printSome people shed darkness wherever they go, and on whatever topic they tackle. Thabo Mbeki, South-Africa’s Leader for Life, and the primitive who runs what is fast descending into a banana-less banana republic, is one of them. About his attempts to deny that the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) causes Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS), Kate Scannell, an assistant clinical professor of medicine at UC-San Francisco and author of the book “Death of the Good Doctor: Lessons From the Heart of the AIDS Epidemic,” writes this:
While most HIV deniers (who are mostly white Americans) neither give care to people with AIDS nor conduct HIV research, they do spend a considerable amount of time building a political base. For many years their ideas have languished in the margins of both the scientific and activist communities, but this summer they got a boost when South African President Thabo Mbeki allowed the work of famed HIV denier and University of California at Berkeley professor Peter Duesberg to be incorporated into this month’s 13th International AIDS Conference in South Africa. Duesberg, whose AIDS research has been criticized by most AIDS researchers, has consistently maintained that HIV does not cause AIDS. He cites as evidence the failure of HIV to comply with specific scientific postulates (the “Koch postulates,” created in 1840 and 1890, before the discovery of viruses) or to follow cardinal rules of virus behavior. Rather, Duesberg and the deniers believe that AIDS is caused by chromosomal damage, certain lifestyles, drug abuse, malnutrition, poor sanitation and parasitic infections…
While deniers rigidly believe that HIV is nonexistent or incidental, they have yet to articulate a coherent explanation for its nearly universal presence in people with AIDS. Nor have they explained the documented efficacy of drugs that specifically suppress HIV in prolonging AIDS patients’ lives and preventing infection in newborns of HIV-infected women. Furthermore, in the face of such data, they have not articulated a moral defense for their advice against anti-retroviral treatments that actually work to save human lives. At best, their position is surreal; at worst, it is blatantly immoral…
Deniers also believe that AIDS researchers are somehow organized into a conspiracy that profits in its singular and rigid focus on HIV as the cause of AIDS. Those of us who actually do research find this humorous. Like their hero, Duesberg, we tend to be a fiercely independent and competitive lot who keep our research secret from colleagues, hoping to be the one to find the new truth and debunk the old one. Any “mainstream” scientist would love to discover another cause of AIDS. The rush of excitement and notoriety that such a discovery would bring are what researchers strive for during their repetitive, dreary work in crowded and underfunded labs. Still, no one so far, including Duesberg, has found another cause for AIDS…
The fact is that [Mbeki] has aligned himself with a handful of white American deniers and disagreed with a vast multicultural group of world researchers who claim that HIV causes AIDS. In his alliance with people whose stubbornly abstract beliefs would deny millions of impoverished people one viable if partial remedy, Mbeki’s attempt to forge a “uniquely African solution” looks like a familiar picture of valuing political power over human lives.
Here is a dry as dust dissection of the science, for those unhealthy, irrational minds who can never quit contemplating conspiracy. “The Relationship Between The Human Immunodeficiency Virus And The Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome” is linked on the website of Robert Todd Carroll, of the Skeptic’s Dictionary.
In any event, there’s a foolproof empirical test that’ll prove HIV causes AIDS. If the HIV denier takes blood from someone who is HIV positive or has full-blown AIDS, and injects a good quantity (just to be safe, although a small amount will do the trick) directly into the blood stream, and then refrains from taking anti-retroviral drugs, he or she will acquire the disease sooner or later. Why, they could even try and isolate the retrovirus from other factors in the blood so as to refine the experiment. The usual warnings apply.
I wonder why these mouth breathers have not put their money were their worthless mouths are?
Update: So far I have received letters from the conspirators. These consist of assertions, not verified facts. The fact that some of these people are scientists, yet commit errors one learns to avoid in Logic and Statistics 101, is distressing, but not surprising: mythical thinking is encouraged in schools and pervades every nook and cranny of the Zeitgeist.
For instance, if a reader asserts that there are a million Americans who are infected with the HIV; have been infected for decades, but are perfectly healthy, he would need to, at the very least, provide VERY good proof of that from credible sources. He’d need, for example, to supply data to indicate these people are not on antiretroviral treatment.
Dissent is welcomed on Barely a Blog, but BAB will not be facilitating junk science and irrational conspiracy.