Note: Unpublished letter to the editor of The Australian.

Dr. Michael Rekart, speaking in Melbourne recently at the 3rd International Conference on the Biopsychosocial Aspects of HIV Infection ( Weekend Australian, 28/29th June), reported that despite an effective needle exchange program involving one million new needles annually over the past nine years, the prevalence of HIV infection amongst injecting drug users in the city of Vancouver has risen tenfold from 2% to 23.2%, the highest rate seen anywhere in the world and it is "not getting any better". Dr. Rekart’s explanation for this sticky anomaly in the HIV theory of AIDS is that cocaine users are simply too busy injecting to make use of clean needles. This may be true but then how does Dr. Rekart explain US Center for Disease Control data showing an even higher rate of "HIV antibodies" in non-injecting cocaine users? Rather, could Dr. Rekart’s data better represent the umpteenth clue to what is inexorably shaping up as the greatest scientific blunder of the twentieth century? Does HIV cause AIDS? Indeed, what is the evidence there is even a retrovirus HIV? In this regard, readers of The Australian may be interested to learn that in March this year, fourteen years and 100,000 scientific publications since the "discovery of HIV", two papers appeared in Virology revealing for the very first time what is actually in the stuff a generation of experts call "pure HIV" and use to extract proteins and RNA as diagnostic reagents to prove "HIV" infection in humans. These electron microscope pictures are derived from cell culture fluids prepared according to the density defining retroviral particles, a procedure which long before the AIDS era researchers at the Pasteur Institute regarded as the first, absolutely essential step in any scientific attempt to prove the existence of a retrovirus. As the micrographs unambiguously reveal, "pure HIV" is virtually all cellular material amongst which there are a few lonely particles bearing only the vaguest resemblance to retroviruses. Examination of these supposed "HIV particles" reveals that they are not the size and shape of retrovirus particles. However, since they have the same density as bona fide retroviral particles we deduce they must have corresponding more mass to make up for their larger volume (density=mass/volume). In one set of particles 750% more mass and volume than any bona fide retroviral particle could possibly have. Nonetheless, the authors of these papers assert that the particles are a retrovirus and they are HIV. Also and inexplicably, the authors do not prove that the particles are able to replicate, an essential additional step in proving a particle is a virus. (Plenty of particles can’t replicate so not all particles are viruses. Just what you wish if you’ve been sneezed on lately). Not that one should get too excited about particles even if they look exactly like retroviruses. They’re ubiquitous in Nature and for decades prior to the AIDS era were known to occur in all manner of places including healthy and (non-AIDS) diseased human tissues. And that’s not all. No cell-free particle with the dimensions of retroviruses called HIV ever photographed, or the most recent, appears to have even a solitary surface knob, that is, the knobs experts unanimously deem essential "landing gear" so that "HIV" can attach to and infect new cells. The sine qua non of replication. (Yet "HIV", obviously rendered with artists’ loving hands, is regularly seen on TV and in glossy magazines adorned with knobs). So, too big, too much mass, no landing gear and no proof of replication? Is it a retrovirus? Is it even a virus? Could you ever "catch" such a thing? From any kind of needle? Or from anywhere else? Sounds like we’re back where we started. Pictures of HIV? Or pictures of Lily? *

Dr. Valendar F. Turner