MG18's Open Salon Blog

Has DC's HIV Rate Declined 40%?

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 16:03:18 -0400

Retired professor Henry Bauer writes a blog called "HIV/AIDS Skepticism." He explains why on his homepage: "my current work has to do with the fact that HIV is not the cause of AIDS." His prior interests include "Genuine Facts About 'Nessie,' the Loch Ness 'Monster.'"

Bauer recently posted an entry entitled "STOP PRESS: 40% DECREASE in HIV in Washington DC." This was the posting cited recently on Open Salon by resistanceisfruitful, along with the disclaimer: "please remember that no one is denying that HIV or AIDS exists." Bauer actually is denying that HIV exists, as he explains in this post, "The Debilitating Distraction of 'HIV'":

"Every now and again, Martin chides me for writing about “HIV” (which doesn’t exist), “infection” (which doesn’t occur), and the like. My standard response has been that I don’t know how to write about HIV/AIDS doings without using the terminology that everyone’s familiar with. In my book, I tried to address the issue by saying that by HIV I would always mean, “Whatever it is that HIV tests detect”, but that repeating this every time, or always putting scare quotes around “HIV”, would get tiresome, for readers as well as the writer. "

But to return to the main point, is Bauer's claim about a 40% decline in DC's HIV prevalence accurate? He quotes the number of people living with HIV/AIDS in the District in 2006 at the beginning of his post, from an article in Newsday:

"The District’s report found a 22 percent increase in HIV and AIDS cases from the 12,428 reported at the end of 2006."

One paragraph later, he quotes a January 2008 article about the 2006 figures, which says the following: "One in 20 Washington, D.C., residents is HIV-positive." From this he concludes the rate was 5%, apparently without contemplating the fact that if the total was 12,428 and the rate was 5%, then roughly half of DC's population must have gone missing. He also does not consider it odd that a rate of 5% would have gone unmentioned by any other media, instead he just leaps to the erroneous conclusion that there has been a 40% decline in the prevalence of HIV in DC.

The reality, of course, is that the writer of the January 2008 article erred, and Bauer hasn't noticed or thought to check his sources. Helpfully, though, the article also includes a link to The District of Columbia HIV/AIDS Epidemiology Annual Report, which confirms that the 2006 figure was 12,428 - as Henry has already written - out of a population of 498,817. This is a rate of 2.49%.

Recruiting for the AIDS Denial Cult

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 12:03:59 -0400

My first post to Open Salon was in response to an article on Celia Farber posted by resistanceisfruitful. This person is also a member of a message board for people who deny HIV causes AIDS, called "AIDS Myth Exposed." For anyone who knows anything about the science of HIV infection, reading posts on that message board is a nightmarish experience; it's like watching people walk out into traffic and when you try to shout a warning, no sound comes out. Worse, there's a crowd of people on the other side of the road beckoning them across.

As I surmised after looking at his blog on Open Salon, resistanceisfruitful is here for a reason, which he has helpfully described in a recent post to "AIDS Myth Exposed."

"I've also started posting at Open Salon, a relatively recent blogging/social networking site with a sizeable audience of well-educated, progressive readers. I try not to brow beat or make people "believers" there and will mix up my dissident posts with other stories (potato soup recipes and Carmen Miranda hats are popular) to keep folks interested.

As a result, in the past three months I've identified three other out gay bloggers living with HIV, plus one other who has been part of that community since the beginning. One of them is reaching out for more information as a result, and based on the comments most other readers appreciate being challenged about what they think they know. Not everyone is aware that the dissident community exists."

You can read the full posting here.

Everyone should be free to make choices about their own healthcare, but resistanceisfruitful is proselytizing lies and misinformation about HIV in an attempt to persuade people that his choices are right for everyone.

The Deceptions of Peter Duesberg

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 21:03:00 -0400

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:

"Patientswith a diagnosis of cytomegalovirus retinitis or M. avium complexdisease before study entry or during the first 30 days of follow-upand patients with active P. carinii pneumonia at the beginningof follow-up were excluded from the analyses of the incidenceof 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.