Does HIV cause AIDS?

Posts: 8235

Videos:

HIV - AIDS: Fact or Fiction?

AIDS: Lee Evans on the HIV tests

The Other Side of AIDS

HIV: The Greatest Medical Hoax of our Time

The Strecker Memorandum

Bayer Knowingly Distributes HIV Infected Drugs

Deconstructing The AIDS Myth

The Origin Of AIDS

http://www.davidicke.net/medicalarchives/aids/aidspoison.html

	Quote:
	A.I.D.S. (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) A SYNDROME a "collection of symptoms"

Quote:

The information the infected person will receive from the medical doctor, nurse, or other appointed health department officials will be that the HIV virus is the sole cause of Aids.
And that over the years the final result will be the breaking down of his or her immunity system.

The recommendation the person will receive is to start taking the AZT drug or a similar cocktail in order to prolong life and postpone death. A frightening and bleak prospect for the person in question. In the coming years many more people worldwide will pay a visit to their health departments or officials, as personal testing kits to discover if someone has been or has not been infected with HIV will become more and more available.

It may be better therefore to become your own Sherlok Holmes, developing your skills as a private detective to unravel the truth.

You won't usually get the following information from doctors or health officials:
1) Doctors Kill More People Than Guns and Traffic Accidents Combined. Ooooops!

2) Doctors and official health officials have not been trained in the Medical Schools to look for the causes but to treat symptoms. Neither have they been educated how to maintain, improve or recover the human immune system, other than by the treatment with drugs or by the means of surgery.

3) They are blindly following the guidelines of their Governmental Health Department which in its turn is financing, following and supporting the guidelines of the World Health Organisation which is maintained by the money collected from its citizens. (your tax money?)

4) There is not one single scientific document proving that HIV is the cause of AIDS, it is a HYPOTHESIS.

5) It was reported in 1996, that there are 65 known "false positive triggers" for HIV tests -- so how is it possible to know that people are infected and live with "HIV", taking into consideration the false and dubious test results?
(The false positive triggering conditions are included on this page.)

6) The recommendation of the drug AZT or the cocktails not only kills the virus but also the healthy cells. In other words, the treatment is to eliminate the virus while at the same time endangering the life of the patient and adding the case to the statistics published by the World Health Organisation. One could wonder if it would be more appropriate to call the World Health Organisation the World Pharmaceutical Organisation.

7) The world-wide brainwashing propaganda that AIDS is being caused by a virus, is financed by the AIDS establishment. The brilliant idea behind it is to first create a problem using fear and afterwards offering the solutions. The deadly HIV virus being the problem and the poisonous drugs, AZT, and the cocktails the solutions.

8) All other scientists, researchers, publishers, individuals are constantly being censored and ridiculed in order to avoid that people become aware of this assault on humanity.

9) The World Health Organisation, according an article published in 1983, has been influenced and taken over by pharmaceutical interests, playing the money game. This same World Health Organisation is also behind the push for the global vaccination programs and the fluoride propaganda machine poisoning children, adults and the environment.

10) Who knows but.... with the insistence of treating AIDS with toxic drugs, the censorship to avoid other points of views, it looks as if the AIDS Establishment is following the Global 2000 depopulation program, a global goal to eliminate at least 50% of the world population.

Therefore we suggest you to become your own Sherlock Holmes, a good detective, assuming your own responsibility by following your intuition.

"One of the intentions of corporate-controlled media is to instill in people a sense of disempowerment, of immobilisation and paralysis. Its outcome is to turn you into good, non-thinking consumers. It is to keep people isolated, to feel that there is no possibility for social change."

David Barsamian, journalist and publisher:

" The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate. "

Noam Chomsky, American linguist and US media and foreign policy critic

The AIDS files for you to discern;

World Health or World Pharmaceutical Organisation?

Since the Japanese Hiroshi Nakajima became top-ranking manager of the World Health organisation last year changes have been dramatic over there. Pharmaceutical industries are taking over rapidly. The headquarters in Geneva are quietly changing into a sycophantic bureaucracy, where officials (Nakajima only wants men) dare talk only in a whisper and anonymously. (translation of an article in Vrij Nederland of 21 October 1989 by Rudie van Meurs)
WORLD HEALTH OR WORLD PHARMACEUTICAL ORGANISATION

Factors Known to Cause False Positive HIV Antibody Test Results

The AIDS establishment has managed to convince many people that the HIV antibody tests (ELISA, IFA and Western blot) are "99.5% accurate". In this article Christine Johnson from HEAL Los Angeles, lists conditions documented in the scientific literature known to cause positives on these tests, and gives her references.

Since false-positives to every single HIV protein have been documented (36), how do you know the positive WB bands represent the various proteins to HIV, or just a collection of false-positive bands reacting to several different non-HIV antibodies?

Factors Known to Cause False-Positive HIV Antibody Test Results

AIDS TESTS (with the corresponding references)

HIV POSITIVE ? DEPENDS ON WHERE YOU LIVE...

THE HIV WESTERN BLOT TEST

The HIV Western blot consists of a thin nitrocellulose strip in which are embedded proteins claimed to be unique to HIV. Each protein is labelled with a 'p' followed by its molecular weight in thousands. Serum is added to the strip and if there are antibodies to a particular protein this band will 'light up'.

The HIV Western blot is not standardised and thus around the world different combinations of bands are considered positive. Hence a positive test in one country is not positive in another. An African would not be positive in Australia. A person from the MACS would not be positive anywhere in the world including Africa. Yet the HIV Western blot is considered to be highly specific and is considered synonymous with HIV infection.

According to data presented in Lundberg et al. (JAMA 260:674-679) when the US FDA criteria are used to interpret the HIV Western blot less than 50% of US AIDS patients are HIV positive whereas 10% of persons not at risk of AIDS are also positive by the same criteria.
HIV WESTERN BLOT TEST

AZT is death.

By Celia Farber
Spin Aug. 1993

Celia Farber picks up the pieces of a shattered medical establishment at the Ninth International Conference on AIDS in Berlin.

To anybody who has followed the literature on AZT throughout, this is not news at all, but merely "official" confirmation of what has been known for years. If one had launched a full-scale truth-finding expedition - groping through the fallen rubble of AZT propaganda to find the kernel of truth underneath it all - the Anglo-French Concorde study would not have seemed revelatory at all.

Concorde went on for three years, examining 1,749 HIV-positive but healthy people at 38 health centers in the U.K., Ireland, and France. Because the research lasted the longest of all AZT studies to fate, and its pedigree was unassailable (it was conducted by the highly reputable British Medical Research Council and its French equivalent), Concorde could not be dismissed.

The team concluded that AZT - a highly toxic and carcinogenic drug - neither prolongs life nor staves off symptoms of AIDS in people who are HIV-antibody positive but still healthy. The blueprint for the Concorde "disappointment" has been in the literature for many years. As we reported in November 1989, the first objective study was completed in France in 1988 and was published with very little fanfare in the Lancet, a British medical journal.

The study found that AZT was too toxic for most people to tolerate, had no lasting effect on HIV blood levels, and left the patients with fewer CD4 cells than they had started with.

If Concorde appeared surprising, it was because we in the U.S. have been captivated by self-induced AZT mythology for so many years. It was our FDA that approved AZT for use in 1987 based on very flimsy data and with a little arm-twisting, and it was our National institutes of Health (NIH) that expanded the parameters for AZT to be given to all healthy, HIV-positive people. In 1989, the NIH cited a study, known as Protocol 019, that it said had "clearly shown" that early administration of AZT would keep AIDS at bay in that population.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), recommended that anyone with HIV antibodies and less than 500 CD4 cells should start taking AZT at once. At that time, that meant 650,000 people in the U.S. I had heard that the Concorde team had been under tremendous pressure from AZT's manufacturer. Burroughs Wellcome, to soften its results.
AZT IS DEATH

AZT ON TRIAL

By John Lauritsen
New York Native 19 Oct. 1987

I argued in a previous article (Native #215) that the theory behind AZT (now known by its trade name of Retrovir) was false, inasmuch as the hypothesis that HIV causes AIDS has been refuted by Prof. Peter H. Duesberg, a world-renowned molecular biologist at Berkeley; that AZT's alleged benefits were not backed up by reliable evidence; that its toxicities were firmly established and severe; and that therefore the drug should not be prescribed, recommended, or used.

In his interview with me (Native #220), Prof. Duesberg referred to AZT as "a poison" and as "cytotoxic" (lethal to body cells). Duesberg said that the theories behind AZT were false, that there was "no rationale for treating with AZT", that prescribing AZT was "highly irresponsible", and that AZT was "guaranteed" to be harmful: AZT hits all DNA that is made.

It is hell for the bone marrow, which is where the T and B cells and all those things are made. It's hell for that. It has a slight preference for viral DNA polymerase compared to cellular DNA polymerase, and that's based on in vitro studies only, but that's certainly not absolute.

It kills normal cells quite, quite extensively. At the time these articles were published, the only reports on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) trial that was the basis for granting government approval to market AZT, were in the popular media or a promotional film produced by AZT's manufacturer, Burroughs-Wellcome. Doctors who prescribed AZT did so on the basis on very limited information, along with the assurances of the Public Health Service that AZT represented the "best hope".
AZT ON TRIAL

AZT
Chemical Name: Azidothymidine
Generic Name: Zidovudine
Nick Name: AZT
Brand Name: Retrovir Â® (Retrovis Â®)
Manufacturer: Glaxo-Wellcome

The label on an AZT bottle from the Sigma Co.

The AZT advisory on the label reads: "TOXIC. Toxic by inhalation, in contact with skin and if swallowed. Target organ(s): Blood bone marrow. If you feel unwell, seek medical advice (show the label where possible). Wear suitable protective clothing." Note the skull and bones on the label; the indication for a deathly poison (bottle contains only 100 mg, healthy people are prescribed 500 to 1500 mg a day)
AZT INDEX

AZT ROULETTE

The impossible choices facing HIV-positive women.
By Celia Farber
Mothering Sept./Oct. 1998

The story of Kris Chmiel

Kris Chmiel is a housewife and mother of two young children, living in Denver. When she was pregnant with her second child, a movement had just gotten under way to test all pregnant women in the state of Colorado for HIV, the virus widely believed to cause AIDS. (Critics remind us that what is tested for is not, in fact, HIV, but antibodies to HIV.) She was perfectly healthy and in her first month of pregnancy. She wasn't worried -- she had been monogamous with her husband for the past nine years.

When the test came back "positive," she literally did not believe it. Her doctors strongly urged her to immediately start taking the AIDS drug AZT, in an effort to prevent transmission to her child. "They finally wore me down," she says, "even though it was totally against my intuition." In her fifth month of pregnancy, Chmiel began taking 500 milligrams of AZT, a drug that has been routinely given to pregnant HIV-positive women following a 1994 study -- ACTG 076 -- which claimed efficacy in reducing the transmission from mother to child.
(1) (AZT stands for azidothymidine and is marketed under the names Zidovudine or Retrovir.)
AZT ROULETTE

OPPOSED TO AIDS DRUGS, MOTHERS GO UNDERGROUND

Mainstream doctors say 'fringe' science is risking lives of children By Mark Kennedy
The Ottawa Citizen 7 Sept. 1999

A growing number of HIV-positive mothers in Canada and the United States are going into hiding as part of an "underground railroad" to avoid having their children treated with anti-AIDS drugs. Some of the Canadian women, concerned that child-protection agencies will take away their babies, are fleeing to the U.S. to remain anonymous and stay beyond the reach of doctors.

The development is part of a recent trend that is infuriating the country's leading AIDS doctors and researchers. A group of U.S.-based dissident scientists has argued for years that HIV is not the cause of AIDS and there's no point in taking the drug cocktails designed to prevent the virus from turning into AIDS.

They argue the side effects of the drugs are so severe that they pose a greater risk to the patient than HIV itself. Montreal doctor Mark Wainberg, president of the International AIDS Society, dismisses the dissidents as "fringe people" who are trying to "make themselves out to be more important than they are." He wishes people would just ignore them so their views aren't given credence.

"Let me give you an example. There are people out there who deny that the Holocaust happened. Do we want to give them equal credibility?" Nonetheless, it appears the message is getting out, despite the best efforts of the medical community to persuade people with HIV that the anti-viral drugs offer the best, if not the only hope, of staying healthy.
MOTHERS GO UNDERGROUND

SINS OF OMISSION-The AZT Scandal

By Celia Farber
Spin Nov. 1989

On a cold January day in 1987, inside one of the brightly-lit meeting rooms of the monstrous FDA building, a panel of 11 top AIDS doctors pondered a very difficult decision. They had been asked by the FDA to consider giving lightning-quick approval to a highly toxic drug about which there was very little information. Clinically called Zidovudine, but nicknamed AZT after its components, the drug was said to have shown a dramatic effect on the survival of AIDS patients.

The study that had brought the panel together had set the medical community abuzz. It was the first flicker of hope - people were dying much faster on the placebo than on the drug. But there were tremendous concerns about the new drug. It had actually been developed a quarter of a century earlier as a cancer chemotherapy, but was shelved and forgotten because it was so toxic, very expensive to produce, and totally ineffective against cancer. Powerful, but unspecific, the drug was not selective in its cell destruction.

Drug companies around the world were sifting through hundreds of compounds in the race to find a cure, or at least a treatment, for AIDS. Burroughs Wellcome, a subsidiary of Wellcome, a British drug company, emerged as the winner. By chance, they sent the failed cancer drug, then known as Compound S, to the National Cancer Institute along with many others to see if it could slay the AIDS dragon, HIV. In the test tube at least, it did.

At the meeting, there was a lot of uncertainty and discomfort with AZT. The doctors who had been consulted knew that the study was flawed and that the long-range effects were completely unknown. But the public was almost literally baying at the door. Understandably, there was immense pressure on the FDA to approve AZT even more quickly than they had approved thalidomide in the mid-60s, which ended up causing drastic birth defects.
SINS OF OMISSION-THE AZT SCANDAL

HIV VOODOO FROM BURROUGHS-WELLCOME

By John Lauritsen
New York Native 7 Jan. 1991 [revised 16 Jan. 1991]

Those who have eyes to see are witnessing genocide-the genocide of gay men.
Milli

Unscrupulous pharmaceutical companies, corrupt government officials, venal physicians, stupid and cowardly media people, incompetent and dishonest researchers-none of these things are new. They are business as usual. Where, then, does the buck stop?

Who is responsible for pharmacogenocide?
My thinking on this question was altered recently when I read Confessions of a Medical Heretic by Robert Mendelsohn, who uncompromisingly places the blame on the members of his own profession: Despite the obvious corruption of the drug company/doctor marketing connection, I don't blame the drug companies, the detail men, the government agencies which are supposed to police these activities, or the patients who badger their doctors for drugs.

Doctors have enough facts in their possession to know what's going on. Even where the drug is fully tested and the side effects and limitations of the drug are well known, most of the harm is done by doctors indiscriminately prescribing the drug. Doctors, after all, are the ones who claim the sacred power and the ethical superiority that goes with it.

The drug companies are in business to make money, and they do that by selling as much of their product as they can at as high a price as they can. And although the drug companies subvert the scientific process through which drugs are tested, certified, and made available to doctors, once the drugs are available, they do let doctors know-albeit subtly-just what these drugs can and cannot do. All of us who know the truth about AZT will have to do what we can. Friends who are on AZT must be told directly and forcefully that they must get off the drug if they want to live. Public health officials, representatives of AIDS organizations, and various and sundry other "AIDS experts" must be confronted with their lies.

Above all, doctors must be told that they have no right to prescribe a drug that can only lead to the deaths of their patients. The buck stops with the AZT-pushing doctors.
They are responsible. *
HIV VOODOO FROM BURROUGHS-WELLCOME

POISON BY PRESCRIPTION-THE AZT STORY

By John Lauritzen

This is the story of a toxic drug, with no scientifically proven benefits, which is being given to thousands of people, including who are perfectly healthy. It is a collusion among corrupt government officials, incompetent researchers, and an unscrupulous pharmaceutical company.
POISON BY DESCRiPTION-THE AZT STORY

The AIDS Catch

In 1987 the Centre for Disease Control in Atlanta USA, revised and broadened its definition of AIDS, listing 25 diseases. So many different diseases points away from one single viral cause argues Peter Duesberg.

DR. PETER DUESBERG: "AIDS is a collection or syndrome of 25 old diseases, conventional diseases. Not one of them is new. They've all been known for centuries, or at least for decades. With the provision that you have to find antibody to HIV or you Â or virus or some other traces of that virus, when they are found then those who believe in the virus as the cause of AIDS, say, those 25 diseases, any one of them or combination of them, are caused by the virus.

For example, if you have tuberculosis and you find HIV, they say HIV has done it. Eighty years ago, a hundred years ago Robert Koch used to say tuberculosis bacillus has done it."
THE AIDS CATCH (MEDITEL 1999)

AIDS AND AFRICA

Meditel 1993

At Old Mulago Hospital, Dr. Martin Okot-Nwang is in charge of the TB wards. He is concerned about the way TB and AIDS statistics are being wrongly reported. TB is a disease that occurs where there is poverty, malnutrition and lack of medicines. Conditions all rife in today's Uganda. Figures have doubled recently in these wards.

The rise in TB cases in Africa has led some scientists to speculate that the HIV virus is making some people more susceptible to the disease but it is hard to find any evidence for this. What IS documented is that flaws in the clinical case definition, that is the combination of symptoms used for diagnosing AIDS without an HIV test, have meant that many TB cases have mistakenly been called AIDS.
AIDS AN AFRICA

New US Government Guidelines & Home-Testing Kits

New government guidelines for tracking the AIDS virus are getting mixed reviews from advocates, who say the old system was outdated but the new one raises privacy concerns. The guidelines, published Thursday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, asks states to report all HIV cases rather than just cases of full-blown AIDS.

Testing sites would report HIV cases and patient names or identifying codes to state health departments, which would pass case data on to the CDC. Names and other identifying information would be kept at the state level. States that don't comply with the guidelines risk losing federal funding for HIV surveillance ranging from $50,000 for Wyoming to $3 million for New York City.

The guidelines will mainly affect people who request an HIV test during visits to their regular doctor or when having lab work done that goes on their medical record. Most states have clinics that offer anonymous HIV tests, and home-testing kits can be bought over-the-counter at many drug stores.
New US Government Guidelines

Censoring the other news about Aids
AIDS CENSORSHIP

Regular updates from AIDS Frontnews
AIDS FRONT NEWS

Inventing the Aids Virus (ISBN 0-89526-470-6)
By Peter Duesberg
"We know that to err is human, but the HIV/AIDS hypothesis is one hell of a mistake. I say this rather strongly as a warning. Deusberg has been saying it for a long time"
-Kary B Mullis, Nobel prize in chemistry, 1993-

Peter Deusberg is a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California at Berkeley, a pioneer in retrovirus research, and a recipient of the Outstanding Grant from the national Insitute of Health. His articles challenging the HIV/AIDS hypothesis have appeared in scientific journals worldwide including The New England Journal of Medicine, Science, Nature, The Lancet, British medical Journal, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
Peter Duesberg Homepage

And more links

http://buildfreedom.com/aidsdir.htm
http://www.buildfreedom.com/tl/tl09a.shtml
http://www.mmsweb.com/eykiw/aids/aids.htm
http://aids-info.net/
http://www.geniusideas.com/aidsgate/
http://www.webleyweb.com/tle/le951101.html
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/6443/aids.html
http://www.artnet.net/~acharya/truth/aids.htm
http://pages.prodigy.net/johnhunter2/hivaids.htm
http://www.zolatimes.com/v2.30/aidsexis.html m

Last edited by madthumbs on Tue Feb 19, 2008 6:46 am; edited 9 times in total

Posts: 8235

Quote:

"Elite" HIV patients mystify doctors

Wed Aug 16, 2006 5:50 PM ET

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent

TORONTO (Reuters) - As many as one in 300 HIV patients never get sick and never suffer damage to their immune systems and AIDS experts said on Wednesday they want to know why.

Most have gone unnoticed by the top researchers, because they are well, do not need treatment and do not want attention, said Dr. Bruce Walker of Harvard Medical School.

But Walker and colleagues want to study these so-called "elite" patients in the hope that their cases can help in the search for a vaccine or treatments.

"What in the heck is going on in people that successfully control this virus?" Walker asked a news conference held at the 16th International Conference on AIDS.

"If we can figure out how people are doing that, we can try to replicate it."

So far Walker and colleagues have not been able to find out why certain people can live for 15 years and longer with the virus and never get ill. The AIDS virus usually kills patients within two years if they are not treated.

Some even appear to have weak immune responses, he noted. "Is it just that these people got infected with a wimpy virus? The answer to that is no," Walker said.

"Some of the people know who infected them," he added, and in those cases, the person who infected the "elite" patients always went on to become ill.

A few years into the AIDS epidemic, researchers identified people who were called "long-term non-progressors." These were patients infected with HIV who did not become ill.

Many have become ill as the years have gone by, and required treatment.

Walker said a few of the long-term non-progressors were now classified as "elite" patients. But the difference is that the "elite" status is clearly defined by how much virus they have circulating in their blood.

Loreen Willenberg, of Diamond Springs, California, is a newly designated "elite." Now 52 and healthy, she said she became infected in 1992.

BAD DREAM

"I dreamed that I was HIV positive," Willenberg told the news conference.

"I was really going through a very bad flu." She sought testing, and after getting an inconclusive result was later declared HIV positive.

HIV patients are not immediately put onto drugs that can keep them healthy, but wait until the virus reaches a certain level in the blood or until the virus kills a certain number of immune system cells called CD4 T-cells.

Willenberg, a landscape designer, never got to that point.

"I am in perfect health. I think I have had maybe only one cold in the past 14 years," she said.

Walker has tracked down 200 elite patients and has now joined up with other prominent AIDS researchers to find at least 1,000 "elites" in North America and as many as possible globally.

Based on research done so far, Walker estimates there are 2,000 of them in the United States.

His team wants to take blood and DNA samples to see what might be different about them. Confidentiality is promised.

The recently published map of the human genome will make this possible.

They will compare key genetic sequences of the "elite" patients to genetic readouts from healthy people and from other HIV patients. Maybe a few genetic variations can explain what is happening, Walker hopes.

Reuters

Posts: 80

How about they look at Life style and diet of non progressors?

Posts: 3

Funny I had that video forever on my Myspace page, and I thought I got it from here! That's how much I depend on this site for mind-breaking videos. Keep up the good work.

Posts: 1737

This Video tries to link Aids to the Polio vacine. But what is important and overlooked in this video is - that they tested old blood samples or polio samples from the 60's and found HIV - which fits with Dr Peter D.'s idea that HIV has been around a long time and is Harmless.

Posts: 1737

http://www.duesberg.com/
and
http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/index/pduesberg.htm
and
http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/index.htm

The inventor of the polymerase chain reaction, a technique used in AIDS tests, Dr. Kary Mullis, 1993 Nobel prize winner, questions HIV and AIDS.

Posts: 1737

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9B0DE7D8103EF935A15756C0A961948260

interesting that 2 cofactors listed are

Alcohol and drugs, chemicals, infections by other microbes, poor nutrition

THE DOCTOR'S WATCH; DOES THE AIDS VIRUS WORK ALONE?

Article Tools Sponsored By
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN, M.D.
Published: May 26, 1987

LEAD: WHY do some people infected with the AIDS virus fall ill and soon die while other virus carriers remain healthy for years?

WHY do some people infected with the AIDS virus fall ill and soon die while other virus carriers remain healthy for years?

The question is one of the most pressing and perplexing problems in research on AIDS, and as scientists search for the answer they are increasingly intrigued by the prospect that co-factors may play a critical role in the progression of the viral infection to disease.

Co-factors, such as drugs, chemicals, infections by other microbes or genetic differences, may act in concert with the AIDS virus to cause acquired immune deficiency syndrome. The assumption is that those who remain healthy or have only mild symptoms fare better because they are not affected by such co-factors. The hope is that identification and control of co-factors will provide a barrier to the relentless march of AIDS.

Since Louis Pasteur's discoveries that many diseases are produced by microbes, most doctors have tended to think of infections as being caused only by a single specific organism that acts on its own.

But that explanation has never been totally satisfactory. Many people get infected with disease-causing-microbes, but in most cases only some of the carriers become ill. Differences in nutrition have long been known to affect susceptibility to diseases such as tuberculosis. Still, scientists have given relatively little attention to specific co-factors that help determine who becomes ill from a particular disease agent.

In the case of AIDS, British scientists recently reported evidence that genetic differences in a blood protein may influence a person's susceptibility to the AIDS virus. But some scientists are also looking for other factors, perhaps involving differences in health history and behavior.

The key questions are:

* Is infection by the AIDS virus alone sufficient to cause disease?

* If not, what other factors determine the course of the infection?

* If co-factors for AIDS are discovered, can this knowledge be used to prevent disease in infected people?

Doctors have cited a wide variety of possible factors that govern an individual's reaction to infection. Among them: alcoholism, poor nutrition, genetics, immunological deficiencies and other individually varying biological characteristics.

For example, doctors have learned that people who inherit a cell membrane factor called HLA-B27 and who become infected with certain bacteria such as shigella and salmonella are more prone to an arthritic condition called Reiter's syndrome.

Doctors have not used the term co-factors to describe the additional elements that may interact with microbes to cause infectious diseases. Indeed, medical dictionaries define co-factors only in terms of enzymes or blood components, not infections. Medical textbooks do not list co-factors in their indexes in reference to infectious diseases.

However, doctors have speculated about co-factors in medical journal articles in connection with AIDS throughout the six years that this infectious disease has been recognized.

To many, the application of the word in the context of AIDS research reflects an important broadening of research. Also, AIDS virus infection takes years to produce disease and the infection persists for life. Thus, greater chance exists for possible co-factors to have an impact on the progression of infection to disease.

To some, employing the concept of co-factors is designed to obfuscate, even hide medicine's ignorance about AIDS and inability to come up with either a drug to cure or a vaccine to prevent it. But others are so strongly convinced of what they perceive as the critical role of co-factors in AIDS that they are almost religiously committed to one or another candidate, such as nutritional items or other microbes.

Even those who doubt the existence of AIDS co-factors tend to agree that research on them should be pursued because of the enormous impact the epidemic is having throughout the world.

THE DOCTOR'S WATCH; DOES THE AIDS VIRUS WORK ALONE?

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By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN, M.D.
Published: May 26, 1987

The idea of co-factors in the development of AIDS-related diseases has been greatly stimulated by an epidemiological observation about a cancer of the skin and blood vessels called Kaposi's sarcoma. Hitherto rare and tending to strike older men, Kaposi's sarcoma now occurs frequently among homosexual men with AIDS, while it is relatively uncommon among patients who became infected through intravenous drug use or contaminated blood transfusions.

This has led many scientists to postulate that some virus or chemical might be a co-factor in producing Kaposi's sarcoma in AIDS patients. Some scientists have theorized, for example, that drugs containing nitrates, used by some homosexual men, may be such a co-factor. Such a link remains unproven. $ ? * * *

However, scientists have now come up with evidence of two types of co-factors for AIDS - one infectious, the other genetic.

Evidence for infectious co-factors comes from studies of African and American homosexual and heterosexual men. The studies were prompted by the striking and puzzling differences in the way AIDS seems to spread among different populations. In Africa, AIDS is believed to be spread chiefly by heterosexual intercourse and it appears to spread this way more readily than in North America and Europe, where homosexual men and users of intravenous drugs have been the main victims.

According to the theory, the immune systems of individuals who have one or more other chronic infections are in a chronically activated state. This might make it easier for the AIDS virus to infect a person, or facilitate its deadly spread once inside the body.

These other chronic infections include syphilis and toxoplasmosis and those caused by cytomegalovirus, Epstein-Barr virus, hepatatis A and B viruses, and herpes simplex viruses. Many of these infections are sexually transmitted, and they are common among homosexual men in the United States and among heterosexuals in parts of Africa.

A study reported in the May 15 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association found that 38 African and 60 American AIDS patients, 100 African heterosexual men and women, and 100 American homosexual men had the same frequency of infection with these organisms. According to the study carried out by American, Belgian and Zairian doctors, all four groups had a significantly greater prevalence of such infections than did 100 American heterosexual men.

In other words, American homosexual men are being assailed by these organisms at about the same frequency as Africans.

Earlier this month British scientists reported finding the first evidence that genetic differences make some people more susceptible than others to infection with the AIDS virus or, when infected, to development of disease. Dr. Anthony J. Pinching and his team in London found that people with one inherited form of a protein called group specific component appeared to be less vulnerable to the AIDS virus and that people with a second variant of the protein are highly susceptible to the virus.

The report has stimulated other researchers to try to confirm the findings and search for other possible genetic co-factors for AIDS. $ ? * * *

Proof that some co-factors exist for AIDS will not necessarily tell people infected with the AIDS virus what they most want to know: how to avoid developing the disease. Still, in the absence of a cure, such knowledge could be useful. If the presence of other infections facilitates the spread of the AIDS virus, for example, then AIDS virus carriers would do well to avoid any behavior that might expose them to those microbes.

Although medical journal articles and textbooks do not now refer to co-factors as crucial components in other infections, a finding that co-factors are important in explaining the course of AIDS in individuals could have enormous implications for other infectious diseases. If so, the word co-factor may appear much more often in the medical literature.

Posts: 1737

Since I have met 5 Thai people who have died from Aids, I can only tell you that life in Thailand is rough. Clean water - Ie Parasites, Nutrition - most people are poor, and of those that have died, that I personally met, they were poor. Many Thai people like to drink, and many drink Moonshine. I can tell you that Malaria and other diseases are present due to the Mosquitoes in Thailand.

Posts: 1

I mean really i feel as if it is the drug AZT that kills millions of ppl, the drug itself is poison, just like a lot of other so called prescription drugs out there. If your mind is brainwashed into thinking that you have a life threatning disease then your mind will actually lead you into self destruction physically and spiritually, its all about self strength and beliefs. Also if ya practice a healthy lifestyle, diet and in touch with your spirituality, i feel you can overcome anything. vfs

Posts: 8235

I've read how ~90% of disease is supposedly created by our minds, however it appears to me that most people with a disease have a direct cause for that disease. Take a look at the additives in foods that make us sick: http://opposingdigits.com/additives/ and just imagine what drugs, their additives, pesticides, and pollution does.

Posts: 226

Does HIV cause AIDS?

NO!

Posts: 16

Gambia's president claims he can cure AIDS using herbs and bananas

Source: http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=276502007

Quote:

FROM the pockets of his billowing white robe, Gambia's president pulls out a plastic container, closes his eyes in prayer and rubs a green herbal paste on to the ribcage of his patient. He then orders the thin man to swallow a bitter yellow drink, followed by two bananas.

"Whatever you do there are bound to be sceptics, but I can tell you my method is foolproof," Yahya Jammeh says, surrounded by his bodyguards inside his presidential compound as he prepares to treat more patients.
Living.scotsman.com MPU

"Mine is not an argument, mine is a proof. It's a declaration. I can cure AIDS, and I will."

In a continent suffering from the world's worst AIDS epidemic, claims of miracle cures like those of Mr Jammeh are alarming public health workers already struggling against the corrosive effect of faith-healers dispensing herbal remedies.

The biggest concern to experts is that Mr Jammeh requires his patients to stop taking their anti-retroviral drugs, a dangerous move, since doing so can weaken the body's immune system, making the patient prone to infection, said Dr Antonio Filipe, the local head of the World Health Organisation in neighbouring Senegal.

Dr Filipe was diplomatic about Mr Jammeh's claims, saying that his organisation respects the president's point of view. But he added: "As the World Health Organisation, we would like to state quite clearly the following - No. 1: so far there is no cure for AIDS."

Mr Jammeh, a 41-year-old former army colonel who wrested control of his country in a coup in 1994, says his treatment is entirely voluntary.

He has gone to great lengths to prove his claim, arranging for blood samples of the first nine patients to be sent to a lab in Senegal for testing. A letter on the lab's stationery indicates that of the nine, four had undetectable viral loads, one had a moderate viral load and three had high loads, a result posted on the government's website as proof of the cure. However, the lab technician who performed the tests warned they are not conclusive, since the blood samples were taken only after the treatment.

"There is no baseline ... you can't prove that someone has been cured of AIDS from just one data point. It's dishonest of the Gambian government to use our results this way," said Dr Coumba Toure Kane, head of the molecular biology unit at Senegal's Cheikh Anta Diop University.

The patients say they do not need lab results to tell them they feel better."It feels as if the president took the pain out of my body," says Ousman Sowe, 54, who says he was diagnosed with HIV in 1996.

Mr Sowe was among the first batch of nine men and women who were treated by Mr Jammeh.

"My appetite has come back and I have gained weight," said Lamin Ceesay, thin from a nine-year battle with HIV.
THE FULL TREATMENT

SINCE January, when he announced his cure, Mr Jammeh has thrown the bureaucratic machinery of his small west African country behind his claim. Although compared to other African nations, Gambia has a relatively low rate of HIV infection - 1.3 per cent of the 1.6 million population - the last six press releases on the country's official website are dedicated to the president's treatment. Radio and TV publicise his alleged cure, available to Gambians free. The health ministry has declared its support.

The claim of a cure has prompted comparisons to the South African minister of health who won international ridicule last year for suggesting that garlic, beetroot and lemon juice were more effective than anti-retroviral drugs.

Posts: 2699

http://www.altheal.org/toxicity/house.htm

Posts: 36

i seen this on my frontpage of yahoo news, the first three lines will get the point across but i included the whole article for accuracy

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070422/ap_en_tv/cdc_in_hollywood_2

By MIKE STOBBE, AP Medical Writer
Sun Apr 22, 2:36 PM ET

UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. - Two AIDS doctors made a house call last month to the set of TV's "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit." The plot line was the suggestion that HIV doesn't cause AIDS — a fringe theory promoted on the Internet and by certain African leaders. But the two physicians weren't there to doctor the script.

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They just wanted to make sure the TV show followed some standard doctor advice: First, do no harm.

Surveys show that most people believe the medical information they see on television dramas and soap operas. With fictional TV shows playing such a powerful role in public health education, the government is dedicated to keeping an eye on what Hollywood says. That's why the CDC is one of four government health agencies that fund the "Hollywood, Health & Society" program at the University of Southern California. The program has an annual budget of nearly $564,000.

It's run by a former CDC employee, Vicki Beck, but the real "talent" are government health officials and other medical experts the program sets up with writers of daytime soap operas, nighttime dramas and other shows.

To be sure, many TV shows consult with doctors, lawyers and others professionals on plot details. Some even hire physicians to be writers. The executive producer of "Law & Order: SVU" is an MD.

Still, some TV and movie scripts skirt — or outright ignore — the practical limitations of the real world. Some low points:

_"Medical Investigation," an NBC series in 2004-05, made health officials cringe. The show didn't even get the names right: The series' heroes did the out-in-the-field epidemic detective work of the CDC, but were identified as employees of the National Institutes of Health, a federal agency that's more focused on lab science. Worse, the heroes wore leather jackets instead of protective gear when checking for a deadly pathogen.

_"Fatal Contact," an ABC movie last spring about bird flu reaching the United States, was denounced as unrealistic by some prominent flu experts for, among other things, showing an Angolan village strewn with bloody bodies that looked more like a mass suicide than an area hit by flu.

_"Outbreak," a 1995 motion picture starring Dustin Hoffman, involves a government plan to bomb a California town to stop the spread of an Ebola-like contagion. But CDC officials insist that they would not deal with such an outbreak by bombing towns.

Beck's program tries to head off such errors.

The CBS show "Numbers" is one example. "Numbers" writer David Harden called, saying he was pursuing a plotline about black market profiteering in human organs. TV writers like the topic because of it's dramatic potential and persistent hold on the public imagination: Who hasn't heard the urban myth about the man who meets a hot woman in a bar and wakes up in a bathtub full of ice?

Health officials, however, hate it. They say there is no black market in organs in the United States, and dramatizing the idea may dissuade Americans from becoming organ donors.

But the program took Harden's call and convinced some experts to talk to him. One in particular was skeptical of the plot idea at first, Harden recalled, but answered every question.

The resulting show, which aired in January 2006, was about an international black market that provided detailed information on how the national organ matching program works. Health officials deemed it a success: In a subsequent online survey of about 160 people who said they were not organ donors, 10 percent said they had decided to become donors after watching the episode.

Another success occurred a few years ago with the Fox show "24."

The show was interested in this scenario: Terrorists release a biological agent in a hotel air conditioning system, making people sick in a matter of minutes and killing roughly 2,000 people within a few hours. They concocted a genetically engineered "Cordella virus" to do it, and wanted government officials to be able to wave an electronic device that could instantly detect the virus in the air.

They consulted CDC officials, who said there are no such devices. The CDC also suggested that health officials might try to deal with such a situation by isolating the ill from the well, perhaps reducing the contagion's impact, said Dr. Mitchell Cohen, director of CDC's Coordinating Center for Infectious Diseases.

The writers took the tip, and the final death toll fell to under 800. "We saved 1,200 virtual people," said Cohen, who consulted with the "24" writers and did an on-camera interview for the DVD boxed set of the series.

CDC officials make time for Hollywood meetings, because they know what's on screen can be influential. In a 2000 CDC-sponsored survey, more than half of TV viewers said they trust health information on prime-time shows to be accurate, and about one-quarter said prime-time television is one of their top three sources of health information.

Health-focused plots, and sympathetic characters dealing with disease, do seem to stir public reaction. Just one example: A CDC study that chronicled the impact of a 2001 story line on a soap opera, "The Bold and The Beautiful," in which a heterosexual male Hispanic character was diagnosed with HIV. The phone number to a CDC hotline for AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases was televised immediately after the episodes, and calls to the hotline spiked from about 100 calls a day to more than 1,400.

Program officials present themselves as resources, not advocates, so there's been little push to get smoking characters to drop the habit push or eat more fruits and vegetables.

They also do relatively little with the movies. The CDC placed a smoking prevention employee in Hollywood in 2002 as a liaison with the motion picture industry, but stopped funding the effort in 2004. Beck hasn't tried to fill that void.

"Film is too difficult to track and influence because of the many years, writers and stages of change that a film undergoes before it is released," she said.

Health officials acknowledge that it can be tough to work in Hollywood, a town that's driven by relationships. They acknowledge to being cautious about taking steps that might be seen as challenging or critical of entertainment leaders.

That's a failing, said Stanton Glantz, a University of California-San Francisco researcher who leads a campaign to remove smoking from the movies. He's critical of how little success the CDC and others have had in diminishing episodes of cinematic smoking, which he said declined only slightly from 1999 to 2006.

Glantz alluded to recent statistics that show, in the last three years, a leveling off in the decline in both teen and adult smoking.

The CDC's approach "does raise consciousness. It does educate people. But it just hasn't had any effect," he said.

"They should follow the lead of several state and local health departments and start pushing for policy changes — most notably an R rating for smoking," he said.

Beck's work includes not only arranging consultations but also holding the "Sentinel for Health" awards, which recognizes TV shows that do fact-based story lines with positive public health impact.

A Sentinel for Health may lack the cache an Emmy, but writers said the award is noted and appreciated.

"It reflects that hard work that we put in to accurately portray health issues that affect Americans," said Paul Grellong, a writer for "Law & Order: SVU."

Grellong and four of the show's other writers sat in on the recent meeting at Universal Studios with the two HIV experts, Dr. Joseph Cadden and Dr. Jocelyn Suzette Dee of L.A.'s Rand Schrader Clinic.

The meeting was run by Josh Kotcheff, the writer penning the episode, who sat with the doctors at a conference table. The other writers sat on a nearby couch with notebooks, listening for future-episode fodder.

Kotcheff peppered the two with questions about disease theories and the intricacies of HIV testing. He listened intently to their replies. Later, he said he wanted not only to master the realism-ensuring details, but also to be responsible in how he presents characters that deny HIV causes AIDS.

"There are people who do believe these kinds of myths, and it can have an impact on their lives. If they don't take (HIV-fighting) meds, they're going to die," he said.

Posts: 1

Thank you for the info, too bad the sites cannot be found anymore.

Cheers
__________________

For pleasures past I do not grieve, nor perils gathering near; My greatest grief is that I leave nothing that claims a tear.

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