AIDS myth
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Excellent post Mac - I couldnt agree with you more! There IS a problem.
What is causing it?
The arguments I have read simply point to an incorrect starting point. Obviously something is happening but from the empirical evidence attested by numerous high ranking Doctors, professors etc worldwide, it is not due to a virus. Virology simply doesnt work like that.
I refer to my first post: Dont confuse AIDS (the problem to which you refer) with HIV ( The non existant virus that made Dr Gallo et al rich)
The single most difficult thing for a layman to overcome is the desire of the medical profession (or indeed any large visible professional body - Government, church etc) not to be proved wrong.
How the hell could they say at this late stage 'oops we were wrong lets start again and find the real problem'. Seriously,how would they survive politically?
Unfortunately a single greedy man started the 'HIV is Virus' nonesense, got rich and left us the legacy of everyone looking in the wrong direction.
Incidentally, I have no axe to grind, I neither know anyone with AIDS nor have any stake in the medical profession, I'm a pilot, but someone got me interested in this and I wasn't prepared to accept his version, so I went looking for myself. I strongly recommend anyone with an interest to do the same, especially if it affects them or their family in someway.
Anyway, enough already! I dont normally go in for the serious stuff conspiracies, UFOs and the like, but this caught my interest and I bothered to check.
Regards to all
Xraf
What is causing it?
The arguments I have read simply point to an incorrect starting point. Obviously something is happening but from the empirical evidence attested by numerous high ranking Doctors, professors etc worldwide, it is not due to a virus. Virology simply doesnt work like that.
I refer to my first post: Dont confuse AIDS (the problem to which you refer) with HIV ( The non existant virus that made Dr Gallo et al rich)
The single most difficult thing for a layman to overcome is the desire of the medical profession (or indeed any large visible professional body - Government, church etc) not to be proved wrong.
How the hell could they say at this late stage 'oops we were wrong lets start again and find the real problem'. Seriously,how would they survive politically?
Unfortunately a single greedy man started the 'HIV is Virus' nonesense, got rich and left us the legacy of everyone looking in the wrong direction.
Incidentally, I have no axe to grind, I neither know anyone with AIDS nor have any stake in the medical profession, I'm a pilot, but someone got me interested in this and I wasn't prepared to accept his version, so I went looking for myself. I strongly recommend anyone with an interest to do the same, especially if it affects them or their family in someway.
Anyway, enough already! I dont normally go in for the serious stuff conspiracies, UFOs and the like, but this caught my interest and I bothered to check.
Regards to all
Xraf
Plastic PPRuNer
Part 2
This next bit depends on whether one accepts the germ theory of disease, i.e., the theory that microorganisms may be the cause of some diseases.
If you don't believe THAT then again we have a major difficulty. Among many others, Anton van Leeuwenhoek(1670s), Ignaz Semmelweis(1840s), Louis Pasteur(1860s)[who worked with viruses but didn't realise what they were], Joseph Lister(1860s), Robert Koch(1870s) and Dmitri Iwanowski(1890s)[who discovered the first virus, tobacco mosaic virus] laid the foundations of what we know today about transmissible diseases.
Again, the evidence today for the germ theory of disease (as opposed to "spontaneous generation" or magic) is as strong today as the evidence for the evolution of species or the laws of thermodynamics or those governing turbulent flow.
There are millions of microorganisms in the world, only a small fraction of which parasitise humans and an even smaller number of which cause human disease. Nevertheless, when you get a boil with staphylococcus aureus, or septicaemia with streptococci, it'll make you very unhappy and maybe dead (lots of people died of blood poisoning from strep infections in the pre-antibiotic days).
But when Pasteur and others started writing about microbes as a cause for disease, many people were incredulous, "how could something so small cause disease?" and they were much mocked with songs about "Microbe, busy microbe!". Poor Semmelweiss was hounded to suicide, even though his introduction of handwashing between patients reduced the death rate among new mothers from 18.27 to 1.27%.
Robert Koch then formulated his postulates, which are four criteria designed to establish a causal relationship between a causative microbe and a disease.
1. The organism must be found in all animals suffering from the disease, but not in healthy animals.
2. The organism must be isolated from a diseased animal and grown in pure culture.
3. The cultured organism should cause disease when introduced into a healthy animal.
4. The organism must be reisolated from the experimentally infected animal.
Koch changed them somewhat later to account for new discoveries, but in all important aspects they still hold true today.
Viruses are a little different. Unlike bacteria, which possess all the machinery needed to reproduce themselves, viruses must "borrow" the host cells transcriptional machinery to reproduce themselves. You can't grow viruses in meat broth, viruses need living cells with intact machinery to reproduce. This makes it harder to culture them, but now almost all viruses can be grown in living culture.
Epidemiology studies how transmissible diseases spread from person to person. Sometimes they can be spread indirectly from person to person like droplet infection with a sneeze. Sometimes they need direct contact with infected material like smallpox (American Indians were once deliberately infected to get rid of them by giving them blankets that had been used by smallpox victims). Sometimes the infective agent has several hosts, like the plague bacillus (flea -> rat -> human) which makes it harder to see the chain.
In a larger sense, epidemiology studies how diseases ebb and flow through a population. Christopher Columbus' men brought back a virulent variant of the spirochaete from America in 1498 and it is possible to trace how travellers spread syphilis across Europe. Tracing the links in the infective chain lead to Typhoid Mary, the asymptomatic carrier of typhoid who infected 47 people during her career as a cook between 1900 and 1907.
In 1977, Grethe Rask, a Danish surgeon who worked in the Congo, went back to Denmark to die after months of illness. She had multiple bizarre infections and died of pneumonia from pneumocystis carinii, a common organism in guinea-pigs that almost never causes illness in people.
As 1981 wore on physicians in the Bay area of San Francisco were used to seeing sexually tranmitted infections - after all, this was the gay centre of America, and in the heady days of gay liberation there were some very promiscuous people around, with dozens of partners a week. But they were all curable, and after taking their pills, plunged back into the fray. But then, strange illnesses started to appear - florid candida, pneumocystis, cryptosporidiosis and more, all unknown in healthy people, and this horde of well-fed, golden, gym-addicted young men were supremely fit. These diseases were normally only ever seen in enfeebled patients who were immunosuppressed by anticancer drugs or for transplants. And they died horribly, eaten up by herpes, unable to eat from the candida that infested their mouths, their lungs strangling on pneumocystis.
Doctors talked about it uneasily, until the trickle of desperately ill men became a stream and the Centre for Disease Control in Atlanta became interested. Now there were cases reported from New York. At first it was thought to be the result of multiple ordinary infections, but that didn't seem to be true. Then it was though to be due to the lubricants used for anal intercourse, but that lucked out. Then the nitrite inhalers used as a recreational drug came under suspicion, but that led to a dead end. The one common factor seemed to be that all the victims were male and gay. And they'd often had sex with someone who'd had sex with another victim.
Finally, in horror, the physicians at CDC had to face the truth - some new transmissible agent was out there that nuked people's immune systems. And the really, really bad news was that it seemed to have a very long incubation time - people were infected and infectious long before they showed any signs of immune deficiency.
So the hunt for the causative agent was on. Bacteria were out, drugs were out, the environment was out, other infections were out, malnutrition was out, so it had to be a virus - but a new virus with very selective behaviour. Selective viruses weren't unknown of course, but this one was special, it targeted the immune system itself. But it was hard to get money for research - not easy to get anyone interested in giving money to look into some wierd faggot disease.
And now there were cases appearing in haemophiliacs, who'd received Factor VIII extracted from many pooled donors. And the gays were socially concious people, who gave blood willingly.
And every day there were more. Cases abroad from foreign gays who'd visited the States and had fun in the bathouses. The first cases in women surfaced. Blood and secretions. Junkies swapping needles. And then the first proven blood transfusion cases, blood given by people who later went down with immune deficiency.
And the band played on.
Eventually of course, after many struggles and false starts and allegations of cheating, the virus was found, by Bob Gallo in America and Luc Montaignier in Paris.
It fulfils Koch's postulates (as Koch himself later modied them) and there is no trace, no scintilla, no smidgen of doubt that once infected with this particular virus (whatever name you want to give it) that the victim's immune system will be gradually eroded over between 2 and 15 years until they develop the opportunistic infections characteristic of the Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome.
If you don't believe THAT then again we have a major difficulty. Among many others, Anton van Leeuwenhoek(1670s), Ignaz Semmelweis(1840s), Louis Pasteur(1860s)[who worked with viruses but didn't realise what they were], Joseph Lister(1860s), Robert Koch(1870s) and Dmitri Iwanowski(1890s)[who discovered the first virus, tobacco mosaic virus] laid the foundations of what we know today about transmissible diseases.
Again, the evidence today for the germ theory of disease (as opposed to "spontaneous generation" or magic) is as strong today as the evidence for the evolution of species or the laws of thermodynamics or those governing turbulent flow.
There are millions of microorganisms in the world, only a small fraction of which parasitise humans and an even smaller number of which cause human disease. Nevertheless, when you get a boil with staphylococcus aureus, or septicaemia with streptococci, it'll make you very unhappy and maybe dead (lots of people died of blood poisoning from strep infections in the pre-antibiotic days).
But when Pasteur and others started writing about microbes as a cause for disease, many people were incredulous, "how could something so small cause disease?" and they were much mocked with songs about "Microbe, busy microbe!". Poor Semmelweiss was hounded to suicide, even though his introduction of handwashing between patients reduced the death rate among new mothers from 18.27 to 1.27%.
Robert Koch then formulated his postulates, which are four criteria designed to establish a causal relationship between a causative microbe and a disease.
1. The organism must be found in all animals suffering from the disease, but not in healthy animals.
2. The organism must be isolated from a diseased animal and grown in pure culture.
3. The cultured organism should cause disease when introduced into a healthy animal.
4. The organism must be reisolated from the experimentally infected animal.
Koch changed them somewhat later to account for new discoveries, but in all important aspects they still hold true today.
Viruses are a little different. Unlike bacteria, which possess all the machinery needed to reproduce themselves, viruses must "borrow" the host cells transcriptional machinery to reproduce themselves. You can't grow viruses in meat broth, viruses need living cells with intact machinery to reproduce. This makes it harder to culture them, but now almost all viruses can be grown in living culture.
Epidemiology studies how transmissible diseases spread from person to person. Sometimes they can be spread indirectly from person to person like droplet infection with a sneeze. Sometimes they need direct contact with infected material like smallpox (American Indians were once deliberately infected to get rid of them by giving them blankets that had been used by smallpox victims). Sometimes the infective agent has several hosts, like the plague bacillus (flea -> rat -> human) which makes it harder to see the chain.
In a larger sense, epidemiology studies how diseases ebb and flow through a population. Christopher Columbus' men brought back a virulent variant of the spirochaete from America in 1498 and it is possible to trace how travellers spread syphilis across Europe. Tracing the links in the infective chain lead to Typhoid Mary, the asymptomatic carrier of typhoid who infected 47 people during her career as a cook between 1900 and 1907.
In 1977, Grethe Rask, a Danish surgeon who worked in the Congo, went back to Denmark to die after months of illness. She had multiple bizarre infections and died of pneumonia from pneumocystis carinii, a common organism in guinea-pigs that almost never causes illness in people.
As 1981 wore on physicians in the Bay area of San Francisco were used to seeing sexually tranmitted infections - after all, this was the gay centre of America, and in the heady days of gay liberation there were some very promiscuous people around, with dozens of partners a week. But they were all curable, and after taking their pills, plunged back into the fray. But then, strange illnesses started to appear - florid candida, pneumocystis, cryptosporidiosis and more, all unknown in healthy people, and this horde of well-fed, golden, gym-addicted young men were supremely fit. These diseases were normally only ever seen in enfeebled patients who were immunosuppressed by anticancer drugs or for transplants. And they died horribly, eaten up by herpes, unable to eat from the candida that infested their mouths, their lungs strangling on pneumocystis.
Doctors talked about it uneasily, until the trickle of desperately ill men became a stream and the Centre for Disease Control in Atlanta became interested. Now there were cases reported from New York. At first it was thought to be the result of multiple ordinary infections, but that didn't seem to be true. Then it was though to be due to the lubricants used for anal intercourse, but that lucked out. Then the nitrite inhalers used as a recreational drug came under suspicion, but that led to a dead end. The one common factor seemed to be that all the victims were male and gay. And they'd often had sex with someone who'd had sex with another victim.
Finally, in horror, the physicians at CDC had to face the truth - some new transmissible agent was out there that nuked people's immune systems. And the really, really bad news was that it seemed to have a very long incubation time - people were infected and infectious long before they showed any signs of immune deficiency.
So the hunt for the causative agent was on. Bacteria were out, drugs were out, the environment was out, other infections were out, malnutrition was out, so it had to be a virus - but a new virus with very selective behaviour. Selective viruses weren't unknown of course, but this one was special, it targeted the immune system itself. But it was hard to get money for research - not easy to get anyone interested in giving money to look into some wierd faggot disease.
And now there were cases appearing in haemophiliacs, who'd received Factor VIII extracted from many pooled donors. And the gays were socially concious people, who gave blood willingly.
And every day there were more. Cases abroad from foreign gays who'd visited the States and had fun in the bathouses. The first cases in women surfaced. Blood and secretions. Junkies swapping needles. And then the first proven blood transfusion cases, blood given by people who later went down with immune deficiency.
And the band played on.
Eventually of course, after many struggles and false starts and allegations of cheating, the virus was found, by Bob Gallo in America and Luc Montaignier in Paris.
It fulfils Koch's postulates (as Koch himself later modied them) and there is no trace, no scintilla, no smidgen of doubt that once infected with this particular virus (whatever name you want to give it) that the victim's immune system will be gradually eroded over between 2 and 15 years until they develop the opportunistic infections characteristic of the Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome.
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I can't believe, someone can even start a thread like this. I have lived in Africa quite some time and everyday people are dying because of HIV/AIDS. What do you want to say, that they are just imagining that they are sick? And all the orphans lost there parents because of what? You can easily say those things sitting in the Western world not knowing anyone actually affected, but once your colleagues have to go to a funeral almost every weekend, because someone died of AIDS and they have to take care of the children of their sisters, cousins, sons etc., you wouldn't even think about something that silly.
I really don't know what to say, it's hard to believe that people can be that ignorant. Sorry for the hard words, but I can't keep quiet on someting like that.
I really don't know what to say, it's hard to believe that people can be that ignorant. Sorry for the hard words, but I can't keep quiet on someting like that.
Well it does sound like there is a lot of information out there, so I'm not against a debate per se.
Of course contributors are passionate about their side of the argument, and views tend to sometimes become polarised. (With the resulting usual personal pprune jibes).
Our job is to seperate the wheat from the chaffe, on behalf of our clients/patients/community. Its not always that easy to critically apraise what's out there- there are aproximately 12,000 (medical) articles published per year alone.
It isn't easy but it is possible to sort out the good from the rubbish, with some degree of scientific rigor.
Epidemiology isn't an exact science. On a scale of 1-10 (1 = exact science, 10 = mumbo jumbo), epidemiology probably rates as 3, the stuff I've seen so far rates as 8.
To suggest that docs/medics are resistant to change, in light of revised evidence, isn't, in my experience, true on the whole. (they do it daily).
And they're usually awkward/assertive/maverick enough to carry it off.
Of course contributors are passionate about their side of the argument, and views tend to sometimes become polarised. (With the resulting usual personal pprune jibes).
Our job is to seperate the wheat from the chaffe, on behalf of our clients/patients/community. Its not always that easy to critically apraise what's out there- there are aproximately 12,000 (medical) articles published per year alone.
It isn't easy but it is possible to sort out the good from the rubbish, with some degree of scientific rigor.
Epidemiology isn't an exact science. On a scale of 1-10 (1 = exact science, 10 = mumbo jumbo), epidemiology probably rates as 3, the stuff I've seen so far rates as 8.
To suggest that docs/medics are resistant to change, in light of revised evidence, isn't, in my experience, true on the whole. (they do it daily).
And they're usually awkward/assertive/maverick enough to carry it off.
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Excuse me? It proves what point??
Why do you reduce the discussion to spell checking instead of concentrating on the topic? If you don't have something meaningful to say you rather criticize someone's spelling?? I guess it rather proves my point of you being ignorant....
Why do you reduce the discussion to spell checking instead of concentrating on the topic? If you don't have something meaningful to say you rather criticize someone's spelling?? I guess it rather proves my point of you being ignorant....
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It's getting beyond a joke when Blue Peter joins in the conspiracy............. I think not!
Are we really to believe that this mainstay of children's television for over 40 years is also in cahoots with the drug companies / media in their apparent attempt to raise funds for the dying children in Malawi, which is really a cynical front for obtaining cash from the masses to buy new cars for BBC producers, whilst the presenters enjoy holidays in the African sunshine?
I don't think so.
Apparently, a child in Malawi dies every 9 minutes of AIDS (a fact I as ashamedly unaware of) and the presenters emotions seem genuine to me.
2close
Are we really to believe that this mainstay of children's television for over 40 years is also in cahoots with the drug companies / media in their apparent attempt to raise funds for the dying children in Malawi, which is really a cynical front for obtaining cash from the masses to buy new cars for BBC producers, whilst the presenters enjoy holidays in the African sunshine?
I don't think so.
Apparently, a child in Malawi dies every 9 minutes of AIDS (a fact I as ashamedly unaware of) and the presenters emotions seem genuine to me.
2close
Millions of kids up and down the country were fascinated by a BP report, describing the new discovery of spaghetti trees- an unlimited supply of the kids favourite for years to come.
I seem to remember the report was made on ........ April the First.
And I was never sure we always got the full facts of John Noakes- his eyes were a bit too close together for my liking.
I seem to remember the report was made on ........ April the First.
And I was never sure we always got the full facts of John Noakes- his eyes were a bit too close together for my liking.
Plastic PPRuNer
Secure in his coughs-and-colds practice, never having seen someone dying of AIDS, Gingernut chooses to trivialise the matter.
Admittedly the medpages of PPRuNe are hardly going to influence world opinion, but it does seem a pity really.
Ah well...
Admittedly the medpages of PPRuNe are hardly going to influence world opinion, but it does seem a pity really.
Ah well...
"Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward."
Kurt Vonnegut circa 1960.
Try it Mac, it's good for the soul
Kurt Vonnegut circa 1960.
Try it Mac, it's good for the soul
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Yes, Mac, a trifle unnecessary considering all Gingernut was doing was responding directly to a question posed by myself which I admitted was off thread but was in itself related to the subject of conspiracy theories, Blue Peter and AIDS, albeit tongue-in-cheek.
I don't think anyone is trivialising the seriousness of AIDS and HIV, apart from those who would like us to believe that it's a myth perpetuated by the pharmaceutical industry. A friend of mine is a toxicologist in the industry; I'll have to find out what the inside word is.......so if our colleague gets a visit late at night from the MIB, well........
2close
I don't think anyone is trivialising the seriousness of AIDS and HIV, apart from those who would like us to believe that it's a myth perpetuated by the pharmaceutical industry. A friend of mine is a toxicologist in the industry; I'll have to find out what the inside word is.......so if our colleague gets a visit late at night from the MIB, well........
2close
PPRuNe Handmaiden
Re-entry,
You asked if any one knew someone with HIV/AIDS.
I do. One dear friend is living with HIV and has done so since the early 90's. He's fortunate enough to live in a 1st world country with access to first rate medical care and standard of living. 2 other friends haven't been so lucky. They contracted the virus in the early part of the 80's and have died.
You asked if any one knew someone with HIV/AIDS.
I do. One dear friend is living with HIV and has done so since the early 90's. He's fortunate enough to live in a 1st world country with access to first rate medical care and standard of living. 2 other friends haven't been so lucky. They contracted the virus in the early part of the 80's and have died.
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Reading comprehension
No one is saying that AIDS is a myth. The disease exists. The question is: What's causing it? That's the crux of the matter.
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on the topics of AIDS myths, im wondering where a specifc myth about AIDS originated- ie. the myth that having sex with a virgin can cure the virus
can anyone refer me to a quote that has advocated this cruel lie?
i was in Zambia a few months ago and saw the extent of thr devastating pandemic. I was told that a South African president had started the spread of this myth, is this true?
thanks for any help in advance
can anyone refer me to a quote that has advocated this cruel lie?
i was in Zambia a few months ago and saw the extent of thr devastating pandemic. I was told that a South African president had started the spread of this myth, is this true?
thanks for any help in advance