Yes, you heard it here, folks.
Is it any wonder that HIV researchers are so outraged by these people?
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Yes, you heard it here, folks.
Is it any wonder that HIV researchers are so outraged by these people?
the monkeys that died that lo injected only had a weak antibody reposnse when near death, so pcr is the way to detect this microbe, not antibodies
do a pub med search for garth nicolson and youll see him find Lo's mycoplasma incognitus in several diseases such as als/cfs by pcr.
do a search on pub med for shyh ching lo, and youll see his animal models, and that even he used the PCR to detect it............
now why would Lo use antibodies testing in that study? well youll have to read Project day lily to find out, being a military scientist Lo was being handled by superiors.
Project day lily's events are true, it had to slightly fictionilized to stay out of court. rave reviews from several scientists, including a nobel laurete roger guilleman md phd.
It was part of the bioweopons program. Every animal Lo injected with it mice/primates/embryos sickened/died. he found it in no healthy controls. These are all peer reviewed sources from Lo md phd, who was considered a scientific genius in china, which is why the military made him the highest ranking scientist, in 1990, he along with several other scientists came to Duesbergs defense, bc Lo had trouble believing the hiv hypothesis as well.
If you are really interested you can search pub med, every time I post links my posts get held up for some reason.
Shyh ching lo md phd is one of the only scientists since koch to discover a microbe that killed/sickened every animal injected....scientists from the nih like Tully were very impressed with his work, but Fauci sabotaged it and caused genocide. good work Tony Fauci.
sorry about the double post, some of lo's work, note the lack of antibody response
http://www.aegis.com/pubs/atn/1990/ATN09501.html
garth nicolson phd is finding it by pcr in cfs/als/gwi etc
his work is all over pub med
Cooler,
Please try to find a nonfiction reference to support your claims.
the link above is nonfiction, lo's peer reviewed work, here is nicolsons post, i told you to search pub med but you refused, so please try using pub med instead of lying about "fictional refrences" learn something from other scientists instead of dismissing them
nicolsons peer reviewd work on gwi/als, search more and youll find a lot on CFS
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&T…
Cooler,
The nonfiction link you provided above has nothing to do with chronic fatigue syndrome.
Here is what Garth Nicolson says about Mycoplasma incognitius and chronic fatigue syndrome:
So according to Nicolson, M. incognitius is not even the most common species of mycoplasma observed in chronic fatigue syndrome patients in Europe or the United States.
So where do you find support for your claim that M. incognitius is the cause of chronic fatigue syndrome?
Please don't send us to Project Day Lily.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&T…
her mfi/cfs correlation
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&T…
heres more mycoplasma fermentans incognitus is a substrain on mycoplasma fermentans
Cooler,
M. fermentans incognitius is not even the most frequent mycoplasma species identified in the papers you are citing.
Is that your evidence that M. fermentans incognitius causes Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&T…
here is one that is.
Obviously more research is needed. Ive given you animal model's, correlations and lo did isolate and grow in culture aka kochs postulates folfilled.
I suggest you read montagniers book "virus" where he scolds people like you for being so dissmissive of mycoplasmas.
Are all cases of cfs caused by mycoplasmas no, but if you test positive for a microbe that kills every animal injected and have a mytesrious infection like syndrome like RA or CFS patients should be informed of this, i know that if merck had ads on TV for this kind of research youd be saying people that deny mycoplasma are holocaust deniers!
Its pointless to argue with a drug company hack like you. You demand so much, can you provide me with the first scientific paper that proves hiv causes aids?
Cooler,
Why are you even arguing about mycoplasma and CFS? What exactly does it (and Project Day Lily for that matter) have to do with HIV denialism?
I'm sorry, Cooler.
Where did you give us the animal model for chronic fatigue syndrome?
http://www.aegis.com/pubs/atn/1990/ATN09501.html
more than gallo ever had, this bug is found in many CFS cases, youre going to say lo's animal model does not exactly resmemble CFS, the monkeys/mice wasted and died in 9 months (even though according to Lo's patents its a definte possible cause of CFS I and I trust his opinions much more than yours, for he is obviously a much more competent scientist than you will ever dream of being, in one of his patents he incolated chimps and they displayed "symptoms of AIDS" )
Funny how you scrutinize Lo's animal models, when 150 chimps were incoulated with hiv and none have died after 20 years, nor do mice mice or chicken embryos get any type of disease when inoculated with HIV, lo incoulated all of these different species with mycoplasma incognitus/penetrans and they all sickened/deformed died.
I suggest you call the armed forces institute of pathology and take an injection if you think they cant cause complex diseases like CFS/ALS
Chicken embroyos killed/deformed by mycoplasma penetrans/incognitus kochs postulates folfilled by the brillaint Lo once again...........take an injection franklin why not? they are harmless even though they kill primates/mice/deform embryos
http://iai.asm.org/cgi/reprint/64/8/3419.pdf
jim these mycoplasmas are found in many AIDS cases so when hiv fundamentalists like Fauci sobotage the research even when experts like joseph tully and Lo and montagnier say they can play a role in many other diseases including aids and Fauci ignores it BC it will upset the hiv religion, thats how it plays a role in the Hiv debacle.
In order for you guys to take a microbe seriously a drug company or a poliical hack like fauci has to have a press confernce..sorry that didnt happen, didnt know press conferences were more important than a microbe that kills/sickens every animal injected, unlike hiv.
Cooler,
You insist that Mycoplasma fermentans incognitius is the cause of chronic fatigue syndrome. You insist that Koch's postulates have been fulfilled for this association. Yet I am unable to find one scientific paper that agrees with you.
Has Garth Nicolson ever claimed that Koch's postulates have been fulfilled to prove that Mycoplasma fermentans incognitius is the cause of chronic fatigue syndrome?
Has Shyh Ching Lo?
Has anyone other than Cooler ever made that claim?
I embrace the multifactorial hypothesis for CFS/AIDS
If ten people ten people had a headache, its would be foolish to say the cause of the headache was the same in all ten people, some it might stress, others a virus etc.
Kochs postulates have been folfilled for mycoplasma incognitus /penetrans causing disease in humans so if you test positive for it and feel sick, it is probably the cause of much of your symptoms, regardless of what garbage can diagnosis youve recieved , CFS, depression etc.
CFS is a denegrating blanket term that lumps many people with differnt clinical histories together, for the subset of patients who test positive for the pathenogenic mycoplasmas, or for any patient complaining of complex symptoms w/ no firm diagnosis then Lo's mycoplasmas are the cause if you test PCR positive.
yes nicolson has claimed KOchs postulates have been folfilled, Lo has suggested it as a cause of CFS in his patents
lurkers should read http://www.projectdaylily.com/
to find out how it was part of the bioweapons program
nicolson has claimed it folfilled kochs postulates, Lo in his patents said it could cause CFS
lurkers should google project day lily to find out how it was part of the bioweapons program, true events slightly fictionilized
Cooler,
You say that:
The first of Koch's postulates states that:
Please provide evidence that this postulate has been fulfilled for mycoplasma incognitus /penetrans in any human disease.
Please don't send us to Project Day Lily or any other work of fiction.
well I guess hiv fails because of all the long term non progressors, and the fact that almost everyone with hiv is asymptomatic, I guess I could create a 10 year window period with mycoplasma incognitus. I guess hiv fails kochs 3rd postulate as well, bc 99% of animals injected dont get sick
according to the body's aids resource famous page Kochs postulates are this.
epidemiological association
The mycoplasmas are strongly associated with CFS. A 100% correlation could be acheived by making a postive mycoplasma test a essential criterion for CFS, thats how you idiots got your 100% correlation with hiv/aids.
Isolation and growth in culture
shyh ching lo did this, learn from him was considered a scientific genius in china, not a drug company hack like you.
Induces disease in healthy host.
every monkey, embryo, mouse sickened and died when injected with mycoplasma penetrans/incognitus. Peer reviewed refrences above. Are you stupid? You call me out on Kochs postulates when hpv, hiv, hep c does not induce disease in virtually every animal.
You're a pathetic drug company hack. There is no reason to further debate, Ive already embarrased you enough.
Lo found it no healthy controls either, not mycoplasma incognitus/penetrans, please read his studies and learn from a far more accomplished scientist, all the peer reviewed refrences are above. I do not really wish to further debate someone who is on the drug companies payroll in all probablilty, it makes me sick.
Have you ever taken any money from a drug company for research? please disclose your conflicts of interest Franklin, I can not debate someone who is paid to take certain positions by drug companies, answer honestly. A debate with a drug comapny hack is like debating a robot, there is no point, disclose the funding youve recieved from drug companies now.
Debating a robot cooler Really? At least Franklins not using the same sentences over and over since what like five months ago? "armys top scientist, noble prize winners, 99% of animals " sheesh cooler your like a little parrot at least a robot can have a bigger vocab!
Anyway wasn't M.fermentans incog a contaminant?
J Antimicrob Chemother. 1997 Jan;39(1):25-30, Observations on the possible origin of Mycoplasma fermentans incognitus strain based on antibiotic sensitivity tests. Dr. PC Hannan checks out it's drug sensistivities finds out it was a contaminant not really isolated from patients.
J Clin Microbiol. 1992 Sep;30(9):2435-40 Evidence that Lo's mycoplasma (Mycoplasma fermentans incognitus) is not a unique strain among Mycoplasma fermentans strains. These guys say its not unique. I like this paper its really cool how they check out what different mycoplasmas do on HIV replication. They find out you don't need real infection with mycoplasma you don't need live mycoplasma to enhance HIV! Just dead lysed mycoplasma does it! And all the strains not just fermenans incognitus. They do it bc they upregulate cytokines that are good for HIV multiplying. So basically there's no unique thing about M.f. incognitius in AIDS. It can do stuff right but its not unique sorry cooler.
Cooler gives us just the stuff he likes I'm putting up these papers to say, no there's another side to the mycoplasma story and cooler's ignoring it.
What if I said oh no you can't ever detect HIV by antibodies you have to use pcr, cooler He'd go nuts and hte other deniosaurs too. But its ok for his mycoplasma to go all incognito on us. Just hafta believe right cooler.
Michael, I'm not convinced that a 9 year prison sentence is the best answer. However, Parenzee should take responsibility for his actions. He hasn't yet.
Michael you should read the actual editorial by Pillay et al
They warn against using phylogenetic analysis by itself. Like many other types of forensic evidence juries have to understand the nature of the evidence. Phylogenetic evidence can yield estimates of the probability that two isolates are related. These are probabilities and it does not prove anything with 100% certainty. In the cluster of cases in the adult film industry the sequences from the isolates from all four were 100% identical. The isolates were obtained shortly after infection and little evolution of the virus had occured. In this case the probability that these three people were infected from somebody other than the initial case is very, very small. Together with other evidence that indicate who was infected first it is beyond all reasonable (and unreasonable) doubt that the infections occurrred as described.
What about Garth Nicolson's proof that M. incognitus has been weaponised with HIV Env?
sorry misery women youre wrong again researchers from the university of alabama concluded it was a novel strain, use your brain a ordinary contaminent would not induce disease in animals, u of alabama reserachers injected the ordinary mf into rats, nothing happened, when mfi was injected all hell broke loose.
Lo had control cultures to ensure it wasnt a contaminent, misery women, call up lo and get injected if you think its harmless
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&T…
Chuck wrote:
You can open your eyes and take your fingers out of your ears now.
I wonder if Chuck can tell us exactly what lead to the formation of the Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation? Something about porn stars dying from AIDS in the 1980s?
misery women,
I read hannans study, he found one strain of mycoplasma that Lo isolated and speculated it could be a contaminent or just that that patient overused abx. Its a pretty pathetic study from one scientist no ones heard of thats half a paragraph long.
compare that with everything that lo did to ensure it was a novel strain, he only found it in sick patients, not in anyhealthy controls he identified in the tissues with electron microscopy, he had control cultures, caused disease in healthy hosts.
Maybe Chuck can divulge what the false positive rate was in the 81,000 "totally nonspecific" HIV tests.
Cooler,
Although you claim that "Lo found it no healthy controls either, not mycoplasma incognitus/penetrans," the peer-revied study that you pointed to as proof that Mycoplasma fermentans causes chronic fatigue syndrome identified this organism in only 32% of chronic fatigue syndrome patients and in 8% of healthy controls.
How do you explain this?
they were looking at all species of mycoplasmas, not the specific 2 species that lo found caused disease when inoculated animals mycoplasma penetrans/incognitus, when lo looked for only those 2 species he found it in ZERO healthy controls read his peer reviewed studies and patents.
CFS like I said lumps together people who's symptoms are caused by several different factors. If a positive mycoplasma test was essential for a CFS diagnosis youd have a 100% correlation, thats the trick you guys did with hiv remember?
You classify diseases together based on the cause, not on sharing similar symptoms, everyone with fatigue is not suffering from the same mechanism of causation.
Still waiting for the first scientific paper that hiv causes AIDS.
Still waiting for you to disclose your conflicts of interest, what drug company research money have you recieved?
All of the scientists that support mycoplasma research are not bought off by drug companies.
shyh ching lo md phd
garth nicolson phd
nancy nicolson phd
luc montagnier phd
Joseph tully phd
What about you? time to come come clean Franklin.
Cooler,
Here's a quote from the abstract of the paper you sent us to:
According to the paper you cited, M. fermentans was detected in 32% of CFS patients and 8% of healthy controls.
How do you reconcile this finding with your contention that M. fermentans has been shown to fulfill Koch's Postulates for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and your claim that Lo is unable to detect this organism in healthy controls?
Drug company hack,
mycoplasma fermentans (which can be a normal resident of the flora) and mycoplasma incognitus and mycoplasma penetrans are totally differnt strains. LO proved this with extensive electron microscopy/dna/antibody testing, reserachers at the university of Alabama confirmed his claim (see above)
For example Lo's incognitus while somewhat similar to mycoplasma fermentans is 1/3 the the size and does induce disease when inoculated into animals, while the ordinary mycoplasma fermantans does not.
The healthy controls tested positive for the mycoplasma fermantans, not the pathenogenic mycoplasmas, besides i could say the healthy controls are in the "asymptomatic" phase of illness and give them a 10 year window period to make the sick to save my hypothesis, like you guys did with hiv, but I dont need to stoop to your level.
Why do you keep avoiding my questions? I take it that your non response about drug company funding is a probable yes LOL no wonder.
Lo between his patents and papers looked at hundereds of healthy controls and found them in no healthy controls, if m penetrans/incognitus pops up in a few healthy controls, thats normal they could be false positives, they could be in the early stages of infection, etc etc...................
obviously more research is needed, Im sorry that your drug company employers are instructing you to "debunk" this research, but its hard to debunk a microbe that kills/sickens every animal injected when the microbes you push hiv, hpv, hepatitis c do
zilch in virtually every animal.
get a life I do not wish to debate a man who is on the payroll of a drug company any further. Ive showed this research to many scientists at my old university and they all agree this agent is real and more funding and research is needed, I do not wish to debate hacks that are associated with the Gallo/moore/wainberg drug company mob any longer.
Cooler,
You cited a study as proof that Mycoplasma fermentans incognitius fulfills Koch's postulates for chronic fatigue syndrome. When I pointed out that the very study you cited only found Mycoplasma fermentans in 32% of CFS cases, you now cliam that mycoplasma fermentans is totally different from mycoplasma incognitius!
This after you explained to us, above, that "mycoplasma fermentans incognitus is a substrain on mycoplasma fermentans."
Are you now claiming that the paper you directed us to as proof that Mycoplasma fermentans incognitius has fulfilled Koch's postulates for CFS really doesn't look at this bacterial strain, at all?
Roy. You said: That would make 82% bottoms. Do you think such a finding has any implications for a sexually transmitted disease such as HIV Michael?
I think it has immense implications, Roy. What it means is that there is a lot of oral only sex going on and far less anal then most would think. Matter of fact, Roy. Oral sex transmits few stds.
This is another reason the HIV causation of AIDS thing does not add up in the gay community. What does add up, is a large number of emotionally stressed out people, in percentages much higher than in the straight community, as is evidenced by substantially higher drug and alcohol addiction and suicide rates.
I know you are well aware that stress and beating ones self up with life in the fastlane on dope steadily weakens immunity. I know you are well aware that drug and alcohol abuse takes a huge toll on a person physically.
And falling into emotional states of depression and hopelessness and panic after an HIV or AIDS diagnosis does not help them to recover at all.
It ain't rocket science as to why some of these people would get ill or be slow to recover or even die of common ailments, Roy, just simple common sense.
Are you stupid Franklin?,
If a positive mycoplasma incognitus test or mycoplasma penetrans test was an essential criterion for a CFS diagnosis you would get a 100% correlation you dumb retard.
DAmn go away weve debated this to death, get a life loser, youve made youre pathetic points and Ive blown you away, while youve provided me with NOTHING.
YOU HAVE NOT DISCLOSED THE FIRST SCIENTIFIC PAPER THAT PROVES HIV CAUSES AIDS
YOU HAVE NOT DISCLOSED YOUR CONFLICTS OF INTEREST
GO AWAY, WHY WOULD I ARGUE WITH YOU WHEN I TALK TO REAL SCIENTISTS ALL THE TIME.
PLEASE MAKE A DRIVE TO WASHINGTON DC, AND HAVE A TALK WITH THE CHEIF THEIR DR. SHYH CHING LO MD PHD. YOU TUBE THAT DEBATE BETWEEN YOU AND HIM, EXPLAIN TO HIM WHY HUMANITY SHOULD NOT FEAR HIS PATHENOGENIC MYCOPLASMAS WHEN THEY KILL EVERY ANIMAL HE INOCULATED AND HE DIDNT FIND IT IN ONE HEALTHY CONTROL.
AND THEN TAKE AN INJECTION IF YOU STILL THINK THEIR HARMLESS. lO DETERMINED IT TO BE THE CAUSE OF DEATH IN 6 HIV NEGATIVE PEOPLE THAT DIED WITHIN 7 WEEKS OF MYTERIOUS INFECTIONS, HE USED ELECTRON MICROSCOPY TO SEE THE AGENT IN THE TISSUES, ISOLATED AND GREW IN CULTURE AND THE CAUSED DISEASE/DEATH IN HEALTHY ANIMALS. ARE YOU STUPID? WHAT DID THOSE 6 PEOPLE DIE OF YOU PATHETIC HACK?
I'D LOVE TO SEE THAT DEBATE, A PATHETIC DRUG COMPANY HACK VS THE MOST BRILLIANT SCIENTIST OF HIS GENERATION IN CHINA, WHICH IS WHY THE MILITARY BROUGHT HIM HERE, YOU AREN'T FIT TO SHINE HIS SHOES. BYE BYE THIS DEBATE IS OVER.
and then caused disease when he inoculated healthy animals (mice/primates)
"Roy. Oral sex transmits few stds."
Few? You mean like six or so? Herpes 1,2 & 8. Gonnorhea, Chlamydia and occassionally syphillis, HIV, HPV and Hepatitiis.
"This is another reason the HIV causation of AIDS thing does not add up in the gay community."
By "does not add up" I assume you mean the excellent evidence provided by things like HIV+ status and HHV-8 infection in explaining the high incidence of specific opportunistic infections (like Kaposi's Sarcoma) in specific risk groups (like male homosexuals)?
Michael,
You brought an article to our attention because you somehow thought it supported your HIV denialist position:
When Jim and Roy pointed out that you omitted several key points made by that authors that can account for the differences between the rates of HIV infection in gay men versus the heterosexual population, you reverted to your usual as hominem attacks:
Well, Michael, it turns out that at least one of the authors of the paper to which you directed our attention is an openly gay man. Here is a link to an editorial he wrote in favor of same-sex partner benefits and same-sex marriage.
So, I guess at least one gay man disagrees with your blanket characterization of the sexual behavior of all gay men. Why should we accept your opinion over his, especially since his position is based upon scientific data--not merely on ignorant prejudices.
The lengths to which you go to maintain the charade of denial that you beleive is somehow magically protecting your lover from the consequences of his HIV infection never ceases to amaze me.
Cooler,
I have not claimed that mycoplasma fermentans incognitius is harmless.
I have just asked you to back up your claim that mycoplasma fermentans incognitius has been shown to fulfill Koch's Postulates as the cause of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. You have been unable to back up your claim with credible evidence.
You seem to think that the science behind this discovery should be emulated by scientists studying AIDS, but you are unable to explain how the causal association between mycoplasma fermentans incognitius and CFS has been proven.
You seem to have different standards of proof when discussing mycoplasma fermentans incognitius than when you are discussing HIV.
Perhaps this is because you have mostly learned about mycoplasma fermentans incognitius from a work of fiction. No, that can't be it. You have mostly learned about HIV from Denialists Web Sites, which are also works of fiction.
Cooler, before you storm off in a flurry of CAPITALs could you write down all of Koch's postulates and give a reference to the evidence that Mycoplasm incognitus fulfills each one in turn.
This should be an easy task for you
Who are these "REAL SCIENTISTS"?
already did list kochs postulates above any how lo's pathenogenic mycoplasmas folfill it for the cause of human diseases scroll up. (a subset of cfs/ra/als patients etc) scroll back, youll see how hiv folfills kochs postulates at a much lesser degree.
I think its time you guys debated lo and montagnier, the nicolsons and tully, or debate me publicly and we can tape it on you tube, the debate will take place in front of scientists and students at a good university, and well take a poll at the end of the debate to see who wins.
the debate topics will be hiv as the cause of aids
and mycoplasmas a the cause of human diseases CFS etc.
The references that you have given do not support your claim that Koch's postulates have been fulfilled.
List Koch's postulates one by one. Giv a reference for each that demonstrated that Mycoplasma incognitus fulfills each of Koch's postulates.
For exactly which disease are you claiming that Mycoplasma incognitus fulfills Koch's postulates?
well I guess hiv fails because of all the long term non progressors, and the fact that almost everyone with hiv is healthy and asymptomatic, I guess I could create a 10 year window period with mycoplasma incognitus to buy time if people were not sick, but there is no need for that. I guess hiv fails kochs 3rd postulate as well, bc 99% of animals injected dont get sick
according to the body's aids resource famous page Kochs postulates are this.
epidemiological association
The mycoplasmas are strongly associated with CFS. A 100% correlation could be acheived by making a postive mycoplasma test a essential criterion for CFS, thats how you idiots got your 100% correlation with hiv/aids.
Isolation and growth in culture
shyh ching lo did this, learn from him was considered a scientific genius in china, not a drug company hack like you.
Induces disease in healthy host.
every monkey, embryo, mouse sickened and died when injected with mycoplasma penetrans/incognitus. Peer reviewed refrences above. Are you stupid? You call me out on Kochs postulates when hpv, hiv, hep c does not induce disease in virtually every animal.
You're a pathetic drug company hack. There is no reason to further debate, Ive already won
Refrences all posted above...........this internet debate is over...........debate me publicly on hiv and mycoplasma at cal berkeley, well you tube it, why dont you in your own words say how hiv folfills kochs postulates, please in your own words dont copy and paste from fauci's website.
Which mycoplasma? None of the mycoplasmas are present in a majority of CFS cases. There are also no studies following mycoplasma incognitus infected cohorts to see if they develop CFS or RA or ALS or AIDS etc. There are for HIV. In addition HIV can be detected in close to 100% of AIDS cases even if they were diagnosed with the pre 1993 definition that did not have HIV antibody serology as a criterium.
This has been done for HIV in 1984. Nicolson's claims about detecting HIV env in the genome of Mycoplasma incognitus makes me suspect that he has a few technical problems.
You are again conflating several different mycoplasmas. Which one causes the diseases? Which diseases are these models for? Do they cause CFS in the animals? RA? ALS? AIDS? Nobody is saying that mycoplasmas are harmless but if you are claiming that these animal models fulfil Koch's postulates then you have to specify which disease they relate to. It is problematic to claim that mycoplasma incognitus causes several different diseases.
HIV/SIV and SHIV cause specific CD4+ loss, immune suppression and susceptibility to opportunistic infections in various animal models including macaques and SCIDhu mice.
More research should be done, especially on those who have died from AIDS. A doctor in Texas found that all of his patients who had died from AIDS also had Herpes Virus 6A, which is very destructive to the immune system. Many believe that HIV is not so important by itself but other co-factors such as the above virus or mycoplasmae such as, penetrans fermentas are the real culprits. An excellent book about the Herpes 6A virus is,"The Virus Within."
noreen, almost 100% of the population has had HHV-6. That a doctor found it in all AIDS patients isn't surprising in the least. (And I've read "The Virus Within" and found it wanting in a lot of ways).
[Edited to add: I should note that "TVW"'s author is another "dissident". ]
Yes, all of the population has been exposed to this virus, except one small group of people. Nevertheless, around 95% have been exposed to the harmless variety, which is HVV6B and the other 5% have the "A" variety, which causes havoic in the body when reactivated.
Noreen,
Do you have a source for that?
And while you look that one up, also give us the rference to your claim that HIV-PCR is positive in HIV negative people.
Cooler
CFS situation may be improved with chocolate. See BBC link
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7018055.stm
Do you think AIDS could also be treated with chocolate ?
Why are these people like this? What is wrong with their brains?
I find the above some very interesting questions. Why? Well, because this time they may have been formulated by a HIV=Aids apologist, but each and every HIV=Aids dissident feels the same questions popping up into his brain when reading the Chris Nobel, franklin, etc. contributions.
Which is one more proof for my statement that, in fact, Aids Apologists and Aids Denialists are one of a kind.
Cooler I have some quesitons about CFS and Mycoplasma.
You say Lo didn't find the mycoplasma in the GW vets bc he didn't do PCR. So why did he tell a gov hearing he used PCR and he still didn't find it?
The Nicholson daughter infected thier cat with Mycoplasma and it died. Did she inject it or what? What was its name so we can honour it and maybe name a disease after it?
The Nicholsons hubby and wife say they treated former Prez Bush and Barbara and their dog for mycoplasma is that true? And why the dog are they vets too.
You say Dr. Lo is the top ranking scientist in Army. What's his rank? Is he like a five star generallissimo of Armed Pathology?
You keep talking the Armed Forces of Pathology. I never heard about it and I even know some real patholiogists. What is it?
So many right wing internet people say the Nicolosons cover up a even bigger government conspiracy. Why are they in the "Zionist-Judeo Media" conspiracy too? Are you cooler?
Obviously chemtrails are giving us all mycoplasmas. Does the chemtrails projects just do incognitus or are tehy dispensing more kinds of Mycoplasma.
Why does "byebye I won the debate this is over" mean "Ahhll be baahhck" very soon.
misery women,
you are not even worth talking to.
Branzaga,
I dont think chocolate will do much for the subset of cfs patients infected with lo's pathenogenic mycoplasmas, i think high dose abx is a much better approach. Here is a case study of someone with a cfs like illness who tested positive for mycoplasma incognitus and was cured with high dose abx
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&T…
part of the bioweapons program people, wake up, thats why no one has heard of it, its classified son, its not a coincidence that a military scientist published the most on it, for he had accsess to classified information and was trying to warn the world, but the frauds in charge of the establishment (Gallo fauci) engaged in genocide on the people.
project day lily
true story slightly fictionilzed. backed up all the info with peer reviewed sources above
your government killed 3 million in vietnam, 1 million in Iraq wake up, 60k young soldiers to fight a war in asia for the globalists. Funny how you people find it so hard to beleive in conspiracies considering your governments criminal history.
the tuskegee experiment, all on wars based on lies project day lily is just an extension of the terror being conducted by the criminal network that controls the government.
http://www.projectdaylily.com/
see hiv fact or fraud google it
Oooh forgot some apex11
What is a "pathenogenic mycoplasma" is that more like a parthenogenic or a pathogenic one?
Also you know Michael Fumento right the right wing journalist critical of big science SARS and stuff right? Weird how he said
First, 123 different symptoms have been attributed to GWS according to Nicolson's own assistant, a number which correlates roughly with my findings. But according to the nation's pre-eminent authority on MF, Dr. Shyh-Ching Lo of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, only one symptom - joint problems - seems strongly correlated with MF. Another - breathing problems - may be related. I confirmed this with two other prominent MF researchers. So how do we account for those other 121 symptoms?
www.fumento.com/gulf3.html
Wow frummyBilly why did he say that is Fumento and Lo in that big conspiracy too?
misery women,
you are really nuts, ill post on whatever forum I want to, why do you care? please stop stalking me, go away, get a life seriously, Lo was being handled by the way. I do not want to talk to you anymore about anything misery women, go away, get out of the house. Do you have any freinds, seriously? get a life.
Cooler, not sure why you so angry but I guess its probably bc your wrong about Dr. Lo and you know it.
When Dr. Lo says something you like then you say he's a genius and general of the "Armed Forces of Pathology"
when you don't like what he says and what he finds in his research then he's getting "handled" and he's getting forced to say stuff by the chemtrails gov people who like to infect the Nicolson's cat with mycoplasma.
You are one logical man cooler I hope you stick around here! Seriously!
Lo SC, Buchholz CL, Wear DJ, Hohm RC, Marty AM.
Department of Infectious and Parasitic Diseases Pathology, Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Washington, D.C. 20306-6000.
The newly recognized human pathogenic mycoplasma M. fermentans (incognitus strain) causes a fatal systemic infection in experimental monkeys, infects patients with AIDS, and apparently is associated with a fatal disease in previously healthy non-AIDS patients. An apparently immunocompetent male who lacked evidence of HIV infection developed fever, malaise, progressive weight loss, and diarrhea and had extensive tissue necrosis involving liver and spleen. M. fermentans (incognitus strain) was centered at the advancing margins of these necrotizing lesions. Following the treatment of 300 mg doxycycline per day for 6 weeks, he recovered fully. He has no fever or diarrhea, and his abnormal liver function tests have returned to normal. He regained all lost strength and 14 kg of lost weight and has remained disease free for more than 1 year.
PMID: 1788266 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
yep just joint pains lol kills monkeys, kills hiv negative patients within 7 weeks, causes lesions in organs.............good day misery women leave me alone
Cooler you can learn alot from Dr. Lo. HE says "apparently is associated" You say "IT KILLS EVERYTHING IN ITS PATH 99% OF ALL LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE"
I just told you what Fumento said I thought maybe you'd listen to a right winger like you. But no.
Vernon, Shukla and Reeves in J Med Microbiol 2003 have this article called "Absence of Mycoplasma species DNA in Chronic fatigue syndrome"
If you read it you find out why the Nicolsons might be wrong I mean beyond thinking they cured former Prez Bush'es dog of Mycoplasma and their cat died of it. This is Vernon et al,
Our goal was to reproduce the results of Nasralla et al. (1999) and Nijs et al. (2002) in a systematic way by using well-defined CFS subjects and non-fatigued controls. These authors detected the presence of four species of Mycoplasma DNA in patients with CFS and fibromyalgia. These studies used patients in tertiary care clinics rather than the general population and the results may reflect recruitment bias. Our study tested persons with CFS identified in the general population. Previous studies did not include appropriate controls, thus reported associations may be spurious. Our study enrolled non-fatigued controls from the same population as CFS cases.
Recruitment bias cooler. See no one says Mycoplasma isn't interesting we all think it should get researched. That's why Tony Fauci asked Lo to give a talk back in the eighties when he found the mycoplasma but Lo refused six times. everyone thinks its good to look at cooler. IT's probably another opportunistic infection like PCP or KSV and stuff. Maybe its more than that who knows yet. But a bunch of people don't find it more often in HIV then in uninfected people and that includes Montagnier WITH PCR. And people like Vernon et al who used better sampling then Nicolson don't find it in CFS patient.
"Although cell-free plasma DNA may have limitations for monitoring the presence of Mycoplasma species, we believe this is unlikely, as numerous other cell-associated microbial pathogens can be detected readily in cell-free plasma DNA "
they did not look for it in the actual cells/ tissues like lo and nicolson did, and then made speculations.
yep that meeting did take place in 1990,
The meeting was led by Dr. Joel B. Baseman, a mycoplasma expert at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center at San Antonio. He said the participants were ''very impressed with the quality of science that Dr. Lo's group displayed.''
''The pathology data was solid and convinced us that the agent is in the tissues,'' Dr. Baseman said. The ability of M. incognitus to cause a fatal wasting disease in monkeys and mice persuaded most participants that the microbe ''has the potential to cause disease in humans,'' Dr. Baseman said, although solid proof is lacking.
new york times 1990
a year later the Miami herald impressed with LO's work tried to call fauci and ask him what happened after the panel reccomended funding and research, faucis response
When asked for an interview concerning Lo's work, NIAID director Anthony Fauci said through spokesperson Mary Jane Walker that he "will not talk about mycoplasma or any other AIDS co-factor."
miami herald 1990, no reason why he refused funding, just didnt want to upset the hiv religion, even though this microbe sickened and killed hiv negative patients.............FAUCI IS GUILTY OF GENOCIDE, for this microbe has infected a subset of cfs/als patients and been the final death blow to many AIDS patients
Hi Tara...
I'm not really buggy (heh) on the subject of genetic diversity, but I've always thought that was an issue that deserves more attention, either from those studying AIDS or in communicating the results to us amateurs (or maybe both).
My thought is that an HIV infection won't cause AIDS unless it has enough diversity in its initial infection(s) so that between recombination and mutation it can stay ahead of the immune system.
It's been a while (years) since I dug into the literature, and most of it's locked away where you have to pay for it, but I just ran across this article referenced in a recent article in PLoS ONE that documents apparent recombination as well as "superinfection". From the discussion:
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't this sort of imply that it may not be HIV per se that produces AIDS so much as infection by a sufficiently diverse population of HIV?
BTW, I noticed some mention of resistant strains and "Voluntary treatment interruptions and poor adherence to treatment". Could this sort of thing be building up new, resistant populations of HIV?
Yo, I have a comment being held in moderation that refutes Adeles lie that Lo refused to disclose his research
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE3DF1038F935A25752C0…
scientists sent from the NIH were very impressed with Lo's work and reccomeneded further research/funding,
a year later the miami herald called Fauci to ask why there has been no funding, with no reason he said he would not discuss "mycoplasmas" aka he caused genocide bc he didnt want to upset the hiv religion
Franklin, The lengths to which you go to maintain the charade of denial that you have enriched yourself through, never ceases to amaze me.
You asked: So, I guess at least one gay man disagrees with your blanket characterization of the sexual behavior of all gay men. Why should we accept your opinion over his, especially since his position is based upon scientific data--not merely on ignorant prejudices.
First of all, Frankie, I could not care less what YOU think or whose opinion YOU accept, as you have already shown yourself to be challenged at your limited attempts to quantify the realities of life into scientific data and assundry extrapolations.
Secondly, this guy is as nerdie as you and has near zero experience in the gay community at large. He is sweet, unlike you, but just as nerdie, with just as very little real life experience.
Thirdly, as a "scientist", he could only answer for the data that he collected, whether individuals he queried were threatened by the very question or not, and whether they told the truth or not.
Fourth, even with his extrapolations and even with his "opinions" as to what his extrapolations mean, the fact is the data still comes up as nonsensical in relating valid reasons for gays versus straights.
Fifth, and the greatest reason is that most of his MSM "subjects" were also illicit drug abusers with various other time and again verified "cofactors" from heterosexuals at large.
Sixth, we have NO idea of how he had even verified what he believed to be HIV infections. He certainly didn't isolate it from anyones sera! Nor did he check it against the well known list of factors that have well been verified to cause false positive results.
But at least he received a well paid grant for producing another meaningless study that was conclusive of nothing, and that again shows that you HIV researchers don't have the slightest clue what is going on.
Cooler,
You referred to a report that you characterized as a "case study of someone with a cfs like illness who tested positive for mycoplasma incognitus and was cured with high dose abx."
You later posted the abstract from this paper, including this description of the patient:
Cooler, this patient's disease is nothing like chronic fatigue syndrome. Extensive tissue necrosis involving the liver and spleen rules out chronic fatigue syndrome.
In his paper looking at the possible association of M. fermentans with Gulf War Syndrome, here's how S. C. Lo characterized this patient and similar patients:
Again, a "fulminant illness" is nothing like chronic fatigue syndrome. And it seems that S.C. Lo feels that he has not proven that M. fermentans was the cause of illness in these patients.
On the other hand, the response of this patient's illness to doxycycline suggests an obvious test of the hypothesis that chronic fatigue syndrome is due to M. fermentans (incognitus strain).
Seems strange that after all this time Nicolson hasn't published a randomized trial of doxycycline for chronic fatigue syndrome.
Such a trial has been published for Gulf war syndrome (491 patients with mycoplasma detectable in the blood), but a one year course of doxycycline led to no improvement in symptoms compared to placebo.
Michael,
Just admit that you were wrong. Here is what you said:
It turns out at least one of the authors of the paper is an openly gay man.
So you are wrong--"ANY gay man" will not agree with your blanket characterization.
Continuing your ad hominen attacks that the scientist is "nerdie" in no way helps your case.
Hello AK. The link you put up says a lot, depending on the viewpoint you look at it from:
http://www.jaids.org/pt/re/jaids/fulltext.00126334-200605000-00002.htm;…
You said: "My thought is that an HIV infection won't cause AIDS unless it has enough diversity in its initial infection(s) so that between recombination and mutation it can stay ahead of the immune system.
However, the link to the guy you show us in the study verifies the following, which shows this guy to be nonstop abusing himself by IV drug abuse since 1981, and further shows him to be on extremely harsh aids drugs, including AZT, D4T (related to DDT), 3TC, and others, all with well verified extremely toxic effects (just google them) on his entire body:
The plasma samples analyzed were obtained from an HIV-1 patient diagnosed in 1987 who reported continuous intravenous drug use since 1981
AK, is not being a verified self destructive junkie, with all of its own associated emotional negativity, poor nutrition, etc, not quite "enough diversity" as you put it, of a reason to have an extremely rundown immune system?
If it is not, perhaps we can add in the fact that he has also been taking the following highly toxic drugs with vast verified toxic effects including attacking bone marrow, since 1995:
FIGURE 1. Immunological and virological characteristics of the patient follow-up. Different antiretroviral regimens are AZT + didanosine Symbol, AZT + zalcitabine Symbol, 3TC + d4T + NFV Symbol, didanosine + d4t + NFV Symbol, and d4T + indinavir (IDV) + ritonavir + abacavir Symbol. Short treatment regimens (15 days of treatment) are indicated by vertical gray arrows in the x axis; first, 3TC + d4T + IDV, and later, d4T + IDV + ritonavir + abacavir.
And if that is not "enough diversity" for you, consider just for a moment factoring in this obviously self destructive individuals personal emotional stress factors over the years of shame, guilt, apathy, etc, including the intensity of his diagnoses of HIV and AIDS, which all must have been quite intensely stressful and shocking to his immune system by themselves.
Would you, AK, agree or disagree that with all this person had going on, it is impossible to say what part of his problems were caused by what, or do you simply attribute any and all health problems strictly to HIV?
Should you find that the overall assault on this guys body, from drugs, nutrition, AIDS drugs, emotions, and perhaps even other things this guy went through is enough to take down most peoples health, then you will understand why there are so many HIV dissidents who say: "Its NOT THE HIV, Dummy!".
AK, looking at your link also shows us that the patient was in prison as well, as the piece thanks the prison's doctor.
Only of interest as again it evidences a highly stressed life which certainly affects ones immune system.
Also of extreme note, at least from a dissident perspective, is that the patients CD4 (T-Cell) count, and his viral load, show absolutely no correlation with each other!
So much for CD4 counts and viral load counts being meaningful of anything having to do with each other.
Did the HIV researchers ever get anything right?
"seems strange" when there is no funding its a bit difficult
besides the necrosis, that patient could have easily been diagnosed with CFS.....or a number of garbage can diagnosis's, funny how you have such a explicit defintion for CFS must be, but when it comes to hiv its ok for some people to have dementia, some not, ok to have some progress in 2-3 years, and others progress in 20 years, thats all ok right?
the real question is if you are not feeling well, and have been given a mulititude of garbage can diagnosis like MS, Fibromylagia, CFS, you should have a right to get tested for a microbe that kills/sickens every animal inoculated unlike hiv.
I know of several people that have recieved several of these diagnosis's simultuaneoulsy! You dont group diseases by the symptoms, you group them by the cause.
And bc its clear that LO's pathenogenic mycoplasmas kill every animal injected, are found in the tissues of people who died of mysterious infections, are not found in healthy controls and there are clear correlations PCR with a subset of CFS/RA/ALS patients, you should get tested and treated if pcr positive, especially with strain ingonitus/penetrans if you are not feeling well, and get a new diagnosis every week.
I know this will lose a lot of money for the drug companies you work for, but for people who are feeling horrible with this microbe in thier blood they have every right to eradicate it with ABX.
As for that gulf war abx study, well if you wait 14 years to treat the infection, any infection chances are slim for a recovery, try treating a syphillis patient 14 years later. Secondly the study was conducted by several people who didnt want national scandal, ie how did the mycoplasma get in their blood?
Independent scientists should conduct studies.
HIV causes a particular form of immune suppression with the specific depletion of CD4+ cells.
Mycoplasmas do not cause MS, Fibromyalgia, CFS, AIDS, rheumatoid arthritis, GWS in animals.
You are claiming that a multitude of diverse illnesses are all cuased by mycoplasma incognitus. The evidence that you have presented is not sufficient to conclude a relationship between mycoplasmas and one of them let alone all of them.
Cooler,
Doxycycline is cheap. It would not be an expensive study.
Then again if it showed no improvement, it might be bad for business.
Liver necrosis is not a minor difference. S. C Lo, himself, describes the patient as having a "fulminant infection." Look that up in the dictionary and see if it sounds anything like chronic fatigue syndrome
an hiv patient with dementia and one w/o dementia is no minor difference, so they possibly couldnt have the same cause (HIV) LOL
Chris, you said: "HIV causes a particular form of immune suppression with the specific depletion of CD4+ cells."
However, you forgot to mention that this only happens in a small percentage of the HIV diagnosed. And quite far from all of them.
Even DT, the avowed HIV negative HIV believer and AIDS clinician admitted to personal CD4 counts that varied greatly, including as low as 400, and was even free of HIV infection.
DT's 400 count, which would have been classified as AIDS or on the way to progressing to AIDS at the time were DT an HIV positive, he/she would even have been recommended by the CDC to be taking the aids drugs that he/she has prescribed for decades.
The fact is, CD4 counts are seldom ever even tracked in any other diagnosis other than HIV, so who knows what CD4 counts anyone would have with or without any other known or unknown infections of any other viruses or diagnoses.
Furthermore Chris, you seem to have conveniently forgotten that Rodriguez et al found CD4 counts as having no bearing in progression to AIDS, except for a small percentage of individuals.
How convenient that selective memory of yours seems to be, Chris!
Lo's mycoplasmas cause disease in animals, fatal in monkeys/mice none of the control animals got sick died, but in one of his patents lo incoculated chimpanzees with m penetrans, he said they got "symptoms of AIDS", while the controls didnt.
he didnt talk much about it, this was years later probably bc he gave up on the scientific establishment knowing it was dominated by criminals like Fauci/Gallo.
Funny how you you scrtutize Lo's animal models, when hiv does nothing in chimpanzees (2-3 were immunosupressed after living in a cage for 20 yrs, what do you expect, the rest were fine), mice, dogs, cats etc etc. I love your animal models for hiv, siv that doesnt occur in the wild, only occurs in macaque monkeys and there is no 10 year latent period.
Or that mouse that was engineered to have a human immune system! Im sure the process of an immune transplant is a far more likely cause of illness in that poor mouse, how do you think a human would feel if they were given an immune transplant from a member of another species?
By the way Chris, Tony Fauci, director of NIAIDS, says you are full of crap about HIV causing a loss of CD4 T Cells. Tony Fauci says HIV infection INCREASES CD4 T-CELLS, and quite well pointed out that HIV drugs themselves cause loss of these cells:
For some reason, perhaps personal modesty, Dr Fauci had not informed the general public previously of his breakthrough in understanding, but merely communicated it to the Proceedings of the National Academy and included it in a chapter on the Immunology of AIDS he wrote for the textbook "Fundamental Immunology", edited by William E. Paul MD and published by Lippincott, Williams and Wilkins in 2003 (p. 1295):
Fauci pointed out:
"Several investigators have demonstrated that there is an increase in CD4+ T-cell proliferation in both HIV and SIV infection. In certain studies, the enhanced T-cell proliferation that was observed during active disease was significantly decreased following the initiation of anti-retroviral therapy, and proliferation increased again in parallel with plasma viremia following the cessation of treatment in these individuals".
What Fauci confirmed to the few graduate students and working scientists who perused this book was that the result of HIV arriving in the human body was to touch off and maintain proliferation of T-cells, rather than killing them off.
What happens is that for a 56 fold (5600 per cent) gain in HIV early on CD4 T-cells drop maybe 6% but CD8 T-cells rise 20 per cent. The net increase is there until drugs are provided, in which case this beneficial effect is wiped out. If the drugs are stopped, then the benefit is once again felt.
The total outcome is hidden in the complexity of the immune system - there are other major factors involved in the standard and rather misleading T-cell count, such as rate of production, redistribution, longevity of cells, level of apoptosis and activation induced cell death - but these trends are clear.
Thanks to http://www.scienceguardian.com/blog/how-fauci-solved-aids.htm
Cooler,
You continue to claim that the case report you brought to our attention represents a CFS-like illness.
Please direct us to any study of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in which the patients show a fulminant course with extensive necrosis of the liver and spleen.
Please don't send us to Project Day Lily or any other work of fiction.
In studies where cohorts have been followed only a small proportion do not show progressive depletion of CD4+ cells. LTNPs are a minority.
CD4+ counts vary from individual to individual and from time to time. In non HIV infected people the average CD4+ count is much higher and the distribution goes to zero at around 200.
In HIV negative people some low CD4+ cell counts occur but these are transient. In comparison CD4+ counts in HIV infected people start in the normal range and decrease progressively over time. Eventually CD4+ counts progress to single digits.
There are studies that have looked at CD4+ counts in non-HIV infected people. DT has personally taken part in one of them.
I am yet to hear a single HIV "rethinker" accurately describe this paper. Your version here bears no resemblance to the paper at all. What are you talking about? Have you read the paper?
I can't remember things that never were.
However, I do remember you promising to give up your Denialism if the Parenzee appeal failed.
a patient complains of diahrrea, mild fatigue, painful urination, memory loss, joint pain she claims its slowly worsening. All tests are normal, except for an abnormal spect scan, and some lymph node swelling.
Most doctors write it off as stress, one gave her a diagnosis of CFS, another lupus, another complicated depression w mild paranioa, all the while she has Lo's mycoplasma penetrans in her blood.
The patient repeatedly goes to the doc saying the symptoms are worsening. Patient feels suicididal and does not respond to antidepressents...........................
HOW DARE YOU NOT LET HER KNOW ABOUT LO'S RESEARCH AND THAT SHE IS PCR POSITIVE FOR MYCOPLASMA PENETRANS, a microbe that causes aids like symptoms in chimps and kills every other animal inoculated ARE YOU PEOPLE SICK TO NOT INFORM HER OF THIS?
Michael, unlike you, I have actually read this chapter. It takes a high level of arrogance, ignorance, dishonesty and stupidity on Liversedge's part to misinterpret the chapter in this manner.
The actual text and the references cited do not support Liversedge's contorted misrepresentation.
289. Lempicki RA, Kovacs JA, Baseler MW, et al. Impact of HIV-1 infection and highly active antiretroviral therapy on the kinetics of CD4+ and CD8+ T cell turnover in HIV-infected patients. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 2000; 97: 13778 - 13783
290. Mohri H, Bonhoeffer S, Monard S, et al. Rapid Turnover of T Lymphocytes in SIV-Infected Rhesus Macaques. Science 1998; 279: 1223 - 1227
291. Zhang ZQ, Notermans DW, Sedgewick G, et al. Kinetics of CD4+ T cell repopulation of lymphoid tissues after treatment of HIV-1 infection. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 1998; 95: 1154 - 1159
292. Sachsenberg N, Perelson AS, Yerly S, et al. Turnover of CD4+ and CD8+ T lymphocytes in HIV-1 infection as measured by Ki-67 antigen. J Exp Med 1998; 187: 1295 - 1303
293. Rosenzweig M, DeMaria MA, Harper DM, et al. Increased rates of CD4(+) and CD8(+) T lymphocyte turnover in simian immunodeficiency virus-infected macaques. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 1998; 95: 6388 - 6393
294. Hellerstein M, Hanley MB, Cesar D, et al. Directly measured kinetics of circulating T lymphocytes in normal and HIV-1-infected humans. Nat Med 1999; 5: 83 - 89
295. Hazenberg MD, Stuart JW, Otto SA, et al. T-cell division in human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-1 infection is mainly due to immune activation: a longitudinal analysis in patients before and during highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART). Blood 2000; 95: 249 - 255
296. McCune JM, Hanley MB, Cesar D, et al. Factors influencing T-cell turnover in HIV-1-seropositive patients. J Clin Invest 2000; 105: R1 - R8
297. Fleury S, Rizzardi GP, Chapuis A, et al. Long-term kinetics of T cell production in HIV-infected subjects treated with highly active antiretroviral therapy. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 2000; 97: 5393 - 5398
298. Fleury S, de Boer RJ, Rizzardi GP, et al. Limited CD4+ T-cell renewal in early HIV-1 infection: effect of highly active antiretroviral therapy. Nat Med 1998; 4: 794 - 801
299. Folks TM, Kessler SW, Orenstein JM, et al. Infection and replication of HIV-1 in purified progenitor cells of normal human bone marrow. Science 1988; 242: 919 - 922
Hosts respond differently to infections, with hiv some get dementia some dont, some people recover from meningitis/ebola some dont, use your brain.
you group diseases bases on the cause, not symptoms
If 10 people had a headache, and the cause in 5 was a virus, and the other five it was stress IT DOES NOT MEAN THAT THE VIRUS IS NOT THE CAUSE OF THE HEADACHE IN THOSE 5 PEOPLE, JUST BC THERE ARE OTHER PEOPLE WITHIN THE SAME GROUP WITH THE SAME SYMPTOMS.
WITH CFS ITS THE SAME, JUST BC THE SYMPTOMS ARE SOMEWHAT SIMILAR DOESNT MEAN THE CAUSE IS THE SAME IN EVERY PATIENT. SO THEY SHOULD NOT BE GROUPED TOGETHER, THEY SHOULD BE DIVIDED BASED ON THE CAUSATION, WITH SOME IT COULD BE DEPRESSION , OTHERS MYCOPLAMSA INCOGNITUS, OTHERS METABOLIC DISORDERS...........ETC
"In studies where cohorts have been followed only a small proportion do not show progressive depletion of CD4+ cells."
Prove it Chris, with a cite, so I can take down your cite by showing all of the drug addicts and all of the people taking ARV's which are proven to lower CD4 counts, and all of the other cofactors to CD4 loss and poor immune system health in every cohort cite that you present.
"LTNPs are a minority."
Really? They had no problem rounding up a thousand of them in short order in Boston recently. And that they found that many when the vast majority of Long Term NonProgressors's refuse to have anything to do with HIV drugs or HIV doctors and researchers is fairly amazing.
LTNP's and even HIV positives who take the AIDS drugs are not displaying any immune problems or any low CD4 counts unless they have other cofactors of self destructive behaviors and other factors, including some of the HIV drugs.
"CD4+ counts vary from individual to individual and from time to time."
Exactly. So why are you trying to attribute it to HIV.
I can't remember things that never were.
How convenient to decide that things that go against your propaganda and preaching "never were". But your memory lapses do not erase Rodriguez et al from the books, now do they.
Furthermore, Chris, you conveniently have also forgotten the very recent CD4 mathematical modelling study that also shows CD4 counts to be impossible to being due to HIV.
Michael,
From your link above:
""Our assessment of these natural hosts like mangabeys offers insight into the disease and shows us that progression to AIDS likely results from the cumulative effects of HIV/SIV replication, CD4 T-cell depletion, generalized immune activation and non-CD4 T-cells depletion or dysfunction," said Sodora."
You see that, GENERALIZED IMMUNE ACTIVATION. HIV infection is recognized and the body reacts the same way it does to other viral infections. This is not as wild and crazy of an idea as you seem to think it is. The problem is when the immune system is activated for prolonged periods of time (ie-neutralizing antibodies no longer effective because escape mutant expansion), resulting in T cell exhaustion. Read this:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&T…
And in case you didn't notice, an increase in CD8+ T cells is responsible for the increased T cell population. This would be expected, as CD8+ T cells are the primary effector cells of an aquired anti-viral response (you did know HIV is a virus, right?)
Michael,
Once again you demonstrate your ignorance.
Unlike the blind men and the elephant, your ignorance is voluntary. You are the ostrich and the elephant, burying your head in the sand while trying to describe that which your refuse to see.
The full text of the PNAS paper you refer to is available free of charge to anyone who is interested.
This paper does not demonstrate that "HIV infection INCREASES CD4 T-CELLS," as you falsely claim. Nor does the paper show that "HIV drugs themselves cause loss of these cells."
This paper shows an increase in the proliferation of CD4 T-cells in HIV-infected patients, even though the level of CD4 T-cells declines.
Hmmmmm? How could the number of cells decline even if cell proliferation increases? Oh, I get it, the cells are dying!
Michael, in this case you are copying-and-pasting from what, I guess, passes as a leading Denialist Web Site--and they got the science completely wrong. Compare the actual paper to the distortion from the Denialist Web Page--Such a distortion cannot possibly be an honest mistake. It can only be a lie by individuals with a baltant disregard for the truth.
I can see why youget along with them so well.
Here is the link to the PNAS paper:
Lempicki RA, Kovacs JA, Baseler MW, Adelsberger JW, Dewar RL, Natarajan V, Bosche MC, Metcalf JA, Stevens RA, Lambert LA, Alvord WG, Polis MA, Davey RT, Dimitrov DS, Lane HC. (2000). Impact of HIV-1 infection and highly active antiretroviral therapy on the kinetics of CD4+ and CD8+ T cell turnover in HIV-infected patients. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 97:13778-83.
A couple more:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&T…
"Programmed death 1 expression on HIV-specific CD4+ T cells is driven by viral replication and associated with T cell dysfunction"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&T…
"Upregulation of PD-1 expression on HIV-specific CD8+ T cells leads to reversible immune dysfunction."
Seriously Michael, go to one of the above links, read the paper and then follow the links on the side to more papers and stop reading the denialist websites.
As for "you are full of crap about HIV causing a loss of CD4 T Cells" read these and again, please follow the links and read up.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&T…
"Role of Fas ligand and receptor in the mechanism of T-cell depletion in acquired immunodeficiency syndrome: effect on CD4+ lymphocyte depletion and human immunodeficiency virus replication"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&T…
"CD4+ T-cell death induced by infectious and noninfectious HIV-1: role of type 1 interferon-dependent, TRAIL/DR5-mediated apoptosis"
The elite controller study was recruiting worldwide for volunteers. The eligibility criteria included not taking antiretrovirals so it is hardly a surprise that they do not take antiretrovirals.
As you refer to the work done in Boston do you actually read the papers that they write?
Like the one currently online at Nature Immunology.
Published online: 30 September 2007 | doi:10.1038/ni1515
Upregulation of CTLA-4 by HIV-specific CD4+ T cells correlates with disease progression and defines a reversible immune dysfunction
I don't expect that Rodriguez would like to be erased. I do expect that he would appreciate it if scientifically illiterate people would stop misrepresenting his paper. Your description of the study bears no resemblance to the actual data.
I am not going to forget something that isn't true. The paper that you refer to does not say this. The authors of the paper do not say or believe that the paper says that HIV cannot cause AIDS.
Ummm. They still appear to be recruiting. Have they gotten 1000 elite controllers yet. They report that they are attempting to find 1000. Are you sure that you aren't -- misreading something?
They also state that they estimate that 1 in 300 HIV infected people are elite controllers
As far as I can tell they're up to 300 and still recruiting. If you have better information then tell us.
In the mean time if you know anybody that is eligible then get them to volunteer.
http://www.massgeneral.org/aids/hiv_elite_controllers.asp
It only involves giving a single blood sample.
So what you are saying is that Mycoplasma fermentans(incognitus) does not fulfil Koch's postulates.
I think what cooler is saying is correct. Take fibromyalgia for instance, there are numerous symptoms for this problem and every patient does not have all of them. The patients generally has two of the most common, which is pain at the pressure points and sleep issues. This problem was at the heart of my sicknesses. This is a tough problem to diagnosis because, like AIDS, the symptoms are unrelated, therefore most doctors miss it, don't diagnose it nor do they know how to treat it. Nevertheless, in the end it boils down to treating each symptom as it arises, which should be how AIDS is treated as opposed to blanket antiretrovirals, which cannot address all the diseases lumped under the AIDS umbrella. If AIDS doctors would treat the appropriate symptom, then AIDS would go away.
quite the opposite, just like the virus that caused the headache in 5 of 10 people with the same symptoms, while in the other 5 it was stress, you take those 5 people with virus induced headache and classify them in a new disease category, which is the same thing that should be done for those people with complex multi organic infectious like symptoms that are positive for Lo's pathenogenic mycoplasmas.
Those who test postitive for mycoplasma penetrans/incognitus should be given a put in a new disease category, they should be labeled as being mycoplasma penetrans positive, much like hiv positive people, they get diagnosed on basis of causation, not similar sharing symptoms, for if we used that method hiv could not be the cause of AIDS bc the symptoms vary greatly from one person to another, some get dementia, some dont etc etc.
Is there any explanation of why the number of CD8 cells is decreasing during an AIDS infection ?
Montagnier in his book does not provide one, but points that this is a mark of the disease progression.
Michael:
The point of my post had nothing to do with whether HIV-1 had produced AIDS in this patient. (I'm assuming it had.) The key item was this:
This means that the genetic diversity of HIV-1 (and presumably any other sort of HIV) will increase through both point mutation and recombination.
Braganza,
Go to a few of the links I posted above on T cell exhaustion and follow the links on the side of the screen to similar papers. I think you may begin to find your answer there.
Cooler says I lie about Lo and the mycoplasma. The guy who says they didn't find data recorders in Pennsylvania!
Lo said he found a new AIDS virus in 1986. He didn't give more details for three years! He didn't give other scientists his materials so they could verify it. He still said it was a virus in 1989. He was wrong for at least three years. He had EMs and he called it a virus. Cooler calls him a genius.
HEres an article from 1989 when Lo still said it was a virus. New york Times Lawrence K. Altman, "The Doctor's World; AIDS Finding piques curiosity, but scientists are wary" April 11, 1989
Dr. Lo has apparently not provided crucial biological reagents to other researchers. Such reagents include molecular probes that can detect genetic material in viruses. In addition, Dr. Lo has been remarkably reticent, declining to discuss his studies recently with reporters or to participate in the usual give and take with scientists.
Even though he acted like that to people other people were still interested in his stuff.
More than a dozen AIDS researchers said Dr. Lo's work was provocative. In general, they agree with Dr. David Baltimore, the Nobel Prize-winning virologist, who said the findings were "interesting and ought to be followed up."
But so scientists who looked at the EMs thought it didn't look like a virus but they couldn't check it because Lo wouldn't give it out like scientists are supposed to do.
Scientists have cited several limitations in Dr. Lo's paper, including the poor quality of the photographs of the virus taken through an electron microscope. Some critics contend that the photos do not show a virus.
Everyone wanted more info. Like Dr. Fauci.
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, an AIDS expert who directs the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, said that Dr. Lo had given a seminar at the National Institutes of Health about his research. But Dr. Fauci said he had to ask Dr. Lo about six times before he agreed to do it, and he came only under the stipulation that no one from Dr. Gallo's laboratory could be there. "That is ridiculous for a scholarly person," Dr. Fauci said, "and he turned off a lot of people."
Six times. He refused. Then he complains no ones interested in his research. But they were, even after that Gallo still said good things about the research.
Cooler says Fauci does "GENOCIDE" all caps. What asking a dude to present his stuff six times is genocide? I think you do all caps at Lo not Fauci.
article from later,
Lawrence K. Altman, "The Doctor's World; Unusual Microbe, once dismissed, is now taken more seriously" January 16 1990 New York Times
A guy whose suppressing stuff to do GENOCIDE doesn't say stuff like this,
"We have an open mind and we are trying to see if we can settle this one way or the other over the next several months," said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, who heads the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. "If it is an important pathogen, then let's see what we can do about it. And if not, let's move on."
And what happened at that meeting in 1990
"The pathology data was solid and convinced us that the agent is in the tissues," Dr. Baseman said. The ability of M. incognitus to cause a fatal wasting disease in monkeys and mice persuaded most participants that the microbe "has the potential to cause disease in humans," Dr. Baseman said, although solid proof is lacking.
Solid proof lacking.
Twenty years now and still not much good evidence the Nicolson studies and Los studies are with small numbers. Some people don't find the mycoplasmas in CFS like the Vernon et al study. A Japanese lab and a English lab did experiments and they didn't think the Lo mycoplasma was unique. STill today a lot of people think it was contaminants. Montagnier was really interested in this thing but his lab found mycoplasmas by PCR in healthy people and sick people at low rate, Kovacic et al JCM 1996, and weren't statisticly different. Montagnier found some reasons to think penetrans is a OI in AIDS patients and it could make progression faster.
Cooler looks at this stuff and he speculates and he says it causes all these different diseases when even Lo doesn't say that. Cooler thinks like this. If Nicolson or Lo finds mycoplasma in tissue with antibodies then the antibodies are fine. But if Lo doesn't find it with antibodies then well the government was forcing him to lie or the antibodies don't work. If Nicolson finds it in blood with PCR then PCR is great. But when Lo doesn't find it in blood then it's the government again or the top Armed Pathology generalissimo has a lab where they don't store blood right. If other labs like Vernon et al don't find it in blood with PCR then they should of looked in cells or in tissues with the antibodies that don't work or do work depending whose using them. But when Montagnier, Kovacic et al JCM 1996 looks in cells its there in like ten percent of healthy people and less of people with HIV.
Maybe Mycoplasma does something in "CFS" or "GWS" and maybe its another OI in AIDS but if you read all this papers your thinking well what the hell. This is lots of contradiction and not very much proof. Defanitely much much weaker then the papers for HIV and AIDS. It kinda helps to be a conspiracy theorist I guess.
Jim,
Thanks for the link, I just collected the papers on PD-1 expression.
Also look up HIV infection and T cell apoptosis, as mechanisms for cell death have also been described.
montagnier didnt find m penetrans in any hiv negative people, he found m fermentans(doesnt specify if it was incognitus strain. HIv negative people are not healthy controls.) Based on his research montagnier said in book "virus" 2000 its a shame that more awareness is not done about mycoplasmas.
Solid proof is lacking is code word for a drug company hasnt supported it, or a press conference hasnnt been thrown yet. It was Altman who said that. theres not much more you can do than induce disease in mice and primates, especially when the microbes you push like hiv/hep c/hpv do zilch in animals.
The meeting was led by Dr. Joel B. Baseman, a mycoplasma expert at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center at San Antonio. He said the participants were ''very impressed with the quality of science that Dr. Lo's group displayed.''
''The pathology data was solid and convinced us that the agent is in the tissues,'' Dr. Baseman said. The ability of M. incognitus to cause a fatal wasting disease in monkeys and mice persuaded most participants that the microbe ''has the potential to cause disease in humans,'' Dr. Baseman said, although solid proof is lacking.
new york times 1990
a year later the Miami herald impressed with LO's work tried to call fauci and ask him what happened after the panel reccomended funding and research, faucis response
When asked for an interview concerning Lo's work, NIAID director Anthony Fauci said through spokesperson Mary Jane Walker that he "will not talk about mycoplasma or any other AIDS co-factor."
While Fauci seemed interested at first, it seems if the retroviral cancer gang of of Gallo/levy got to him, to bad they had to unleash this epidemic on society, who dares upset the hiv religion with possible cofactors....unless their Gallo's co factor hhv6, then its all good.
Garth nicolson is finding it by PCR in many complex multi organic illnesses, that have been given garbage can diagnosis's.
a patient complains of diahrrea, mild fatigue, painful urination, memory loss, joint pain she claims its slowly worsening. All tests are normal, except for an abnormal spect scan, and some lymph node swelling.
Most doctors write it off as stress, one gave her a diagnosis of CFS, another lupus, another complicated depression w mild paranioa, all the while she has Lo's mycoplasma penetrans in her blood.
The patient repeatedly goes to the doc saying the symptoms are worsening. Patient feels suicididal and does not respond to antidepressents...........................
HOW DARE YOU NOT LET HER KNOW ABOUT LO'S RESEARCH AND THAT SHE IS PCR POSITIVE FOR MYCOPLASMA PENETRANS, a microbe that causes aids like symptoms in chimps and kills every other animal inoculated ARE YOU PEOPLE SICK TO NOT INFORM HER OF THIS?
Sorry Michael, sometimes your comments leave me a little confused, were you being merely ignorant, totally dishonest, or completely full of shit when you said above that D4T was related to DDT?
Are you referring to yourself in the third person?
Garth Nicolson is also finding HIV env in the mycoplasma genome. This makes me wonder whether his reults are all they claim to be.
Sorry Roy, sometimes your comments leave me a little confused, were you being merely ignorant, totally dishonest, or completely full of shit when you questioned above, my statement that D4T was related to DDT?
dideoxythymidine (ddT) and didehydrothymidine (d4T)
AK, the point of my own comment was that the "patient" had more than ample reasons for being susceptible to opportunistic infections and for not recovering quickly or exibiting immune suppression.
I do understand your own question though, in considering mutations. However, as with everything HIV, it seems that nothing in this sordid science is ever agreed upon for long, even among the top researchers.
Just a couple of months ago, the following statement was made by Dr. Davey Smith, http://www.gaylesbiantimes.com/?id=9919 an assistant adjunct professor of medicine in the division of infectious diseases at UCSD, said it has been his experience that the virus hasn't been mutating.
"There's been a bunch of papers around about that," said Smith, who agreed to answer some specific questions about HIV, so long as they were removed from the issue of the AIDS dissidents. "I don't think there's really much difference between the virus that is circulating now and the virus that was circulating 20 years ago."
Finding a vaccine has been difficult, Smith said, because of the way the virus works itself into DNA.
"Once it gets into the bloodstream and it integrates into the person's own DNA, it lives there ... and we can't get it out," Smith said. "Even though we can start someone on therapy and we can keep the virus from producing copies of itself, we can't get it out of the DNA form. Once we stop the therapy, it just makes more copies of itself."
Hey AK, what he didn't tell you is that the therapy keeps the cells themselves from replicating, not just viruses or retroviruses. And not just the part of the cell that is believed to be HIV! What makes these guys think HIV is not even simply a part of some peoples DNA that becomes unraveled and detectable under certain stresses such as drug abuse, high emotional stress, malnutrition, etc?
So, what can I say, AK? Perhaps you should look this guy up and ask him. Or...Perhaps you were smart to have put your papers on HIV away many years ago, instead of being frazzled by the unending never answered questions in a science where todays reality is tomorrow's debunking.
My own experience is that one paper on HIV or AIDS contradicts the last paper which contradicts another paper which contradicts another paper.
To me, it is no wonder there are so many dissidents who are convinced HIV, AIDS, and its researchers are all off track. They can't ever seem to agree on much for very long, so all of the lingering questions and massive inconsistencies are then spun off into a mystical virus with mysterious abilities and attributes of an evil genius (even though HIV supposedly is a mere minutia of a 9kb retrovirus that at that size would have extremely low ability to be able to "do" anything other than to exist as an inherent part of another cell and only replicate as a part of the individual cell that replicates) that continues to evade and dumbfound the modern Sherlock Holmes HIV researchers.
More than anything, all of these mystical attributes they come up with seem to be nothing more than excuses or imaginings to explain why nothing they say or come up with ever makes any sense for very long.
The concept of mutation may also simply be an excuse of their dumbfounded imaginations when faced with the fact that they are for never and ever coming up with any working vaccine or cure despite more than 100 billion and 25 years.
Perhaps they are chasing ghosts or simply finding markers of other processes that are going on and mistakenly attributing it to HIV. Who knows? The HIV tests don't find active HIV. They only find what are believed to be parts of antibodies. Are these tiny molecular weights of proteins ONLY found in HIV antibodies, or are they parts of other processes? Are they a natural part of some peoples bodies? Do they only show up in countable numbers when other factors are at play, such as cellular destruction due to various other factors such as drugs, or malnutrition or stress are at play? Again, who knows?
But of course, the "experts" all want to convince the public that is more than amply funding them that HIV is a huge public threat, and to convince them the grant seekers and drug perveyors all know what they are doing.
Do they?
no, MY SISTER SON, DONT GET INVOLVED IN MY PERSONAL LIFE, fully recovered with abx, no thanks to the peices of garbage who gatekeep the scientific establishment,(drug companies and hacks AND LOSERS like fauci and all of their sycophants who troll these blogs, YOU PEOPLE ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THESE ILLNESSES, IF FAUCI HAD A PRESS CONFERENCE OR MERCK HAD AN AD YOUD BE SINGING "MYCOPLASMA") YOU PEOPLE want to see people like that die.
other scientists are confirming nicolsons results........
SHYH CHING LO STARTED IT ALL , THE ONLY MICROBE DISCOVERED IN RECENT DECADES TO KILL SICKEN EVERY ANIMAL INJECTED. BOW YOUR HEAD.
I'm just trying to understand what your last post was all about. You referred to someone as "her".
In the only controlled trial so far there was no proven benefit from taking antibiotics for people infected with Mycoplasmas.
Which scientists? I asked you before about which "rela scientists" you were in contact with. You didn't answer.
vojandi, these scientists in Europe
Endresen GK.
Department of Rheumatology, The National Hospital, University of Oslo, Forskningsvn. 2-Block B, 0027, Oslo, Norway. gerhard.endresen@rikshospitalet.no
Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) and fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS) are characterised by a lack of consistent laboratory and clinical abnormalities. Although they are distinguishable as separate syndromes based on established criteria, a great number of patients are diagnosed with both. In studies using polymerase chain reaction methods, mycoplasma blood infection has been detected in about 50% of patients with CFS and/or FMS, including patients with Gulf War illnesses and symptoms that overlap with one or both syndromes. Such infection is detected in only about 10% of healthy individuals, significantly less than in patients. Most patients with CFS/FMS who have mycoplasma infection appear to recover and reach their pre-illness state after long-term antibiotic therapy with doxycycline, and the infection can not be detected after recovery. By means of causation and therapy, mycoplasma blood infection may permit a further subclassification of CFS and FMS. It is not clear whether mycoplasmas are associated with CFS/FMS as causal agents, cofactors, or opportunistic infections in patients with immune disturbances. Whether mycoplasma infection can be detected in about 50% of all patient populations with CFS and/or FMS is yet to be determined.
PMID: 12879275 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
Michael this has been patiently explained to you time and time again. If HIV were present in everybodies DNA then every single person would test positive on nucleic acid tests. They don't. HIV is not present in the human genome.
There isn't anywhere for the HIV DNA to hide. It isn't there.
You are also wrong about antiretrovirals stopping the replication of all cells. Think about it for a moment. If antiretrovirals really did this then peoples hair would stop growing and fall out. Antiretrovirals are specific for HIV enymes.
here is a single blind, although it was single blind, patients reported a greater than 50% improvement, much more than what you would expect from a placebo accrding to the authors based on a previous studies
pilot study that showed much improvement with abx in cfs
http://www.translational-medicine.com/content/4/1/34
The gwi study was conducted 14 years after the gulf war, any infection treated that late will probably not show improvement also it was conducted by people with competing interests,
Department of Veterans Affairs
Pfizer
Department of Defense
all of these entities who conducted the study had conflicts of interest, the dept of defense repeatedly said it was stress, and they are sponsering the study? after all if they improved, then their would be a national scandal, for how did the mycoplasma get in their blood? They did improve in the first since months according to nicolson, but when those results were embarrasing they sabotaged the study, what else would you expect when adversaries are the judge?
Antiretrovirals are specific for HIV enymes.
BULL SHIT -- PROVE IT!
first 6 months
Chris, you said:
If HIV were present in everybodies DNA then every single person would test positive on nucleic acid tests. They don't.
Interesting you should bring that up Chris, considering EVERYONE DOES show as HIV positive on HIV elisa tests unless the sera is diluted 400 times
Furthermore it is also interesting because EVERYONE DOES SHOW a registered HIV "VIRAL LOAD" on PCR tests. The quantity for most people is in the low range, in what is called "undetectable" but the FACT is that PCR is detecting something in everyone at the lowest ranges. Don't take my word for it, go send a sample of your own blood for a "viral load" test, and take a look. The system will have a count, however low, under viral load.
Furthermore, you said: "HIV is not present in the human genome."
But how could you possibly know that unless every human being on earth has had their own dna unraveled. Just because a few have been, does not mean that significant differences won't be found in variance in small percentages of the worlds population.
Michael are you incapable of registering new information. The fact that tests do not work properly when used incorrectly is of surprise to no-one except Denialists.
There are several HIV antibody tests that uses straight serum with no dilution. It is not true that they all test positive.
Other tests use diluents with agents such as BSA to block non-specific binding. If you don't use the diluent then you will get non-specific binding. What surprise!
Viral load tests typically have a sensitivity of around 50 copies/ml. This is the limit of the accuracy of the test. A HIV- person would get a reading of < 50 copies/ml. This range includes 0 copies/ml. It does not imply that there is any HIV there at all.
If HIV were a recent addition to the human genome, ie. it was an exogenous retrovirus that incorporated itself into the human genome of an individual and passed itself onto the descendants of that person, then there would be a clear hereditary pattern. There isn't.
This is a review. It doesn't present new findings. It doesn't replicate or confirm Nicolson's results. In fact it pointedly does not make any conclusions as to whether Mycoplasmas play a causal role.
It isn't single blind. There was no placebo control group.
The GWI was a better controlled study and showed no improvement. Stop making ad hoc excuses to ignore it.
Ah, merely ignorant, or perhaps utterly careless, either way, rather than admit fault you change your story and try to pretend its me who's wrong not you.
"D4T (related to DDT)"(sic)
Thus you are being completely dishonest in this comment, hence my occassional confusion about what's really going on in your comments.
This is DDT:
http://www.3dchem.com/molecules.asp?ID=90
d4T is related to ddT. Neither is related to DDT.
Michael:
I don't have time to spend debating the paradigm. Just out of open-mindedness, I took a look at the link you offered me, and I found this quote from Duesberg:
Any "scientist" who uses the phrase "there cannot be" is immediately suspect of not being a scientist, whatever his credentials. I'll allow for rhetorical hyperbole, but examination of what he deem "impossible" shows his ignorance.
The entire paradigm for retroviruses allows for "slow viruses". Many of these exist and have been isolated, including several forms of herpes.
I have myself suffered from shingles, known to be a form of chicken pox, which is caused by a retro-virus. (Yes, I know of the relationship with stress.)
Retroviruses are thoroughly embedded in the evolutionary paradigm used to examine evolution, so statements like the above put Duesberg in the same camp as the creationists/ID'ers. After all, there are many creationists with PhD's and other credentials as well.
Tara:
Can you easily point me to a reliable Web resource that describes the mammalian immune system in complete detail, along with how HIV-1 is thought to attack it, preferably in language an educated amateur can understand? That would be great!
"bow your head" cooler??? Did you just say that?
Sorry scientists aren't all into head bowing cooler.
Bow our head to a guy who thought a bacteria was a virus for three years? Who found out he was wrong bc other scientists said his EMs didn't have a virus in them?
A guy who refused talking to his collegues til Fauci asked him SIX times. Who didn't publish details for three years. A guy who wouldn't let any one from Gallo's lab near him even though Gallo thought his work was interesting. Who wouldn't give people his strains and reagents for years. Wouldn't talk to journalists or anyone.
Sorry if I don't bow my head cooler maybe Lo's a good scientist and maybe he learned from his mistakes but hes not a god.
Since you said "bow" though cooler how is your torque bow these days? Maybe you can use those exploding arrows to kill some mycoplasma??!! Heh heh!
ad hoc excuses? Treat a syphillis patient 10 yrs later and see how much success you have/
ad hoc excuses, no such thing as conflicts of interest? then deusberg should conduct a study to see whether or not hiv causes aids, no one would claim any conflicts of interest, right lol?
vojandi replicated nicolsons study and found the same correlation. pub med him, or scroll back for the study.
Mycoplasma inconitus/penetrns kills/sickens every animal inoculated, including mice/primates and causes "aids like symptoms" in chimps, im sorry your pet microbes like hiv, hpv, hep c do nothing in virtually every animal. Stop making ad hoc excuses to deny reality.
Lo didnt reveal much bc he said he wanted to wait until he published, gallo was never interested in his work.
misery women,
you dont have a sense of humor, stop trying to be funny.
Dear Noble,
You said :
"Viral load tests typically have a sensitivity of around 50 copies/ml. This is the limit of the accuracy of the test. A HIV- person would get a reading of ..."
Could you tell if the noise in the assay is due to the sample or the machine ? If you run a sample of synthetic plasma (cannot have any HIV particle) do you still have the noise or no ?
If you dont have noise with synthetic plasma, but you have it with HIV-, Michael could still be right.
You also said :
"If HIV were a recent addition to the human genome, ie. it was an exogenous retrovirus that incorporated itself into the human genome of an individual and passed itself onto the descendants of that person, then there would be a clear hereditary pattern.".
If the HIV amount is so low that it cannot be measured, as Michael imply, you can not have any measured pattern per definition.
Thanks for clarifying, I have seen that you are an erudite scholar in the matter.
Cooler I thought you won the debate and you were done here what are you doing still around sharing your sisters private medical history with the internet? Shouldn't you be playing video games or won't any body let you in there clan?
gallo was never interested in his work.
New York Times April 11, 1989 Gallo said Lo's stuff
"obviously piqued my curiosity"
piqued means provoked, aroused cooler just so you know.
Braganza very technical quesiton! OK!!
Could you tell if the noise in the assay is due to the sample or the machine ? If you run a sample of synthetic plasma (cannot have any HIV particle) do you still have the noise or no ?
Good assays shouldn't have "noise" the standard just goes down to 50. So below that its not noise really you just say undetectable or negative. Its all the standard you use if you have a good standard curve you can go down to 1 copy but thats very hard to be that good.
How it works is, you use a pure HIV reference nucleic aced and you know exactly how much you have and in different amounts. So you put them in your experiment and read them and you make a standard curve and you fit your unkown samples to it. So if your standards is
10 000 000
1 000 000
100 000
10 000
1 000 copies
Than your cutoff is a thousand copies bc you don't have any thing below it in your standard. If you get a number like 700 for a patient then you can't say 700 bc you don't know for sure without a standard below 1000. You can gues but its not good enough. But if you have 100 and 50 too than your cuttoff is 50 now so 700 is good. or 70 or 51.
A good tech how does this all the time with good reagents they make themself can go lower than 50 copies like I said down to 5 or 1 copy for some PCRS.
You always have negatives in your experiment too they should never be in your standard range or you know you have contamanation. You have a zero and you use a negative plasma too.
Cooler,
You referred us to a study by Vermeulen and Scholte:
This study is not a blinded study--not even "a single blind." If you read the author's conclusions you can confirm this for yourself:
A "retrospective open study" is, by definition, not a blinded study. In this case, the authors do not even include a control group of any kind.
What do Vermeulen and Scholte say about the importance of doing a controlled, blinded study before drawing any firm conclusions about the value of antibiotics for CFS?
You also referred us to a review paper by Endresen. How does Endresen characterize the scientific basis for antibiotic therapy in CFS:
In his conclusions he adds that:
He flatly states that the treatment is "not evidence-based" and that the role of mycoplasma infection is unclear. And he is a cheerleader for the therapy!
Why does he say it is not evidence-based? Because when Endresen wrote this review no one had bothered to perform a randomized controlled trial of antibiotic therapy for these conditions.
The only controlled, blinded study of antibiotic therapy in a CFS-like illness is the study we already discussed of Gulf War Syndrome--the study that showed no significant benefit after 1 year of treatment with doxycycline.
You criticiize this study because of the delay between the onset of the infection and the onset of treatment. Funny thing is, we don't know what the delay was between infection/treatment in the study by Vermeulen and Scholte? The authors give us no information on this point, and we have no reason to assume that the delay in this study was shorter than the delay in the Gulf War study. So you have no basis to criticize the Gulf War study on this point compared to Vermeulen and Scholte. Especially because the Gulf War Study is much more methodologically rigorous--as Vermeulen and Scholte would undoubtedly admit.
When reading the Gulf War study, you seem to have experienced some difficulty with subtraction. What makes you think the the authors waited 14 years to treat the infection? The Methods Section of the paper (did you read the paper?) states that the study was conducted between April 1999 and November 2001.
You compare the delay in treatment to syphilis:
Syphillis responds to antibiotic treatment even 10 years into the infection. In the absence of tissue destruction/scarring, symptomatic improvement is expected when treating syphilis. Given that Gulf War Syndrome patients typically have no tissue destruction/scarring, there is no reason to think that curing the infection would not lead to improvement in symptoms--unless the infection is not the cause of the symptoms
competing interests,
Department of Veterans Affairs
Pfizer
Department of Defense
Hmmmmmmmmmm all these people claimed GWI was PTSD and nothing else...........and would have to pay millions in lawsuits if the study showed improvement, not only that but how did the mycoplasma get in their blood?........a microbe that kills every animal inoculated.
The open study I cited clearly showed much improvement, although it was not double blind, the authors clearly state that other similar studies show a placebo response that was much lower, so this was an unlikely explanation, its not a perfect study, but the authors did not have conflicts of interest and warrants a further study from independent scientists.
garth nicolson and nancy nicolson phd claims armed agents from threatened them to stop thier research when they started a small pilot study to test for MFI in GWI vets, their boss right before he was going to blow the whistle on illegal testing Fred Conrad was shot 5 times in the head.
The nicolsons claim that 5 of their collegues died under mysterious circumastances, they also claim to have confidential sources within the pentagon that mycoplasma incognitus was part of the bioweapons program.
This would make sense to some bc it just so happens to be that a military scientist shyh ching lo published most on mycoplasma incognitus, inducing death and disease in every animal injected.
You are going to dismiss these as wild conspiricies, and the very fact that you do shows you dont know much about criminal investigations. If someone is saying a crime has been committed, you only dismiss it after an investigation. For example, you would ask nicolson who his sources are and put them under oath, you would put shyh ching lo under oath, offer him immunity if he knew anything and ask him if there were any truth to the nicolsons accusations...etc etc...........
thats the protocol when someone makes a criminal complaint, especially when your govt does not have the greatest track record.......3 million killed in vietnam, about a a million in IRAQ, the tuskegee experiment all on wars based on lies etc etc.
The gulf war was the only conflict where the vaccines records were destroyed, a few vets saved copies, and on those records were mysterious unlabeled vaccines.
A funny thing is that the GWI antibiotic study confirmed that MFI was in the blood of the soldiers, a microbe that kills every animal inoculated and could easily explain their symptoms. And the soldiers were claiming to be very ill and they claim the illness was being passed to thier relatives.
If you were living in Nazi germany and someone told you they were throwing people in gas chambers youd say "youre a crazy conspiracy theorist" So this post is more dedicated to the lurkers, I can never convince people who think its impossible for their own government to do horrible things.
Read Project Day lily to find out about the the hell the nicolsons went through when all they did was do a small pilot study on mycoplasma incognitus and found in many gwi patients blood. True story slightly fictionilized.
Braganza,
You seem to be confused between detecting a sequence inherited in the genome of human cells and detecting RNA in plasma.
If the genes of HIV were inherited as part of the human genome, then at least one copy of the HIV genes would be present in the DNA of all of our cells.
Using PCR to detect a single copy gene is easily accomplished by molecular biology labs all over the world. If the genes of HIV were part of the human genome, detecting them by PCR in human DNA would be trivial. I daresay that even Dr. Maniotis's lab could successfully amplify a single-copy gene from human DNA. (Perhaps a clever postdoctoral fellow would need to design the PCR primers.)
Even a much less sensitive procedure such as Southern blotting is more than adequate to easily detect a single copy gene.
In contrast to, say, the genes that encode hemoglobin, which can be detected in the DNA of all of our cells, HIV genes can only be detected in the DNA of infected cells. That is, even if you make DNA from a person who is infected with HIV, you cannot find HIV genes in all of that person's cells--only in cells that are infected by the virus.
These results disprove Michael's assertion that:
HIV genes simply do not behave in the same way as DNA sequences present in the human genome. Michael is simply grasping at straws as he attempts to keep his head buried in the sand.
Cooler,
You said that:
But you didn't provide a reference for these claims. Have the Nicolson's claims been published, anywhere? Can you provide a reference?
Keep in mind the nicolsons were well respected scientists at the md cancer center in Texas and had published many papers in the peer reviewed literature, Nicolson was given many prestigious awards before the gulf war debacle, and never made claims to any "conspiracy theories"
As usual they have been smeared by drug company hacks, which is disgusting when all they wanted to do is find out what was wrong with the gwi soldiers, and did not make a penny off their research.
The vets claimed so much improvement on Doxycycline, they made them honorary Navy seals, One navy seal was going blind and had many other complex symptoms and made a full recovery on doxycylinne. Another young girl diagnosed with ALS made a recovery with abx, according to the patients and nicolson.
I would suggest if you think mfi cant cause complex multi organic symptoms you take an injection.
for lurkers mycoplasma biowarfare program
http://www.projectdaylily.com/
Every test has a sensitivity limit. Beyond that limit you can't tell the difference between having a very small amount and having none. Less than 50 includes 0. If you are HIV negative and have a viral load test with a result of <50 copies/ml it does not in any way imply that you have any HIV RNA in your blood.
Michael is repeating a silly argument that he apparently picked up from Andrew Maniotis. As far as logic goes it is a nonstarter.
If HIV is part of the genome of some people then it would be detected. Every single cell in the human body (well not red blood cells) has the same DNA. HIV PCR DNA tests can detect HIV DNA in a small fraction of T-cells. In fact Michael has previously complained that HIV DNA is only found in a small fraction of T-cells. If HIV were part of the humnan genome it would be present in every single T-cell.
Do you really think that scientists haven't thought about these things before? Do you really think that people with no knowledge of the subject can find "flaws" that have been overlooked by scientists for 25 years? Do you think everybody else is that stupid?
"Drs. Garth and Nancy Nicolson are receiving tremendous pressure from on high to shut them up and shut down their work on GWI and Mycoplasma fermentans (incognitus). As Garth Nicolson has said - we have uncovered one of the messiest controversies and cover-ups since Watergate - - this one makes Watergate look like a tea party. Nicolson said the U.S. government has stifled their efforts to reveal their findings, other than a brief paper published in 1995 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). This is now apparently changing, however, and the Nicolsons have published six peer-reviewed articles in medical journals in the last year on GWI.
Since I have been working on Desert Storm health issues, he explained, I have encountered numerous attempts to prevent us from continuing our work on Gulf War illnesses (GWI). I have suffered attempts to block my papers and journal articles from publication, my grant applications have been tampered with, and my mail, phone, and fax have all been repeatedly intercepted. In a lengthy interview with The Spotlight, Mrs. Nicolson said she is certain their efforts are being stifled due to business links that current or former high government officials have with U.S. firms that have developed chemical and biological warfare (CBW) agents. She mentioned specifically former President George W. Bush, former Secretary of State James A. Baker, III, and current CIA director John Deutch.
Administrators at my own institution (M.D. Anderson Center in Houston] who are close personal friends of James A. Baker III, Garth Nicolson said, have also attempted to discredit me as a scientist and prevent us administratively from working on GWI. In addition, they have attacked academic colleagues who came to our defense in the name of academic freedom. For example, Nicolson continued, I was called to a meeting with our institutional president and his four vice presidents, where they attempted to prevent or limit our access to facilities and materials necessary to conduct research on GWI or collect data on soldiers who are ill. They also indicated that I cannot be involved in any professional or public discussion of our research without first having a special committee appointed by the administration review the contents of such research. (This is the first time that such a tactic has ever been used in the history of my institution)... Obviously, this is a gross distortion of academic freedom and a crude attempt to prevent us from continuing our research and discussing it publicly.
The reason for such highly unusual events, he explained, is probably due to the fact that former President Bush and former Secretary of State James Baker, as well as the president of UTMDACC [the Anderson Cancer Center], have financial interests in the local biotechnology companies that we strongly suspect were selling illegal biological weapons to Iraq which were subsequently used against our soldiers in Desert Storm.
[ED. NOTE: Dr. Garth Nicolson told this writer on 8/9/96 that the M.D. Anderson Center in Houston (where the Nicolson's have worked for many years) has been directly involved in biological weapons research and testing since the late 1970s and that he recently discovered that M.D. Anderson had been doing research on Mycoplasma fermentans (incognitus) as a chemical/biological warfare agent. This would seem to be another strong reason why the Nicolsons were forced out of M.D. Anderson].
In addition, we have been visited at our hospital by armed Defense Intelligence agents and warned not to continue our research. The DIA agents entered the MD Anderson Cancer Center and threatened the Administration not to allow the Nicolsons to continue their research on GWI, nor to allow them to talk about it publicly."
Garth Nicolson
In an interview in 1996
Cooler,
I'm still confused as to why you keep jabbering on about mycoplasma and government conspiracy theories. So it was found in HIV+ patients and can occasionally cause disease in healthy individuals. The same can be said for other OIs.
Also, have you even read the original paper? You keep parroting things like "a microbe that kills every animal inoculated." What dosage was used? What was the route of infection? One could easily infect animals at high dosages in order to cause maximal pathology for study. I'd read the paper myself but I don't have access to papers that old from that journal (why are most papers from denialists pre-1995ish?) and I don't think it's worth the effort to go to the library.
Michael Geiger responded to the well-supported notion (to make an understatement) of HIV as an exogenous retrovirus with the following:
But how could you possibly know that unless every human being on earth has had their own dna unraveled. Just because a few have been, does not mean that significant differences won't be found in variance in small percentages of the worlds population.
Mr. Geiger's statement makes sense only if he is an evolution denier in addition to being an HIV/AIDS "rethinker."
To understand why, we must first ask, "What is an endogenous retrovirus?" It is a retrovirus that has been integrated into the human genome as opposed to an individual's DNA or an individual cell's DNA, i.e., is inherited in Mendelian fashion just as are other genetic elements. This means that in every somatic cell, two copies of the element must be present (unless the element resides on the x chromosome; then males would have but one copy).
How does an exogenous retrovirus become endogenous? This is quite a fascinating problem. It seems to me that the virus would need to infect the germ-line (which gives rise to sperm or egg). An insertion event into the germ-line (let's say, into chromosome 2) would ensure that a proportion of offspring would have one copy of the provirus in their genomes. If, subsequently, a male and a female (BOTH descended from the individual in whom the first insertion occurred and BOTH containing the provirus--say, a brother and sister) were to mate, then some of their offspring (a quarter, we would expect) would have the provirus or present on each chromosome 2 in every cell of the body.
In the unlikely event that the ONLY surviving members of the species are descendents of the quarter of the offspring with both copies of the provirus, then the provirus is fixed in the population. Polymorphisms--minor changes in genetic sequence--could still arise, but every individual in this species would still have some version of the provirus on BOTH chromosome 2 copies in every cell.
Genetic analyses of endogenous retroviruses suggest that no new insertional events have occurred since "modern" humans arose in Africa 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. See:
J Mol Evol. 2004 Nov;59(5):642-56 (MacFarlane, C. and Simmonds, P.)
Mamedov, I. et al., Genomics. 2004 Sep;84(3):596-9
Considering that most retroelements in the genome are not "new" anyway (merely duplications) and that no replicatively functional endogenous retroviruses are known to exist, Michael Geiger's suggestion may be taken seriously only if:
A. We assume that the earth is 6,000 years old and
B. We acknowledge that a sovereign creator God inserted a retrovirus into humans in the last several decades.
I don't know about you, but I find the science fairly convincing:
HIV is not an endogenous retrovirus.
"Thereafter, Garth Nicolson devoted a lab in his department to mycoplasma research. As they began studying microorganisms, the espionage community began studying them, the Nicolsons say. Faxes and letters were intercepted, and "the phone company said they'd never seen so many taps on a phone," Nancy Nicolson recalls.
"It was a record," her husband adds.
Nancy Nicolson claims to have endured at least six attempts on her life. Assassins told her they saw her face and just couldn't pull the trigger. She says she was walking through the lobby at M.D. Anderson one day when a man in dark glasses stopped, opened a briefcase and showed her a gun with a silencer on it. He identified himself as an agent from the Department of Defense who had been sent to scare her. It was kind of absurd, she says. She laughed, and he ran away."
houston press 1995
jim,
youre a peice of garbage, youre just a washed up peice of trash.....like you have any friends or respect from the scientific community and dont have time to go to the libary. LOL
Now the amount of microbe was too much....LOL koch never mentioned that. I could get incoculated with some harmless virus in certain quantities and I doubt it would do much.
Lo never did this, stop lying about his research, since you have no life go to the libary and brush up on a far more intelligent scientist, thats why the military brought him here bc he was a scientific genius in China, you couldnt get a job at an respectable institution if your sorry life depended on it. Go away get a life.
"youre a peice of garbage, youre just a washed up peice of trash.....like you have any friends or respect from the scientific community and dont have time to go to the libary."
I have a few friends in the scientific community, although it is only a few as I am just starting my career as a scientist. As for respect, you're absolutely right, I don't have respect from the scientific community because I have yet to earn it through the production of high quality data, the introduction of novel ideas or publication of solid papers. All in do time though, cooler. You on the other hand, probably don't have any friends or respect in the scientific community either as your ideas are a sham and your "presentation" of ideas as science is laughable at best.
"Now the amount of microbe was too much....LOL koch never mentioned that. I could get incoculated with some harmless virus in certain quantities and I doubt it would do much."
That's not what I said, I asked for specific information from the paper and whether or not you've read it. Your inability to answer a single question I asked is telling. Why can't you answer a few simple questions without resorting to personal attacks?
I have read all of lo's papers and patents and he did not do this. youve now made a allegation against Lo's that is completely false. He inoculated with one 1ml at most intravenously of mycoplasma pentrans. Thats a pretty big allegation to be making, that Lo's manipulated his studies w/o evidence, you should be ashamed of yourself.
1ml is nothing, somebodies ejacualtion fluid contains far more fluid
from lo's patent in 1993
"Sixteen chimpanzees are divided into four groups. Group A is inoculated intravenously with 1 ml of M. penetrans as isolated in Example 1 Group B is inoculated with 1 ml of fluid containing 10.sup.6 M. penetrans-infected mammalian cells. Group C is inoculated with 1 ml of fluid containing 10.sup.6 inactivated or attenuated M. penetrans, and Group D is the control group and did not receive an inoculation of the infected mammalian cells.
All chimpanzees in Groups A and B developed symptoms of AIDS. However, none of the chimpanzees in Groups C and D developed the symptoms of AIDS. The chimpanzees of Group C are rendered immune to subsequent challenge of intravenous inoculation with 1 ml of M. penetrans or 1 ml containing 10.sup.6 M. penetrans-infected NIH/3T3 cells. "
Cooler,
The chimpanzee study is intriguing. Were these results ever published?
Less intriguing is your repetition of conspiracy allegations from the Nicolsons. These have all the credibility of your delirious 9-11 delusions. "Gulf War Syndrome," like "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome," is not well defined. Solid evidence for a significant increase in health problems among deployed versus non-deployed veterans remains elusive. Many health professionals feel that Gulf War Syndrome, like CFS, is a complex but mainly psychosocial phenomenon. Given that the best epidemiological studies have failed to define any clear problem, much less an etiology, why would any government bother to threaten the Nicolsons, whose studies, as we have seen, are so insignificant and inconclusive?
Cooler, my friends who have traveled the road back from drug addiction themselves often replace one addiction with another, then another, and yet another. Certainly, memorizing the works of third-rate scientists and lionizing them irrationally is healthier than ingesting chemical substances. Healthier, cooler, but still not healthy.
Ask questions, cooler, doubt and rethink; but keep your health in mind above all. Conspiracy is a dank pit of addictive despair. It's not a place you want to spend your life.
HAHA cooler if nothing else you're good for a laugh.
"I have read all of lo's papers and patents and he did not do this. youve now made a allegation against Lo's that is completely false... Thats a pretty big allegation to be making, that Lo's manipulated his studies w/o evidence, you should be ashamed of yourself."
I asked YOU specific questions to see if YOU knew the studies you were touting well enough to be believed. Nothing more.
"He inoculated with one 1ml at most intravenously of mycoplasma pentrans...1ml is nothing, somebodies ejacualtion fluid contains far more fluid"
I don't mean volume, cooler, what was the infectious dose? Again, you show yourself to be completely ignorant. I could inject you with 1 ml of the poliovirus stocks I use. Doesn't sound like much does it? Except that 1 ml would contain 1-2X10^12 infectious virions. You'd die, quickly.
I believe "10.sup.6 M" is the answer you would want to give (Although I have to admit I'm unfamiliar with the notation, is it =10^6 anyone?).
Adele, you said: "Good assays shouldn't have "noise" the standard just goes down to 50. So below that its not noise really you just say undetectable or negative.
Call it what you want, if you have more than zero, you have more than zero.
Braganza is right on target by calling it "noise", and you still did not answer his question as to where anything above zero, and below the subjectively set "cut-off point" is coming from.
Its all the standard you use if you have a good standard curve you can go down to 1 copy but thats very hard to be that good.
Than your cutoff is a thousand copies bc you don't have any thing below it in your standard. If you get a number like 700 for a patient then you can't say 700 bc you don't know for sure without a standard below 1000. You can gues but its not good enough. But if you have 100 and 50 too than your cuttoff is 50 now so 700 is good. or 70 or 51.
Your standard, unfortunately, is subjective to whomever is performing the experiment, and relies on an individual setting their own arbitrary cut-off point as "THE" standard of the moment.
Then, you are using your arbitrary cut-off point to say that just one over your subjective standard is a positive or detectable, and one under is negative/undetectable.
How it works is, you use a pure HIV reference nucleic aced and you know exactly how much you have and in different amounts. So you put them in your experiment and read them and you make a standard curve and you fit your unkown samples to it.
There is an awful lot riding on that very subjective moment of decision of the lab experimenter, who has hopefully had their morning coffee and is flawlessly focused on what they are doing, Adele. Things riding on it are such as whether or not someone will be panicked and scared to depression, hopelessness, divorce, abortion, suicide, or put on a lifetime of highly toxic drugs, etc.
And now we are also only hoping that your assumed "pure HIV reference" is actually an exogenous retrovirus that also is the cause of AIDS.
Would you share an Electronic microscope of your "pure HIV" to verify that all of the particles are exactly the same size and identical?
No, Adele? There's none available?
I didn't think so, cause if there was, it would show that what you think is HIV may not actually even be such a critter.
In 1983 Montagnier claimed to have purified HIV and thus to have shown the existence of the p24 HIV protein. This claim has been widely accepted by many people including Brian Foley of our Los Alamos HIV gene library. However, in an interview Montagnier gave to the French journalist Djamel Tahi, after repeated questioning, Montagnier gave the astonishing reply, namely, that in what they called "purified virus" they did not have even particles with "the morphology typical of retroviruses".
WTF????
Elkmountain said: "I don't know about you, but I find the science fairly convincing: HIV is not an endogenous retrovirus".
Elk, I too, am quite convinced HIV is not endogenous retrovirae. But I am also fairly convinced that what is being found, in these minute genetic bits and pieces that PCR amplifies, is also not parts of an exogenous retrovirus either.
After all, PCR is NOT amplifying the entire 9kb sequence of a retrovirus, it is only amplifying just a small sequence of proteins, just a small percentage of a tiny piece of biomarkers for what is believed to be a retrovirus.
So it may very well be that what is detected is not endogenous retrovirae or its biomarkers. How do we know it is not also simply some peoples cellular chemical responses to various stressors or perhaps that combined with or bits and pieces of other endogenous/exogenous cellular material or reactions to such that happen to have these sequences or perhaps have them only when combined and taken together.
After all, we are talking about a certain combination and sequence of but 4 proteins. For instance; CCCTTAAAGGCTTA. But you could chop this up into CCT+TAA+AGGCT+A and still have the VERY SAME sequence.
Just as their are many combinations available that would equal the same number. After all,
25+25+25+25 = 100,
but so does 75+20+5=100
and so does 37.5+37.5+10+15=100.
There are many ways to make a combined total of numbers or of 4 proteins, Elk.
Soooo.....How do we know we are not adding parts of various things together to equal what is being found? Say parts or reactions of certain strains of herpes plus parts or reactions of gonorhea or chlamdia or yeasts or a nearly unlimited number of other combinations of things that are also possible?
So surely Elk, you won't mind sharing the cites that prove science has an exogenous retrovirus in its gunsight, as you seem to hold so dear to your beliefs?
And inasmuch, do tell, Elk, my science loving factoid believing friend, Where are the experiments which prove HIV isolation and thus the existence of the HIV genome, sexual transmission and antibody specificity?
A scientific fact is an observation that has been confirmed over and over. However, observations are gathered by our senses, which can never be trusted entirely. Observations also can change with better
technologies or with better ways of looking at data. For example, it was held as a scientific fact for many years that human cells have 24 pairs of chromosomes, until improved techniques of microscopy revealed that they actually have 23. Ironically, facts in science often are
more susceptible to change than theories;
which is one reason why the word "fact" is not much used in science.....
EXCEPT BY THOSE WHO PROMOTE HIV AS THE CAUSE OF AIDS
yeah its real funny that chimps get symptoms of aids when inoculated with m penetrans, when the microbes you push like HPV, hep c hiv do zilch in virtually every animal.
Real funny that people with multi organ symptoms test positive for this microbe. thanks for contributing to the epidemic.
I dont beleive Lo ever published these results, this was already after he published on mfi inducing disease/death in mice/silver leaf monkeys, he begged for funding, but Fauci sabotaged it and caused an epidemic of chronic multi organic mycoplasma induced illnesses. Lo realized it was all a sham and kept to himself for a while. he did publish a few years later on mfi/m penetrans inducing disease/deformity/death in chicken embryos.
Are there any lurkers here at all, speak out now........its pretty sad the same 6 people keep posting
Hey Michael,
I bet I can find a spot in your DNA that says CAT, so maybe you're a cat?
If you can't discuss biology with the competence of a high school graduate you really should not use your ignorance of biology as the foundation for influencing the decisions of others regarding their own welfare.
Roy, you are real good at being an ad-homming 13 year old wise-ass, and real good at changing the subject, but are you any good at finding the proof for the subject that you profess to believe in:
Where are the experiments which prove HIV isolation and thus the existence of the HIV genome, sexual transmission and antibody specificity?
Hey Roy, maybe DDT would even be less toxic than d4t. The HIV docs often give d4t to kids who test poz as well:
http://www.atdn.org/simple/stav.html
Stavudine (trade name Zerit, also known as d4T)
effects:
The most common effect of Zerit is peripheral neuropathy. Peripheral neuropathy usually shows up as sharp burning pain sensations in the hands and/or legs. Early signs are a burning sensation or a numbness, like a deep pain that may come and go but always affects the same spot. Early symptoms of peripheral neuropathy are a tingling sensation in the fingertips, feet or legs.
Other effects of Zerit are pancreatitis, elevated liver function tests and bone marrow suppression (isn't the bone marrow where your blood born immune T cells are created?)
Symptoms of pancreatitis can be pains in the stomach area that go through to your back, and you should notify your doctor immediately if these symptoms occur. Your bloodwork should also be routinely checked for any signs of pancreatitis. Liver function should be closely monitored if you are taking Zerit. Bone marrow suppression is monitored through your blood work.
Zerit and lipodystrophy:
One of the effects linked to long term use of anti-HIV drugs has been given the name lipodystrophy. This effect shows up as loss of tissue from the face, giving the cheekbones a "sunken" look. There can also be a build up of fat around the waist causing a pot belly. Fat levels in the blood (cholesterol and triglycerides) may also increase. At first, this side effect was thought to be caused by the class of anti-HIV drugs called protease inhibitors. However, recent research suggests that some symptoms of lipodystrophy may be related to other anti-HIV drugs. Although it is not yet certain, some researchers have found that long term use of Zerit may be a risk factor for some of the symptoms of lipodystrophy, such as loss of tissue from the face.
A set of serious effects of nucleoside analog anti-HIV drugs is called lactic acidosis and severe hepatomegaly with steatosis (an enlarged fatty liver). Women, especially those who are oveweight, are particularly at risk. This set of effects is probably the result of mitochondrial toxicity. Mitochondria are cell's power organs that supply the energy needed for normal cell growth. Anti-HIV nucleoside analogs impair the function of mitochondria. This can lead to increased acid levels in the blood, and an enlarged fatty liver. The symptoms are severe nausea, shortness of breath and vomiting that does not get better.
Michael,
Chuck bought to our attention a well-documented example that not only proves that HIV is not part if the human genome, but also demonstrates sexual transmission of HIV--when he brought up the work of the Adult Film Industry Medical Health Care Foundation.
Chuck stated that tests of the performers in adult films in the LA area showed approximately 81,000 negative tests and only 11 positive tests.
These tests were performed by PCR. If the sequences of HIV were part of the human genome, inherited by all of us at birth, how come there are more than 7,000 negative tests for each positive test? Tests that are sensitive enough to detect 50 copies of RNA per ml of plasma? (Maybe Dr. Maniotis can tell you what concentration that represents in molarity.)
Chris directed us to a paper published about a cluster of cases of HIV infection that came to light from this work, and this paper documents new infections in four adult film actors--an index case (male) and three of his (professional) sexual contacts (all female). All of these individuals had previously been documented to be negative by PCR testing. DNA sequencing of viral genes from the index case and two of the infected women show that the nucleotide sequences of the viruses are identical.
These results confirm that the HIV sequences are exogenous to the human genome (11,000 negative tests), that the PCR tests have a very low false positive rate, and they document heterosexual transmission of HIV infection. Oh yeah, and all four infected individuals became seropositive for HIV antibodies.
So just this one study answers all of your questions. Maybe if you took your head out of the sand long enough to read this one paper your questions would be put to rest.
But that will not occur, because facts and logic are never sufficient to talk someone out of a delusion--especially when he clings to that delusion as the only protection that can magically save his lover from the consequences of HIV infection.
Michael,
What about the cloning/sequencing that many labs are doing independently around the world? You don't think that they are isolating and characterising HIV ? And therefore there is the proof that you required.
Why should you be fixed in Montagnier studies of 20 years ago ?
Some months ago I have been in Swaziland (a small country in Southern Africa) where I have been in touch with people at the University.
The heads of the chemistry and the biology departments were very interested in a mushroom that was used locally and - so they say- could alleviate AIDS symptoms in dying patients.
What they told me is that persons with full blow AIDS could take a tea of the mushroom/ wake up and be in enough good shape to go out of the hospital. Apparently these mushrooms have been used by a number of people locally.
I didn't make any major question because AIDS/HIV is not my field of work, .
I dont know how sustainable the mushroom based treatment is, but I thought that this required a better look, mainly because Swaziland is in the HIV/AIDS African belt, treatment may be cheap < I dont have exact values but this is what the persons in the University suggested>.
Side effects are unknown at this stage.
Back home, I had a quick check in the literature and found that some mushrooms have immune mediating/ and anti-HIV properties (for example Ganoderma species).
I dont know if somebody could be interested in this question, as I could provide the contacts required in Swaziland, and would help (as a free voluntary) to look for an eventual sponsorship for the study, from local charities to others organisations.
Thanks for answering me and thanks Franklin/Adele for yours explanations on PCR/ HIV as an infectious exo- retrovirus.
Braganza, thanks for reminding us of natural ways to treat diseases. For those struggling with immune issues, there is a wonderful product called Immune Assist 247, which contains six species of mushrooms, which supply beta-glucan. The attached link shows the history and uses for one of the ingredients. This product is organic and clinically proven to work. It was at the heart of my recovery strategy. http://www.alohamedicinals.com/Cordy_Article.pdf
Michael says,
fter all, PCR is NOT amplifying the entire 9kb sequence of a retrovirus, it is only amplifying just a small sequence of proteins,
Michael PCR does not amplify proteins. It does nucleic acids. The "small sequence" is large enough its not going to happen anywhere else by chance its like hundreds of base pairs long.
Michael you know becaues you've been reading these blogs for years, people do amplify the whole HIV at once. They don't always do it it's easier, cheaper to just look at a part of if your just doing diagnosis or viral load. But you can do it and its good to look at stuff like recombination and sequencing when you want to look at just one virus.
Where do you get this stuff?
fter all, we are talking about a certain combination and sequence of but 4 proteins. For instance; CCCTTAAAGGCTTA. But you could chop this up into CCT+TAA+AGGCT+A and still have the VERY SAME sequence.
"4 proteins" What? Did you ever look at that Wikipedia article about PCR? What your saying doesn't make sense. You don't just magically get tiny pieces DNA or RNA bumping together and making a new sequence and you can't sequence something unless its all one piece.
Its to bad you don't know any science it would be easy to explain but maybe you can get this. Here's something funny cooler said,
Lo never did this, stop lying about his research, since you have no life go to the libary and brush up on a far more intelligent scientist, thats why the military brought him here bc he was a scientific genius in China, you couldnt get a job at an respectable institution if your sorry life depended on it. Go away get a life.
OK so if cooler did wrote that and I find this exact like 60 words all together on another science blog later or on a video game blog but the authors named "TorqueBowKiller" there's just a few possabilities, Cooler wrote it there to or TorqueBowKiller copied of Cooler. Any way its the same run on sentence obviously.
What Michaels saying is all the words in it you can find seperately some where else other places so its not the same thing as here. And cooler didn't write it and cooler doesn't exist.
Well no that's crazy, any one sees its the same thing as cooler wrote and cooler's a unique person. very unique but whatever.
In HIV its more obvious then that quote even. DNA or RNA doesn't just break up and you have five base pairs hooking up with two base pairs and then another one and then ten more til you have like hundreds getting amplified in HIV PCR. And that same thing going on in EVERY SINGLE HIV positive person with the same sequence randomly happeneing every time. If you can believe that like Michael does you can believe anything. It's like ID and ETs and skinwalkers all together are more likely and alot more scientific!
AIDS and the Immune System
I've been searching for on-line resources the explain how the immune system works and how HIV-1 (etc.) attacks it. I've found nothing really satisfactory, but here are some useful sites so far:
Microbiology Bytes. A good overall discussion but somewhat text-heavy. Some nested pages:
CELLS alive! A much more pictorial site. Includes a top page on Immunology which in turn contains an HIV Infection Overview which some nested detail.
The Biology Project. Less picture, more detail, probably as of about 2003. Contains nested Immunology which contains HIV and AIDS Tutorial. There is a quiz on immunology and another on AIDS. Posters who want to debate the paradigm might consider taking these quizzes, if you don't pass you probably don't understand the paradigm well enough to debate it.
Immune System. Another good overview taken from an MS site.
Finally (so far) there's The Exception to the Rule: Immunoglobulin Genes. This is from DevBio, the on-line companion to Developmental Biology, 8th Edition by Scott F. Gilbert. I own and have read the 7th edition and can recommend it. The immunoglobulin link goes into some detail regarding the DNA manipulations performed by the immune system. The book has much more detail regarding the location and development of various immune cells and their precursors.
Noreen, did you read the document that you linked to?
The fungi contains nucleoside analogs. Sound familiar? AZT is a nucleoside analog.
Cordycepin is an analog of adenosine. It is related to Didanosine (ddl) which is also found in these fungi.
Attaching the meaningless label of "organic" does nothing to change the nature of these chemicals. If they are terrible toxins when given as HAART then they remain terrible toxins when present in a fungus.
Adele, thank you for letting us know that counts of HIV are found in all PCR tests including in HIV negatives, even though they are simply called "undectable" or "negative" if it is below the "standard" set by the person running the process.
Just wondering. Have you ever run samples of your own blood, to see what counts you were able to get at various times with various circumstances?
It would also be interesting if you did so again shortly after recovering from such as a flu to see what the counts are after the immune system has been stimulated with a lot of antibodies.
From what people tell me, their presumed "HIV viral load" is often much greater after dealing with such as a bout of influenza. I have often wondered what that is about, as it leads me to believe there is more going on with the PCR viral load than what is currently believed. I myself would guess that it has to do with cellular breakdown at such times, and the bits and pieces or reactions to such a process interfering with the counts.
You might want to run such an experiment just for your own understanding, though I would be interested in finding the results.
Unfortunately, I am HIV negative, and as such, have so far been unable to get any test lab to run a viral load test without having a confirmed HIV positive test.
Also, from what I hear, the counts can vary widely depending on the length of time that the sera to be tested has been held before testing. Don't know if it is when it is exposed to air or if it is when it is still sealed in an airtight vial, or if this makes a difference either.
It would be interesting to see the variance with this as a factor as well.
Some also claim that they have gotten very different results with the same sera sample being run at different labs or in the same lab at different times.
If there is any truth to any or all of these factors, it does not bode well for the PCR "viral load" process or results to be held as reliable to me at least.
Franklin, your "clusters" thing is interesting to me only in that it merely causes me to question what is actually being found in these individuals via the HIV antibody and/or PCR tests.
And were they even actually passing a retrovirus called HIV, such a "cluster" of findings still certainly does not prove nor even evidence that such a retrovirus is the cause of actual immune system suppression.
It is far too obvious, to me at least after having known hundreds of the "affected", that cofactors such as high degrees of emotional and/or physical distressors are necessary to such occurrences. It is also further obvious to me that in the cases of actual illness in those who I have witnessed, HIV could be taken fully and completely out of the equations and these individuals would have still been ill due to the stressors that they were subjecting themselves to.
Now, as an esteemed researcher and teacher of the HIV=AIDS theory, I am sure that this would be near impossible for such as you to even look at, let alone admit, though it would be most beneficial to the affected, as well as to all of mankind, as well as to all of science, if someone such as your own self were to publicly admit this.
Because in your own words: "But that will not occur, because facts and logic are never sufficient to talk someone out of a delusion"--especially when he clings to that delusion as the only protection that can magically save his career and ego from the consequences of full disclosure or even exposure of such facts.
Are you deliberately being obtuse or are you really incapable of understanding these simple concepts?
If soembody who is HIV- has a viral load measurement of "less than 50" copies/ml (or whatever the sensitivity limit of the test is) this does not imply that any HIV RNA was detected. Less than 50 includes 0
Michael said
Adele, thank you for letting us know that counts of HIV are found in all PCR tests including in HIV negatives
No Michael I didn't say that that's just what you wanted me to say and that's what you want to believe. You can believe it I'm not stopping you. Its a free country your living in. But you are wrong. I can't help you out here if you won't learn the assay and what it measures and how it measures it.
Just wondering. Have you ever run samples of your own blood, to see what counts you were able to get at various times with various circumstances?
We have negative donors we get samples from for controls and their usually the same people so sometimes they had a cold or a flu before they came in and they tell us that so we know. Still always negative.
What your thinking about is a HIV positive with flu. Sometimes flue or another sickness weakeness your defenses and so you get a higher viral load. Its not the test is picking up flu or something its picking up HIV and there's more HIV because your bodies not controling it as well when your sick with soemthing else.
Some also claim that they have gotten very different results with the same sera sample being run at different labs or in the same lab at different times
Yeah and like turn on the radio three stations give you three different temps for Portland. You don't say there's no Portland oregon or thermometers don't work do you? ITs not like you get viral load 15000 at one place and then viral load 0 some where else and viral load three billion third place all with same sample. ITs like 97000 and 96000 and 100,000 or something.
Michael,
The "clusters thing" is not mine. Chuck brought up the results of HIV testing of performers in the adult film industry in the greater Los Angeles area. He said that of 81,000 tests performed over a seven year period, only 11 positive tests were found.
Chris pointed out that Chuck had just provided a good example that proves that the HIV tests have an extremely low false positive rate.
Chris also pointed us to a paper that discussed 4 of the positive tests recorded in this program. This paper documents heterosexual transmission of HIV from a male performer in the adult film industry to three of his female sexual contacts.
This one paper disproves your argument that HIV test are nonspecific, disproves your argument that HIV sequences are inherited as part of the human genome, and establishes heterosexual transmission of HIV infection.
Your response to this paper:
Although your cowardice requires you to keep your head buried in the sand and ignore the findings of this paper, you have no substantive arguments to back your claims.
You have no explanation for the low rate of false positives in this population of adult film industry performers.
You have no explanation for the newly positive tests in these four performers.
You have no explanation for the heterosexual transmission of HIV infection.
There is no scientific basis for your HIV denilaist fantasies, but you are too much of a coward to face reality.
FALSE POSITIVE VIRAL LOADS
What Are We Measuring?
By Matt Irwin
2001
Abstract
Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and other RNA assays are being used with increasing frequency in a variety of fields of science and medicine, especially in the study of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). In spite of the widespread use of these tests, however, there are several inconsistencies that raise serious doubts about their accuracy. RNA assays are perhaps most heavily relied upon in the medical management of people diagnosed with AIDS and in people who test positive on the HIV antibody tests, where they are used to measure a person's "viral load". Because many important clinical decisions are made based on these tests, the highest standards of sensitivity and specificity should be required.
The most significant inconsistency in RNA assays for people diagnosed HIV-positive is the presence of false positive viral loads, which occur commonly in 3% to 10% of people who have no risk factors for HIV and who test negative on the HIV antibody tests (people considered HIV-negative). In the United States, where the prevalence of HIV infection is about 0.4%, this false positive rate means that random screening using the viral load test would produce 30 to 100 false positives for every 4 true positives.
Other inconsistencies include the finding that between 99.99% and 99.9999% of the HIV virions estimated by this method are not infectious, which raises questions about their ability to cause disease. This paper will review a number of studies that focus on false positive results on HIV RNA assays, and will also briefly review some of the other inconsistencies that raise questions about their accuracy. This review is not meant to be a comprehensive review, but rather to highlight the most serious problems and discuss their implications for management of HIV infection as well as their implications for furthur research. The most likely explanation for the findings to be reviewed in this paper is that much of the RNA measured by viral load assays does not come from HIV, but rather comes from other microbes and from normal human cells.
Introduction
Monitoring of a person's viral load is used in a variety of ways in people diagnosed HIV-positive. It has become one of the primary methods, along with measuring people's CD4+ T-lymphocyte counts, for making treatment decisions such as starting or changing antiretroviral medications, or for deciding how advanced a person's HIV-infection is. If someone has been diagnosed HIV-positive, it can be used to diagnose them with AIDS. It is rarely used to diagnose someone as being HIV-infected, however, because of the high rate of false positives.
Most people, including many clinicans, believe that the numbers generated by a viral load test represent the number of active viruses present in each milliter of a person's blood, but this is not what viral loads actually represent. The viral load test is used to measure the quantity of RNA fragments that are believed to be specific to HIV which are present in each milliliter of a person's blood. Even this is not completely accurate, however, because the quantitative measurement is done indirectly using mathematical equations, as opposed to any method of direct counting. What actually happens is that probes are used to identify short RNA sequences thought to come from HIV. Then whatever is found by the probes is amplified exponentially by a string of replication steps. Only after all of these amplifications are completed can the RNA fragments be detected and counted. Then a complex mathematical estimation is used to try to acertain how many RNA fragments were present in the original sample of blood, which finally generates the number which represents a person's "viral load". Each one of these steps introduces the potential for inaccurate results, from the assumption that only RNA from HIV will be identified and amplified, to the assumption that the mathematical formula will accurately reveal how many of such RNA copies were originally present.
False positives occur with all of the available RNA assays, including the newer generation of tests (Mendoza et al 1998). When they are done on the serum of people considered HIV-negative, 3% to 10% of them commonly have positive viral loads, and the highest reported rate of false positive results is a remarkable 60% (HIV surrogate marker coll. group 2000). Although most cases reported have false viral loads of 10,000 or less, there have been reports of false positive viral loads as high as 100,000 copies per milliliter. In the United States, where the prevalence of HIV is about 1 in 250 people (0.4%), a false positive rate of only 2% would still mean that random screening of the population would result in 5 false positives for every true positive, and a false positive rate of 10% would result in 25 false positives for every true positive. The most likely explanation for this high false positive rate is that HIV-RNA assays commonly react with non-HIV RNA, such as that produced by normal human cells and other microbes.
The human genome has about 3 billion base pairs, while that of HIV has only about 10,000. Because of this difference, human cells produce a great deal more RNA than HIV does. RNA from human cells could be released in large quantities during times of rapid cell death, which is what occurs during the infectious and inflammatory processes commonly present in people diagnosed HIV-positive. This could greatly increase the potential for false positive viral loads in the very population being studied. The high rate of false positive results from HIV RNA assays suggests that some of the 3 billion base pairs in the human genome could be producing RNA that is mistakenly attributed to HIV. This argument is strengthened by the fact that typical RNA assays look for only about 3% of HIV's genetic material, or about 300 base pairs.
Another fact that increases the risk of false positive viral loads is that these tests use RNA sequences that are based on the antibody proteins detected by the ELISA and Western Blot antibody tests. This means that if a person has a false positive or indeterminate result on either of the antibody tests they are also very likely to have a false positive result on the viral load test. False positive and indeterminate results on these tests are well described. For instance, 20 to 40% of healthy blood donors with no risk factors for HIV infection and who test negative on the ELISA test will test indeterminate on the Western Blot test (Proffitt et al. 1993).
Another inconsistency is that studies have found that the number of viral copies estimated by these tests represent between 99.99% and 99.9999% non-infectious viruses (Piatak et al 1993). Non-infectious viruses are not considered to be able to cause disease, since by definition they cannot infect cells. It is also possible that these "non-infectious viruses", which may make up 99.99% to 99.9999% of a person's viral load count, are not really viruses at all, but rather represent the detection of RNA from non-HIV sources.
This paper will first present some inconsistencies in viral load measurements, as well as some alternative explanations for these inconsistencies which suggest the possibility that they are not accurately measuring HIV activity. Then it will review a number of studies documenting the relatively common occurrence of false positive viral loads in people who are considered HIV-negative. Some discussion of antiretroviral (anti-HIV) medications will be included. These medications work by interfering with RNA and DNA synthesis, and they have these effects in nearly all human cells as well as in other microbes, not only in HIV (Schmitz et al. 1994, Dalakas et al. 1994, Bacellar et al 1994, Physician's Desk Reference/PDR 1999, Cassone 1999, Atzori 2000, PDR 1999). This means that anti-HIV medications could reduce viral loads dramatically even if the RNA is coming from normal human cells or other microbes that are present in the person being tested.
I. Viral loads represent 99.99% to 99.9999% non-infectious virus
Viruses can only cause damage if they are infectious, because they need to infect cells in order to cause cell death. Researchers attempting to see what proportion of the huge numbers of HIV reported by quantitative PCR represent active, infectious viruses, have found that as few as 1 in 10 million (0.0001%) are actually infectious. A virus that cannot infect another cell is essentially sterile, since it cannot harm any cells if it cannot infect them. Following are some comments from a study published in Science in 1993 where researchers found that the vast majority of viral particles estimated by viral load assays were non-infectious and non-culturable (Piatak et al. 1993).
"Circulating levels of plasma virus determined by (quantitative) PCR correlated with, but exceeded by an average of 60,000-fold, numbers of infectious HIV-1 that were determined by quantitative culture of identical portions of plasma... Total virions have been reported (in other studies) to exceed culturable infectious units by factors of 10,000 to 10,000,000, ratios similar to those we observed in plasma." (Piatak et al. 1993, page 1752)
This means that these researchers estimated that only about 1 in 60,000 virions found using quantitative PCR were actually infectious, and that other studies have found as few as 1 in 10 million. The researchers were not able to culture any virus at all in more than half (35 of 66) patients, and people with no infectious virus at all had viral loads as high as 815,000 copies per milliliter. The study subjects had all tested positive on the ELISA and Western Blot antibody tests which are the two tests currently used to diagnose people as being HIV-positive, they all had high viral loads, and yet the majority of them had no culturable infectious units of HIV. This difficulty in finding active HIV particles has been encountered by many other researchers who have tried to confirm the presence of HIV in people's blood (Chiodi 1988, Gallo 1984, Learmont 1992, Popovic 1984, Sarngadharan 1984, Schupbach 1984).
II. False positive viral loads
Studies examining false positive viral loads have found false positive rates varying widely from 0 to 60%, with the most common rates being about 3 to 10%. The numbers of viral copies per milliliter of blood found in people considered HIV-negative have ranged from 48 to over 100,000. These levels are much higher than the level used to make treatment changes in people diagnosed HIV-positive. Current recommendations are that if a person is on antiretroviral combination therapy and their viral load rises above undetectable, their medications should be changed. For instance, a recent article on the use of viral load in managing HIV-infection states:
"Failure to achieve the target level of 50 copies per milliliter after 16 to 24 weeks of treatment should prompt consideration of drug resistance, inadequate drug absorption, or poor compliance. ... For patients in whom a plasma viral load below detectable level has been achieved, a general guideline is to change antiretroviral drug therapy if the plasma HIV RNA concentration is found to be increasing. Ideally, any confirmed detectable plasma HIV RNA is an indication to change therapy. In some patients, it may be reasonable to wait until there is a documented increase in the plasma HIV RNA level to greater than 2000 to 5000 copies per milliliter." (Mylonakis et al. 2001, page 483).
This shows clearly that a level of only 50 copies per milliliter is considered significant, and yet it will be shown that false positive viral loads up to 100,000 copies per milliliter have been detected. Learning about what conditions predispose a person to have a false positive viral load would help a great deal in managing someone diagnosed HIV-positive, since it could help in determining how much of a person's viral load represents actual HIV activity. Although it is reasonable that false positive viral loads would appear any time there is a great deal of cell death because of the high quantities of RNA that are released when cells die in large numbers, no controlled studies were found that attempt to determine what factors influence the likelihood of false positive results.
IIa. False positive viral loads on three different viral load tests.
In 1998 Mendoza et al. published an article on false positive viral loads which is significant because they compare three different viral load assays (Mendoza et al. 1998). Several days after diagnosing a 5 month-old child with HIV-infection based on a positive viral load of 3044 copies per mL and starting him on antiretroviral medications, they discovered that he and his parents all tested negative on the antibody tests. After extensive follow-up testing of the child and his parents, they concluded that "a suspicious false-positive viral load result becomes the sole explanation for this controversy" (page 2076). This event prompted them to perform a simple experiment, which they describe as follows:
"Since viral load tests were approved for quantification of viraemia in already known HIV-positive individuals, we were interested to know their specificity. For this purpose, we selected 20 healthy volunteers, all of whom yielded negative results for HIV antibodies using different screening tests. Plasma from all of them were analyzed by three currently available HIV viral load tests." (Mendoza et al. 1998, page 2076)
The first assay, which used a branched DNA assay from Chiron laboratory, found that 2 of the 20 volunteers (10%) had a positive viral load, one with a viral load of 10,620 copies per mL and one with 2,020. The nucelic acid based amplification test, from Organon Teknika, also yielded 2 of 20 false positives, although with smaller values of 150 and 480 copies per mL. The final assay, RT-PCR Monitor from Roche, was run in two different ways, once looking for only a particular HIV subtype and once looking for any type of HIV. When looking only for the subtype, only 1 of 20 (5%) was positive, but when looking for any type of HIV, 4 of 20 (20%) were positive. Although this rate of false positives (20%) was higher than that found for the other tests, the values measured were lower, ranging from 48 to 253 copies per mL. The authors do not reveal whether the same people who tested positive on one assay were more likely to test positive on another, but they do state that repeat testing reproduced the same results in more than half of the specimens that were able to be retested.
This study is significant not only because it found false positives in three different RNA assays, but also because it used healthy volunteers with no risk factors for HIV infection, in whom the possibility of acute HIV infection is exceedingly small. Most of the other studies to be reviewed only looked at the accuracy of the RT-PCR Monitor RNA assay in measuring viral loads, and they often studied people with known risk factors or known exposures to HIV.
IIb. False positives of 100,000 copies per mL
In 1997 a study was published with a carefully documented false positive viral load of up to 100,000 copies per mL (Schwartz et al. 1997). The patient in question was a participant in an HIV vaccine clinical trial who was being carefully followed and whose blood had been tested for antibodies to HIV every few months for several years. A viral load test was first performed on his serum when the patient reported flu-like symptoms. Flu-like symptoms are thought to suggest the onset of acute infection with HIV, which is also called "acute retroviral syndrome". The viral load test was positive, and the authors decided to run viral load tests on all of the available samples of blood from that patient which had been stored over the course of the clinical trial. The antibody tests on these serum samples had all been negative, but they now found that four of the samples from several years prior had positive viral loads, with the largest viral load being "in the range of 10,000 to 100,000". This patient had repeated testing for the next year which continued to show negative results, so the likelihood that he actually was experiencing acute HIV infection is extremely low. While such a large false positive result is unusual, even one such result is significant enough to question the practice of choosing an arbitrary cutoff above which a viral load test is thought to accurately diagnose HIV infection. A cutoff that is commonly used is 10,000 copies per mL: for example, a very recent study that looked retrospectively at blood samples from people with risk factors for HIV infection and flu-like symptoms assumed that viral loads above 10,000 represented "true positives" while those below 10,000 did not (Daar et al. 2001). This was described by Daar et al. as follows:
"Follow-up was not available for these 127 patients (cohort 1); therefore, before testing any samples, we determined that an HIV RNA result above 10,000 copies/mL would be considered a true-positive result. ... Two of 127 patients in cohort 1 were negative for HIV antibody and negative for p24 antigen, but positive for HIV RNA with levels of greater than 100,000 copies/mL. For the purpose of this analysis, they were considered to be true positive for primary HIV infection." (Daar et al. 2001, page 26)
While it is possible that these patients would have eventually had positive HIV antibody tests, it appears inappropriate to assume that this is the case in the light of the studies above describing the high rate of false positive results. These two patients may represent more examples of false positive viral loads over 100,000, but it is impossible to be sure without furthur follow up data. This study by Daar et al. also looked at two other cohorts of people at risk for HIV infection. In the other two cohorts follow up antibody testing was available, and they found that 8 of 217 (3.7%) subjects had a false positive result, with viral loads ranging from 50 to 2000 copies/mL. Because the authors include cohort 1 in their data even though no follow-up data is available for this cohort, their conclusions and abstract report a lower false positive rate of 2.6%.
Although not the primary subject of this paper, the accuracy of p24 antigen testing was also called into question by Daar et al (2001). Some people in the study cohorts were found to be positive for HIV antibodies on initial screening, and were described as having "chronic HIV-infection". The large majority of these people (82%) were negative for p24 antigen, which is a protein thought to be a specific and integral part of the virus. People with viral loads at least as high as 631,000 copies/mL were still negative for p24 antigen, which again raises the question of how much virus was really present in these people.
Another recent study by Rosenberg et al. (1999) also found very high viral loads in people who were negative on the HIV antibody tests, with the highest being greater than 1.5 million copies per mL. This study was designed as an attempt to see if people diagnosed previously with acute mononucleosis were actually having symptoms of acute HIV-infection. They used a single stored blood sample, with no clinical outcome or follow-up to determine this. The authors found 4 of 563 (0.7%) subjects had positive viral loads with negative ELISA antibody tests. This rate of 0.7% is much smaller than the false positive rates mentioned above, which actually increases the probability that they were false positives, although no follow-up clinical data or testing was available. As with the authors just described, they assume that the people in their study are HIV-positive based solely on the viral load tests. While it is again possible that these people were newly infected with HIV, it is also possible that they represent yet another example of false positives, this time with viral loads of over 1.5 million.
IIc. A Meta-Analysis of RNA assay false positive results
In 1996 Owens et al. published a meta-analysis of 96 different studies that looked at the specificity and sensitivity of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) in diagnosing HIV infection (HIV surrogate marker coll. group 2000). They found that the specificity of PCR varied widely in these studies from a low of 40% to a high of 100%, which means that false positive rates varyed from 60% to 0%. They would have had even higher false positive rates if they had included "indeterminate" PCR results as being positive. In the studies of highest quality, according to the authors, the false positive rate ranged from 5% to 0%. The authors also found that studies using more recent PCR technology were no more accurate than older studies, and that publication bias may have prevented studies with worse results from being published. Here are their descriptions of these findings:
"Our subgroup analysis show that studies published only as abstracts provided lower estimates of the sensitivity and specificity of PCR. This may indicate publication bias - the preference for publishing favorable rather than unfavorable studies. ... We did not find evidence that performance of PCR improved over time." (HIV surrogate marker coll. group 2000, page 810)
They also discuss a common factor that can lead to claims of falsely high specificities. This comes about because the PCR test result is called positive or negative based on a threshhold value, and is not a "yes or no" result. If the threshhold is chosen so that even a very mild reactivity is interpreted as positive, then many people who are not actually positive will be mistakenly identified. If a high threshhold is required and only very strongly reactive samples are counted, then specificity will increase, but more people who are actually positive will be missed resulting in poor sensitivity. As described by the authors:
"Because both sensitivity and specificity are determined by the choice of the threshhold for an abnormal test result, there is an inherent tradeoff between them. The threshhold can be chosen so that PCR is 100% sensitive or so that it is 100% specific, but not normally both (unless the test is perfect...). Thus, a study that only evaluates the sensitivity of PCR or only evaluates the specificity of PCR provides insufficient information for evaluation of the test's performance." (HIV surrogate marker coll. group 2000, page 812)
IId. False positive viral loads - a case series
Rich et al. (1999) published a case series describing three patients with false positive viral loads. While the authors do not give information that would allow an estimation of the rate of false positives, their series is significant because it demonstrates that false positives on viral load may be likely to occur in conjunction with false positives on both the ELISA and Western Blot HIV antibody tests. Since the RNA assays look for RNA that is based in the amino-acid sequence of the same proteins used in the ELISA and Western Blot, this would not be surprising. The ELISA is used as a screening test and the Western Blot, which separates the same proteins that are used in the ELISA into 10 separate bands, is used as a confirmatory test. The Western Blot test is only done if the ELISA is positive. While the first two cases had negative antibody tests, but the third case had a positive ELISA and an indeterminate Western Blot test. This case was a 20 year old healthy woman whose test results were described as follows:
"During a four month period after her indeterminate result on the Western Blot test, she had positive results on ELISA and indeterminate results on Western Blot on separate occasions. Five months later, both the ELISA and Western Blot tests yielded negative results, but the patient had a plasma viral load of 1300 copies/mL." (Rich et al. 1999, page 38).
The possibility that false positive viral load tests are more likely when false positive ELISA or indeterminate Western Blot tests occur is reasonable, and furthur studies would not be difficult. Western Blot tests are indeterminate in 20 to 40% of healthy blood donors who are negative on the ELISA test (Proffitt et al 1993). While this extremely high false indeterminate rate raises questions about this most heavily relied upon test, it would make future research easy to perform because of the plentiful supply of people with indeterminate tests in whom viral loads can be measured.
IIe. False positive viral loads after needle sticks with HIV positive blood
Gerberding et al. (1994) conducted a study of HIV contaminated needle sticks, and in the process also uncovered data that call into question the value of viral load/PCR testing. They did PCR tests on 133 of the 327 healthy workers who had experienced needle sticks in their clinic. All of these 133 subjects remained HIV negative on the ELISA antibody test, but seven of them had "indeterminate" PCR results, and four others had one or more actual positive results, for a false positive rate of 3%. If the indeterminate results are counted as well, the false positive rate is 8%. Gerberding et al. comment on their findings with PCR as follows:
"The failure to demonstrate seroconversion... among those with positive PCR tests suggests that false positives occur even under stringent test conditions. The low predicitive value of a positive or indeterminate PCR test... contraindicates the routine use of gene amplification in this clinical setting." (Gerberding et al. 1994, page 1415)
IIf. False positive tests for HIV-DNA
Another assay which was once heavily promoted is an HIV-DNA assay, which is similar to an HIV-RNA assay and uses the same polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technology. A study looking at this assay was published in 1992 by Busch et al.. They did PCR-DNA tests on 151 ELISA-negative people and found that 18.5% (28 people) had positive PCRs. Furthurmore, they found that only 25.5% of people diagnosed HIV-positive had positive PCR's. In their conclusion section they draw attention to how close the two numbers, 18.5% and 25.5%, are:
"This study of PCR detection of HIV-DNA in serum identified a disturbingly high rate of nonspecific positivity with a widely employed gag primer pair system [gag is a protein considered to be specific to HIV]. In fact, the overall positivity was not significantly different for serum specimens from seropositive patients and seronegative control donors (25.5% vs 18.5%). ... In contrast to the high rate of false positive results observed with gag primers, env DNA [env is another protein thought to be specific to HIV] was not detected by laboratory B in any of the specimens from either seronegative or seropositive individuals. Absence of reactions with both primer pairs from all 59 specimens from seropositive persons meant that no serum sample could be confirmed positive for HIV-DNA, i.e. 0% sensitivity. This finding is in marked contrast to the high sensitivity reported previously by Laboratory B for both gag and env primers." (Busch et al. 1992, pages 874-875).
Although HIV-DNA testing is not used for viral load measurements, it is of interest to note the significant problems that developed with this test even though the laboratories that produced it claimed that it was highly accuracte, sensitive, and specific. The fact that they found 0% sensitivity for one of the key proteins thought to be specific to HIV again suggests that these assays are mostly reacting with non-HIV DNA and RNA, and mistakenly attributing it to HIV.
III. Alternative explanations for variations in viral loads and improved clinical outcomes
IIIa. The placebo effect
Although people whose viral loads are reduced successfully by antiretroviral drugs do have better clinical outcomes (Gilbert et al 2001), there are several other possible explanations for this besides the widely accepted one. The conventional explanation is that these reduced viral loads represent reduced HIV activity and reduced numbers of HIV particles, and this results in improved clinical health.
One factor that is ignored by this model is the placebo affect. Although many HIV drug trials are double blind placebo controlled trials, viral load scores are not blinded. Because viral loads are commonly thought to represent the number of viruses per milliliter of blood, it can be terrifying to hear that one's viral load is in the thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even in the millions. Receiving good news, such as being informed of a dramatically lowered viral load, can have a direct effect on a person's physiology, even if the RNA being measured is not coming from HIV. Hearing that one's viral load has been dramatically lowered can reduce the emotional and psychological problems such as anxiety and depression which can be severe in people diagnosed HIV-positive. Enhancing psychological and emotional well-being may promote various health behaviors such as exercise, good nutrition, improved medical care, and self-care.
There is also good reason to believe that the patients in the clinical trials in question can see through the double blind. It has been shown that most participants in drug studies can correctly guess whether they are getting active or placebo medications (Greenberg and Fisher 1997). There are several reasonable explanations for this finding. In the case of HIV, one is that the viral load is often reduced more by active medications. Another is that the groups receiving the active medications also have significantly more side effects.
IIIb. RNA reductions in normal human cells and other microbes
The number of viruses estimated by viral load tests is based on measurements of RNA fragments, so that any change in overall RNA levels in the blood could potentially alter a person's viral load, even if this RNA does not come from HIV. Many antiretroviral drugs have a short-term antimicrobial effect, which can result in a temporary improvement in health, and they do this by directly inhibiting RNA and DNA synthesis. These drugs also cause reduced RNA and DNA synthesis in a wide variety of human cells including red blood cells, white blood cells, nerve cells, bone building cells, and muscle cells, which result in some of their most common adverse effects as reported in clinical trials (Schmitz et al. 1994, Dalakas et al. 1994, Bacellar et al 1994, Physician's Desk Reference/PDR 1999). Microbes that have been found to be suppressed by these drugs include Pneumocystis carinii, Candida albicans, Enterobacter, Shigella, Salmonella, Klebsiella, Citrobacter, and E-coli, and many other microbes that have not yet been studied may also be affected (Cassone 1999, Atzori 2000, PDR 1999). The reduced RNA and DNA synthesis in the microbes will result in reduced infection, while in human cells it will result in reduced activity, reduced cell division, and reduced inflammatory response to infection. This reduced infection and inflammation, as well as the direct suppression of RNA production, is likely to result in dramatic reductions of RNA levels in the blood stream. If viral load assays commonly measure RNA from normal human cells and other microbes and mistakenly attribute it to HIV, as is suggested by the articles to be reviewed in this paper, then the reduced RNA and DNA synthesis that they cause could obviously result in a lowered viral load, even if there is no HIV present.
Unfortunately, the antimicrobial effect of these drugs is short lived as microbial resistance develops quickly (PDR 1999). This may be another explanation for people whose viral loads increase while taking anti-HIV drugs, since microbes and human cells could adapt and increase their RNA production in spite of the presence of anti-HIV medications. Other drugs that interfere with RNA synthesis, such as many cancer chemotherapeutic agents, would also cause viral loads to fall dramatically, even in a person who is HIV-negative.
Another possibility raised by these arguments is that the rebound in viral loads that is often seen soon after a person stops taking antiretroviral drugs may not represent renewed HIV activity as is commonly thought. When human or microbial RNA and DNA production is suppressed by artificial means, the cells will naturally try to compensate by increasing their production of RNA and DNA. When the inhibiting effect of the drug is removed, this accelerated production may become dominant and cause a rapid increase in viral load even if HIV is not present.
IIIc. Large reductions in viral load are no better than small reductions
Comparisons of studies showing positive effects from lowered viral loads show another inconsistency: dramatic reductions in viral load do not offer any better clinical benefit than small reductions. An analysis of all 16 randomized trials that compared outcomes based on drug-induced lowering of viral load found that drugs that cause marked lowering of viral loads do not show better clinical results than studies with only mild reductions and drugs that cause similar reductions in viral loads have widely varying clinical outcomes (HIV Surrogate Marker Collaborative Group 2000). If a surrogate marker such as viral load is a reliable indicator of drug efficacy, then more dramatic reductions in the viral load should result in better clinical outcomes, but this is not the case. Here are some quotes from the authors of a study looking at this question, published in AIDS Research and Human Retroviruses in 2000.
"If a prognostic marker is reliable as a surrogate endpoint, then comparisons of randomized treatments that show large differences in marker levels should also show large differences in the hazard of AIDS/death. ... (In our analysis), trials that show similar differences in marker effects may have quite varied differences in clinical outcome." (HIV Surrogate Marker Collaborative Group 2000, pages 1129-1130)
In their abstract they state simply:
"Short-term changes in these markers (HIV-1 RNA and CD4 count) are imperfect as surrogate end points for long-term clinical outcome because two randomized treatment comparisons may show similar differences between treatments in marker changes but not similar differences in progression to AIDS/death." (HIV Surrogate Marker Collaborative Group 2000, page 1123)
IIId. Alternative explanations for reduced AIDS death rates
Although antiretroviral combination medical regimens are credited with the dramatic reduction in AIDS death rates in the United States, there are some alternative explanations for the reduced rates that are often overlooked. The first problem is that the reduction began before the new drugs were introduced. In 1995, the AIDS death rates began to drop (CDC 1997), but the first protease inhibitor was not approved by the FDA until December of 1995. In 1996, only 20% of people diagnosed HIV-positive were taking the new medications, which is not enough of a proportion to account for the large drops that occurred (McNaughten et al. 2001).
An alternative explanation for the reduction in death rates that started in 1995 is that the number of new cases of AIDS began dropping in 1993 (CDC 1997). The drop in AIDS deaths starting two years later in 1995 would be a logical extension of the drop in new AIDS cases. In addition, in 1993 a new definition of AIDS was introduced that allowed people with no clinical illness to be diagnosed with AIDS - people with CD4 counts below 200. This group of people has represented about half of all AIDS diagnoses since that time. This means that people diagnosed since 1993 are not as sick as people diagnosed before 1993 and that more people would be able to be diagnosed with AIDS. In spite of this loosening of the diagnosis, the incidence of new AIDS cases began to fall which suggests that the number of AIDS cases would have been dropping even more steeply if this new definition had not been introduced.
Conclusions
While this paper does not explain the cause of false positive viral loads, it does demonstrate that there is a surprisingly high rate of false positives. This finding raises enough questions to advise caution regarding the current heavy reliance placed on them when making treatment decisions for people diagnosed HIV-positive.
False positive viral loads occur commonly in 3 to 10% of people who are HIV negative, with the highest reported rate being 60%. The highest false positive viral load reported was in the range of 10,000 to 100,000 copies per milliliter, and it is possible that some values over 1.5 million also indicated false positives although no follow up data is available for these cases. This fact must be contrasted with the current practice of changing antiretroviral regimens if a person's viral load does not fall below 50, as described in Mylonakis et al.'s (2001) description of current practice guidelines.
One hypothesis that could explain these findings is that HIV viral load assays commonly misidentify RNA from normal human cells and from other microbes as being from HIV. This hypothesis could be tested by measuring viral loads in acutely ill people with high RNA levels in their blood. Because anti-HIV medications reduce RNA synthesis in a wide variety of cells, the reductions in viral load that accompany the use of these medications may indicate a non-specific reduction in total RNA burden, as opposed to a specific reduction in HIV RNA. This argument is supported by the finding of Piatak et al (1993) and others that most people with high viral loads do not have culturable/infectious virus, and that even in people who do have culturable virus, between 99.99% and 99.9999% of the viruses are non-culturable and non-infectious. These "non-infectious" viruses may represent falsely elevated viral loads due to misidentification of RNA from human cells and other microbes.
Another implication of the findings is that the diagnosis of HIV-infection continues to rely heavily on the ELISA and Western Blot antibody tests. The accuracy of these antibody tests and the experimental methodology used to determine their sensitivity and specificity should thus be carefully examined, especially since some authors consider false positives to be a problem with these tests as well (Proffitt et al. 1993, Challakeree et al. 1997, de Harven 1998a&b, Giraldo 1998, MacKenzie 1992, Papadopulos-Eleopulos et al. 1993, Sayre et al. 1996). A strong correlation between positive viral loads and positive HIV antibody tests is expected because the viral load tests are designed to look for RNA sequences that come from the proteins used in the antibody tests. If a person tests positive for the antibodies, they are likely to have RNA with the same code sequences in their blood because this RNA is used by the cells to code for these proteins. This means that a false positive HIV-antibody test is very likely to increase the risk of a false positive viral load.
Furthur examination of what factors increase the risk of false positive or falsely elevated viral loads would be extremely valuable since many treatment decisions are currently based in viral load measurements. Until such research is undertaken, however, it is advisable to make treatment decisions based on a person's symptoms and on the presence of clinical illness, and not to rely heavily on viral load test results. If a person appears to be clinically worse even though their viral load has gone down, it may be advisable to reduce or stop the medications being administered. Much of the reduced viral load observed in this situation may be due to toxic effects on human cells. Likewise, if a person is clinically healthy even though their viral load is high and they are not on any anti-HIV medications, it may be advisable to withhold medication and instead encourage conservative health promoting measures that focus on nutritional, social, psychological, and spiritual health, rather than focusing on treatments whose primary goal is to reduce the person's "viral load".
Matt Irwin MD is a family practice resident who wrote several literature reviews on HIV and AIDS while attending medical school at George Washington University. He also holds a Master's degree in social work from the Catholic University of America. In addition to his interest in alternative views of HIV and AIDS, he specializes in health promotion with nutritional, psychological, social, and spiritual interventions, as well as classical homeopathy. He has a practice near Washington, D.C.
Sorry about posting that entire thing, I only meant to copy one line out of that.
Which line did you want Michael.
Matt Irwin is very confused its one thing when someone who's not a doctor messes up some complicated science that's fine. But a doctor? This guy needs remedial work.
This hypothesis could be tested by measuring viral loads in acutely ill people with high RNA levels in their blood.
Done. Check out the Aptima literature. They tested aptima on HIV negative people who were sick with different things. All were negative. Irwin hypothesis disproven. I wonder wheres Matt Irwin's correction?
We've already been through this one. Busch investigated the possible use of cell free HIV DNA PCR. HIV DNA is found in cells. Looking for HIV DNA in the cell free fraction did not turn out to be useful. The technique that is used (in the adult film industry for example) is cell associated HIV DNA PCR. As the evidence from the adult film industry inddicates this technique has an extremely high specificity (99.996%) and an extremely high sensitivity(~100%).
There are two possibilities: 1) Irwin does not understand the Busch paper 2) Irwin is deliberately misleading his readers.
Chris,
I fill that in your comment of October 4, 2007 9:55 PM you have missed the point of Noreen main argumentation.
As far as I understand she says that standard AIDS drugs are FINE, BUT should be used only for short time because of the side effect and life quality.
One of the problems that she refers are the side effect in the liver. Problems with liver as a side effect are known (see for example: www.nih.gov/about/researchresultsforthepublic/HIV-AIDS.pdf) which specifically states "the use of antiretroviral therapy is now associated with a series of serious side effects and long-term complications that may have a negative impact on mortality rates. More deaths occurring from liver failure, (...) are being observed in this patient population"; Wikipedia also indicated that "35% of patients in the USA infected with HIV are also infected with the hepatitis C virus", these would benefit from therapies that don't attack the liver.
What Noreen is adding is that she is using LDN as safest therapy (no side effects on liver). She didn't develop the procedure, it was the work of Dr Bernard Bihari. Work has been done on others autoimmune diseases by others groups that indicate that LDN may indeed help in dysfunctions of the immune system.
She also said, what looks revolutionary if true, is that she does not need to worry about liver enzymes, but also about viral load. The new treatment system that she advocates is a method to live in symbiosis with HIV, without major side-effects and a low cost treatment.
She never said that many drugs produced by pharmaceutical companies are not derived from compounds from Nature.
Well stated Braganza! I have accidentally stumbled upon another contributing fact to AIDS. Mercury has been proven to affect T-cells in a negative way. The WHO and many studies have proven that the number one cause of mercury toxicity in humans is due to mercury amalgams. Two dentists who have shown a connection are Dr. Eggleston, who measured T-cells on patients before and after removing the silver/mercury amalgams. In all cases, the T-cells went up substantially. He also performed a reverse test by reinstating silver/mercury back into the patients' mouth. In these cases, the percentage of T-cells decreased again. Finally, he removed them and replaced the fillings with non-mercury fillings and the T-cells went up again.
Dr. Hal Huggins, a dentist who has a Masters Degree in Immunology, has measured rises of 100-300% after the fillings were removed. Mercury fillings have been associated with numerous immune diseases and other health problems.
There probably is a lot to all of this. I noticed this year, after having one quadrant of my filling removed and replaced with composite material, my CD4's climbed for no apparent reason. I plan to have another quadrant done before my next CD4 count, although removing the fillings can stir up the mercury again.
Time will tell, when all of the amalgams are out of my mouth and after the necessary chelation treatments that are necessary to rid my body of its excess mercury. My mercury and lead levels are high. Those who are concerned with their toxic level exposure should seek out environmental doctors, who can test by hair, urine and/or stool samples as blood is not the most accurate test.
So I guess Michael doesn't even look at what he's posting, he just copies, pastes, and hits post, otherwise I'm not sure how you could confuse a 4000 word essay with one line.
brag, noreen has said such contradictory things in her tenure here it's difficult to follow what exactly her claims are. She also refuses to answer simple questions which would make it easier to pinpoint where she stands.
References dear girl references! Why do you even post anything without giving references, you know we want them! Did you validate any of this independently? We all know your awesome track record with verifying claims. Have you gotten your hair, urine, and stool samples tested? If so how high were the levels?
Apy, yes I have had my level tested, why do you think that I have to have the toxic metal chelated out as that is the only way to remove them from the body. If you check the internet there have been over 60,000 documented items against the health effects of mercury, too many to list. Do you want to argue that mercury, the second most toxic element on the planet, is not harmful to humans?
If you would not take what I say out of context, then you would get it. I repeat, in some, desperate cases where the body is being attacked by many viruses, etc. I believe that the antiretrovirals can be appropriate, especially if all else has failed. I DO NOT believe that one should stay on them for the rest of one's life as this will cause many side effects and some have life-threatening consequences. I do believe that LDN is a better way to go due to basically no side-effects, low cost, long-prove,safe track record,one cannot become immune to it and it is inexpensive.
I would also add to the above, I do not believe that HIV cause AIDS. However, I do believe that AIDS is caused by many factors such as the life-style/habits of the person, past medical history and treatments, vitamin/supplement levels in the body, drugs (street or legal) stress, environmental influences and toxic metals. Basically, many negative influences pile up and over time do great harm to one's immunity. I believe that there are many avenues to AIDS and the reasons for each person may not be entirely the same. Nevertheless, I also believe that if one works diligently at it, one can rebuild one health.
I don't want 60,000 health effects, I want the one you "stumbled upon" that shows a link between Mercury and CD4+ counts. Also note, when told that CD4+ counts are a relative judge of ones susceptibility to various infectious diseases you argue that ones health cannot be boiled down to a number but you seem to have no problem arguing that removing dental amalgams boosts ones CD4+ count making you healthier.
I'm not sure where I ever argued this. I never even stated that Mercury was not bad for you, I specifically asked for a reference to where you claim that it has an effect on CD4+ counts. Most of the dental amalgam arguments are over birth defects and neurological issues.
Please read what I actually write instead of whatever you fantasize it is saying.
Where do ARV's fit into this? How do they help a person if HIV does not cause AIDS?
I am arguing that it has been proven that mercury effects CD4 levels as far as pulling them up or down. Overall, I do not place great significance upon them as mine are low and I am still around. However, when all of my amalgams are removed from my mouth and the mercury levels in my body are greatly reduced, if I see significant increases in my CD4's then, there may be something to them.
Mercury has many known side effects:
Dr. Vimy in 1989 found that amalgams in sheep during pregnancy built up in the maternal and fetal blood, the amniotic fluid and the maternal urine and feces. Mercury accumulates in the kidneys, liver, brain, bone marrow, bile and other organs. Mercury transfers to the fetus and from the mammory glands. Dr. Williamson states mercury effects the development of endocrine, immune and reproductive systems. Mercury can effect the brain, coordination, impair vision and cause glandular dysfunction.
There is virtually no barrier in the body to methylmercury. It can go to every cell in the body.
Mercury damages blood vessels, can cause single strand breaks in DNA, increase allergies and much more. There is no safe level of mercury in the body. It is associated with CFS, fibromylagia and other diseases. I think if people have unresolved health issues, then they should consider being tested for toxic metals as there are many other metals, which also cause great harm in the body and many of them have also been implicated to various diseases.
As far as I know, the antiretroviral medcines are so strong that they eliminate all viruses, which I had many going on at the same time. If HIV is so detrimental by itself, then how have I managed to exist for 20 months with a viral load >100,000? In theory, with low CD4's too, I should have AIDS opportunistic diseases. For you believers of HIV, maybe you will concede that the LDN is keeping them at bay?
I know that is what you are arguing, which is why I asked for a reference, remember?
What does 'greatly reduced' mean? How much Mercury is even in your mouth? How much Mercury do the study you hint at suggest are required to caused CD4+ count to change? Is the amount in your mouth anywhere near this amount? Do you have any actual numbers? Is the Mercury in your mouth methylmercury? Are you saying that, if your CD4+ counts go up due to Mercury being removed from your mouth that there is something to the link between CD4+ count and health? Or that there is a link between Mercury and CD4+ counts but the link to healthy is still meaningless?
This is a complete lie. Do you have any evidence that shows this?
Except silver right? Because colloidal silver is beneficial to the body according to you. Even though, as far as I have been able to find, all colloidal silver tests have been carried out in a petri dish and all usage of it on a human has resulted in a grey color that lasts their entire life with no miracle healthyness.
They don't. Do you have any evidence to back up this claim in any way?
I don't know. I never claimed to know. I could be the LDN. I never attacked your health or your choice to use LDN or claimed LDN does not work. If you were capable of reading my posts, you'll remember I have stated the entire time that you LDN needs to be studied in a controlled experiment to determine its usefulness. Time will tell if your health holds out. If you do end up getting seriously sick with stereotypical AIDS diseases are you could to come up with some irrational explanation for this or will you say it is because HIV causes AIDS?
Apy, it is not a "lie" that there is no safe levels of mercury in the body. What levels do you consider to be safe? Have you had your levels tested? Yes, according to me and the EPA, there isn't any harm in colloidal silver. We are talking about toxic metals such as, aluminum, antimony, arsenic, beryllium, bismuth, cadmium, lead, mercury, nickel, platinum, thallium, thorium, tin, tungsten and uranium, these are the standard metals that are tested.
Are you not familiar with forms of silver, which is placed on newborn's eyes, or silver burn cream used in burn hospitals and NASA purifies the space staion's drinking water with silver. Silver was placed in milk in the western days to help preserve it. Throughout history, silver has safely been used, dating back thousands of years. So, I would not hesitate to injest it as it can kill over 650 pathogens and does not become resistant as modern antibiotic do.
"I would also add to the above, I do not believe that HIV cause AIDS. However, I do believe that AIDS is caused by many factors such as the life-style/habits of the person, past medical history and treatments, vitamin/supplement levels in the body, drugs (street or legal) stress, environmental influences and toxic metals. Basically, many negative influences pile up and over time do great harm to one's immunity."
Then why don't we see a large population of HIV negative people developing AIDS? Show me a large, controlled study that reports large numbers of HIV negative subjects developing AIDS. I'm not holding my breath as I'm sure you won't be able to find one because whether you want to believe it or not, HIV causes AIDS. Could there be other ways to cause AIDS? Possibly as AIDS is a syndrome and not a disease but these other cases would be a tiny minority (at least according to what I've read).
Test people who are known to have low immunity such as cancer patients, hemophiliacs, organ transplants person and other chronic diseases and I bet that many of them could qualify according to the CDC's definition for AIDS.
"As far as I know, the antiretroviral medcines are so strong that they eliminate all viruses, which I had many going on at the same time."
That is absolutely untrue Noreen. Do you even know how they work? They don't "kill" the virus or eliminate the infection. They prevent viral replication, thus giving the immune system a reprieve and a chance to recover. It is the recovery of the immune system that results in a reduction of other infections, not the ARVs. You (and I've noticed many other denialists) look for these simple, black and white direct causations and have no appreciation for the complexities of the immune system and disease.
Take for instance
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&T…
Thirty-three HAART-naive, HIV clade C-infected subjects presenting with KS were enrolled prospectively in Durban, South Africa, and were randomly assigned into two study arms, receiving either HAART alone or HAART in combination with chemotherapy. The clinical outcome was assessed after 11 months of treatment and showed overall significant reductions in HIV viral loads and increases in CD4 cell counts (P < 0.001, Table 1 and Fig. 1). KSHV viral loads remained high between baseline (median 758 copies/106 PBMC, n = 21) and 5 months (1199 copies/106 PBMC, n = 14) and then dropped to 56 copies/106 PBMC at 11 months (n = 17, Fig. 1)."
and
"Despite the small number of individuals included, subjects treated with combination therapy but not those with HAART alone showed a significantly reduced KSHV load over the 11-month follow-up"
and finally
"Of the individuals included in the present study, 78% showed undetectable HIV viremia and a significant increase in CD4 cell counts over the first 5 months of therapy with HAART with or without chemotherapy. The significant virological and immunological benefits were temporally associated with successful KS management in 82% of the enrolled subjects after one year, independently of chemotherapeutic treatment."
So this paper single handedly blows your arguments out of the water. ARVs aren't so potent they kill all viruses. HIV infection is the cause of CD4+ T cell depletion and HAART treatment suppresses HIV replication and allows for immune system recovery.
No study I see. Hhmmm telling.
"organ transplants person"
You're kidding, right? You do realize organ transplant recipients are immunosuppressed on purpose and wouldn't really be a good population to study.
Please show me the evidence that shows colloidal silver kills pathogens inside the body. All evidence I found was based on petri dish experiments which did not show that it has the same effects on the complex networks of the human body.
Yes, I'm also aware that this usage of silver is different from using it as a medicine. NASA uses it to keep its water pure, not for astronauts to take when they feel ill. On top of that, I'm also aware of the fact that several silver salts are known to be toxic and carcinogenic.
The human body always contains traces of mercury. There isn't any evidence that small amounts over a long period of time cause negative effects to a person.
I am still waiting for your reference that shows mercury, especially the small amounts found in dental amalgams, affect the CD4+ count of an individual. Could you please provide it? You also did not tell me how much mercury is in your mouth vs how much the paper you stumbled upon says has a noticeable effect on CD4+ counts.
Also, if you get sick with AIDS defining illnesses will you still argue that you are healthy or perhaps LDN has not been the wonder-drug you claim it to be? I'm not saying you will get sick, but asking what to expect if you were to.
One thing is for sure, if I got sick it would not be due to HIV but due to the known cause of the particular disease. How can you folks claim that HIV causes the AIDS defining diseases when the cause of these diseases along with the diseases themselves were on the planet prior to AIDS being called AIDS? Has every one forgot that AIDS was called GRID and why?
I don't know how we got on mercury but anyway. Mercury in amalgams, Noreens giving one side of all the research out there. I'm not trying to argue with her I think she knows more about this then me but there is more to think about so any way.
I mean obviously mercury can get to toxic levels and that's very bad but does it do it in tooth fillings?
Noreen says,
The WHO and many studies have proven that the number one cause of mercury toxicity in humans is due to mercury amalgams.
But Osborne JW Adv Dent Res 6:135-138, September, 1992 sasy
the World Health Organization (WHO) allows from 300 to 500 ug of mercury daily, five days per week, with no side-effects and
As has been pointed out by Berglund (1990), this WHO
standard for mercury is 100 times greater than the weekly dose from 12 amalgam restorations.
Noreen says
Two dentists who have shown a connection are Dr. Eggleston, who measured T-cells on patients before and after removing the silver/mercury amalgams. In all cases, the T-cells went up substantially.
Thats David W Eggleston "Effect of dental amalgam and nickel alloys on T-lymphocytes: preliminary report."
J Prosthet Dent. 1984 May;51(5):617-23 who's "all cases" is two patients with mercury amalgam a third one with nickel. "substantially" in the two mercury patients, one was substantial the other one was minor.
Noreen says
He also performed a reverse test by reinstating silver/mercury back into the patients' mouth. In these cases, the percentage of T-cells decreased again. Finally, he removed them and replaced the fillings with non-mercury fillings and the T-cells went up again.
"These cases" was one person Eggleston talked about in 1984. He didn't do it with the other mercury patient.
Egglestons stuff got tested by Mackert JR jr et al "Lymphocyte levels in subjects with and without amalgam restorations" J Am Dent Assoc. 1991 Mar;122(3):49-53 They did 37 patients not two and they say
The results of this study show no indication that amalgam restorations affect the human immune system nor do they support the "reduced immunocompetence" claim
Noreen talks about all the health problems with mercury no one says that's wrong I sure don't. But she talks about "Dr. Vimy" and sheep experiments with dental fillings. Well Malvin 1991 found out later those sheep were sick because they weren't eating because of other reasons not becuase of the mercury fillings! Problem, the mercury scare people doesn't tell you that, they still use the Vimy paper like its proof of something.
Just the other side of the story. And the one with more evidence!!
Oh did I mention.
Dr. Huggins the second one Noreen said about got his license taken away in 1986.
"During the revocation proceedings, the administrative law judge concluded:
Huggins had diagnosed "mercury toxicity" in all patients who consulted him in his office, even some without mercury fillings.
He had also recommended extraction of all teeth that had had root canal therapy.
Huggins's treatments were "a sham, illusory and without scientific basis.""
Quote from the National Councial Against Health Fraud
NCAHF Position Paper on Amalgam Fillings (2002).
Look this up, read about how people like Huggins use manipulated "tests" to convince people they got high levels of mercury and get them to pay lots of money for operations they don't need.
No scientific evidence + "Dentists" diagnosing stuff that's not a dentists business = malpractice. No license for you!
Adele, I am trying to make the point that other things beside HIV causes poor immunity. All that I can say to you non-believers is leave the mercury in your mouth and it will migrate througout your body causing havoic. I will leave the mercury subject with some quotes:
Until recently most infants have been receiving up to 15 doses of mercury-containing vaccines by the time they are 6 months old. It is almost inconceivable that these burdens of foreign immunologicl material, introduced into the immature system of children, could fail to bring about disruptions and adverse reactions in these systems.- Dr. Harold Buttran
Mercury toxicity is not rocket science. Our medical establishement simply does not want to admit that a major mistake has been made. - Boyd Haley PhD
There is also a problem of credibility; they spent years telling us that the mercury in the vaccine was safe and now they are removing it. - Dr. Peter Mansfield
200 micrograms of mercury would fit on the head of a pin. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) dropping that pinhead of mercury into 23 gallons of water would make it unsafe for human consumption.
The EPA also states that a person could injest seven teapsoonfuls of silver every day of his or her life till age seventy without any toxic effects.
So you are making a point by giving incorrect information? You said one thing, turns out its false, and your answer is "Gosh i was trying to show you that other things aren't healthy for you". Well thanks noreen, maybe next time you could do it with actual evidence. You are quite right I'm a non-believer. The 'evidence' that you couldn't even provide a link to is clearly BS, so why would I believe it? Do you find believing in things that are easily shown to be false enjoyable?
Noreen says
All that I can say to you non-believers is leave the mercury in your mouth and it will migrate througout your body causing havoic.
Umm Noreen I don't have 500 amalgam fillings do you? Cause that's how many you need to get minimum levels of mercury even ifyour the most sensitive person.
Mackert and Berglund Crit Rev Oral Biol Med. 1997;8(4):410-36. "Mercury exposure from dental amalgam fillings: absorbed dose and the potential for adverse health effects." says
Published relationships between the number of amalgam surfaces and urine levels are used to estimate the number of amalgam surfaces that would be required to produce the 30 micrograms/g creatinine urine mercury level stated by WHO to be associated with the most subtle, pre-clinical effects in the most sensitive individuals. From 450 to 530 amalgam surfaces would be required
Well Noreen you got the non-believers part right!!
How can anyone in their right mind believe that having mercury in their mouth or vaccinations if good for them. There are many studies which prove this if you do your research. Read the following:http://www.amalgam.org/#anchor71305
"Until recently most infants have been receiving up to 15 doses of mercury-containing vaccines by the time they are 6 months old. It is almost inconceivable that these burdens of foreign immunologicl material, introduced into the immature system of children, could fail to bring about disruptions and adverse reactions in these systems.- Dr. Harold Buttran
Mercury toxicity is not rocket science. Our medical establishement simply does not want to admit that a major mistake has been made. - Boyd Haley PhD
There is also a problem of credibility; they spent years telling us that the mercury in the vaccine was safe and now they are removing it. - Dr. Peter Mansfield"
Why are denialists so ready to point out quotes from Drs and Ph.D.s that support their argument but systematically dismiss the thousands of other Drs and Ph.D.s that say HIV causes AIDS and vaccines don't cause autism? Do you have an answer Noreen because I am genuinely interested in hearing it.
I don't recall saying it's positive for your health (good for you) but it appears that the dosages required to have negative effects are much higher than the amount you could possibily get via a filling.
I'm not sure what you want me to take from the link you provided. The first sentence clearly disagrees with you:
I don't see a study in the specific anchor you linked to either, just mention of a court case. Are court cases equivalent to studies in your mind?
noreen, do you have the one study/paper that shows the mount of mercury in fillings is enough to cause negative effects on a person?
Jim, I don't believe HIV causes AIDS for lot of reasons, whcih have been discussed here on numerous sections. I have to go also on what I see, which is my health of 20 months being off the meds and I am fine in regards to AIDS. I think that there is a link to autism and vacciantions. Too many children have been harmed or killed right after the shots and Congress has a program in effect to compensate the parents for this. If vaccinations are so safe, why then did Congress start this program, why has autisms increased to 1 in 66 children and why don't the Amish get autism? They don't get vaccinated either.
http://www.epa.gov/ttncaaa1/t3/reports/volume5.pdfu contains an over 300 page report to Congress from the EPA about mercury.
http://www.epa.gov/ttncaaa1/t3/reports/volume5.pdf
This should be the correct link!
How can anyone in their right mind believe that having mercury in their mouth or vaccinations if good for them.
Noreen no one does. I didn't say mercury in your mouth was good for you. Thing is, there's no good evidence its bad for you if you have a few fillings.
You say Vimy. Well the Vimy study was disproven.
You say Eggleston. Well Eggleston looked at one or two patients. Better larger studies with lots of patients didn't get his results.
You say Huggins. Well Huggins got his license taken away for making stuff up and selling people stuff they didn't need.
Every study you give us is like that. Something wrong with it or a quack behind it.
Sad thing is, you never read any of these studies not even the quackish ones you just paste this stuff from woo sites.
Or like what's this thing about a pinhead of mercury in 23 gallons of water?
According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) dropping that pinhead of mercury into 23 gallons of water would make it unsafe for human consumption.
Whats that supposed to mean. IT depends how much you drink! A average size person could drink a gallon a day and stay in the EPA limit or four gallons a day for FDA limit. But everything is toxic at some dose. If you drank all 23 gallons it will kill you right there even without mercury. Yes water will kill you drink enough gallons and it will.
So drink water! Get a few fillings when you need them.
Don't drink 23 gallons of water in a hour and don't get 530 mercury fillings.
adele, you are missing the point that such a small amount of water could contaminate 23 gallons and none of this water would be fit for drinking. No one is advocating drinking 23 gallons. There are many studies from around the world about the bad health effect of mercury if you will take the time to research them.
Meant to say, small amount of mercury could contaminate this much water and be unfit for human consuption!
why don't the Amish get autism? They don't get vaccinated either.
Noreen for gods sake why not just one accurate sentence? Amish people do get vaccinated.
Yoder and Dworkin Pediatr Infect Dis J. 2006 Dec;25(12):1182-3 "Vaccination usage among an old-order Amish community in Illinois"
Vaccination rates as high as 80 to 90% in Old-Order Amish.
How about this: Amish people don't get autism because they have big families. Because some times they grow corn. Because they have horses. Because they don't live in cities. Because they don't use cell phones. Because they wear alot of black. Because their fathers have beards. Because their mothers where caps. Because they go to church. Because they don't watch TV. Give me a break this is all speculation! Just like your no vaccination thing. Except all these things about Amish people are true yours is not.
Do you have a link to that information please? I didn't see it in the pdf you linked, but I only looked quickly.
adele, you are missing the point that such a small amount of water could contaminate 23 gallons and none of this water would be fit for drinking.
Do the math noreen you will find out you can drink about a gallon of that water a day and stay in EPA limit almost four gallons and stay in FDA limit. I'm not saying you should I'm just saying the example is wrong you can drink some of the water and stay in the limit.
even a silly and pointless example like this the woo people screw up on their websites and your copying them noreen!
Adele, certain sects of the Amish population do not vaccinate. The following link talks about this and a newpaper reporter wrote a story about this if I can find it.
http://www.mercola.com/2005/may/4/amish_autism.htminate. :
Sweet mama noreen do you research ANYTHING?
This link you are referring to is talking about Age Of Autism by Dan Olmsted, a journalist, not a scientist, and not peer reviewed.
His wikipedia page (wiki is probably controlled by big pharma too right? They don't even need to buy anyone off just change the pages as they want!)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Olmsted
So some believe that mercury is good to be in vaccines and amalgams. You probably also believe that flouride is a good thing too. If so, read the warning on the back of any standard toothpaste. And of course, you believe that HIV cause AIDS.
First of all you realize thiomersal metabolises to ethylmercury not methylmercury, ethylmercury not appearing to have the same level of toxicity as methylmercury, right?
Secondly, how much flouride do I have to injest to cause serious issue? I use a pretty darn small amount on my toothpaste, which I then spit out, not injest.
I'm sorry I use this thing called 'evidence' to make decisions, would you prefer I just decide things based on whatever I want to be true?
Noreen Martin On the Relationship Between HIV and AIDS:
Noreen Martin on the Relationship Between Amalgam Fillings and AIDS:
This, from someone who would likely be dead if not for the effectiveness of HAART.
When she went off HAART, her viral load went sky high and her CD4 counts progressively declined. She hasn't felt any symptoms, so she concluded that viral load and CD4 counts are unimportant.
Now she cites mercury's effects on T-cells as showing that mercury is a contributing factor to AIDS--and she credits having a filling changed with increasing her CD4 cell count!
Noreen, I realize you are in a very difficult situation. You have AIDS and chronic Hepatitis C Virus infection. You made a choice to stop the antiretroviral therapy. This choice was made based upon your instincts--but you feel a need to pretend that this choice is justified based upon scientific evidence.
There is no evidence that LDN is an effective alternative to antiretroviral therapy. None.
That you have felt no symptoms is not particularly unusual, nor does it predict a good prognosis for your illness. The high viral loads and declining CD4 cell counts that you report suggest that your prognosis is grim. You seem to understand this on some level, since you cling to the hope that changing your fillings will lead to an increase in your CD4 cell counts.
Noreen, please re-read your posts from today and consider how you are basing your most important health care decisions on silly arguments, arguments that would be laughable if the stakes were not so high.
If your amalgam fillings are so bad for your immune system, then how do you explain your "perfect health" of the last 20 months? I mean, how long have you had those fillings--since childhood? If those fillings are the cause of your immune deficiency, why did your immune system improve long before you started changing the fillings? If your fillings are causing the drop in your CD4 cells, why did your CD4 cell counts go up on HAART and then decrease when you stopped HAART?
Carter called our attention to studies of Cambodian AIDS patients. Before HAART was available in Cambodia, in one study the median CD4 level at presentation was 15 cells per microliter.
Your CD4 count has been progressively declining, and you have chosen to take no effective measures to halt their decline. There is no reason to think that they will not continue to drop and that your immune system will become progressively weaker.
Best of luck.
Franklin, I have other issues, which are not related to AIDS. I have Hep B from working with blood products many years ago in the dental field. At that time we did not wear protective equipment and were constantly in the patient's mouth, exposed to blood products and breathing in mercury vapors. Reread what I said, I have no AIDS defining diseases. I will continue to base my health care decisions on the fact that the LDN is working for me and on the fact that I haven't any AIDS sicknesses, have perfect blood and liver enzymes. After all, isn't that what should be desirable from the antiretrovirals?
Michael,
You copied-and-pasted a paper that claims a high false positive rate for PCR-based tests used to detect HIV.
Yet you fail to address the data that Chuck, an HIV Denialist, brought to our attention.
According to Chuck, performers in adult films in the LA area showed approximately 81,000 negative tests and only 11 positive tests. This data gives an upper level for the false positive rate of 11/81,000 = 0.014%.
Chris directed us to a paper about four of the positive results in this population, and all four of these turned about to be true positives representing new infections by HIV.
That lowers the upper limit of the false positive rate to: 7/81,000 = 0.009%.
You have no explanation for the low rate of false positives in this population of adult film industry performers.
You have no explanation for the newly positive tests in these four performers.
You have no explanation for the heterosexual transmission of HIV infection.
There is no scientific basis for your HIV denilaist fantasies, but you are too much of a coward to face reality.
You just keep burying your head deeper into the sand and regurgitating Denialist Pap.
Noreen,
Some time ago you gave an interview in which you said:
Yes, that is a true statement. They missed an AIDS diagnosis, sent me home for two months without the meds and obviously, I survived during this time. Whether I personally like what constitues AIDS or not does not change the situation. In fact, if they had just treated any of the conditions that I had, I may have recovered on my own as of right now my CD4's are very close to then yet I am not sick and dying. It's easy to tell the difference, I had the old-fashioned "symptoms," which used to be all that was necessary to treat diseases. Now, an HIV+ label has to be factored into the equation, whether necessary or not.
Noreen,
You don't know how long your CD4 levels were low before you felt ill in the first place, so the fact that you lack symptoms now despite CD4 levels similar to those at your presentation provides little basis for encouragement regarding your prognosis.
You improved because of the therapies given for the opportunistic infections and because HAART inhibited replication of HIV, allowing the function of your immune symptoms to improve.
After stopping HAART, your test results show that HIV replication increased and your CD4 levels have progressively declined. There is no reason to think that you are in any better shape now than you were in just before you first felt ill.
You made a choice to stop the anti-retrovirals. Just because the scientific data indicates that your choice is likely to lead to progression of your immune deficiency (and your CD4 counts indicate that such a progression is taking place), that does not mean that you made a "wrong" choice. You made a choice based upon your own values that avoiding potential drug toxicities was extremely important to you.
That choice has given you 20 months in which you have been free of side-effects from the medications and have had no symptomatic opportunistic infections. Even if you ultimately suffer from fatal complications of immune dysfunction, the freedom you have felt over the past months suggests that you may have made the right choice for your own values.
It is not uncommon for cancer patients to turn down therapies that can extencd their survival if they consider the toxicities to be unacceptable. In your case, your Hepatitis B and C virus infections increase the likelihood of liver dysfunction, and you did experience this complication. Avoiding this complication was very important to you, and you chose accordingly.
Even though the available data suugests that your choice was not the best for preserving your immune function, you still may have made the choice that best reflects your values.
Franklin,
You wrote, in your post of October 8, 2007 8:18 PM that
(...) There is no evidence that LDN is an effective alternative to antiretroviral therapy. None. (...).
However we can read some work done by Dr. Bihari, which show some previous experiments on LDN/HIV, with patients that where either antiretroviral naïve or on antiretroviral therapie at :
http://www.lowdosenaltrexone.org/ldn_and_hiv.htm
There is no proof that Dr. Bernard Bihari are fake, despite the fact that we can understand the need to obtain more data from bigger assays.
It has been proven that LDN can modulate cytokines, IL2, TNF, etc... These are not at normal values per measure that HIV infection develop, as reported in at least one general review, so it may be possible that at least this would be one of the mechanisms that would explain efficacy of LDN on HIV.
These cytokines have also been implicated in a number of others disease of the immune system, Crohn's disease for example, and recent studies published early this year by another groups have shown that LDN may be a candidate for a novel therapeutic treatment for this condition.
See for example :
Smith JP, et al Am J Gastroenterol. 2007 Apr;102 (4):820-8. Low-dose naltrexone therapy improves active Crohn's disease.
Would you agree in function of the existing evidence that LDN should be better look at either as a support for HAART or as a therapy in itself ?
Forget to say:
In the indicated 1996 Bihari study, for the 108 compliant patients using only LDN, and over 18 months, mortality was 1% and CD4 was stable.
In a subsequent study where LDN was given with dual antiretroviral therapy (Epivir and AZT) CD4 had a sustained increase, which was superior to the one reported in a Glaxo study where only Epivir/AZT was provided.
See http://www.lowdosenaltrexone.org/ldn_hiv_1996.htm.
I cannot comment on Noreen case, but I assume that she is seeking advice from a medical doctor, as she is not doing lead analysis in her kitchen at home.
That right, I do actively seek medical advise and my testing and chelation therapy is being performed and monitored under Medical Doctors. Although, there are do-it-yourself products on the internet, I would not advise anyone to go that route. It is important, first to know what exactly one is dealing with and the proper means to rid the body of each element as the removal procedure may differ. Secondly, during/after chelation therapy, testing is required to determine the baseline and effectiveness of the procedure. I would add in regards to mercury, one cannot be expected to rid the body of the total effects of mercury as long as one has amalgams in one's mouth.
http://www.lowdosenaltrexone.org/ldn_hiv_1996.htm
Maybe this link will go through about LDN.
Dr. Bahari's original studies were with a 3mg dosage. He later determined that 4.5mg worked better and this is the dosage that is generally prescribed.
Braganza and Noreen,
I hope LDN works but Franklin's right there's not much evidence yet. Why didn't Bihari publish? I know there's trials going on now. I hope we get more information soon.
Adele, that's a good question. I know that he has some health issues, however, Dr. Gluck, who maintains the site may be able to shed some light on this. Yes, we are all looking forward to Dr. McCandless reports from Africa. Although, those of us who take it for various reason, know that it works!
Noreen is McCandless from the pennsylvania group or is that a separate LDN study?
Remember, the sign above the doctor's door says 'practise' for a reason! As T. Huxley (known as Darwin's Bulldog)once said:
"All truth starts off as heresy, and ends as suspicion."
Talking of Darwin (whose ideas were hardly original, just look at the apotheosis/'becoming' of George Washington), wasn't it he who said that Africa would have to be depopulated of its natives, since they were technically 'a sub species', and just weren't up to the rigorous standards set by other more evolved races.
Ladies and gentlemen, we bring you: "AIDS".
Seems to be doing its job.
Why are there no more 'cures', only 'treatments'? $$$
Diagnosed with ADHD? - ritalin - side effect - obesity - take next drug - side effect - endless chain of profit for pain.
I say: a moratorium on science and an end to the dictatorship of the expert - buy good food, live a good natural life, be humble and compassionate before god and your fellow man - good common sense ideas that you don't need to get a degree in to prove.
btw, if your an atheist, you live a paradox, how can you know God doesn't exist, what are you, a God? Nietzcheans need not answer that question!
nice blog - I sit on the fence, but in a world of elite population control doctrine, don't expect a cure anytime soon.
Adele, she is currently performing a study in Africa and I do not know if she is affliated with the Penn. group. I don't believe that she is since she has mortgaged her home to complete the project that is why it is important that those interested supports her work. Tax-free doantions may be made to The OJAI Foundation, 9739 Ojai - Santa Paula Road Ojai, California 93023.
Thanks for the info Noreen. I'm glad LDN is working for you. Really I don't care what your taking or who makes money or not so long it works for you. Its just best when theres good science behind it too and that should happen soon w/LDN if there's something to it.
I know some people who work on a "off labell" drug too for another condition. If it works people can take it for almost free its so cheap and its got less side effects then other drugs used for that disease right now. Soon we'll know.
I mean of course everyone wants to make money but if you know scientists you know they're more interested in helping people and doing good work and the ones that aren't should be a shamed of themself.
I say: a moratorium on science and an end to the dictatorship of the expert - buy good food, live a good natural life, be humble and compassionate before god and your fellow man - good common sense ideas that you don't need to get a degree in to prove.
Wow what a great idea. Lets go back before modern science and medicine where your teeth fall out when your 16 and you die before your thirty and most babies die before they're one and no one lives long enough to get cancer and heart disease. Great idea. Now that's some real population control.
What do you think, if your a scientist or go to an expert about your health you can't eat good food or be humble and compassionate? Sheesh.
Hello Adele. As you are very knowledgeable about PCR and its supposedly absolute abilities to find HIV, perhaps you would explain One problem why it is that "HIV" has no unique and isolatable identity or proven molecular signature as an exogenous retrovirus (a virus that comes from outside of a cell or organism) that is the cause of AIDS. And explain why "HIV" gene sequences are detected in non-infected humans, chimps, and monkeys:
"HIV-like sequences exist in normal human, chimpanzee, and rhesus monkey DNAs...Herein we describe the first report of the presence of nucleotide sequences related to HIV-1 in human, chimpanzee, and rhesus monkey DNAs from normal uninfected individuals."
Horwitz MS, Boyce-Jacino MT, Faras AJ. Novel human endogenous sequences related to human immunodeficiency virus type 1. J Virol. Apr;66
(4):2170-9, 1992.
Franklin, get your own head out of the sand, you babbling fool, and tell us all about the "clusters" of:
"HIV-like sequences that exist in normal human, chimpanzee, and rhesus monkey DNAs...Herein we describe the first report of the presence of nucleotide sequences related to HIV-1 in human, chimpanzee, and rhesus monkey DNAs from normal uninfected individuals."......that have been found in 11 out of 81,000 individuals, who also happen to be.... DARE I SAY IT?
Porno Industry Sex Workers!!!
Horwitz MS, Boyce-Jacino MT, Faras AJ. Novel human endogenous sequences related to human immunodeficiency virus type 1. J Virol. Apr;66
(4):2170-9, 1992.
Say your Hail Mary's Frankie, cause the jig is up!
Have you already forgotten the motto of the last AIDS FESTIVAL CONFERENCE in Toronto that you and I (ahhhhemmmm) attended?
TIME TO DELIVER!!!
Undoubtedly the movie "Snakes On A Plane" was the movie that was playing on your flight from Toronto to New York!
Unlike Michael I have actually read the study.
The authors used a low stringency nucleic acid hybridisation method so that DNA sequences with partial similarity were amplified. If the normal high stringency methods are used nothing is found.
Even then the similarity was only seen in a small sequence of 21 bps with low complexity consisting mostly of ga repeats (ie gagagagagaga).
The primers that are actually used in HIV DNA PCR techniques do not find any related sequences in uninfected people.
Braganza,
Dr. Bihari's web site provides no evidence that LDN is an effective treatment for AIDS.
According to the web site,. Bihari's first study of LDN was originally presented at a scientific conference in June 1998--more than 19 years ago. As far as I can tell, it has never been published in a peer-reviewed jornal.
This study suffers from several methodological flaws that likely account for the lack of publication of these results in a peer-reviewed journal.
In this study, 56 patients were randomized for a 12 week trial of LDN or placebo. 13 patients dropped out within the first two weeks and insufficient data was available for 5 additional patients. This means that 14% of the patients are unavailable for analysis.
Of the 18 patients who dropped out of the study, 44% had a previous opportunistic infection, whereas only 24% of the 38 patients who remained in the study had a previous opportunistic infection. Therefore, at baseline the patients who dropped out of the study were already more severely affected than those who remained in the study. This leads to a very serious selection bias in this study population.
At the end of the twelve week trial period, the patients receiving LDN showed a decrease in serum alpha-interferon level compared to those receiving placebo. No difference was seen in the CBC (with differential) or levels of T-cell subsets (CD4/CD8 T-Cell Levels).
After the initial 12 week trial, all of the patients were placed on open-label LDN and followed for up to 14 additional months with no control group. During the open-label phase of the trial, 17 patients died despite the LDN (45% mortality).
During the open-label phase of the trial, 61% of the patients showed a significant decline in alpha-interferon, whereas 39% of the patients did not show a significant decline in alpha-interferon. The lack of decline in alpha-interferon was associated with greater mortality (86% mortality versus 17% mortality). It is important to remember that all of these patients received LDN, so the decline in interferon during the open-label phase of the study cannot be ascribed to LDN. In the absence of a control group, we cannot tell if LDN caused the decline in interferon.
Of interest, the patients who did not show a decline in alpha-interferon differed in their baseline characteristics from those who did show a decline. At baseline, the ones with no decline in alpha-interferon had a lower mean CD4 cell count (114), a lower hematocrit (37.8), and a higher alpha-interferon level (226 i.u.) than the group that did show a decline in alpha-interferon (baseline CD4 of 224, baseline hematocrit of 43.1, baseline interferon 145 i.u.). Therefore it seems that the main differences that explain the decline of alpha-interferon and mortality have to do with how sick the patients were at the start of the study. There is no evidence from this study population that LDN provided any benefit.
In the second study you mentioned from the web page, patients who were judged as regularly taking the LDN (compliant) were compared to patients who were judged as not having taken the drug regularly (noncompliant). Obviously, the patients were not randomized into these groups. No attention was paid to confounding factors that might have led some patients to stop taking the drug while others continued to take the drug. For example, patients who became more ill and therefore decided that the drug was of no benefit may have been more likely to stop taking the drug (noncompliant) than patients who did not become more ill. This type of selection bias renders these data of no use in trying to decide if LDN is of benefit to AIDS patients.
The web page goes on to describe patients receiving LDN in whom Dr Bihari had "added the combination of 3TC (Epivir) and AZT." Dr. Bihari describes the "baseline" CD4 levels in these patients as the levels at the time that the antiretroviral drugs were added--he does not provide the CD4 levels at the time that LDN was started, nor does he mention how long the patients had received LDN before the antoretrovirals were added to their regimen. When the antiretrovirals were added, the mean CD4 level was 88, while 6 months after adding 3TC and AZT the mean CD4 level had incresed to 194. These data suggest that in patients on LDN who have low CD4 counts, adding antiretroviral drugs may increase the CD4 counts.
Bihari compares this group of patients to those studied by Eron et al. (1995) NEJM 333:1662-1669, to try to argue that since his patients had a more pronounced increase in their CD4 levels than the published group, LDN must be providing an additional boost to the CD4 cells. . However, the published study was limited to patients with a baseline CD4 level from 200-500 per microliter and is not comparable to Bihari's patient group, in which the mean CD4 cell count was only 88 at baseline.
Bihari provides no controlled data that establishes that LDN treatment provides any benefit for AIDS patients. All of the data he has posted on his web page suffers from crucial methodological errors. I doubt that his conclusions would ever be accepted in a peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps that is why he has chosen to post his data rather than publish.
Franklin, why don't you read about LDN on Yahoo from patients who take this wonder drug. There are support groups for fibromyalgia, MS, AIDS, etc. Time will provide the truth to the benefits of this drug. For those of us with serious health problems, we do not have the luxury to wait for studies, we need help now. I am quite happy to take this drug off-label because it has helped to maintain my health and it has done so for so many others too.
But remember everyone, noreen is disgusted that there is a loop-hole that permits unapproved drugs, and approved drugs to be used in unapproved way that the FDA has not patched yet.
Noreen,
Testimonials may be a good way to pick a movie or a George Foreman Grill, but they are not very helpful to answer the question: "Is LDN an effective therapy for AIDS."
Dr. Bihari has been prescribing LDN for AIDS for 20 years.
Maybe you should stop to think about why, after all this time, he hasn't bothered to perform a well-designed randomized trial to test to see if this therapy works?
Maybe you should stop and think how does it work for me and others? Dr. McCandless is currently doing a study to prove this issue. If you don't believe it works, then explain how AIDS persons are living without antiretrovirals? Doesn't this show a flaw in this HIV hypothesis? Apparently, it must not be so deadly if we can survive nicely without the standard meds.
Noreen,
My understanding is that you consider yourself to be in "perfect health."
So why do you need to take LDN?
noreen,
Would you mind taking a moment to explain to me your thoughts on the scientific method? Do you believe the scientific method is a valid means of discovering the answer to questions or do you believe it is lacking in some way? If you believe the scientific method is sufficient then can you tell me what part of the scientific method the work on HIV causing AIDS has failed? Also, if you would be kind enough ot give specific examples of where the failures have been I would appreciate it. It is easy to say so-and-so is a shill for big pharma, but If you plan to make such a statement please provide some actual tangible evidence of it (such as financial records), otherwise I could easily claim you are a shill for Bihari, promoting his work for financial gain over the AIDS community. That is a baseless claim and I am sure you would not appreciate it, thus I would hope you would only make verifiable claims as well.
How do you determine of LDN has an actually effect on your health? From what I gather you are taking a lot of supplements and have radically changed your diet so, in what way, did you determine that LDN is the tipping point in deciding your health? Did you perform an experiment? If one has a claim for how to treat AIDS, what information would you require in order to be sure that the treatment is valid? On top of that, does your experience with LDN fulfills this criteria? I notice you fall back on the fact that over the last 20 months you have had good health and you attribue this to LDN. Do you consider your claims to be enough evidence of LDNs effectivness as a treatment for AIDS? If a patient made a similar statement about ARVs would you consider their anecdote as persuasive evidence as your own about LDN or would you still argue against ARVs? Why?
Thanks noreen, I hope you completely respond to this post.
Dear Franklin,
I just have read your post October 10, 2007 12:35 AM, and it appears that you have missed some major points of Dr. Bihari approach.
I would like to remember that in this blog, the HIV+ user of LDN, Noreen, explained that OI's need to be treated separately from LDN treatment, and that LDN treatment should be performed at 4.5 mg per day.
You dont realise that the documents that you discussed in your post should be seen as the documentation referent to the development of a method to treat HIV+ patients.
The first report that you mention, which is the more compreensive one, described the effects of using 1.75 mg LDN per day. Showing quite interestingly that alpha induced IFN is a critical parameter in the evolution of AIDS, it shows that HIV+ people with IFN of 145 i.u. could be reduced to substancially lower values (11 i.u) and this patients survived. In HIV+ patients with higher IFN (231 i.u.) it was not possible to reduce the alpha induced IFN. A number of factors could explain this one of them being the concentration of the drug (naltrexone). The effect of naltrexone on IFN-alpha was previously reported and has since then be confirmed by researchers around the world (see for example Valentine, A., Cancer-Invest. 1995, 13, (6) 561-566), Jian, CL., et al, Neurochem Int. 2000, 36(3):193-6, there are many more papers available)
As you pointed this very interesting study was published almost 19 years ago. At this time, as suggested in Montagnier book, there was an hope that efficient treatment which could led to the eradication of HIV would be quickly developed, so we can understand that Bihari research, which did not reduce viral load was not considered important.
As such it would have been very dificult for him to obtain any sponsorship to perform any additional major placebo controled trials. He however has still being working on the method as LDN dosage that he propose today is different. At the end he was a simple medical doctor.
His next published studies were much simpler, but I expect that they have in fact led to Noreen new approach to AIDS (i.e. daily use of LDN to control alpha induced IFN, separate treatment of any OI's, reduction of potential contact with chemicals that would reduce her CD4 etc...).
On the basis of Bihari study there is a strong suggestion that patient lowering alpha induced IFN would stop the progression of the disease.
There is nothing in the literature that disprove him.
I can see a lot of potential research from an academic point of view and from industrial point of view (developement of new opiate antagonist/ new HAART formulations/ new treatment systems/ etc...).
I therefore believe, with all respect that I have for you knowlegde in the matter, that you were wrong saying to Noreen that there is no evidence that LDN would help her, because you did not realise that the research that you cited was part of a process designed to provide what looks to me new knowledge on AIDS pathogenesis and new treatment possibilities.
With all your threshold for evidence, I wonder if you agree that the free-HAART anti-AIDS treatment proposed by Stephen Martin from the Kurosawa Grouppe, a colaborator of AIDS truth web site is proven. The evidence looks to be more tenuous than Bihari evidence.
Braganza,
I have not argued that there is no basis for saying that naltrexone has immunomodulatory activity. I just stated that there is no evidence that LDN is an effective therapy for AIDS patients. These two statements are very different.
In the work of Bihari to which you referred, all of the patients received LDN and 45% of the patients died. Not a great track record.
This is the work in which Bihari looked at alpha-interferon levels. 61% of the patients showed a drop in alpha-interferon, and 39% of the patients showed no significant change in alpha-interferon. All of these patients received LDN--the ones with no change in alpha-interferon as well as the ones with a decrease in alpha-interferon.
There is no reason to assume that the drop in alpha-interferon in a subset of the patients is related to LDN, just as there is no reason to assume that the continued high levels of alpha-interferon in the rest of patients is due to LDN.
The other studies that you referred to about alpha-interefron and naltrexone are not relevant. One shows that naltrexone can counteract the side effects of alpha-interferon treatments for hematological malignancies. This result in no way suggests that naltrexone will lower secretion of alpha- interferon in AIDS patients (Bihari's model), it only suggests that in the presence of pharmacologic doses of alpha-interferon, naltrexone reduces some of the side effects.
The other study suggests that alpha-interferon can act as an agonist of certain opioid receptors. This result is irrelevant to the question of whether LDN is an effective therapy in AIDS patients.
Bihari has provided no evidence that LDN is an effective therapy for AIDS.
You are all welcome to hate me if this re-opens an old can of worms, but I couldn't help but remember the "Loneliness causes AIDS" fantasy as I read the following article today:
Gibb J, et al., "Synergistic and additive actions of a psychosocial stressor and endotoxin challenge: Circulating and brain cytokines, plasma corticosterone and behavioral changes in mice." Brain Behav Immun, 9 Jan 2008, epub
These researchers find that social stress can combine with the effects of foreign organisms to make changes in the brain and the rest of the body. What social stress, exactly? Not loneliness. Isolation followed by re-introduction to the group.
Perhaps Mr. Gieger will now revise his theory to: "The alleviation of loneliness causes AIDS."