AIDS: conspiracy or reality?

Mr. Tea said:

I'm sure I read somewhere a year or two ago that there is some (early, provisional) evidence that HIV is 'weakening' globally - perhaps because more virulent stains kill their carriers more quickly, so they have less time to infect other people.

Nomad, padraig or mistersloane - you guys heard of this too?

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Yeah it's here :

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4290300.stm

but I'm not sure how well it stands now, although that trial certainly seems kosher.
I'm not totally up to date on all this stuff now though, to be honest I find it really depressing.

zhao said:

thanks Mr. Sloane.

you seem to be agreeing that discussion about the various aspects of the HIV/AIDS phenomenon, on which there is no unanimous agreement, is generally a positive thing, right?

you describe very well the numerous uncertainties we have been, and still are living with...

given these uncertainties, i would think nearly all different perspectives on the subject should be considered, and it is important that no reasonable lines of inquiry is suppressed.

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From what I know/knew, there's a large holistic community within the HIV/AIDS community, but within that there's also alot of people who I personally thought were afraid of modern medicine, and I saw people put themselves through horrendous delusions of cures (hyper-oxygenated water, selenium doses, peroxide cures... there were loads) so I'd personally be very dis-inclined to knock modern medical techniques which have made proven advances over a wide section of the community, as opposed to maybe more personal techniques (acupuncture, healing etc) that maybe work on a belief based basis but maybe not for the general population.

I come from a line of thought that says "It's your body, do to it what you want" but just cos you do it, doesn't mean you should recommend it to anyone else, and in fact it may be irresponsible to do so.

mistersloane said:

to be honest I find it really depressing.

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No shit...really sorry to hear about your friends you talked about earlier, I can't imagine what it's like to watch people you're close to waste away like that, especially at such a young age. But big up for being involved in activism like that!

Yeah, it's weird about AZT, since (iirc) it was originally a chemotherapy agent. Nobody was making much money from it, or not inordinate amounts based on the fact that cancer is pretty common in the industrialized West. Then someone realized it may help HIV patients by killing the same proteins that the inhibitors simply block from being made. Even so I don't think there's a generic version yet, and that's a problem.

I saw a speech on World AIDS Day by a guy who's gone through being diagnosed with HIV, then AIDS (with a viral load really high--like over 1000), and then was rediagnosed recently with HIV at the lowest possible load after he went on disability several years ago and decided to make his recovery a full-time job. He talked about being a professional guinea pig because he's volunteered for every clinical trial that existed from 1984 onward. But he also talked about how he eats a macrobiotic diet and exercises constantly. Luckily for him his father is a doctor who had friends and could help him get placed in trials. He talked about how he had no access to medical benefits when he lived in the south (New Orleans and Atlanta I think), or when he did, he was put on waiting lists for treatment because the conservatives down there refuse to spend state money on the old gay cancer. He's the one who told me that people move from all over the world to New York and California to get treatment, even though the U.S. is the only country in the world that still has a law meant to bar HIV + folks from immigrating.

It'd be nice if that became as high-priority as Prop 8 for activists, but it's not as sexy a cause. Too many people think they're invincible and that it would never affect them.

zhao said:

sometimes you don't have to be a weatherman to sense which way the wind is blowing

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no, but the weatherman's a hell of a lot more accurate. and if you told people to take off their jackets and rely solely on a macrobiotic diet to protect them from the wind the weatherman could explain wind chill & convection to them. and - well this analogy was labored to begin with. the distrust of experts (unless they agree with you) is such an American thing.

also, w/r/t alternative medicine - if you will go back & read through the last few pages here you'll see the response was almost entirely positive. with qualifications, but that's hardly "ridicule". what there definitely was - ridiculing of your personal half-baked notions of alternative medicine and its powers. which, if you've backed off, then great.

zhao said:

no reasonable lines of inquiry is suppressed

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2 things

1 - who is suppressing you? and how? who is suppressing any AIDS skeptic or denialist, in fact? argument, consideration & rejection by the (great majority) of the scientific community, even ridicule but clearly not suppression as these people manage to keep spreading their message to the world.

2 - do you realize how similar you sound to climate change skeptics? tho in that case there's almost certainly big $ behind creating that & in fairness to AIDS skeptics it seems most of them (S.A. govt aside) are motivated by personal conviction. anyway, it's the same game - cherrypick a quote here & an interview clip there & give them the same weight as majority scientific opinion to create the illusion of a debate. not every iconoclast is Einstein. very few of them are, in fact.

Tangentially related but interesting article in the NYTimes today.

What seems strange to me about the "it must be a conspiracy!" reaction to complex phenomena, and I'm not just thinking about AIDS denialism here but all sorts of half-baked theories that arise out of ignorance and paranoia, is that the people who engage in that type of thinking have all kinds of time to construct fantasy scenarios, but so little time for actually making sure that they inform themselves and understand the specific complexities and circumstances involved in what they criticize.

Yeah, it's that cabbal, as usual...those fuckers! At it again.

Speaking of which Jesse Ventura of all people has a new TV show that uncovers terrifying conspiracies like the lizard people and other such code-words for Jew.

zhao said:

Padraig:

comparison with global warming does not work because of the very different levels of uncertainty involved.

global warming: pretty much none / nearly all scientists agree

HIV/AIDS: a fuck of a lot / contradictory phenomenon / contradictory explanations / contradictory treatment.

after 30 years of being told that you get it you die, now a major scientific source is saying all it takes is nutrition and good health to reverse it.

(Sloane is right that there were lots of disgreements and debates since the beginning, but not so much for the general public, who believed what they were told)

Nomad:

sure conspiracy buffs are often probably taking the easy way out.

but in this case i don't think foul play, or at least profit driven behavior which may have played an obfuscating or obtrusive role, on the part of global pharmaceutical companies can be ruled out.
we all know there are plenty of examples from the past of big companies acting not exactly in the interest of scientific truth, or the well being of patients.

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aw man did you read the last 3 pages of discussion?

nomadthethird said:

Speaking of which Jesse Ventura of all people has a new TV show that uncovers terrifying conspiracies like the lizard people and other such code-words for Jew.

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I believe in the lizard people, I'm just not sure that they're Jewish. I think it's power that turns people into lizards, and sometimes being in prison. People get that shark-eyed and shiny skinned thing. But then I've seen people I don't like turn into snakes in front of my eyes, so I should shut up and take some meds.

I'd love to see a headline in The Onion that goes something like Masonic Communist Reptillian Space-Jews admit: We Rule World
with a sub-header saying Scientologists, conspiracy dicks 'smug'.

zhao said:

HIV/AIDS: a fuck of a lot / contradictory phenomenon / contradictory explanations / contradictory treatment.

after 30 years of being told that you get it you die, now a major scientific source is saying all it takes is nutrition and good health to reverse it.
.

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Just watched the Montagnier interview - I should have watched it before I said anything I think.

What Montagnier is talking about in that interview is much more subtle than the interviewer - and thus the public - gets.

He's talking about a point in time after exposure to the virus - very small window of a few weeks - where it appears than some people are able to be able to get rid of the virus without seroconversion - i.e. becoming HIV positive. As I said, this has been known from time. What isn't known yet is how that happens. I'm not sure that's saying quite the same thing as 'it's possible to reverse an HIV status', and to say so would be irresponsible.

From what I glean he's also coming from a humanistic point of view, which is that the money spent by Bill Gates etc on drug treatments could equally be spent on providing water and other sanitation facilities, rather than stating that this is all people need in order to avoid HIV infection.

zhao said:

however subtle, or how ever you want to read it, it is painting a picture with enough significant differences, or presenting other significant sides of the picture, than what has passed for "conventional knowledge" thus far. (edit: what was "conventional knowledge" to me. to someone who has not focused on or looked into the matter beyond the usual awareness level - i never bought books on it, i never was a part of activist groups, etc.)

the possibility that general health and nutrition MAY be more important than drugs for patients??? fairly shocking stuff don't you think? (edit: again, to a non-specialist) it will be interesting to see reactions when this full doc is out.

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Can 'conventional knowledge', when it comes to science, ever be fully conflated with 'what the public knows/thinks'?

zhao said:

comparison with global warming does not work

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w/r/t global warming - the only difference is you agree with the one & are "skeptical" about the other. you've already admitted you know next to nothing about AIDS & I doubt you know much more about global warming or the fake scientific "debates" around either. the M.O. is almost exactly the same, the major difference being that climate change skeptics have been much more successful.

anyway, by all means prove me wrong - cite some more sources, anything besides that one video clip. but you won't be able to; there's guys in the S.A. govt hip pocket like Duesburg & Rasnick, both of whom were on Thabo Mbeki's AIDS "advisory panel". Rasnick is also all tied up with the ultra-dodgy & ultra-crazy Rath Foundation (Matthias Rath is a snake oil salesman if ever there was one). and Kary Mullis*, who is f**king crazy whatever his views on AIDS are (see below, you'd love this dude). that's really it, as far as scientists. after that you get into the virulent homophobia of Henry Bauer (denialism appeals to a certain strain of conservatives for obvious reasons), the sheer craziness of Celia Farber & of course the prematurely dead like Christine Maggiore. that's your team.

*claims that PCR, for which he won a Nobel, came to him in an LSD hallucination. he also claims to have had a close encounter with fluorescent raccoon aliens - no, I'm not making that up (fits in well with the whole masonic lizard people thing tho). oh and to make it even more perfect he's also a climate change skeptic.

zhao said:

the possibility that general health and nutrition MAY be more important than drugs for patients??? fairly shocking stuff don't you think?

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dude didn't rank anything by importance. he said that there was perhaps too much of a focus on drugs to detriment of other (cheaper, easier to implement) methods of prevention & preventative treatment, which seems like a valid question at least. he didn't say a single bad thing about antiretrovirals, a single thing about conspiracies, nothing to suggest that HIV doesn't cause AIDS or that the AIDS situation in Africa is inflated. he made some ambiguous comments about the ability of people with strengthened immune systems to "fight off infections". & no, there's nothing shocking about the idea that nutrition is important, unless you're fairly clueless about AIDS.

this is what you always do; fixate on one guy (Bernal, Diamond etc.) - or in this case one video clip - & refuse to acknowledge anything else. I'm going to assume you didn't watch Montagnier's Nobel lecture I linked where he, among other things, directly refutes AIDS denialism.

mistersloane said:

I believe in the lizard people, I'm just not sure that they're Jewish. I think it's power that turns people into lizards, and sometimes being in prison. People get that shark-eyed and shiny skinned thing.

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Photo on today's beeb news:

Mr. Tea said:

Photo on today's beeb news:

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I think she looks really great! Well Cleopatra-era Liz Taylor. I'd love to go for a pint with her, I bet she's a right laugh. I'm being honest there n all, I always thought she was really good at being famous.

padraig (u.s.) said:

Kary Mullis*, who is f**king crazy whatever his views on AIDS are...

*claims that PCR, for which he won a Nobel, came to him in an LSD hallucination. he also claims to have had a close encounter with fluorescent raccoon aliens - no, I'm not making that up (fits in well with the whole masonic lizard people thing tho). oh and to make it even more perfect he's also a climate change skeptic.

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Nice!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis

He's like something out of a David Foster Wallace novel:

"I was sagging as I walked out to my little silver Honda Civic. Neither [assistant] Fred, empty Beck's bottles, nor the sweet smell of the dawn of the age of PCR could replace Jenny. I was lonesome."

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At a 1994 conference in Toledo, Spain, Mullis changed the topic of his speech from PCR to his idea that HIV does not cause AIDS, at the last minute. According to The New York Times, his supporting slides were "photographs he had taken of naked women with colored lights projected on their bodies."

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