Peter Duesberg is an organic chemist who has become notorious for propagandizing his false claim that HIV does not cause AIDS. Duesberg first argued this view in the late 80s, when there was already substantial evidence against it. As the scientific evidence that he was wrong grew to mountainous proportions, he began to resort to deception and dishonesty to support his claims, sending his scientific career off the precipice in the process. Like many disgruntled crackpots before him, he decided to bypass his scientific peers and take his campaign directly to lay people, publishing a book entitled "Inventing the AIDS Virus" with the Regnery Press (check out their website to get a sense of where Duesberg is coming from politically). 

Some examples of Duesberg's deceipts:

He claims to have documented 4,521 "HIV negative AIDS cases" (this claim was repeated in Harpers Magazine by the writer Celia Farber, a longtime promoter of Duesberg). He arrived at this number by taking cases from papers where the researchers were reporting that the first clinical surveillance definition of AIDS was too broad, and was therefore capturing people without the disease. Duesberg simply ignores what the papers are saying and decides that anyone reported to have met this 1985 surveillance definition has AIDS, and is therefore an "HIV negative AIDS" case. He also cites a paper which reports that HIV-negative drug using gay men in the US didn't develop AIDS unless they were HIV-infected. He claims that the uninfected, drug using gay men in this study can be counted as "HIV negative AIDS" cases because his theory says that they will eventually develop AIDS (he cites one of his own review articles - he has conducted no HIV research - in support of this statement). The full text of this Duesberg opinion piece can be read online on his website.

This is his qualifying statement explaining why he feels it is appropriate to describe HIV negative gay men and hemophiliacs who do not have AIDS as "HIV negative AIDS" cases"

 "Table 1 includes some American and European immunodeficiencies that may not exactly fit the current definition of AIDS defining immunodeficiency without disease, which is 200 T-cells per microliter (CDC, 1992, MMWR 41, RR 17, 1-19), as for example, HIV-free male homosexuals on various recreations drugs with "X cells per cubic millimeter" (Table 1, ref. 14) or HIV-negative hemophiliacs with T4/T8 cell ratios of about 1 or 1 (Table 1, refs. 46-61). But even if not all of these cases fit the current definition of AIDS-defining immunodeficiency exactly, they do so prospectively. This is because their T-cells typically continue to decline either because of risk behavior, such as the consumption of recreational drugs, or because of clinical AIDS risks, such as chronic transfusion of foreign proteins as prophylaxis against hemophilia (Duesberg, P.H., 1992, op. cit.)."

 The "X" in the original paper is <600; what he's saying is that he counted uninfected, drug using gay men as "HIV negative AIDS" cases because their CD4 T cell counts were reported to be at the low end of the normal range (he did the same thing with uninfected hemophiliacs based on CD4/CD8 ratios). If this already isn't too arcane to follow, it should be possible to guess why <600 was replaced with an X in the HTML version of this article (which is also posted to the "virusmyth" website). 

Ironically, while Celia Farber quoted Duesberg's "HIV negative AIDS" case number in her Harpers article ("His exhaustive analysis of the peer-reviewed scientific literature has revealed more than 4,000 documented AIDS cases in which there is no trace of HIV or HIV antibodies"), she also lambasted the 1985 surveillance definition on which most of Duesberg's cases are based:

"The “Bangui definition” of AIDS was established in the city of Bangui in the Central African Republic, at a conference in 1985. The definition requires neither a positive HIV test nor a low T-cell count, as in the West, but only the presence of chronic diarrhea, fever, significant weight loss, and asthenia, as well as other minor symptoms. These happen to be the symptoms of chronic malnutrition, malaria, parasitic infections, and other common African illnesses."

The increasing effectiveness of combination antiretroviral therapies has also forced Duesberg to deceive, because he argues that in addition to recreational drugs and malnutrition, antiretroviral drugs cause AIDS. In reality, studies have found an increasingly dramatic decline in progression to AIDS and mortality as the approach to treatment has progressed from mono- to dual- to triple-combination antiretrovirals (comprehensively reviewed in this paper). One of the first and most-cited papers on the impact of antiretroviral therapy on mortality was a report by Frank Pallela which focused on people with advanced illness (less than 100 CD4 T cells). The full text is available online. The highest mortality is among people that never took antiretrovirals, the lowest among people on triple combinations (see table 1). 

Here is Duesberg’s attempt to explain away the findings (in a paper written with Claus Koehnlein and David Rasnick):

 http://www.duesberg.com/papers/chemical-bases.html

“the evidence for “declining morbidity and mortality” is only based on uncontrolled survey studies that investigated how long HIV-positive, clinically healthy subjects, but mostly from AIDS risk groups, survived on various anti-HIV drugs. The largest and most influential of these surveys was conducted by Palella et al (1998) who investigated in 1998 1255 anti-HIV drug-treated “patients, each of which had at least one CD4+ count below 100” from nine clinics in the US. However, all of these “patients” were “nonhospitalized”, AIDS-free subjects. “Patients with a diagnosis of cytomegalovirus retinitis or M. aviarum (sic) complex disease before study entry or during the first 30 days of follow-up and patients with active P. carinii pneumonia at the beginning of follow-up were excluded.” A similar survey investigated in 2001 1219 anti-HIV drug-treated Canadian HIV-positives with less than 200 CD4+ cells, of which 87% were AIDS-free (Hogg et al 2001). Neither of these studies mentions drug-free controls. On this basis the Palella-study found that the mortality of initially asymptomatic, HIV-positive people, which are treated with new anti-HIV drug cocktails, is 8.8% (“8.8 per 100 person-years”) and the Hogg-study found it is 6.7%.”

 - what he's trying to do is pretend that the participants in the Palella study were healthy before starting antiretrovirals. This is not the case, all had <100 CD4 T cells and many had previous opportunistic infections. What he then does is deliberately alter a quote from the Palella paper to make it seem like people with opportunistic infections were excluded. But this is what the quote says in the actual paper:

"Patients with a diagnosis of cytomegalovirus retinitis or M. avium complex disease before study entry or during the first 30 days of follow-up and patients with active P. carinii pneumonia at the beginning of follow-up were excluded from the analyses of the incidence of that opportunistic infection."

In other words, they weren't excluded from the study, they just weren't counted as having developed that particular opportunistic  infection during the study, if it was pre-existing or developed during he first 30 days. Because the sentence, in its original form, is also an acknowledgement that people entered the study with a history of opportunistic infections and not just low CD4 counts - i.e. not "asymptomatic" or "AIDS free" as Duesberg is claiming - Duesberg accomplishes a whole lot just by inserting a period after the word "excluded." 

The fact that the Palella paper reports data on people who never took antiretrovirals also contradicts Duesberg's statement that "Neither of these studies mentions drug-free controls."

So that's a couple of Duesbergian deceptions. Untangling them is like attacking an intractably knotted barbed wire of fictions, a barbed wire that - to me - feels like it's been dipped in a toxic goo of deranged bigotry. 

There are unfortunately many more  examples. Next time, the story of Peter Duesberg and Raphael Lombardo.