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dollars annually. Neither was the largess confined to just the
medical-scientific community and its controlling bureaucracies. As HIV came to
be automatically equated with AIDS, anyone testing positive qualified as a
disaster victim eligible for treatment at public expense, which meant
lucrative consultation and testing fees, and treatment with some of the most
profitable drugs that the pharmaceuticals industry has ever marketed.
And beyond that, with no vaccine available, the sole means of prevention lay
in checking the spread of HIV. This meant funding for another growth sector of
promotional agencies, advisory centers, educational campaigns, as well as
support groups and counselors to minister to afflicted victims and their
families. While many were meeting harrowing ends, others had never had it so
good. Researchers who would otherwise have spent their lives peering through
microscopes and cleaning Petri dishes became millionaires setting up companies
to produce HIV kits and drawing royalties for the tests performed.
Former dropouts were achieving political visibility and living comfortably as
organizers of programs financed by government grants and drug-company
handouts. It was a time for action, not thought;
spreading the word, not asking questions. Besides, who would want to mess with
this golden goose?
Storm-Cloud Over the Parade
And then in the late eighties, Peter Duesberg began arguing that AIDS might
not be caused by HIV
at all nor by any other virus, come to that. In fact, he didn't even think
that "AIDS" was infectious! This was not coming from any lightweight on the
periphery of the field. Generally acknowledged as one of the world's leading
authorities on retroviruses, the first person to fully sequence a retroviral
genome, Duesberg had played a major role in exploring the possibility of
viruses as the cause of cancers. In fact it was mainly his work in the sixties
that showed this conclusively not to be the case, which had not exactly
ingratiated him to many when that lavishly funded line of research was brought
to a close. But this didn't
prevent his being tipped as being in line for a Nobel Prize, named California
Scientist of the Year in
1971, awarded an Outstanding Investigator Grant by the National Institutes for
Health in 1985, and inducted to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences
in 1986.
What Duesberg saw was different groups of people getting sick in different
ways for different reasons that had to do with the particular risks that those
groups had always faced. No common cause tying them all together had ever been
convincingly demonstrated; indeed, why such conditions as dementia and wasting
disease should have been considered at all was something of a mystery, since
they are not results of immunosuppression. Drug users were ruining their
immune systems with the substances they were putting into their bodies,
getting TB and pneumonia from unsterile needles and street drugs, and wasting
as a consequence of the insomnia and malnutrition that typically go with the
lifestyle;
homosexuals were getting sarcomas from the practically universal use of
nitrite inhalants, and yeast infections from the suppression of protective
bacteria by overdosing on antibiotics used prophylactically;
hemophiliacs were immune-suppressed by the repeated infusion of foreign
protein contained in the plasmas of the unpurified clotting factors they had
been given up to that time; blood recipients were already sick for varying
reasons; people being treated with the "antiviral" drug AZT were being
poisoned; Africans were suffering from totally different diseases long
characteristic of poverty in tropical environments; and a few individuals were
left who got sick for reasons that would never be explained.
The only difference in recent years was that some of those groups had gotten
bigger. The increases matched closely the epidemic in drug use that had grown
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since the late sixties and early seventies, and
Duesberg proposed drugs as the primary cause of the rises that were being
seen.
227
Although Duesberg is highly qualified in this field, the observations that he
was making really didn't demand doctorate knowledge or rarefied heights of
intellect to understand. For a start, years after their appearances, the
various "AIDS" diseases remained obstinately confined to the original risk
groups, and the victims were still over 90 percent male. This isn't the
pattern of an infectious disease, which spreads and affects everybody, male
and female alike. For a new disease loose in a defenseless population, the
spread would be exponential. And this was what had been predicted in the early
days, but it just hadn't happened. While the media continued to terrify the
public with a world of their own creation, planet
Earth was getting along okay. Heterosexuals who didn't use drugs weren't
getting AIDS; for the U.S., subtracting the known risk groups left about five
hundred per year fewer than the fatalities from contaminated tap water. The
spouses and partners of AIDS victims weren't catching it. Prostitutes who
didn't do drugs weren't getting it, and customers of prostitutes weren't
getting it. In short, these had all the characteristics of textbook
non-infectious diseases.
It is an elementary principle of science and medicine that correlation alone
is no proof of cause. If
A is reported as generally occurring with B, there are four possible
explanations: (1) A causes B; (2) B
causes A; (3) something else causes both A and B; (4) the correlation is just
coincidence or has been artificially exaggerated, e.g., by biased collecting
of data. There's no justification in jumping to a conclusion like (1) until
the other three have been rigorously eliminated.
In the haste to find an infectious agent, Duesberg maintained, the role of HIV
had been interpreted the wrong way around. Far from being a common cause of
the various conditions called "AIDS," HIV
itself was an opportunistic infection that made itself known in the final
stages of immune-system deterioration brought about in other ways. In a sense,
AIDS caused HIV. Hence, HIV acted as a
"marker" of high-risk groups, but was not in itself responsible for the health
problems that those groups were experiencing. The high correlation between HIV
and AIDS that was constantly being alluded to was an artifact of the way in
which AIDS was defined:
HIV + indicator disease = AIDS
Indicator disease without HIV = Indicator disease.
So if you've got all the symptoms of TB, and you test positive for HIV, you've
got AIDS. But if you have a condition that's clinically indistinguishable and
don't test positive for HIV, you've got TB.
And that, of course, would have made the problem scientifically and medically
trivial.
Anatomy of an Epidemic
When a scientific theory fails in its predictions, it is either modified or
abandoned. Science welcomes informed criticism and is always ready to
reexamine its conclusions in the light of new evidence or an alternative
argument. The object, after all, is to find out what's true. But it seems that
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