Abstracts

ABSTRACT:

“AIDS” was first noted around 1980 in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, among gay men and drug addicts. In 1984 came discovery of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), presumed to be the sexually transmitted cause of AIDS. Given an apparent latent period of about 10 years, HIV is thought to have arrived in those communities around 1970. Since 1985, tests for HIV have been widely deployed to detect its anticipated spread into other social groups and geographic locales.

HIV-positive people were found in every sector of society and in every part of the United

States as soon as testing began. That HIV could have spread so rapidly into the general population across the country from those cities within 15 years is infeasible for several reasons:

(1) the geographic distribution of HIV does not look like a spread from the AIDS epicenters;

(2) that geographic distribution has not changed in two decades;

(3) if anything, the prevalence of HIV has decreased since the mid-1980s;

(4) direct studies have revealed that HIV is not readily transmissible.

The conclusion seems inescapable: HIV tests do not track a virus that spread from the original centers of the AIDS epidemic. HIV is endemic. It is not the cause of the AIDS epidemics of the early 1980s.

ABSTRACT:

HIV tests are supposed to detect the human immunodeficiency virus, but results of HIV

tests are not consonant with that view. The frequency of positive HIV-tests, F(HIV), varies in regular fashion with age among widely different sectors of the population: blood donors, military personnel, drug users, and others. F(HIV) increases from the teenage years into the middle adult years and then declines again toward old age. Newborn babies test HIV-positive about 4 times more often than do children from about 1 year of age to the pre-teen years. Male children always test positive more frequently than do female children. These regular variations mark HIV tests as indicators of a physiologic process and not indicators of a sexually transmitted infection.

F(HIV) also varies from group to group, in a manner that reflects the general state of health of that group: repeat blood donors test positive most rarely, first-time donors somewhat more frequently, military personnel even more frequently, members of the Job Corps considerably more frequently, and medical patients being treated for reasons unconnected to HIV or AIDS nevertheless test HIV-positive more often than do healthy people--even when the medical condition is psychiatric. These variations again mark a positive HIV-test as indicating, not anything specific to HIV but something non-specific about health in general, for example, the degree of physiologic or oxidative stress.

These and other aspects of the data confirm the conclusion reached in Part I of this series, that HIV tests do not track a sexually transmitted agent. The most significant corollary is that newborns who happen to test HIV-positive should no longer be treated with the highly toxic anti-retroviral drugs.

ABSTRACT:

The relative circumstances of Black and White Americans serves as a further demonstration that HIV does not cause AIDS. Between 1981 and 2000, the ratio of Black Americans to White Americans reported with AIDS has increased by a factor of 3; but the relative incidence of positive HIV-tests in the two groups has remained the same.

Racial ancestry influences the frequency of positive HIV-tests, F(HIV), as an independent variable. In a variety of disparate demographic groups in the United States, at all ages and for both sexes, F(HIV) increases in the order Asian < White < Native American < Hispanic < Black. Data from South Africa display a similar sequence, White/Asian-Indian < Colored < Black. This constant relation among the racial categories renders a behavioral explanation less likely than an explanation in terms of genetic polymorphisms of the kind used in tracing human migration patterns. That Native Americans are closer to Whites than to Blacks also bespeaks a physical rather than socioeconomic-behavioral cause. F(HIV) is a response to a health challenge; the intensity of that response is evidently modified by ancestral genomic patterns among HLA genes associated with the immune system. Polymorphisms among these genes are well known and have been correlated with racial disparities in a variety of diseases.