Peter Duesberg, Cary Mullis, and Christine Maggiore are wrong.
AIDS is a transmissible disease. There are plenty of people --
Americans in good health, not malnourished Africans -- who acquired AIDS
even though they had never had any other AIDS risk factor than sharing
blood or sexual fluids with someone who had AIDS at the time or who later
came down with it. This includes babies, thousands of hemophiliacs,
transfusion recipients, medical workers, and ordinary people having sex.
These people who contracted the disease by infection were not drug users,
gay or anal sex practitioners, Haitians, or members of any other AIDS risk group.
They did not indulge in any of the practices that Duesberg claims are
the cause of AIDS.
These people were not diagnosed as HIV positive and treated with toxic
antiviral drugs which then destroyed their immune system. On the contrary,
their first sign that anything was wrong was the appearance of an opportunistic
infection -- Pneumocystis Carinii pneumonia, Kaposi's Sarcoma, rampant herpes,
etc., resulting from immune disfunction. These cases -- and there are many --
totally disprove the claims of Duesberg et al.
AIDS did not exist before (approximately) 1980. Although various people
had suppressed immune systems, generally from known causes (e.g., cancer
chemotherapy) these cases were isolated, and their condition was not
transferable to other people. Their sex partners didn't get it. There were
no clusters of such cases.
Transmissible, infectious immune suppression first appeared on Earth
around 1980, in some gay male communities. Before that it had never
been seen in all of human history. Whereas the conditions that Duesberg
blames for AIDS -- anal sex, use of nitrite inhalants and other
"recreational" drugs, large numbers of sex partners, intestinal parasites,
etc., had all been present for many decades without the slightest
appearance of major immune suppression and consequent PCP, KS, etc.
There can be no doubt that AIDS is transmitted by an infectious agent.
HIV can be isolated from every person who has AIDS. No other virus or
bacterium has been found in every case of AIDS. HIV has been shown to
cause AIDS in apes.
Furthermore, HIV has fulfilled
Koch's Postulates: It can be found in
all AIDS patients. It can be isolated and grown in cell cultures.
It has been injected into apes and caused AIDS. And it has been isolated
from those apes. Also, it has been accidently injected -- by blood
transfusions, medical accidents of blood specimen splashing or needle
sticks, etc. -- into humans who were not in any of the AIDS risk groups,
but who then subsequently developed AIDS from that injection. The HIV
was then isolated from some of those patients and typed and found to be
the same variety they had been injected or splashed with.
Not only does HIV exist, it has been isolated and photographed with
electron microscopes. The pictures -- actual electron micrographs,
not diagrams -- are shown on the websites linked below. You may want to
download some of the pictures and view them with a display program that
permits you to magnify them and increase the gamma (brighten the dark areas),
which will make the cores of the viruses more visible, or just increase
the gamma on your screen generally (e.g., with the KDE Control Center in
Linux). If you can't change the gamma just increase the brightness and
turn down the contrast on your monitor.
The size and structure of many of the viruses shown are remarkably
consistent, refuting the claim of the no-HIV adherents that they are merely
some kind of cellular debris.
- HIV Pictures - U of Utah
- HIV pictures - Fermin Lab, Tulane
- HIV picture - Otago School, NZ
- HIV - The Big Picture Book of Viruses
As Duesberg points out, HIV doesn't behave like other viruses, but the
reason is simple: it slowly attacks the immune system! Here are some
excellent texts, arranged from short to long, that explain how HIV
causes AIDS, how it's diagnosed accurately, how it can be treated
(by conventional medicine), etc. They are very worthwhile reading.
Of course alternative therapies, such as high-dose Vitamin C, can also
be very beneficial.
- HIV Pathology - U of Utah
- HIV Tutorial - U of Utah
- Textbook of AIDS Pathology - PDF