Jad Adams, 'AIDS; The HIV myth' Macmillan London UK, St. Martin's Press New York USA 1989, ISBN 0-333-48930-6.

This book challenges the theory that AIDS is caused by a virus called HIV. It puts foward the view that in the rush to identify the cause of an apparently new disease, a harmless 'passenger' virus was leapt upon as the sole culprit.

It is believed by an increasing number of scientists that HIV is the wrong type of virus to cause a fatal disease. It is present in the bodies of patients in quantities too small for it to do so and is, anyway, inactive for most of its life.

The easiest of the arguments against HIV causing AIDS relates to the AIDS patients who have no trace of the virus - or even antibodies to it - despite being screened by the nost sophisticated methods. Unfortunately for research into this issue, so few AIDS patients now receive even an antibody test that we cannot be sure what they are carrying. Virtually anything could be causing their disease.

Conversely, the world is full of healthy people who have antibodies to HIV but show no signs of developing AIDS. The message of doom from early in the epidemic, based on estimates of the number of HIV infections, has not been borne out by a vast increase in AIDS cases or by the predicted spread of the syndrome outside the 'at risk' categories.

AIDS; The HIV Myth follows the early years of research and shows how the work from the failed virus-cancer research programme, attempting to discover viruses which cause cancer, was grafted on to AIDS research.

The result of the misidentification of HIV as the cause of AIDS has been the diversion of all research funds exclusively into HIV. The real cause of AIDS is not being investigated. Instead, an 'AIDS establishment' has come into being, committed to the HIV hypothesis and fiercely resisting anyone who challenges it.

AIDS: The Unheard Voices, the making of which led to the writing of this book, received the Royal Television Award for the best International Current Affairs Documentary. It gained high praise from the critics: 'important and accessible' (Independent), 'astonishing... impressive' (Daily Mail), 'startling' (Guardian), 'outstanding documentary' (Sunday Telegraph).

Jad Adams was educated at Sussex and London Universities. He trained as a newspaper journalist and won the Young Journalist of the Year Award, spending four years on Fleet Street before leaving to work in television. Since then he has worked on documentaries on a variety of subjects, including the international pharmaceutical industry, the life and death of Robert Calvi, animal experiments and food fads. His work has mainly involved rendering scientific controversies accessible to a popular audience. He has written for a wide variety of magazines and journals, including the Listener, New Scientist, The Lancet, The British Medical Journal and Company. He lives in London.

• The chapter about virus hunters.
• Book review published in Nature.
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