On Wednesday of
this week – a mere two days before World AIDS Day, (today) – quite a few
panicked articles were released proclaiming that the scourge was set to become the
“third leading cause of death worldwide” within the next 25 years. Here is a typical one: AIDS to be 1 of top 3 causes of
death - AIDS - MSNBC.com.
But it is
fallacious to compare “diseases” between differing parts of the world when
those diseases are not even defined in the same way. AIDS in Africa is
sometimes diagnosed clinically without an HIV test, and in the case that an HIV
test is administered, the criteria for “positivity” are less stringent than
they are anywhere else in the world despite the fact that diseases endemic to
Africa (tuberculosis being a prime example) are documented as likely to
register falsely positive on an “HIV test”.
As can be seen
from examining the graph of HIV prevalence in the US linked here, and displayed in miniature to the right, with the exception of
a small drop in case estimates in
1995, the prevalence of HIV in the U.S. population has remained, for all
intents and purposes, perfectly constant since testing began in 1985.
In contrast to the
HIV prevalence curve, U.S. AIDS cases peaked in 1993–1994. Although this was
due, at least in part, to the expansion of the AIDS definition by the CDC in
1993, it is clear that the AIDS epidemic is not constant, and indeed, after
increasing slowly prior to 1993, it has gradually declined up to the present
day. We often hear phrases in the lay media such as “The number of AIDS cases
is double what it was x number of
years ago,” which creates a false sense of alarm because it implies that many more people are now developing AIDS
than ever did before. What the media reports don’t mention, however, is
that the numbers given are cumulative totals, in which all new cases for a
given year are added to all the cases for all the years prior to yield a
running total. Of course, if you continually add up all the AIDS cases since
the beginning of AIDS record keeping, it will be impossible to ever obtain a
decrease.
The true numbers
of annual AIDS cases, however, are not reflected by cumulative totals but
rather by annual incidences. The prevalence curve displays the estimated number
of HIV-antibody-positive people in the US for each given year, and as
the curve clearly conveys, this number has remained almost perfectly constant
since 1985 at about one million. With a U.S.
population of about 295 million people, this amounts to only 0.4 percent of U.S. citizens
testing positive for HIV antibody.
This data should
sound a clear alarm when one considers the supposed “infectious” nature of AIDS
(and possibly HIV). First, if HIV is a new pathogen, then its prevalence should
not have remained constant—it should have clearly increased, according to
Farr’s Law, which asserts that a new contagion spreads exponentially throughout
the population. More damning, however, is the following.
HIV is said to
cause AIDS on average eight to ten years after infection. If HIV causes AIDS,
then the incidence of AIDS should have mirrored the prevalence of HIV, only
shifted eight to ten years into the future. If HIV causes AIDS, the AIDS
incidence curve should be flat. This is not the case.
The discrepancy
cannot be explained away by AIDS drugs because this cannot account for the
sharp rise in AIDS incidence between 1987, when the first AIDS drugs were
marketed, and the drop that began in 1993, three years before the first protease inhibitor and combination therapy
cocktails were marketed. Although the AIDS establishment prefers to pretend
that the drop is attributable to these medications, it is difficult to imagine how a "partial cure" could magically become a graphic measure of prevention.
As problematic as
this is for the AIDS experts, and as inconsistent with the cries of panic that
occur with regularity whenever public awareness of (some might say public
hysteria about) AIDS is perceived to have dropped, it is even more troublesome
that upon careful inspection, a true AIDS epidemic in the Third
World makes no sense. The same disease cannot behave that
differently in two parts of the world, and the same virus cannot have such
drastically differing transmission rates as we are expected to believe it does.
The picture becomes even more troubling when one considers that HIV estimates
for Africa are taken from leftover blood
samples of pregnant women, often based on a single Elisa test, and extrapolated
to the entire population. By contrast, in most of the developed world, HIV
infection is not diagnosed until positive results have been obtained on two
Elisa tests and one Western Blot test – a testing protocol that eliminates a
very high proportion of initially reactive results. Clearly, even if we don’t
consider all the potential causes of false-positives, there is no way of
getting around the fact that the HIV estimates for Africa
must be vastly overstated.
But logical
consistency has never been a problem for AIDS specialists. If observations
don’t fit the framework that has been established, simply add more criteria to
the framework rather than questioning it. Make the data fit the uber-construct. No matter the cost to logic and scientific method, it is very expensive construct that has already cost more than any other real disease in the US, and continues to get more money than cancer even though it claims far, far, far fewer lives. But not to worry, soon all cancers in HIV antibody positive people will be AIDS-related. At least if the present company continues to have its deceitful and dangerous way.
Rebecca V. Culshaw worked on mathematical models of HIV infection
for almost ten years. She received her Ph.D. in mathematics (with a
specialization in mathematical biology) from Dalhousie University in Canada in
2002 and is currently an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of
Texas at Tyler. She is a celebrated internet author as a result of her writings
on Lew Rockwell, and "Science
Sold Out: Does HIV Really Cause AIDS?", a book based on those essays is due
next month. [The miniature at the top left is Hypatia
of Alexandria (370-415), famous as the first woman known to have made a
substantial contribution to the development of mathematics.]
This comment does not relate directly to this article of Dr. Culshaw, but as it is the most recent, I will hijack it for the purpose of giving any interested a preview of my preface to her almost sold out of its first printing book, as I just learned from the Bulletin Board sidebar.
---
Preface
As Dr. Culshaw’s text so clearly speaks for itself, there is really no need of any analytical preface, and I will not even attempt one. Instead I will tell a story of how this Terra Nova tome/ette came to be, in the hope that it will make the reasons for its publication now more apparent.
In February of this year, Darin Brown, a mathematics professor at Eastern New Mexico University and Frank Lusardi, a computer programmer in NYC, began a “Wikipedia” website devoted to providing a “fair” (meaning data rich) but by no means “balanced” forum for the internet presentation of HIV/AIDS dissent.
When I was directed to this “AIDS Wiki”, one of the first things I saw was a page devoted to “Petitions”, and since I had just launched one of my own, I of course checked to see if these “newcomers to internet AIDS insurgency” had included it. Indeed they had, but described it quite incorrectly and thus confirmed some of my worst fears concerning it.
The petition, which I thought a simple and quantitative way to test the truth of one of the favorite orthodox shibboleths for denying credibility to dissenting arguments --- that the vast majority of scientists had already considered the Duesberg critique for many years and found it lacking in substance, and so saw no reason at all to further engage a useless and possibly dangerous debate --- had turned out to be not simple at all.
In fact, it was apparently so confusing that almost nobody who read it understood either its semantic content or its purpose.
The text of the petition called on the editors of Nature and Science to take an anonymous, electronic straw poll of their readers asking them whether they thought a series of debates between Peter Duesberg and David Baltimore (the two most prominent and best credentialed scientists on opposite sides of the AIDS causation question) that would be sponsored by the National Academy was a waste of time.
Like the two blackboards with “A Bird in the the Hand” and “Paris in the the Spring”, it was very difficult for most people to see that the petition did not actually call for such a debate.
And so, I wrote an email to”the moderator” of this new website pointing out the correction. Not 15 minutes later I received a reply apologizing profusely for the oversight (and of course correcting the web entry), excusing the lapse only by saying how pressured he had been in trying to build the site’s content quickly, and that he was really much better at solving differential equations than his misreading of the simple
text might have indicated.
This began my knowing of the remarkable Dr. Brown.
Some short while later, Donald Miller MD, a very highly-regarded cardiac surgeon as I was to learn, published an online review of my biography of Peter.
The review appeared on the extremely popular website of Lew Rockwell, and surprisingly, quickly became a most popular “most popular” item.
Some short while after that I learned about Dr. Brown’s good friend Rebecca, who was thinking of leaving the “Sunny Brook AIDS Farm” after 10 years of making hay for it as an HIV mathematical modeler, and had written a cathartic, first person account of her journey from unquestioning believer to convinced heretic.
She was wondering if I would be kind enough to look it over, and to please not be too hard on her writing since it was her first go at this kind of prose.
What she sent was an essay entitled “Why I Quit HIV”, and it stunned me, as it did Lew Rockwell to whom I suggested she send it (without any line editing at all) and everyone else who has read it, including Richard Grossinger and Lindy Hough, the publishers of North Atlantic Books.
The rest, as they say, is her story.
Harvey Bialy
Cuernavaca
12 June 2006
Posted by: Harvey Bialy | January 16, 2007 at 01:35 PM