Have you ever had an HIV test ???

[lembeh]

 

 

>one of many that I've co-authored

 

Three in total, if I am not vastly mistaken (plus one sole authorship).

-j-

[Khun_Kong]

josh_ingu said:

 

 

>one of many that I've co-authored

 

Three in total, if I am not vastly mistaken (plus one sole authorship).

-j-

 

Yeah, I included the unpublished work presented at various conferences.

 

Everybody has their agendas. One of mine is the understanding of the nature of science.

 

Often, the disagreements seen seem to center around science, based on reproducible experiments, and philosophy, based on belief. Such is the so-called debate between biological evolutionists and Christian fundamentalists, regarding the origins of life.

 

I think that both schools of thought can co-exist. Things become dangerous when the boundaries become too fuzzy (see Gallileo vs. Catholics and the repeated attempts to substitute religious philosophy classes for science in the Amerikan south).

 

Maybe best, if anyone wants to continue this discussion with, to open a new thread. Sorry for leading the hijack.

 

Voted "Yes" in the current thread. 2X. Around 1986 and again in 2002.

[thamachat]

Khun Kong, I still don't see your point. I don't see how Liam Scheff misrepresented Gallo's words. Furthermore, I am not Liam Scheff, so I don't see what this has to do with my article about the Aids conference.

 

Actually, I AM familiar with Gallo's actual words on this subject. He said, in The Scientist, that KS is "enormously augmented by HIV" but he never explains how HIV can augment KS when he never found HIV DNA in KS cells. It's pretty obvious this is just typical "Bob" face-saving bullshit.

 

Liam Scheff was referring to what Bob said at the NIDA meeting, not in the Scientist. I assume he is accurately representing what Bob said.

 

Why don't you tell me what you think are the many inaccuracies in my article, not Liam Scheff's?

[thamachat]

I inadvertently omitted an important fact in my piece which is the following:

 

Fiala also points out that, in Thailand, a so called "symptomatic HIV-infection" is also counted as an AIDS case. "Any HIV-positive patient, suffering from one of?11 mostly unspecific symptoms will get this diagnosis," he says. These people are added to the AIDS case numbers in Thailand, although they would not be considered AIDS cases in the rest of the world. "'Symptomatic HIV infections' represent more than 40% of the national figure and are highest in the north of Thailand, the so called epicenter of Aids,? says Fiala.

 

So not only would many HIV positive Thais not be HIV positive in the west, almost half of all Thais reported as "AIDS cases" would not be considered to have AIDS in the west.

 

Further evidence that AIDS is a politically, not a medically defined disease.

[lembeh]

 

Well, firstly you forgot the link to the "virus myth" site. Which is what this of course is all about. Better written than most, but virus myth mis-information and distortion as usual.

 

The quoting of "two nobel prize winners" of course refers to Kary Mullis and Pete Duisberg. Its always the same names dragged out, isn't it? Particularly along with the western australia group.

 

Lets have a look at one small portion of your post:

 

Indeed, two recent studies from Uganda (Morgan D et al, 2002 and Collaborative Group on AIDS Incubation and HIV Survival, 2000) found that unmedicated HIV + Ugandans lived as long after diagnosis as did HIV + westerners who were taking the Aids drugs.

 

 

As usual with the virus myth stuff, this quote takes the study out of context, now, here (from the astract) is a bit that would *appear* to support what the virus myth people are saying (from:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=10961197 )

 

However, the conditions with the longest survival (cryptosporidial diarrhoea, chronic HSV, and extrapulmonary tuberculosis) had a similar survival to that in developed countries.

 

OK. Loooks good for you right? *Except*, when we go to the actual paper (which I did), we get this bit from the discussion (first paragraph):

 

The median survival from developing AIDS in this rural African cohort was only 9.3 months. This may be an underestimate of the true survival because the incident cases who developed AIDS did so a median of 49 months after seroconversion. Since this is faster than the median time to AIDS for the incident cases as a whole (currently more than 8 years) they may represent rapid progressors. Although short, the survival in this cohort is similar to that of around 10 months in developed countries early in the HIV epidemic.4, 15, 16 However, the course of AIDS in developed countries changed with better management of HIV infection owing to the use of prophylaxis and antiretrovirals. Survival after an AIDS diagnosis in the United Kingdom increased from 10.6 months before 1987 to over 19 months in 199117 and in Italian haemophiliacs it increased from 12 months in 1983?8 to 25 months in 1990?1.18 With HAART both the incidence of AIDS has been reduced further and the survival with AIDS has been prolonged.19, 20

 

Above a direct quote taken from the paper:

 

Survival by AIDS defining condition in rural Uganda.

Morgan D, Malamba SS, Orem J, Mayanja B, Okongo M, Whitworth JA.

 

Sex Transm Infect. 2000 Jun;76(3):193-7.

 

So, in Uganda, the survival rate *in the absence of medication* is roughly equal to the survival rate in the west, ***in the abasence of medication***. So, the guys work is being quoted in the exact opposite of what he says in the paper. Typical virus myth distortion, mis represenation and absolute fabrication.

 

Now, most of what is in your post is in a similar vein. Honestly, there is no real point in going through it line by line, because, frankly you would not belive it anyway, right?

 

 

Now, the KS story is identical, but relies upon what we mean by "cause". HIV does not "cause" KS, but, the destruction of the immune system (by HIV), which is what kept the sarcoma from growing, now allows the sarcoma to grow. What *causes* is? Well, not known at this point in time. But there again what *causes* almost every cancer is not fully known or understood. So, may well be poppers that are causing the initial mustational event, which, in a healthy (read non HIV infected individual) is kept in check and does not "grow" and "spread". HIV destroys the immune system and the sarcoma grows. Easy peasy no? Not great evidence of any conspiracy.

 

Now, I will *try* to put this little graemlin in, as I am sure it will be apt:

 

-j-

[mongatu]

Hi josh_ingu,

 

Great response. Very patient of you as well.

[thamachat]

Josh, nice try. Problem is that HIV researchers (the ones who don't fake the data) tend to make Herculean efforts to put their data in the best light, so as not to antagonize the HIV-AIDS industry that funds their studies and their vacations on the Riviera. If they found the wrong conclusion, it would mean no more highly profitable studies for them to do. So you have situations like the one in Vancouver, where the researchers found that drug addicts who attended free needle programs were many times more likely to seroconvert than addicts who didn't use these programs. But then, realizing the implications of their findings, they went on a PR offensive to try to make their results seem the opposite of what they were, lest they lose out on future studies for finding the wrong conclusions. Other researchers simply report the data and "play dumb," refusing to draw obvious conclusions, especially on studies of Aids drugs. It's easy to do this sort of thing, you just "mine the data" and reorganize it to make it mean what you want it to mean.

 

In the case of Uganda, Dr. Rodney Richards, founding scientist for Amgen and one of the developers of the first HIV tests, addresses this study as follows (from http://www.aliveandwell.org/html/africa/ugandan_study.html):

 

"In fact, this is an understatement. The untreated Ugandans in the above study are actually surviving just as long as their medicated HIV positive counterparts in the developed world, according to data published in the April 1, 2000 issue of The Lancet.(2) This latter study was conducted by the Collaborative Group on AIDS Incubation and HIV Survival Group (Collaborative Group) which analyzed data from 13,030 individuals with known dates of seroconversion from Europe, North America, and Australia to estimate time from seroconversion to AIDS and death.

 

Specifically, "median time from seroconversion to death was 9.8 years"(1) in the Ugandan study, as compared to 10.1 years for aged matched individuals in the Collaborative Group study; and median time from seroconversion to AIDS was 9.4 and 9.3 years for the two studies, respectively (see note 1).

 

Even more miraculously, for individuals infected at ages15-24 in these studies, 10-year survival was substantially better in antiretroviral-free Ugandans than it was in their medicated counterparts living in Europe, North America, and Australia (78% vs 66%, see note 2).

 

Could it be that these particular rural Ugandans are living in abundance with good nutrition and the necessary resources to provide for an environment conducive to fending off the opportunistic infections waiting to take advantage of their failing immune systems?

 

The authors give us the answer in a separate report, which was published two months earlier in the British Medical Journal (BMJ). "Most of the population" in their study area "lives in poverty; food is often in limited supply, there is no electricity, and there is poor access to any, let alone clean, water. Malaria is endemic, and infections other than HIV, especially bacterial infections, are common."(3)

 

Interestingly, the BMJ publication doesn't even talk about time to AIDS or death. Rather it focuses on symptoms in these "HIV infected" individuals and paradoxically concludes that "disease progression associated with infection with HIV-1 seems to be rapid in rural Uganda." Only in the world of HIV/AIDS can "rapid" disease progression be correlated with "considerably longer" survival. The apparently schizophrenic conclusions in these two publications, which are derived from the same patient population, are discussed further in note 3.

 

Rather than comment on the contradictory nature of observable facts, the authors of the Ugandan study attempt to divert attention from the extraordinary survival rates observed in their subjects by emphasizing these rates are "comparable to survival times in industrialized countries prior to the widespread use of antiretroviral therapy." Technically true, but only because survival times have not changed since the widespread use of antiretroviral therapy in industrialized countries!

 

Note 3. The Ugandan studies use the WHO Staging system to define disease progression. (WHO. Wkly Epidemiol Rec 1990; 65:221-8.) Unlike the Bangui definition of AIDS (WHO. Wkly Epid Rec 1986; 61:72-73.), which is based on clinical symptoms without an antibody test, the WHO staging system requires a positive anti-HIV test. It then attempts to gauge disease progression according to four Stages. Stage 1: asymptomatic; Stage 2: mild symptoms, including weight loss of as little as 5%; Stage 3: weight loss greater than 10%, or treatable opportunistic infections; and Stage 4, which is synonymous with AIDS. Stage 4 includes many, but not all of the illnesses used by the CDC to define AIDS.

 

The staging system is progressive, hence when a person progresses to a higher stage, they cannot go back even if the condition is resolved. So when the authors report, "only 17% of participants remained symptom-free five years after seroconversion," this is not striking. In fact, the vast majority of participants may actually be symptom-free as we speak. A single bout of sinusitis, dermatitis, or bacterial infection, or even a 5% weight loss (in a month), over this 5 year period leaves the subject classified as symptomatic, regardless if they recover or not.

 

The fact that disease progression to Stages 2 and 3 is remarkably rapid, while disease progression to Stage 4 (AIDS), or death, is remarkable slow, leaves one wondering, "of what value is this Staging system?"

End of Richards quote.

 

As for your comments on KS, you point to "the destruction of the immune system by HIV" as allowing KS to develop. Can you show me even one single paper in which it is proven that HIV destroys T-cells and thus destroys the immune system? I don't mean a paper that assumes it, or that theorizes a way for HIV to do it, but one that PROVES it.

 

Furthermore, if KS is caused by destruction of the immune system by HIV, why does it occur almost exclusively in gay men, and not other HIV positive people? Why does it occur in HIV negative gay men?

 

Hey, haven't you heard? The Virus Hunters who insist that everything is caused by germs and nothing by toxins have announced that it's a different virus, HHV-8, that causes KS. http://www.ucsf.edu/pressrel/1998/04/0401kapo.html

 

You also get your facts wrong about the two Nobel Prize winners, Josh. It's Kary Mullis and Walter Gilbert, not Peter Duesberg. But then you obviously aren't much concerned about precision in data presentation. If you'll visit http://aras.ab.ca/articles/AIDSQuotes.htm you will see that it's not just the two Nobelists and the Western Australia group, it's hundreds of scientists and doctors with qualifications at least as good as yours I suspect, who point out the fallacies and unproven assumptions, the hypotheses masquerading as proofs, in your arguments.

[thamachat]

Here's the latest HIV dissident, not yet on any website. You'll note his pathetic lack of scientific credentials after his quote:

 

From: Review of ?Oncogenes, Aneuploidy and AIDS: A Scientific Life & Times of Peter H. Duesberg? by Harvey Bialy, 7 July 2004, Nature Biotechnology

 

?The central figure of Bialy?s book is Peter Duesberg, a classical, no-nonsense University of California, Berkeley, professor who has for more than 20 years presented data and interpretations to cancer and AIDS scientists that call into question?that specific genes when mutated cause cancer, and [that] HIV causes AIDS. The sadly predictable result of questioning these two sacred cows of modern biomedicine was the almost complete destruction of a once lofty professional standing.?

 

??To this reader, Duesberg?s situation suggests parallels with?the Nobel Prize winner Barbara McClintock. For decades her work was ignored?yet how right she turned out to be. The inescapable conclusion: clean data and perceptive, unbiased analyses win every time.?

 

?As far as this reviewer is concerned, Duesberg gets the Big Picture correct on both cancer and AIDS because he demands the highest standards of data interpretation, something that is a common casualty in the cancer and AIDS fields where fame, stock options, potential blockbuster drugs, appearances on Larry King Live and the front cover of Time or Newsweek, often appear to take precedence?Duesberg represents a golden era of molecular biology when there was no room for the shoddy overinterpretations and unimpressive correlations that pass for some of today?s cancer and AIDS ?breakthroughs.??

 

?How can you perform academic or commercially relevant biology if you don?t think deeply? If you don?t have a coherent theory and if you are dependent upon sophisticated technologies and bioinformatic protocols? then your data interpretations are in the realm of voodoo science. It is painfully obvious by now that this is where many cancer and AIDS researchers have located themselves--a conclusion attested to by the?mountain of contradictions in the scientific literature concerning presumed HIV pathogenesis, AIDS morbidity, mortality, epidemiology and demography. Having got it so wrong, they can?t buy their way out of their self generated cul-de-sacs.?

 

-- Dr. George L. Gabor Miklos, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer, Human Genetic Signatures, Sydney, Australia; Director, Secure Genetics, Sydney; Consultant in Functional Genomics to Novartis Pharmaceuticals and to the CELERA Human, Mouse and Drosophila Genome Projects. Formerly with University of California, University of Washington, University of Edinburgh, the Neurosciences Institute, The SCRIPPS Research Institute and the Australian National University. Dr. Miklos was an invited speaker at a Nobel Symposium, held at the Alfred Nobel Estate in Karlskoga, Sweden 1992

[gobbledonk]

Not sure where this post has gone from the original question, but I can assure anyone considering taking a test that its a painful period waiting for confirmation that one is HIV-negative : very stressful. My heart goes out to each of you.

[lembeh]

 

 

>Problem is that HIV researchers (the ones who don't fake the data) tend to make Herculean efforts to put their data in the best light, so as not to antagonize the HIV-AIDS industry that funds their studies and their vacations on the Riviera. If they found the wrong conclusion, it would mean no more highly profitable studies for them to do

 

And there we go. Any study that support the HIV/AIDS link is either fraudulent, poorly done, mis-interpreted or other wise wrong. This is why there is so little point in having these discussions. A quick check on PubMed with the term "HIV" came up with nearly 140,000 papers. Sure all of them are wrong, or written out of vested interest. The fact they they provide a *huge* body of essentially consistent data *must* be evidence of some great conspiracy on behalf of hundreds of thousand of scientists right?

 

>You also get your facts wrong about the two Nobel Prize winners, Josh. It's Kary Mullis and Walter Gilbert, not Peter Duesberg

 

Ah, yes indeed. Then your next post is of course about, well, Peter Duesberg. Hmm.

 

>But then you obviously aren't much concerned about precision in data presentation

 

Now now.

 

Look the point here is that I was able to conclusively show that one of the papers you put up in your arguement was indeed taken literally and factually out of context. I am sure that will make no difference to you what so ever (and indeed you go on to post *further* misinterpretations of the same data!!!!) Can I be bothered to go through your post again and do the same again?. No. because it would make no real difference to you what so ever. Your mind is made up, and there is no worthwile discourse to be had.

 

Well, OK, one more try. You said:

 

>Can you show me even one single paper in which it is proven that HIV destroys T-cells and thus destroys the immune system? I don't mean a paper that assumes it, or that theorizes a way for HIV to do it, but one that PROVES it.

 

I can give you well over a hundred, as they mechanism is now well know (read up on the process called apoptosis), but as you asked for one, here it is:

 

 

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=9744279

 

 

The virus *is* out there, it *is* infecting people, and indeed killing them. But is so much nicer and safe to belive that it is all a conspiracy by scientists and big pharma, and that theres nothing to worry *you*. Its a nice dream world. Not a safe one maybe, but a nice one.

-j-