From: downey%homer.CS.Berkeley.EDU@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Allen B. Downey)
Subject: Re: Dealing with "HIV doesn't cause AIDS" people.
Note: Copyright 1992, Dan R. Greening. Non-commercial reproduction allowed.
Archive-Number: 6162
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Date: 11 Sep 1992 23:21:41 GMT

The following is a quote from a recent thread.  I will leave it
up to you to sort out the authors:

>>If Duseberg's model is correct, (actually he doesn't have one),  
>>why doesn't anyone in the scientific community take it seriously??
>
>If a better model....well, probably the reason why Duseberg's theory is not
>appreciated is that it is only a negation--he says this is not the case in
>my professional opinion.  No detailed theory about the cause of AIDS is
>given by  Duseberg.  Sometimes  people have to have answers.  Can you
>imagine what the media would do if many scientists agreed that they did not
>know what Caused AIDS?

+Listen, AIDS follows all the criteria for being an infectious disease
+and HIV being the cause.  You've got hemophiliacs, transfusion patients,
+newborns and health care workers infected via a needle stick who show the
+same signs of HIV infection and who follow the same clinical course as
+those who contracted it sexually or via IV drug use.  All of these people
+have no additional risk factors.  People who aren't exposed to HIV don't
+get AIDS.  (The Amsterdam report on an AIDS-like illness w/o HIV infection
+is mostly a red herring.  We're talking another immune deficiency there,
+certainly not identical in presentation to AIDS.)

The following is my reply to some of the points raised here:

1)  Peter Duesberg (note the spelling) does have an alternate hypothesis
    for the cause of AIDS, and he agrees that his criticism of the HIV-
    AIDS hypothesis would be worthless without one.

    I will paraphrase his hypothesis, but I would refer you to the
    following article for more details:

	"The role of drugs in the origin of AIDS", Biomed & Pharmacother
	(1992) 46, 3-15

     His hypothesis is that AIDS among homosexual men and intravenous
     drug users is caused by habitual drug use, that among Africans it
     is caused by malnutrition, intenstinal parasites, and other factors,
     and that among hemophiliacs it is caused by repeated blood trans-
     fusions.

2)   I have seen an interview in which one member of the media explained
     that she was reluctant to criticize some of the
     more popular AIDS researchers because she was afraid of alienating
     her own sources of information (like the CDC).  She reported that
     after she wrote about Peter Duesberg, she found herself ostracized
     by AIDS researchers and other reporters specializing in AIDS news.

3)   By "all the criteria" for being an causative infectious agent, I
     assume you are referring to Koch's postulates, which the HIV-AIDS
     hypothesis does NOT satisfy.  For a well-balanced discussion of this
     point, I would recommend the following:

	"HIV is not the cause of AIDS" by Peter Duesberg
	"HIV is the cause of AIDS" by W. Blattner, R.C. Gallo, and H.M. Temin

	Science, Vol. 241, 29 July 1988, pp 514-517

4)   I think it is presumptuous of you to call AIDS in the absence of HIV
     "a red herring."  It is at least worthy of consideration, regardless
     of your confidence in the HIV-AIDS hypothesis.

5)    My advice for dealing with people who don't believe the HIV-AIDS
      hypothesis is the same as my advice for dealing with people who do:
      evaluate what they say skeptically, think for yourself, try to find
      the purest data you can (raw numbers, not someone's interpretation
      of someone's interpretation of someone's...  you get the idea).

ABD
Newsgroups: sci.med.aids