Startling similarities when comparing micrographs of budding HIV and budding HERVs.

Could it be that we are getting closer to a (more) unified alternative explanation for what causes “AIDS”?  There are several recently published articles, as well as conversations between the authors, that just may prove to be the impetus for such a epiphany.

This is not about some startling new discovery.  It is the work of lay people wading through the scientific literature and gleaning and assembling already documented knowledge and information in ways that most orthodox scientists simply seem incapable of doing.

Most recently, Liam Scheff has published another great piece of writing, How AIDS Didn’t Become a Kissing Disease, which further challenges the mainstream explanation for AIDS.

In the article, Scheff presents official government definitions for what retroviruses are as he wanders through the history of “HIV”.  He notes  Matthew Gonda’s discovery of “HIV” in the saliva of healthy and ill gay men in the 1980s, though no self-respecting AIDS risk reduction educator today would suggest that HIV can be transmitted by kissing or even oral sex.  Gonda incidentally co-authored scientific articles with the now discredited discoverer of HTLVIII/LAV/HIV, Robert Gallo.

The article concludes that what Gallo and others were seeing are actually Human endogenous retroviruses, or HERVs; self-made cellular messengers that our bodies create in reaction to stressors and toxins, the same way scientists create them in the lab.  Scheff suggests that nutritional responses can suppress the expression of HERVs.

Other writers have written about issues of gut dysfunction and exposure to toxins that are entirely compatible with the theory that HIV is a HERV.  What remains to be done, in my personal opinion, is to tie these various perspectives together and to present a unified alternative theory of AIDS that can be understood by a fifth grader.

Until that happens, those readers who are struggling to understand the significance of a positive test result owe it to themselves to read the collection of writings by Schell and Cal Crilly at reducetheburden.org, as well as the essential and related information contained in Tony Lance’s paper, Gay Related Intestinal Dysbiosis.  It really isn’t that difficult to make the connections for oneself, but it does take some time and effort and for most people, it also requires some de-programming to allow the mind to accept new information.

As an Affected gay man, I struggle mightily to explain what I’ve learned to friends and others who find themselves in a similar situation.  That job is nigh-impossible as long as people remain uninformed and in the dark.  When I worked for the New-Telegraph in the 1980s and 1990s, the masthead read:  “Knowledge is Power”.  Nothing could be truer today.

Some folks seem to be so deeply mired in the world of AIDS that they are unable to rise above their peer-reviewed journals and view the world as a big picture.  This tunnel vision allows them to overlook, if not protest, all of the contradictions that are ever more likely to show up in the online media.

Reports like this one from the Journal of Medical Case Reports, via Medscape.  A 28-year-old Polish woman presented at a hospital with respiratory problems, rash and ulcerations, among other things.  Doctors were ready to presumptively diagnose “Human immunodeficiency virus seroconversion syndrome complicated by Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia” until a PCR test result came back negative.

The actual disease?  Measles!  I didn’t write the headline:  Measles Mimicking HIV Seroconversion Syndrome: A Case Report, a peer reviewed journal editor determined that from reading the research.

In this case, the misdiagnosis was caught in a modern European hospital, but what would the outcome have been in a less developed part of the world, or even in a rural or community medical clinic with less capability?

Then there is this Reuters report about a supposedly deadly link between salmonella and HIV in Africa.  That’s right, the bacteria typically responsible for food poisoning and the lethal HI virus.  According to this report, researchers are puzzled to discover that HIV-positive people with salmonella did not have a suppressed immune system, but rather an excess of antibodies to salmonella.

“It’s quite a surprise and it suggests that what we are dealing with here is more of a consequence of an immune disregulation as opposed to an immune deficiency per se,” said lead researcher Cal MacLennan of the University of Birmingham.

MacLennan’s  comment is spot-on consistent with the views of Dr. Heinrich Kremer, author of The Silent Revolution in Cancer and AIDS Medicine.  Kremer is a qualified and outspoken opponent of the use of anti-retroviral drugs and a critic of the HIV theory of causation of AIDS.

I approach scientific research as a layperson.  My interest is in taking the pulse of the current state of science, as presented in the media, including, but not limited to peer-reviewed journals.  My area of interest is obviously AIDS, which I have been intimately involved with since it was called GRID.

It doesn’t take a lot of research to find these reports.  Contradiction after contradiction parade across my screen these days, courtesy of Google Reader.  Inconsistent information about AIDS was also the norm in the 1980s and 90s, when the current mainstream theory was being manufactured by the virologists.

I simple share some of the more obvious contradictions here occasionally, as well as at QuestioningAIDS and then leave it to others to draw whatever conclusions they can from this litany of inconsistencies, particularly as it pertains to AIDS.

What is almost amusing is how some of the more rabid AIDS apologists protest my posts about these questions.  It’s kind of flattering to imagine they feel threatened, but I just don’t understand why anyone would think science is immune to contradictions. Historically, contradiction has been one of the essential engines for scientific advances.

Recently, published reports from various scientific fields offer new insight about possible ways the human immune system wards off disease, specifically those conditions blamed on viruses, such as AIDS and hepatitis.

For starters, the latest word from atrociously well-funded AIDS researchers is that they’ve discovered the secret to defeating the HI virus by studying elite controllers (ECs), those people who test positive for HIV antibodies but never get sick, at least not according to any of the major AIDS theories.

As virologists, these scientists at MIT ultimately base their research and subsequent findings on assumptions established using the original faulty research of the now-discredited “co-discoverer” of HIV, Robert Gallo.  According to them, ECs have a genetic trait that causes them to create “super t-cells” that can defeat HIV and other viruses, such as Hep C.

Glia cell in cell culture from neonatal mouse brain, green: glia cell, red: peroxisome. (Courtesy of Max-Planck-Institute for experimental medicine, Goettingen, Germany)

Meanwhile, across town at Children’s Hospital Boston, less well known molecular and cellular biologists are busy performing research that continues to throw cold water on  Virology’s notion that t-cells are the key to fighting viral infections in the first place.  According to them, organelles inside the cell known as peroxisomes can detect virus invasion signals and launch a limited antiviral offensive. Other organelles, the mitochondria, follow up with a more definitive antiviral counterattack.

Even the headlines for these very different explanations for stopping viral infections tell a story.  Virologists are “finding secrets” to “mysterious viruses” while the cellular biologists report “mild-mannered helpers” of the immune system.  While mild mannered may not sound nearly so dazzling as secretive and mysterious, this research being conducted at a community hospital sounds exciting.

What is a poor layperson like myself to think of these very different explanations for how our immune systems work?  I may be out of my league to try to analyze these kinds of research reports too finely, but it shouldn’t take a rocket scientist (or a virologist or a molecular biologist) to realize that “Science” has not conclusively defined the process by which these supposedly lethal viruses kill.

Add this new information to the huge questions of what viruses actually are, where they come from and what they do, as articulated by Janine Roberts in her book Fear of the Invisible, for example, and the basis for skepticism grows exponentially.  Roberts reports on the body of research conducted by cellular biologists purporting that at least some viruses—retroviruses, in particular—may actually be cellular messengers that are manufactured by our body’s cell.  These are called endogenous viruses and every human being is chock full of them for good reasons.

Reading these various accounts of what is going on in the world of Science recently has led me to think that we just might soon be reading about a significant and newsworthy breakthrough very soon.  I hope that isn’t just my personal optimism working overtime.

I also read the tea leaves of published accounts by the AIDS industry and it appears that they, too, see the writing on the wall of the demise of the ‘HIV=AIDS, unless you take the expensive and toxic drugs for the rest of your life’ meme.

The line between the terms “HIV” and “AIDS” have been blurred since the beginning of the epidemic, resulting in lengthy and convoluted treatises that attempt to explain how AIDS is not a disease, but rather a syndrome of diseases, yet the treatment of choice is one-size-fits-all.  More recently, AIDS is becoming even more blurred as public health policy makers (and grant seekers) now lump it in with malaria, tuberculosis and other viral diseases like hepatitis.  This appears to me to be a rather transparent attempt to keep funding within the AIDS establishment, rather than refocusing the commitment to fight long standing epidemics of actual diseases that can be cured and prevented without drugs.

I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that the work of cellular biologists will soon result in a new way of viewing illness from diseases like these in the very near future.  This new view will hopefully be heeded and will result in a shift of our scarce public funding resources from “fighting sneaky viruses” to working to eliminate the common contributing factors of malnutrition, poverty, lack of sanitation and clean water and drug abuse.

Then again, maybe what I’m feeling is simply optimism, rather than intuition.

Tony Lance

I’ve gotten to know Tony Lance personally the last few months. The more we visit, the more things we seem to discover we share in common.

Both of us are gay men who came out just before, or in the very earliest years of the Gay Plague.

We are both “poz” and living without taking any antiretroviral (ARV) drugs.  We are both dissidents from the mainstream theory of AIDS.

Each of us has a history of writing and editing.

We make our own home made sauerkraut to help boost our gut health. We are interested in beekeeping, though Tony is much farther along in that adventure than I am.

I got to know Tony better after he agreed join the new QuestioningAIDS team earlier this year.  QA has quickly become one of the top-ranked AIDS dissident websites, with a very active dissident discussion forum.

At the RethinkingAIDS 2009 conference last fall (which I was unable to attend), Tony presented his hypothesis that the immune failure known as “AIDS” in the gay male community may actually be caused by damage to the intestinal flora due to common sexual and hygiene practices, such as rectal douching and the use of some sexual lubricants, as well as the high rate of antibiotic abuse in some subsets of gay men.

Though I had previously read Tony’s  paper GRID: Gay Related Intestinal Dysbiosis, I had not heard some aspects of his personal story, until I viewed recently posted videos of his presentation.If you can’t tell by now, I really like Tony and think highly of how he thinks, writes and now I’ve discovered that I like the way he speaks in the videos below.

I’m posting all three videos  here because I believe it is important to reach other gay men about some of the potentially dangerous practices that we are not hearing about from the AIDS service organizations in our communities.  In our personal conversations, Tony and I have also agreed that it is important and urgent for those of us “affected” by the illness to take leading roles in the AIDS dissidence movement.

Thank you Tony, for being willing to overcome your personal discomfort to become such an articulate and visible spokesperson for all of us.

(Note: The PowerPoint slides are available in a PDF format here.)

courtesy of freefoto.com

AIDS researchers continue to stretch the limits in finding excuses to spend some of the billions of dollars worth of funding being made available to them. Lately, the anti-smoking forces have been rallying to compete for a piece of the HIV research pie.

This morning’s news brought this “study” about the lung damage caused by smoking to my attention.  Apparently “HIV-positive” are three times more likely to smoke cigarettes than the average population.  The research was published in the PubMed approved, peer-reviewed journal AIDS Research and Therapy.

The study’s conclusions, published as a provisional article:

Cumulative cigarette consumption was associated with worse lung function; however the loss of %FEV1 did not accelerate in HIV-positive population compared to the general population. Current smokers had higher odds of respiratory symptoms than non-smokers, while former smokers had the same odds of respiratory symptoms as non-smokers. Cigarette consumption was likely associated with more COPD cases in HIV-positive population; however more participants and longer follow up would be needed to estimate the effect of smoking on COPD development. Effective smoking cessation strategies are required for HIV-positive subjects.

Key points:

• Smokers have worse lung function than non-smokers
• The lung function of former smokers is about the same as non-smokers.
• Being “HIV-positive” makes no difference in these findings.
• “HIV-positives” would benefit from quitting smoking.
• Send more money for us to study this phenomenon further.

Duh.

As a moderator at the forums at Questioning AIDS, I often read personal accounts of poz people being put on ARVs after presenting to their doctors or a hospital with respiratory distress.  Inevitably, these folks are presumptively diagnosed with pneumocystis pneumonia, an “AIDS-defining” infection, without any confirmatory testing.

If it is true that poz people are three times as likely to smoke, then is it a no-brainer that this group is going to be far more likely to present with respiratory illnesses, such as pneumonia or lung cancer.  Heck, in the bizarre world of HIV, smoking is even blamed for causing dementia.

In 2006, another peer reviewed study reported that smoking alone may actually be an independent risk factor for testing “positive”.

My initial takeaway from this undoubtedly expensive study is that if you have tested positive on the Gallo polyreactive protein test (aka the “AIDS” test), and you are trying to remain healthy without resorting to a lifetime of chemotherapy, quit smoking immediately.  While you’re at it, quit all recreational drugs, including alcohol; eliminate all environmental toxins around you; eliminate processed foods and refined sugar from your diet; and incorporate as many other common sense healthy practices into your life as you possibly can.

One of the earliest actions I took when I started addressing my own health problems was to quit smoking cigarettes.  I even remember the date:  March 13, 2001, my father’s birthday the year after he died of COPD.

I didn’t need a research study to tell me it was the right thing to do if I wanted to improve my health.

David Rasnick, PhD:
Do ARVs Save Lives? The raw data

Rethinking AIDS Conference
November 6-8, 2009
Oakland, CA

Lance proposes that the disease affecting so many gay men is actually caused by disruption and destruction of the intestinal tract, or gut.

To read more about Lance’s background in this article written by independent journalist Russell Schoch , published at Reduce the Burden.

Do not miss the links to Lance’s  insightful paper on GRID (Gay Related Intestinal Dysbiosis), which can be found here.

(editorial disclosure:  I consider Tony to be a good friend and we work together as part of the team that operates a new website questioningaids.com)

My partner Michael is taking a class to get his EMS (Emergency Medical Services) certificate. One of the course requirements is that he get a series of Hepatitis B vaccinations.

Because we were concerned that this or one of the other mandatory vaccinations could result in a falsely positive reaction to the Gallo antibody test result (aka HIV test) in the future, Michael made the difficult decision to have that test done before getting any vaccinations.

Michael has not tested in many years and until now has always tested negative when he did.  If his status were to suddenly change after a Hep B vaccination, he wanted to have as reasonable a point of reference as is possible with these flaky and poly-reactive tests.

The medical staff at the suburban clinic he goes to actually tried to discourage Michael from HIV testing, despite knowing he is gay and has been in a long term relationship with a poz man.

The reasons the medical staff gave to not take a HIV test? First, it wasn’t included on the school’s list of required tests and vaccinations and secondly, they cautioned him that a positive result could cause him a lot of problems with his insurance and employment!

Concerns about the possibility of a cross-reaction due to the vaccinations if he was ever tested later in life were summarily dismissed.

When the clinic finally accepted the fact that Michael still wanted the test done, they first made him read and sign several papers, including a 2-page “patient consent form”, initialing 14 points.

Here are the first two points in that form, posed as questions & answers:

WHAT IS AIDS?
Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) is caused by a virus(HIV) that destroys the body’s ability to fight infection.

WHAT IS HIV?
HIV is a virus which is the cause of the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).

There is no reason to go further down the list of points in the informed consent form because one cannot escape the circular reasoning of the answers to the first two questions that are the basis for everything that follows.

Circular reasoning is an attempt to support a statement by simply repeating the statement in different or stronger terms.  In this fallacy, the reason given is nothing more than a restatement of the conclusion that poses as the reason for the conclusion.  To say, “You should exercise because it’s good for you” is really saying, “You should exercise because you should exercise.”

It shares much with the false authority fallacy because we accept these statements based solely on the fact that someone else claims it to be so.  Often, we feel we can trust another person so much that we often accept his claims without testing the logic.  This is called blind trust, and it is very dangerous.  We might as well just talk in circles.

None of this is new information to most of us who have been questioning the HIV/AIDS paradigm for any length of time, but I was surprised nonetheless that the AIDS orthodoxy hasn’t done a better job of covering their tracks for sloppy science from the very beginning.  After all, BigPharma’s army of drug pushing sales representatives taking up valuable space in these clinics’ waiting rooms and the doctors’ schedules could be mobilized to provide some straight answers.

If there had any.

Joseph Goebbels

The Canadian Broadcasting Center (CBC) is doing what the mainstream media does so well for AIDS apologists:  repeating inaccurate headlines without reading or thinking:

Premature Aging of the Brain Seen in HIV Patients

That is simply not what this study reports, and I blogged about it just a few days ago here.

It is pretty obvious that the symptoms of advanced aging are being observed in people on anti-retroviral drugs (ARV). Researchers are loathe to include information about people who test poz but do not take the drugs and who are not enrolling in these studies.

When will the media stop goosestepping for AIDS, Inc.?

(note:  the headline is based on a quote attributed to Joseph Goebbel, Lenin and others)

You could no longer climb the stairs in your home without dropping to your hands and knees, and could only come back down by crawling backwards?

Do you remember the times you came out of unconsciousness to see the faces of friends and loved ones hovering over you with concern… no, panic in their eyes because you had dropped to the ground, started trembling and speaking in tongues, and your eyeballs rolled up in your head until only the whites of your eyes were visible?  Worse yet was the time you came to, laying in a snow bank in the back yard, staring at the stars in the night sky, with no one else around at all.  You had seized on your way in from the garage.

How can you forget the strange look in people’s faces as you sss—tt—u—tt—ered every word to the point that you were nearly unintelligible?  Other times you struggled to find even the simplest word to express your needs.

You must remember how your hands were unable to guide a fork or a spoon to your mouth as you ate and food ended up on your cheek, or up your nose instead? When they weren’t misguiding your food, your hands would simply rest on the edge of the table and tremble.

Remember the overwhelming sense of panic you would experience upon entering the brightly lit and noisy Costco store?  Sensory overload you called it.  Or “rockin’ and rollin’”.  You wouldn’t stay long at the family holiday gathering either, for fear of stepping on, or tripping over noisy, distracting kids.

Congnitive dysfunction, you were told.  Neurological problems. Advanced aging.  Multiple autoimmune disorder syndrome (MAS, but you called it MAD). These were just some of the general diagnoses you got from medical specialists across the country, from San Francisco to Denver to Chicago and back home to Kansas City.

You only now remember some things about those times, though details are still often difficult to recall. Fortunately, you kept most of your records, though their organization leaves much to be desired.

The neuro-psychiatrist in Chicago ordered an MRI of your brain in April, 2006:

IMPRESSION:

1. There is slight generalized atrophy with nonspecific periventricular signal alteration. The signal can certainly be related to HIV or perhaps CMV. PML can give this appearance as well. There are no obvious enhancing mass lesions of any sort. (emphasis added)

2. There are inflammatory changes in the left maxillary antrum.

“AIDS-related dementia”, the shrink told you, just because one day you tested positive on an antibody test developed using fraudulent research by the now-discredited Dr. Robert Gallo.  A test that can return a positive result for dozens of other reasons.  A test developed from the cellular debris of hundreds of unhealthy gay men in the 1980s, most of whom did not even have symptoms of AIDS.  A test that went through a process that might be compared to making sausage and then sending it to a dry cleaner for a chemical bath.

(Note: the past is written third person for a reason, but now that we’re back in real time I’m going to switch back to first person.)

If my diagnosis of probable early stage HIV-associated dementia in April 2006 was correct, there is no way in hell I would be writing this today.  That’s just not how progressive dementia manifests itself, whether it is HAD, or PML (a lovely condition, google it) or Altzheimer’s.  It’s progressive… that means it gets worse, not better.

These various explanations were given to me by the same physicians who prescribed the two dozen pharmaceutical drugs I took in 2006.  Every one of them received a copy of my then-current med list.  (Regular readers know that I quit all pharmaceutical drugs in 2007 and now take only 1 or two prescription drugs required to manage recurrent DVT blood clots until I find a better solution.)

Now a study from Wash U in Saint Louis and UC San Diego admits that AIDS drugs must be responsible for the “premature aging” of brains in “HIV-positive” patients. Despite this likely cause, study authors perform contortions to try to blame the virus instead.

For one thing, despite this being a study of “long term” effects, which surely means that most of the patients must be on some form of antiretroviral therapy and probably dozens of other drugs for side effects and other symptoms, the authors never specifically address the numbers of patients taking drugs.

Secondly, they dismiss the use of traditional, and therefore comparative means of measuring cognitive function used for Altzheimers studies, claiming that HIV-populations are poorer, have less time on their hands (or brains), and the lack of testing sites.

Huh?  OK. Whatever.

Instead they perform advanced MRI scans on patients brains to study blood flow.  Now, that’s got to save some money, right?

The researchers go on to perpetuate a myth (which is what I call a debunked theory) that the HI virus crosses the blood brain barrier and pisses on the machinery there because the ARVs can’t follow it.

Another report on these symptoms of advanced aging in poz people, published a few months ago in New York magazine, was more honest:

But in many cases of dementia, there are no signs of viral activity around the brain, suggesting other factors may be at play. At the Manhattan HIV Brain Bank at Mount Sinai, researchers have dissected the skull contents of 250 volunteers who agreed to a series of psychological interviews and neurological exams, then promised to hand over their brains at death. (One is the gift of Fred Gormley, a felicitous writer who toiled with me years ago at the now-defunct New York Native; he wrote about his life as a brain donor before his death from AIDS complications in 2002.) According to Dr. Susan Morgello, who directs the lab, most people who showed signs of dementia while alive do not have evidence of HIV in their autopsied brain. What they do have in common, she says, is evidence of persistent inflammation, which alone could account for the cognitive damage.

(Read more: Why a Number of HIV Patients Are Aging Faster — New York Magazine http://nymag.com/health/features/61740/index3.html#ixzz0dNXmDa8o)

So what else might explain the symptoms of advanced aging?  “The inflammation might be caused as much by the patient’s emotional and psychiatric burden as the virus’s pathological course,” says Dr. Susan Morgello, director of the above mentioned brain bank.

Sounds reasonable to me.  I’m a big believer that the cause of most illness and disease is multi-factoral. Looking for a single causative agent can be counterproductive.

How are the effects of environmental toxins factored into this research?

Better yet, what about the effect of pharmaceutical drugs?  More than any other factor, this is the most probable common denominator for people with AIDS and other chronic diseases. Similar brain aberrations are also common in patients with lupus, MS and other auto-immune disorders.

Most problems caused by medication are cumulative.  People can generally handle a week or two of antibiotic treatment and either avoid serious effects, or quickly rebound from them, for example. The fast pace of drug development demanded by AIDS activists (including me) in the 1980s means long term trials have never been conducted and we are only now seeing some of the worst, cumulative effects and interactions.

Regrettably, AIDS research is so entrenched in the theory of HIV causation and the notion that ARVs can control viral replication that other possible (and rather obvious) causes of symptoms are not even examined.

I opened this post with some descriptions of my life a few years ago.  Today I walk without a cane; speak fluently; haven’t fallen since 2008; have had no seizures since 2007; and you would not be embarrassed to sit across the table from me while we ate a meal.  I still avoid Costco, but not just because of the bright lights.

I do not claim to be totally free of health problems.  I still experience considerable fatigue, for example, and have a nasty habit of throwing blood clots in my left leg. Considering the likely damage of several years of pharmaceutical abuse, I’m lucky I don’t have worse problems I suppose.

One person’s experience does not make for a clinical trial, but it shouldn’t be ignored either, and there are others who can testify to similar experiences.  Nor is it just about HIV and AIDS research. I remember sharing an IV infusion (vitamins and nutrients) room with a woman several years my senior who has successfully treated her cancer for decades without chemo or radiation.  It does happen.

A sneaky, mutating virus that can evade the electron microscope was not the cause of my cognitive and neurological problems.  Those problems started after I began taking a lot of prescription drugs and greatly resolved after I quit them.

Anyone care to study that proposition?