was present. Peter Duesberg, he said, “gave a presentation so removed from African medical reality that it left several local doctors shaking their heads”. It wasn’t AIDS that was killing babies and children, said the dissidents: it was the anti-retroviral medication.
http://www.badscience.net/2009/04/matthias-rath-steal-this-chapter/0 -
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We already know that there are people who got HIV and never got AIDs even after 20 or more years.
We also know that people have been diagnosed with AIDs and who don't have HIV in their system.
Me doing what you said would prove nothing new.
Like Monty said, sources would be useful.Not much point arguing with you. You seem to depend on stupid arguments in debating the issue and in making yourself sound intelligent.
This is the point of an argument, to back up your points so that they are credible.0 -
Sources are difficult to give as the pro HIV=AIDs side (who are winning) give out statistical data that is skewed to show that HIV causes AIDs.sources would be useful.
As they state in Wiki:
"There are two main definitions for AIDS, both produced by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The older definition is to referring to AIDS using the diseases that were associated with it, for example, lymphadenopathy, the disease after which the discoverers of HIV originally named the virus.[15][16] In 1993, the CDC expanded their definition of AIDS to include all HIV positive people with a CD4+ T cell count below 200 per µL of blood or 14% of all lymphocytes.[96]developed countries+ T cell count rises to above 200 per µL of blood or other AIDS-defining illnesses are cured. The majority of new AIDS cases in use either this definition or the pre-1993 CDC definition. The AIDS diagnosis still stands even if, after treatment, the CD4"
In other words, the definition states that it's only AIDs if you also have HIV. This discounts all the people that have AIDs like symptoms and are for all intents and purposes AIDs sufferers but because they don't have HIV, they're not included in the statistical data as having AIDs. So the figures are unhealthyily skewed. This is why you need to take statistics on the issue very carefully.
It's like making the statement:
"All firetrucks are red. My dad drives a truck and it is red. Therefore my dad's truck must be a firetruck"0 -
Stuff unrelated to request.
You were asked to a source for the following:
1) We already know that there are people who got HIV and never got AIDs even after 20 or more years.
2) We also know that people have been diagnosed with AIDs and who don't have HIV in their system.
In the case of 1), this is entirely possible. Just because they haven't gotten AIDS for the 20 or so years doesn't mean they will never get it.
In the case of 2), if this has occurred, it's likely been a mis-diagnosis, and a very, very bad one at that. You can't have AIDS without first acquiring HIV.0 -
I don't think anyone will deny that it is possible to develop some of the illnesses that are usually associated with AIDS without being HIV positive. At the end of the day HIV is a disease that compromises our immune systems. There are other ways to compromise our immune systems without having HIV.
However, to say that HIV does not cause AIDS is in my opinion complete and utter bull****. There is ample evidence to show the correlation between increased viral loads and reduced CD4 T cells and the development of AIDS. There is also evidence that using drugs to suppress the virus and therefore keeping the CD4 count up puts off development of serious disease. Often for many many years.
To say HIV is harmless, well that is so so unlikely to be true and there is so much evidence against it that it really doesn't merit much more discussion.0 -
This is the very problem i'm talking about. HIV and AIDs might be two entirely separate things with an unsafe connection built between the two.if this has occurred, it's likely been a mis-diagnosis, and a very, very bad one at that. You can't have AIDS without first acquiring HIV.
AIDs is rampant in africa BUT HIV is not. However, the HIV=AIDs camp largely remove those AIDs cases from their statistics because it messes up their results.
Deusberg has pointed this out several times and has never been contradicted on it by anyone in the established HIV=AIDs camp.
Deusberg is portrayed as a crank and a psycho but the reality is that very few of his teachings are actually challenged.0 -
Can we please have some evidence for these assertions?AIDs is rampant in africa BUT HIV is not.
The Flat Earth society are viewed as cranks and loons but very few of their teachings are actually challenged.Deusberg is portrayed as a crank and a psycho but the reality is that very few of his teachings are actually challenged.0 -
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http://pathmicro.med.sc.edu/lecture/hiv13a.htmThis is the very problem i'm talking about. HIV and AIDs might be two entirely separate things with an unsafe connection built between the two.
This debunks much of Deusberg' claims.AIDs is rampant in africa BUT HIV is not. However, the HIV=AIDs camp largely remove those AIDs cases from their statistics because it messes up their results.
Deusberg has pointed this out several times and has never been contradicted on it by anyone in the established HIV=AIDs camp.
Deusberg is portrayed as a crank and a psycho but the reality is that very few of his teachings are actually challenged.
While there have been cases of AIDS without HIV, it isn't the norm. In fac the only medical literature I can locate referring to it dates from the very early 1990's.
(Root-Bernstein, 1990, Pers. Biol. Med., 33:480)
(Huminer et al., 1987, Rev. of Inf. Dis., 9:1102).
Laurence J, Siegal FP, Schattner E, Gelman IH, Morse S. Acquired immunodeficiency without evidence of infection with human immunodeficiency virus types 1 and 2. Lancet. 1992 Aug 1;340(8814):273–274
Spickett GP, Millrain M, Beattie R, North M, Griffiths J, Patterson S, Webster AD. Role of retroviruses in acquired hypogammaglobulinaemia. Clin Exp Immunol. 1988 Nov;74(2):177–181.
Castro A, Pedreira J, Soriano V, Hewlett I, Jhosi B, Epstein J, González-Lahoz J. Kaposi's sarcoma and disseminated tuberculosis in HIV-negative individual. Lancet. 1992 Apr 4;339(8797):868–8680 -
The early days of HIV and AIDs were probably the most honest because no one had built up their careers around supporting the HIV=AIDs hypotheses back then.HavingCrack wrote: »While there have been cases of AIDS without HIV, it isn't the norm. In fac the only medical literature I can locate referring to it dates from the very early 1990's.
Do you not think it was strange that cases of AIDS without HIV were in the literature and statistics back in the early 90's as you've said but are not now? All of a sudden there was no one getting AIDs that didn't already have HIV. Kinda odd don't you think?0 -
The early days of HIV and AIDs were probably the most honest because no one had built up their careers around supporting the HIV=AIDs hypotheses back then.
Do you not think it was strange that cases of AIDS without HIV were in the literature and statistics back in the early 90's as you've said but are not now? All of a sudden there was no one getting AIDs that didn't already have HIV. Kinda odd don't you think?
As I said there were some cases. However they still only accounted for a relatively small proportion of those infected with AIDS from what I've read, generally around 2%.
I think I linked to a report detailing cases of people in Africa with HIV who did not develop AIDS earlier in the the thread that dated from around 2000. But once again, it only accounted for 1-2% of those infected.
I would agree it does seem odd that much of the literature is dated. However it is possible that our scientific understanding of the link between HIV and AIDS has advanced hugely in 20 years.
The only issue I really have with AIDS is that many health organisations discount AIDS sufferers who are HIV negative, thereby skrewing the results. Clearly, this is wrong. However it is not a frequent enough occurance (from what I can see) to cause a massive variation in the correlation between HIV and AIDS.0 -
Once again, I'll point out that you don't become a famous scientist for agreeing with the crowd - you become successful and famous for disagreeing and being correct. That's what they hand out Nobel Prizes and the like for. Not for coming out with the 100th 'me too' paper proving something everyone believes anyway.The early days of HIV and AIDs were probably the most honest because no one had built up their careers around supporting the HIV=AIDs hypotheses back then.0 -
This is the very problem i'm talking about. HIV and AIDs might be two entirely separate things with an unsafe connection built between the two.
AIDs is rampant in africa BUT HIV is not. However, the HIV=AIDs camp largely remove those AIDs cases from their statistics because it messes up their results.
Deusberg has pointed this out several times and has never been contradicted on it by anyone in the established HIV=AIDs camp.
Deusberg is portrayed as a crank and a psycho but the reality is that very few of his teachings are actually challenged.
A quick look at Wikipedia shows that 88% of the world's HIV patients are living in Africa.
Not rampant?The early days of HIV and AIDs were probably the most honest because no one had built up their careers around supporting the HIV=AIDs hypotheses back then.
Do you not think it was strange that cases of AIDS without HIV were in the literature and statistics back in the early 90's as you've said but are not now? All of a sudden there was no one getting AIDs that didn't already have HIV. Kinda odd don't you think?
Honest? Or more error prone due to a lesser understanding of the connection between the two which is present today?0 -
If HIV is 'harmless', please explain how it develops into aids and eventually kills people?
and i've seen a number of people ask you this yet you haven't responded,
if it is so harmless, why don't you get infected with HIV and prove to us all that it's harmless?
please do. your ignorance is beyond forgiveness.0 -
Im Only 71Kg wrote: »there's a good chance someone of youth will read this...thread should be closed.
Oh, so a 6 year-old is gonna read it and say "Cool HIV doesn't cause AIDS. I'm off to shag someone without a rubber!" :rolleyes:0 -
OK 2wsxcde3, have a read of this:
http://www.niaid.nih.gov/topics/HIVAIDS/Understanding/howHIVCausesAIDS/Pages/HIVcausesAIDS.aspx
Pick out a few points from it which you are not satisfied with and we can address them individually.0 -
OK 2wsxcde3, have a read of this:
http://www.niaid.nih.gov/topics/HIVAIDS/Understanding/howHIVCausesAIDS/Pages/HIVcausesAIDS.aspx
Pick out a few points from it which you are not satisfied with and we can address them individually.
Thanks, this was a good article. it draws on the main points in discussion in the debate.
"AIDS and HIV infection are invariably linked in time, place and population group."
Another way of phrasing this would be:
AIDs and
- widespread famine in africa due to wars
- increased gay activity due to it's legalization
- increased drug use among people
"Many studies agree that only a single factor, HIV, predicts whether a person will develop AIDS."
I agree. And seeing how pretty much everyone who has HIV takes the highly toxic (deemed too toxic for cancer sufferers which it was initially intended for) drug AZT, there would consequently be a high correlation between HIV and AIDs. How do we know that HIV causes AIDs when a third party (AZT) is introduced into the mix nearly every time.
"In cohort studies, severe immunosuppression and AIDS-defining illnesses occur almost exclusively in individuals who are HIV-infected."
Same answer as above
"Before the appearance of HIV, AIDS-related diseases such as PCP, KS and MAC were rare in developed countries; today, they are common in HIV-infected individuals."
Same answer as above ...and this goes on for most of that article.
The thing is that do you not think it's a bit odd, that when we think of AIDs, we don't think of it as a disease like cancer which affects everyone worldwide in pretty much the same amounts however when we think of AIDs, we think of:
Gays,
Drug Users
Poor countries of africa
Are we to believe that AIDs is picky about whom it chooses to affect? That it doesn't like these groups of people but everyone else is pretty much non existant in the AIDs statistics worldwide. I mean have you ever gone for an STI test. Pretty much anyone can get chlimidia, gonerria and those types of diseases so they check for those. But when it comes to the HIV test they want to know if:
You have sex with men
Inject yourself with drugs
Have had sex with anyone from a foreign country such as the continent of africa
Do you not think it's a bit odd that AIDs seems to be confined to these groups? The exact groups whose activities have been proven to suppress the immune system. And don't come on here and say AIDs affects everyone equally. Any doctor whose out on the ground, meeting real people and doing real exams will tell you if you're not in one of the above groups, you don't have to worry about it.
...Sorry about the bold print, the html code is stuck on it for some reason.
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Just thinking about this... AIDS is a syndrome (it's in the name), which is just a collection of symptoms. I can see how it could be possible to be diagnosed with AIDS without having HIV. The symptoms may be caused my some other factor.0
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