National resource center on HIV and aging Things To Know Before You Buy
How many times have you heard the phrase, "HIV, the virus that causes AIDS"? Because of this association, HIV is the most feared virus on earth. But is this fear justified? Is it possible that this infamous association is nothing more than propaganda? With all the funding for this syndrome and all the Ph.D. s studying it, I doubted this could be true myself, until I looked into it. What I found was fascinating.
When one actually reads the early research on AIDS, before the picture was muddied with the declaration that it's caused by HIV, it seems fairly obvious that AIDS is actually caused by drug use, just as we can now see with perfect hindsight that lung cancer is caused by cigarette smoking. These people have absolute control over what research is funded for AIDS and since the discovery and conviction of HIV all research has been slanted toward learning how to kill or suppress it. He says HIV could not possibly be the cause of AIDS.
Of course, other drugs, especially inhaled drugs like methamphetamines and cocaine contributed to the picture. Fungal infections are primarily caused by the overuse of antibiotics. Like cigarettes, long-term use of them causes cancer.
When the definition of AIDS was expanded (because no one was interested in studying a gay disease), we saw new groups enter the picture-namely hemophiliacs and IV drug users. Hemophiliacs use something called Factor VIII to help their blood clot. Commercial grade Factor VIII, which is cheaper and comes from thousands of donors, causes immune system dysfunction, whereas purified Factor VIII does not. Only hemophiliacs who receive commercial Factor VIII get AIDS and if they switch to the pure form, they often recover. Need more proof? HIV has been absent from the blood supply since 1984 but the number of hemophiliacs contracting AIDS has not decreased. And by the way, hemophiliacs' spouses never get AIDS, even when they practice unprotected sex.
These users often die of things like blood infections and if the person happens to have HIV in his/her body, the death certificate says they died of AIDS. Statistically, HIV status does not affect the age at which IV drug users die either.
HIV is completely irrelevant in the clinical picture and often it's not even tested for. HIV is being blamed for these deaths because AIDS receives more funding than Malaria or other African diseases do.
Since HIV was discovered, many patients who are HIV-positive, but healthy, have been put on anti-retroviral drugs like AZT. This loss of T-cells leads to a sickening patient and the diagnosis of AIDS. The doctor interprets this as the natural progression from HIV-positive to AIDS, but it's really AIDS by prescription.
For all viral diseases other than AIDS, the presence of antibodies in the blood means your immune cells have been in contact with the virus and successfully eliminated or at least learned how to suppress it. For AIDS, however, the presence of antibodies (which is what the AIDS test actually tests for) supposedly means the virus is breeding and living within you. Why do they reverse this time-honored laboratory standard only for AIDS? Because it is virtually impossible to find any active HIV in a patient, even if they have full-blown AIDS! Your body produces millions if not billions of T-cells every day. In order for HIV to kill more T-cells than are being produced, there would have to be millions and millions of HIV particles circulating in the blood. This just isn't the case.
What about patients with supposedly high viral loads? Nobel Prize winner, Kary Mullis, who I mentioned before, invented the PCR test which is used to test these viral loads. He says the test is "meaningless" when used in this way. To help justify this inability to find HIV in AIDS patients, researchers have created elaborate stories regarding HIV. The long and the short of these stories is that HIV does not have to be present in order to kill all these cells. I call this, "The Magic Virus Theory".
By the way, in order to produce the HIV antibody tests, they grow the virus in human T-cells. The strange thing is the virus doesn't kill the T-cells! It lives harmoniously with them. That's because retroviruses don't kill cells. Why would they? They need them in order to reproduce.
Because these patients screwed up their statistics, rather than considering other possibilities as to the cause of AIDS, the CDC decided to create a brand new diagnosis (ICL) for these patients. Further, they said that from then on HIV must be present in order to give a diagnosis of AIDS.
On the other side of the coin, there are millions of people who are HIV-positive (many who have been positive for decades) who have never developed AIDS. As long as they stay away from AZT, poppers, cocaine, etc. they remain healthy. Also, the number of HIV-positive people has remained relatively constant since testing began. According to epidemiologists, the overall stability of HIV infection rate indicates the virus has been with us for a long time. We just discovered it in the 1980s.
All these facts and many more indicate that HIV (like most viruses) is actually a "passenger virus". It basically just hangs out in the body, but doesn't cause any disease.
So how did HIV come to be the AIDS scapegoat? The main character in this story is the man who is usually credited with the discovery of HIV, Robert Gallo. Gallo has been discredited on many occasions and at several points he's been the laughing stock of the scientific community. Most pertinent to our story, however, he was convicted of fraud and scientific misconduct and asked to leave the National Cancer Institute because he had falsified all the research he had done on AIDS. In fact, his papers, which supposedly made the connection between HIV and AIDS, never actually say that HIV is the cause! The titles of these papers (which did indicate HIV was the cause) were simply taken at face value and never confirmed by another lab. Before the papers had even been published, it was simply announced to the world that we (the Americans) had found the cause of AIDS. But Gallo actually stole the infamous virus from a French scientist named Luc Montagnier and claimed for years that he had found it himself. Interestingly, the patient Montagnier found the virus in didn't even have AIDS! Thusly, Montagnier, the true discoverer of HIV, also says that it can not more info and does not cause AIDS!
How many times have you heard the phrase, "HIV, the virus that causes AIDS"? Because of this association, HIV is the most feared virus on earth. But is this fear justified? Is it possible that this infamous association is nothing more than propaganda? With all the funding for this syndrome and all the Ph.D. s studying it, I doubted this could be true myself, until I looked into it. What I found was fascinating.
When one actually reads the early research on AIDS, before the picture was muddied with the declaration that it's caused by HIV, it seems fairly obvious that AIDS is actually caused by drug use, just as we can now see with perfect hindsight that lung cancer is caused by cigarette smoking. In fact, most of the early AIDS researchers saw this with crystal clarity and many still do. Their voices are silenced, however, by the germ hunters who run the CDC, the pharmaceutical companies who sell anti-retroviral drugs, and by other vested interests who want you to be afraid of germs or sex. These people have absolute control over what research is funded for AIDS and since the discovery and conviction of HIV all research has been slanted toward learning how to kill or suppress it. Professor Peter Duesberg, Ph.D. of U.C. Berkeley, who was the first person to ever map the genome of a retrovirus is one of the most outspoken critics of the HIV= AIDS hypothesis. He says HIV could not possibly be the cause of AIDS. Another very credible source who takes this contrarian view is Nobel Laureate Kary Mullis, Ph.D. who says he can find no reason to explain why anyone should believe that HIV causes AIDS. The truth is, no matter what you've heard or how many times you've heard it, the evidence simply isn't there and the story doesn't add up. There is so much to this fascinating story that only the broadest of strokes can be covered here, but let's dig a little deeper.
Though the definition of AIDS has changed considerably over the years, the original syndrome occurred exclusively in fast-track homosexuals. All of these patients had at least two things in common. They all used heavy doses of antibiotics to ward off urinary tract infections and STDs and they all had a long history of heavy recreational drug use - especially amyl nitrates or "poppers." Of course, other drugs, especially inhaled drugs like methamphetamines and cocaine contributed to the picture as well. The diseases these patients died from were fungal infections (thrush and pneumocystis carinii) and a rare skin cancer (Kaposi's sarcoma). Pneumocystis carinii is a lung disease. Kaposi's sarcoma often affects the lungs in these patients, as well as the face and the tip of the nose. Thrush affects the oral cavity. These findings tie in well with the inhaled drug use factor. Fungal infections are primarily caused by the overuse of antibiotics. Amyl nitrates are carcinogenic. Like cigarettes, long-term use of them causes cancer. Both types of drugs also weaken the immune system.
When the definition of AIDS was expanded (because no one was interested in studying a gay disease), we saw new groups enter the picture-namely hemophiliacs and IV drug users. Hemophiliacs use something called Factor VIII to help their blood clot. Commercial grade Factor VIII, which is cheaper and comes from thousands of donors, causes immune system dysfunction, whereas purified Factor VIII does not. Only hemophiliacs who receive commercial Factor VIII get AIDS and if they switch to the pure form, they often recover. Need more proof? HIV has been absent from the blood supply since 1984 but the number of hemophiliacs contracting AIDS has not decreased. And by the way, hemophiliacs' spouses never get AIDS, even when they practice unprotected sex.
It's probably no big surprise to find out that IV drugs suppress the immune system as well. These users often die of things like blood infections and if the person happens to have HIV in his/her body, the death certificate says they died of AIDS. Statistically, HIV status does not affect the age at which IV drug users die either. In fact, if anything, HIV-positive drug users live longer than their HIV-negative counterparts.
HIV is completely irrelevant in the clinical picture and often it's not even tested for. HIV is being blamed for these deaths because AIDS receives more funding than Malaria or other African diseases do.
Since HIV was discovered, many patients who are HIV-positive, but healthy, have been put on anti-retroviral drugs like AZT. These drugs stop the virus from spreading, but they destroy T-cells in order to do so. This loss of T-cells leads to a sickening patient and the diagnosis of AIDS. The doctor interprets this as the natural progression from HIV-positive to AIDS, but it's really AIDS by prescription. This is precisely what happened to Magic Johnson. Luckily, he was smart enough to stop taking the drugs and recovered completely. Wimbledon champ Arthur Ashe was not so lucky.
For all viral diseases other than AIDS, the presence of antibodies in the blood means your immune cells have been in contact with the virus and successfully eliminated or at least learned how to suppress it. Because it is virtually impossible to find any active HIV in a patient, even if they have full-blown AIDS! In order for HIV to kill more T-cells than are being produced, there would have to be millions and millions of HIV particles circulating in the blood.
To help justify this inability to find HIV in AIDS patients, researchers have created elaborate stories regarding HIV. The long and the short of these stories is that HIV does not have to be present in order to kill all these cells. I call this, "The Magic Virus Theory".
By the way, in order to produce the HIV antibody tests, they grow the virus in human T-cells. The strange thing is the virus doesn't kill the T-cells! It lives harmoniously with them. That's because retroviruses don't kill cells. Why would they? They need them in order to reproduce.
Because these patients screwed up their statistics, rather than considering other possibilities as to the cause of AIDS, the CDC decided to create a brand new diagnosis (ICL) for these patients. Further, they said that from then on HIV must be present in order to give a diagnosis of AIDS.
On the other side of the coin, there are millions of people who are HIV-positive (many who have been positive for decades) who have never developed AIDS. As long as they stay away from AZT, poppers, cocaine, etc. they remain healthy. Also, the number of HIV-positive people has remained relatively constant since testing began. According to epidemiologists, the overall stability of HIV infection rate indicates the virus has been with us for a long time. We just discovered it in the 1980s.
All these facts and many more indicate that HIV (like most viruses) is actually a "passenger virus". It basically just hangs out in the body, but doesn't cause any disease. At most, it may kill a few cells here and there. Research has confirmed this fact again and again. But unless you read the right medical journals, you won't hear this news.
How did HIV come to be the AIDS scapegoat? His papers, which supposedly made the connection between HIV and AIDS, never actually say that HIV is the cause! Thusly, Montagnier, the true discoverer of HIV, also says that it can not and does not cause AIDS!
The same rules for longevity apply to people with HIV:
Cultivate healthy eating habits
Reduce stress
Obey physicians' recommendations
Quit smoking, drinking to excess and using drugs not prescribed by your doctor
Keep immunizations current. They can help prevent infections
Get adequate exercise, relaxation and sleep
Ask your physician for further recommendations and additional help
There are a lot of people living with HIV today who are 60 and older. About half had already progressed to AIDS before they 'd even received the HIV diagnosis, the report found.Currently, about 27 percent of people with HIV are over 50. Due to the special needs of HIV-positive individuals, challenges are on the horizon for public health systems and organizations that serve seniors and people with HIV.
HIV can be a lonely road. According to one report, 70 percent of older Americans with HIV live alone. AIDS- and HIV- related stigma and discrimination refer to intolerance, negative feelings, abuse and mistreatment directed at people living with either disease.
Many older Americans with HIV are still sexually active, though, and should continue to practice safe sex. While 57 percent of older Americans with HIV said they revealed their HIV status to sexual partners, about 16 percent admitted that they didn't, the report found.
To help justify this inability to find HIV in AIDS patients, researchers have created elaborate stories regarding HIV. His papers, which supposedly made the connection between HIV and AIDS, never actually say that HIV is the cause! In order for HIV to kill more T-cells than are being produced, there would have to be millions and millions of HIV particles circulating in the blood. To help justify this inability to find HIV in AIDS patients, researchers have created elaborate stories regarding HIV. His papers, which supposedly made the connection between HIV and AIDS, never actually say that HIV is the cause!