VIRUSMYTH HOMEPAGE
Pharmac. & Ther. Vol. 55: 201-277, 1992
AIDS ACQUIRED BY DRUG CONSUMPTION AND OTHER NONCONTAGIOUS
RISK FACTORS
PETER
H. DUESBERG
Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, 229 Stanley Hall, University
of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, U.S.A.
6. Why Did AIDS Science Go Wrong?
6.1. The Legacy of the Successful Germ
Theory: A Bias Against Noninfectious Pathogens
Unlike any other scientific hypothesis, the virus-AIDS
hypothesis became national American dogma before it could be reviewed by
the scientific community. It had been announced by the Secretary of Health
and Human Services in 1984 before it had been published in the scientific
literature. Unlike any other medical hypothesis it captured the world without
ever bearing any fruits in terms of public health benefits. From the beginning
the hypothesis has absorbed the critical potential of its many followers
with the question, whether Montagnier from France or Gallo from the U.S.
had won the race in isolating the "AIDS virus" and who owned
the lucrative patent rights for the "AIDS test." This question
was so consuming that the presidents of the two countries were called to
sign a settlement, and a revisionist paper was published by the opponents
describing their fierce controversy as an entente cordiale against the
real enemy, the "deadly" AIDS virus (Gallo and Montagnier, 1987).
During the 1980s press accounts consistently called HIV "the deadly
virus" (Duesberg, 1989c).
Clearly, the enthusiastic acceptance of the virus-AIDS
hypothesis was not based on its scientific rigor or its fruits. It was
instead grounded on the universal admiration and respect for the germ theory.
The germ theory of the late 19th century ended the era of infectious diseases,
which now account for less than 1% of all mortality in the Western World
(Cairns, 1978). It celebrated its last triumph in the 1950s with the elimination
of the polio epidemic by antiviral vaccines.
But the germ theory continues to inspire both scientists
and the public to believe that a "good" body can be protected
against "evil" microbes. Accordingly, even the greatly feared
and highly stigmatizing "AIDS test" for a presumably new, sexually
transmitted "AIDS virus" was readily sold to all governments,
medical associations and even to the AIDS risk-groups (Section 6.2), despite
the absence of convincing evidence for transmissibility. In the words of
one observer, "The rationale for such programs is often the historical
precedent of syphilis screening," which "never proved to be effective"
and led to "toxic treatments with arsenical drugs, assuming the tests
were correct ..." and "deep stigma and disrupted relationships
...." "Patients required a painful regimen of injections, sometimes
for as long as two years" (Brandt, 1988). Even epidemiologists failed
to recognize that AIDS and HIV were only spreading in newly-established
behavioral and clinical risk groups and that HIV was a long-established
virus in the general populations of many countries (Section 3.5.1). Instead
of considering noninfectious causes, they simulated "coagents"
(Eggers and Weyer, 1991) and "assortative scenarios" (Anderson
and May, 1992) to hide the growing discrepancies between HIV and AIDS and
intimidated skeptics with apocalyptic predictions of AIDS pandemics in
the general populations of many countries that have raised fears and funds
to unprecedented levels (Section 1) (Heyward and Curran, 1988; Mann et
al., 1988; Mann and the Global AIDS Policy Coalition, 1992; Anderson
and May, 1992).
Even now, in an era free of infectious diseases but full
of man-made chemicals, scientists and the public share an unthinking preference
for infectious over noninfectious pathogens. Both groups share an obsolete
microbophobia but tolerate the use or even indulge in the consumption of
numerous recreational and medical drugs. Moreover, progressive scientists
and policy makers are not interested in recreational and medical drugs
and man-made environmental toxins as causes of diseases, because the mechanisms
of pathogenesis are predictable. Further, prevention of drug diseases is
scientifically trivial and commercially unattractive.
By contrast, microbial and particularly viral pathogens
are scientifically and commercially attractive to scientists. Beginning
with Peyton Rous, at least 10 Nobel prizes have been given to virologists
in the last 25 years. And many virologists have become successful biotechnologists.
For example, a blood test for a virus is good business if the test becomes
mandatory for the 12 million annual blood donations in the U.S., e.g. the
"AIDS test." The same is true for a vaccine or an antiviral drug
that is approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
Thousands of lives have been sacrificed to this bias for
infectious theories of disease, even before AIDS appeared. For example,
the U.S. Public Health Service insisted for over 10 years in the 1920s
that pellagra was infectious, rather than a vitamin B deficiency as had
been proposed by Joseph Goldberger (Bailey, 1968). Tertiary syphillis is
commonly blamed on treponemes, but is probably due to a combination of
treponemes and long-term mercury and arsenic treatments used prior to penicillin,
or merely to these treatments alone (Brandt, 1988; Fry, 1989). "Unconventional"
viruses were blamed for neurological diseases like Kreutzfeld-Jacob's disease,
Alzheimer's disease and kuru (Gajdusek, 1977). The now extinct kuru was
probably a genetic disorder that affected just one tribe of natives from
New Guinea (Duesberg and Schwartz, 1992). Although a Nobel Prize was given
for this theory, the viruses never materialized and an unconventional protein,
termed "prion," is now blamed for some of these diseases (Evans,
1989c; Duesberg and Schwartz, 1992). Shortly after this incident, a virus
was also blamed for a fatal epidemic of neuropathy, including blinding,
that started in the 1960s in Japan, but it turned out later to be caused
by the prescription drug clioquinol (Enterovioform, Ciba-Geigy) (Kono,
1975; Shigematsu et al., 1975). In 1976 the CDC blamed an outbreak
of pneumonia at a convention of Legionnaires on a "new" microbe,
without giving consideration to toxins. Since the "Legionnaire's disease"
did not spread after the convention and the "Legionnaires bacillus"
proved to be ubiquitous, it was later concluded that "CDC epidemiologists
must in the future take toxins into account from the start" (Culliton,
1976). The Legionnaire's disease fiasco is in fact the probable reason
that the CDC initially took toxins into account as the cause of AIDS (Oppenheimer,
1992).
The pursuit of harmless viruses as causes of human cancer,
supported since 1971 by the Virus-Cancer Program of the National Cancer
Institute's War On Cancer, was also inspired by indiscouragable faith in
the germ theory (Greenberg, 1986; Duesberg, 1987; Shorter, 1987; Anderson,
1991; Editorial, 1991; Duesberg and Schwartz, 1992). For example, it was
claimed in the 1960s that the rare Burkitt's lymphoma was caused by the
ubiquitous Epstein-Barr virus, 15 years after infection (Evans, 1989c).
But the lymphoma is now accepted to be nonviral and attributed to a chromosome
rearrangement (Duesberg and Schwartz, 1992). Further, it was claimed that
noncontagious cervical cancer is caused by the widespread herpes virus
in the 1970s, and by the widespread papilloma virus in the 1980s-but in
each case cancer would occur only 30 to 40 years after infection (Evans,
1989c). Noninfectious causes like chromosome abnormalities, possibly induced
by smoking, have since been considered or reconsidered (Duesberg and Schwartz,
1992). Further, ubiquitous hepatitis virus was proposed in the 1960s to
cause regional adult hepatomas 50 years (!) after infection (Evans, 1989c).
In the 1980s the rare, but widely distributed, human retrovirus HTLV-I
was claimed to cause regional adult T-cell leukemias (Blattner, 1990).
Yet the leukemias would only appear at advanced age, after "latent
periods" of up to 55 years, the age when these "adult" leukemias
appear spontaneously (Evans, 1989c; Blattner, 1990; Duesberg and Schwartz,
1992). Although the Virus-Cancer program has generated such academic triumphs
as retroviral oncogenes (Duesberg and Vogt, 1970) and reverse transcriptase
(Temin and Mitzutani, 1970), it has been a total failure in terms of clinical
relevance. Indeed, the pride of retrovirologists in retrovirus-specific
reverse transcription is the probable reason that inhibition of DNA synthesis
with AZT is perceived, even now, as a "specific" antiretroviral
therapy (Section 4.3.3).
The wishful thinking that viruses cause "slow"
diseases and cancers faces four common problems: (1) the diseases or tumors
occur on average only decades after infection; (2) the viruses are all
inactive, if not defective, during fatal disease or cancer; (3) the "viral"
tumors are all clonal, derived from a single cell (with a tumor-specific
chromosome abnormality) that had emerged out of billions of identically
infected cells of a given carrier; and (4) above all, no human cancers
and none of the "slow viral diseases" are contagious (Rowe, 1973;
Duesberg and Schwartz, 1992).
Therefore these viruses all fail Koch's postulates, the
acid test of the germ theory. And therefore these viruses are all assumed
to be very "slow," causing diseases only after long "latent
periods" that exceed by decades the short periods of days or weeks
that these viruses need to replicate and to become immunogenic. Because
of their consistent scarcity, defectiveness and even complete absence from
some tumors and slow diseases (Duesberg and Schwartz, 1992), the search
for the presumably pathogenic latent viruses has been directed either at
antiviral antibodies, i.e. "seroepidemiological evidence" (Blattner
et al., 1988), or at artificially amplified viral DNA and RNA (Section
3.3) or at the "activation" of latent viruses, euphemistically
called "virus isolation" (Section 2.2).
Accordingly cancer-, AIDS- and other slow-virologists
try to discredit Koch's postulates in favor of "modern concepts of
causation." For example, Evans states that, "... Koch's postulates,
great as they were for years, should be replaced with criteria reflecting
modern concepts of causation, epidemiology, and pathogenesis and technical
advances" (Evans, 1992). And Blattner, Gallo and Temin point out that
Koch's postulates are just a "useful historical reference point"
(Blattner et al., 1988), and Weiss and Jaffe find it "bizarre
that anyone should demand strict adherence to these unreconstructed postulates
100 years after their proposition" (Weiss and Jaffe, 1990)-but they
all fail to identify a statute of limitation for adherence to the virus-AIDS
hypothesis. In addition, "cofactors" are assumed (a) to make
up for the typical inertia of the viral pathogens or carcinogens, (b) to
account for the clonality of the cancers via a clonal cellular cofactor,
and (c) to help to close the enormous gaps between the very common infections
and the very rare incidences of "slow" disease or cancer, that
even the long "latent periods" could not close (Duesberg and
Schwartz, 1992). The tumor virologist Rowe "recognized that the latent
period may cover much of the life span of the animal and that the virus
did not act alone but that the tumor response might require ... treatment
with a chemical carcinogen" (Rowe, 1973).
Despite the total lack of public health benefits and even
negative consequences of these theories, such as the psychologically toxic
prognoses that antibodies against HTLV-I or against papilloma virus signal
future cancers (Duesberg and Schwartz, 1992), or that antibodies against
HIV signal future AIDS and the need for AZT prophylaxis, the public and
the majority of scientists have held on to them much longer than was justified
in terms of scientific evidence. The irresistible appeal of the germ theory
was the basis for each of these unproductive theories of the past, as it
is the basis now for the universal and enthusiastic approval of the virus-AIDS
hypothesis.
But unlike the mistaken germ theories of the past, the
virus-AIDS hypothesis was a windfall not only for (1) the virologists and
epidemiologists, but also for (2) the biotechnology companies who could
develop virus-tests and antiviral drugs, (3) the AIDS patients who were
relieved that a God-given, egalitarian virus rather than behavioral factors
were to blame for their diseases, and (4) the politicians who had to confront
the public and the gay (homosexual) lobby requesting action against AIDS.
Indeed, a thoroughly intimidated public was happy, once more, to be offered
protection by its scientists against another "deadly" virus,
albeit for the highest price-tag ever.
6.2.
Big Funding and Limited Expertise Paralyze AIDS Research
Ironically, AIDS research suffers not only from being
tied to an unproductive hypothesis, it also suffers from the staggering
funds it receives from governments (Section 1) and from conceptually matched
private sources. Intended to buy a fast solution for AIDS, these funds
have instead paralyzed AIDS research by creating an instant orthodoxy of
retrovirologists that fiercely protects its narrowly focused scientific
expertise and global commercial interests (Booth, 1988; Rappoport, 1988;
Nussbaum, 1990; Duesberg, 1991b, 1992b; Savitz, 1991; Connor, 1991, 1992).
The leaders of the AIDS orthodoxy are all veterans from
the wars on "slow" and cancer viruses. Naturally they were highly
qualified to fill the growing gaps in the virus-AIDS hypothesis with their
"modern concepts of causation" (Evans, 1992), including long
"latent periods," "cofactors" and "seroepidemiological"
arguments of causation (Sections 3.3, 3.4 and 3.5). When it became apparent
that the first order mechanism of viral pathogenesis, postulating direct
killing of T-cells, failed to explain immunodeficiency, the bewildering
diversity of AIDS diseases, the many asymptomatic HIV infections, and HIV-free
AIDS cases, the scientific method would have called for a new hypothesis.
Instead the virus hunters have shifted the virus-AIDS hypothesis from a
failed first order mechanism to a multiplicity of hypothetical second order
mechanisms, including cofactors and latent periods, to fill the ever growing
discrepancies between HIV and AIDS. By conjugating these second order mechanisms
with a multiplicity of unrelated diseases, the virus-AIDS hypothesis has
become by far the most mercurial hypothesis in biology. It predicts either
diarrhea or dementia or Kaposi's sarcoma or no disease, 1, 5, 10 or 20
years after 1 or 2000 sexual contacts with an antibody-HIV-positive person
with or without an AIDS disease.
But the coup to rename dozens of unrelated diseases with
the common name AIDS, proved to be the most effective weapon of the AIDS
establishment in winning unsuspecting followers from all constituencies.
By making AIDS a synonym for Kaposi's sarcoma and candidiasis and dementia
and diarrhea and lymphoma and lymphadenopathy, the road was paved for a
common cause. Who would have accepted, prior to AIDS, that a dental patient
caught candidiasis from her doctor's Kaposi's sarcoma? Or which scientist
would accept it even now knowing the original data rather than just the
corresponding press release? According to the sociologist David Phillips
"researchers use newspapers as a 'filter' to help them decide which
scientific article is worth reading" (Briefings, 1991) or more often
which article is worth knowing about.
The control of AIDS research by the nationally and internationally
funded AIDS orthodoxy via the popular and scientific press is almost total.
It instructs science writers that faithfully report every "breakthrough"
in HIV research and every "explosion" of the epidemic. It feeds
scientific journals with over 10,000 HIV-AIDS papers annually and with
advertisements for HIV tests and antiviral drugs (Schwitzer, 1992). The
AIDS doctors are controlled by the companies created, consulted or owned
by the AIDS establishment (Barinaga, 1992; Schwitzer, 1992). For example,
the Physician's Desk Reference 1992 instructs AIDS doctors about AZT with
an exact copy of Burroughs Wellcome's instructions. Science writers
are warned against reporting minority views. For example, Fauci states:
"Journalists who make too many mistakes, or who are sloppy, are going
to find that their access to scientists may diminish" (Fauci, 1989).
And Ludlam points out, "Whilst I support, and encourage the reporting
of, minority views ... If the belief that AIDS is not due to HIV becomes
prevalent ... (it) could lead directly to the deaths of countless misinformed
individuals" (Ludlam, 1992). Any challengers are automatically outnumbered
and readily marginalized by the sheer volume of the AIDS establishment.
For example, the 12,000 scientists attending the annual international AIDS
conference held in San Francisco in 1990 were only a fraction of the many
who study the information encoded in the 9000 nucleotides of HIV. Says
the HIV virologist Gallo when asked about a dissenter: "Why does the
Institute of Medicine, WHO, CDC, National Academy of Sciences, NIH, Pasteur
Institute and the whole body of world science 100 percent agree that HIV
is the cause of AIDS?" (Liversidge, 1989).
Consequently there is no "peer-reviewed" funding
for researchers who challenge the virus-AIDS hypothesis (Duesberg, 1991b;
Maddox, 1991a; Bethell, 1992; Farber, 1992; Hodgkinson, 1992). Since HIV
became the dominant focus of the billion-dollar AIDS-research (Coffin et
al., 1986; Institute of Medicine, 1988), there has not been even one
follow-up of the many previous studies blaming sexual stimulants and psychoactive
drugs for homosexual AIDS (Sections 4.4 and 4.5). None of the former "lifestyle"
advocates (Section 2.2) have investigated whether drugs might cause AIDS
without HIV. Instead drugs, if mentioned at all, were since described as
risk factors for infection by HIV (Darrow et al., 1987; Moss et
al., 1987; van Griensven et al., 1987; Chaisson et al.,
1989; Weiss, S.H., 1989; Goudsmit, 1992; Seage et al., 1992)-as
if HIV could discriminate between hosts on the basis of their drug habits
(Duesberg, 1992a). For example, Friedman-Kien concluded in 1982 and 1983
with Marmor et al. (1982) and Jaffe et al. (1983b) that the
"lifetime exposure to nitrites ..." was responsible for AIDS
(Section 4.3.2). In 1990 he and his collaborators just mentioned nitrite
use in HIV-free Kaposi's sarcoma cases (Friedman-Kien et al., 1990)
and in 1992 they blamed viruses other than HIV for HIV-free AIDS cases,
and drug use was no longer mentioned (Huang et al., 1992).
Likewise all studies investigating transfusion-mediated
immunodeficiency in hemophiliacs were frozen around 1987 (Table 3), once
the virus-AIDS hypothesis had monopolized AIDS research. The question whether
immunodeficient (!) HIV-free hemophiliacs would ever develop AIDS defining
diseases was left unanswered and even became unaskable.
Fascinated by the past triumphs of the germ theory, the
public, science journalists and even scientists from other fields never
question the authority of their medical experts, even if they fail to produce
useful results (Adams, 1989; Schwitzer, 1992). Medical scientists are typically
credited for the virtual elimination of infectious diseases with vaccines
and antibiotics, although most of the credit for eliminating infectious
diseases is actually owed to vastly improved nutrition and sanitation (Stewart,
1968; McKeown, 1979; Moberg and Cohn, 1991; Oppenheimer, 1992). Indeed,
the belief in the infallibility of modern science is the only ideology
that unifies the 20th century. For example, in the name of the virus-AIDS
hypothesis of the American Government and the American researcher Gallo,
antibody-positive Americans have been convicted for "assault with
a deadly weapon" because they had sex with antibody-negatives, Central
Africa dedicates its limited resources to "AIDS testing," the
former U.S.S.R. conducted 20.2 million AIDS tests in 1990 and 29.4 million
in 1991 to identify a total of 178 antibody-positive Soviets and communist
Cuba even quarantines its own citizens if they are antibody-positive (Section
3.6).
Predictably the AIDS virus hunters, on their last crusade
for the germ theory, have no regard for the current drug-use epidemic and
its many overlaps with American and European AIDS. Even direct evidence
for the role of drugs in AIDS is fiercely rejected by the virus-AIDS orthodoxy
(Booth, 1988; Moss et al., 1988; Kaslow et al., 1989; Baltimore
and Feinberg, 1990; Ostrow et al., 1990). Merely questioning the
therapeutic or prophylactic benefits of AZT is protested by the AIDS establishment
(Baltimore and Feinberg, 1990; Weiss and Jaffe, 1990; Anonymous, 1992;
Freestone, 1992; Tedder et al., 1992). The prejudice against noninfectious
pathogens is so popular, that the virus-AIDS establishment uses it regularly
to intimidate those who propose noninfectious alternatives, to censor their
papers (Duesberg, 1992e) and even to question their integrity.
For example, an editorial in Science called me
a "rebel without a cause for AIDS," because denying HIV was to
deny a cause altogether. The editorial quoted Baltimore as saying I was
"irresponsible and pernicious" (Booth, 1988). An article in Nature
called my drug hypothesis a "perilous message" that would "belittle
'safe sex,' would have us abandon AIDS screening ... and curtail research
into anti-HIV drugs." "Arguments that AIDS (is) the result of
evil vapors (poppers (!)), mal'aria ... (are from) the last century."
"We ... regard the critics as 'flat-earthers' bogged down in molecular
minutiae and miasmal theories of disease, while HIV continues to spread"
(Weiss and Jaffe, 1990). This is said even though the article agrees that,
"Duesberg is right to draw attention to our ignorance of how HIV causes
disease ..." (Weiss and Jaffe, 1990). Others declare "All attempts
by epidemiologists to link AIDS to the use of amyl nitrite or other drugs
as a direct cause of disease have failed ... Duesberg's continued attempts
to persuade the public to doubt the role of HIV in AIDS are not based on
facts" (Baltimore and Feinberg, 1990). Gallo called the author of
the article, "Experts mount startling challenge to AIDS orthodoxy"
in The Sunday Times (London) (Hodgkinson, 1992), "irresponsible
both to myself (Gallo) and to HIV as the cause of AIDS" (Gallo, 1992).
Further, Vandenbrouke and Pardoel argue, "If one is allowed to compare
the evolution of scientific theories with the evolution of biologic nature
in general, the poppers (nitrite inhalants) episode is the Neanderthal
of modern epidemiology" (Vandenbroucke and Pardoel, 1989).
As a consequence there are no studies that investigate
the long-term effects of psychoactive drugs (Lerner, 1989; Pillai et
al., 1991; Bryant et al., 1992). The toxicologist Lerner points
out that "fewer than 60 are currently enrolled in fellowship programs
on alcoholism and drug abuse in the entire country" (Lerner, 1989),
although about 8 million Americans alone are estimated to use cocaine (Weiss,
S.H., 1989; Finnegan et al., 1992) and many more use other psychoactive
drugs regularly (Section 4). This stands in contrast to the 40,000 annual
AIDS cases that are studied by at least 40,000 AIDS researchers of which
just 12,000 attended the annual International AIDS Conference in San Francisco
in 1990.
Instead of warning against drugs, the AIDS establishment
"educates" the public with its "clean needle" campaigns
that drugs (albeit illegal) are safe, but bugs are not. For example, AIDS
researcher Moss, citing Napoleon's line "On s'engage et puis on voit,"
recommends "clean needles" for "harm reduction" (Moss,
1987). Mindful of its educators, the public is unaware and even disinformed
about the health risks of recreational drugs. A popular joke in point is
the response of two "junkies" (drug addicts) sharing a syringe
filled with an intravenous drug to a concerned colleague: "We are
safe, because we use a clean needle and condoms." The long "latent
periods" between the gratification from recreational drugs, such as
tobacco, alcohol, cocaine and nitrite inhalants, to their irreversible
health effects unfortunately give credence to the "perilous message"
that drugs are safe but bugs are not.
Particularly the victims of drug consumption prefer egalitarian
infectious causes over noninfectious behavioral ones that imply personal
responsibility (Shilts, 1985; Lauritsen and Wilson, 1986; Rappoport, 1988;
Callen, 1990). For example, the executive director of the San Francisco
based national "Project Inform," an organization operated mainly
for and by male homosexuals, Martin Delaney, informs its clients about
a study documenting a "level of sexual contact and drug use which
was shocking to the general public" as follows: "It (the study)
might just as well have noted that most wore Levi's (jeans) for all this
told us about the cause of AIDS" (Project Inform, 1992). The organization
collaborates with the NIH and is supported by grants from pharmaceutical
companies including Burroughs Wellcome, the manufacturer of AZT (Project
Inform, 1992).
In 1987, before AZT, Delaney advised gay men in his book
Strategies for Survival: A Gay Men's Health Manual for the Age of AIDS
about the health effects of nitrite inhalants: "Possible heart damage;
fibrillation (compulsive, erratic heart rhythms); possible stroke and resulting
brain damage. Conducive to high-risk sexual behavior; distortion of judgement
and senses. Statistical link to Kaposi's sarcoma (KS, an AIDS-related cancer);
suspected immuno-suppression" (Delaney and Goldblum, 1987). Delaney's
advice about amphetamines reads as follows: "Liver and heart damage;
neuropathy (nerve damage); possible brain damage; weight loss; nutritional
and vitamin depletion; adrenal depletion (uses up the body's energy reserves).
Distorted judgment, values, senses, delusions of strength, anxiety, paranoia,
rebound depression, financial strain, powerful addiction, conducive to
high-risk sexual activity. Likely immunosuppression (not currently measured),
potential for unknown and risky drug interactions, complication in treatment
of brain disorders." Delaney also warns about the effects of cocaine:
"Heart and lung damage, stroke, cardiovascular irregularities, possible
physical addiction. Distortion of judgment, values, and senses, dangerous
delusions of grandeur and strength, intense anxiety, paranoia, financial
strain, leads to poor judgment about high-risk sexual activity. Likely
immunosuppression (not currently measured); increased stress, if smoked,
complicates treatment of pneumonia." The book also gives the basis
for Delaney's intimate knowledge of drug toxicity: "He ... has done
work for the National Institute on Drug Abuse" (Delaney and Goldblum,
1987).
Clearly big science is not always good science, particularly
if it is conceptually paralyzed by an unproductive hypothesis. I hope that
the scientific evidence collected for this article will focus attention
on the noninfectious causes of AIDS and prove that it is not "too
late to correct" (Red Queen) the spell of the virus-AIDS hypothesis
by the scientific method. Considering noninfectious causes may prove to
be as beneficial to the challenge of AIDS as it was, for example, to the
challenge of pellagra. Indeed, a few investigators have recently smuggled
recreational drugs as "cofactors" of HIV (Haverkos and Dougherty,
1988; Haverkos, 1990) or even more cautiously as cofactors of cofactors
of HIV (Archibald et al., 1992) into the highly fundable virus-AIDS
hypothesis. One investigator even dared to document that drugs are sufficient
for pediatric AIDS, if only in preliminary reports (Koch, 1990; Koch et
al., 1990). A complete report of the data (Section 4.5) was not published
for political reasons (Thomas Koch, personal communication). And the "100
percent" consensus on HIV claimed by Gallo in 1989 (Liversidge, 1989)
is eroding just a bit in the face of a growing group of dissenters, some
of which united in the "Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the
HIV/AIDS Hypothesis" (DeLoughry, 1991; Bethell, 1992; Bialy and Farber,
1992; Farber, 1992; Hodgkinson, 1992; Project Inform, 1992; Nicholson,
1992; Ratner, 1992; Schoch, 1992).
Continue
VIRUSMYTH HOMEPAGE