http://barnesworld.blogs.com/barnes_world/2006/09/post.html

September 21, 2006
Rebecca Culshaw on AIDS and Her Native Africa

I  was born in Malawi, one of the countries supposedly hardest hit by "AIDS", and even though I have
only dreams of my early months under the African sun, they are always wonderfully warm and pleasant.
Thus I have naturally long been curious about AIDS in Africa, and have often wondered about the
dramatically different epidemiology and disease manifestation that were reported to be occurring in
North America and Europe versus that seen in Africa. I assumed for many years that this was part of
the "vast mystery of HIV" that science would some day explain.

One of the major reasons I began to work on mathematical modeling of HIV infection (other than my
love for applied mathematics and a lifelong interest in the pathology of disease) was because there
were questions about HIV and AIDS that really bothered me: Why do some people live so much longer
with an HIV-positive diagnosis than do others? Why is it so difficult to produce a vaccine? -- among
the more obvious ones. And so I entered the world of HIV research in the hopes that I would uncover
at least partial answers to at least some of my questions. Instead, I encountered contradictory
models, nonsensical data, inconsistent conclusions, and intensely confused scientists - and I came
to the realization that what was mysterious and paradoxical was not the virus itself, but rather the
entire virus theory. The scientific questions that remain unanswered are disturbing, but what is
even more disturbing is the foundation of racism and prejudice on which the HIV hypothesis is built.

To understand the sociological motivations behind the HIV/AIDS paradigm, one must understand the
racism and homophobia that have persisted in western societies for centuries. It is only very
recently in the timeline of history that gays and blacks have been accorded equal rights under the
law-rights that Caucasians and heterosexuals have long enjoyed. To understand the inherent prejudice
behind the very definition of "AIDS", one needs only to consider the official party line: "AIDS"
infected humans when Africans consumed or did strange things with monkeys, and it has been spread
throughout the world by gay men and sexually promiscuous, prostitute-visiting black Africans.

This ridiculous concept is utterly empty-the evidence for an African origin for HIV, much less AIDS,
is essentially non-existent, and what there is is based entirely on the hypothesis that Africans
have been doing bizarre and obscene things with monkeys that permitted not one but two distinct
retroviruses, HIV-1 and HIV-2, to emerge and begin to cause massive immune deficiency the likes of
which has never before been caused by a single-let alone two distinct-infectious agents. For this
improbable enough scenario to even approximate a possible reality, these two "new" retroviruses in
humans would have to be pretty new in monkeys, too, since nothing has changed regarding how Africans
relate to monkeys in the last forty or so years, and logically, such a zoonotic jump, if it were
possible, should have happened long ago. So if this were even partially so, AIDS ought to have
existed in Africa significantly before it existed in New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco,
rather than after (1983), which is what happened.

For the current interpretation of the HIV/AIDS dogma to be true, we must somehow accept that either
people of African descent are many times more genetically susceptible to "HIV infection", or else
that they are many orders of magnitude more promiscuous than are people in any other racial
category. Neither of these ideas bears up under scrutiny, however. An analysis of HIV tests from the
past twenty years shows that the predisposition of African-Americans to test HIV-positive is far
more likely to be a result of biased test interpretation, as well as a reflection of inherent,
hereditary differences than it is to be a result of anything related to behavior. The distribution
of HIV-positive results among those of African descent is too consistent across the risk groups to
be the consequence of behavior (or even a combination of behavior and predisposition to infection).
More damning, however, to the concept that HIV somehow spreads more effectively among heterosexuals
in Africa than in the West is the fact that in all studies that attempt to determine transmission
rates, said rates are no different in Africa than anywhere else - in every study, constant
per-contact infectivity through unprotected heterosexual sex is on the order of 1 per 1000. Clearly,
such transmission rates, no matter how one interprets the odds ratio, are not sufficient to sustain
a heterosexual epidemic anywhere in the world.

So what is going on? Why on earth have we been so quick to accept the concept of a virus that causes
different diseases in different risk groups and even in different countries; a virus that is somehow
transmitted far, far more efficiently if you happen to be brown-skinned?

Scientists jumped to such conclusions despite a lack of hard evidence, and the media and the public
accepted them awfully easily. Would this have happened if the first five AIDS patients had been
heterosexuals in the prime of their lives? Would this still be happening if we were not being fed
the hypothesis that Africans and African-Americans are somehow, mysteriously, more "susceptible" to
HIV than are Asians and Caucasians? I wonder.

The first five men with AIDS were not sexually involved with one another, so why was a sexually
transmitted cause considered to be so likely? And of Robert Gallo's cohort of seventy-two
homosexuals with AIDS, only twenty-six had any trace of HIV. Yet somehow HIV (and therefore AIDS)
was considered sexually transmittable. This conclusion was arrived at not by the traditional method
of proving an infection is indeed an STI, which involves microbial isolation and contact tracing,
but rather by simply assuming sexual transmission. Laboratory studies of "HIV," in which researchers
do experiments showing things like "HIV" not being able to penetrate latex or "HIV" being able to
infect monkeys when rectally injected, do not use pure HIV particles at all, but rather molecular
biology experiments consisting of combinations of proteins that trigger an antibody reaction. So how
do we know anything about what HIV really does, where it came from, and even what it is? And even
more fundamentally, how do we know what AIDS itself is, when its presentation and even its very
definition have become so amorphous that no-one is in possession of all the facts?

The answer is: we don't, anymore than we did back in 1984. Despite the fact that other viruses
(cytomegalovirus and herpes virus, to give just two examples) were far more prevalent in AIDS
patients than HIV ever was, the HIV train started rolling and hasn't lost momentum since, and this
one retrovirus became inextricably wound up in a complex, hard-to-grasp syndrome of immune
deficiency which simple logic ought to tell us cannot possibly have a single cause.

What has the HIV hypothesis accomplished? More than twenty years after a cure for AIDS was promised
to have arrived, there is none, and there likely never will be a vaccine. A massive industry has
been built around T-cell testing, viral load testing, antibody testing, and drug development. Drugs
have been developed to lower viral load and drugs have been developed to alleviate the sometimes
horrific effects of the primary drugs. An entire plastic surgery industry has been put into place to
mask the loss and redistribution of fat caused by the drugs. Now, pressure is on to distribute these
drugs to those who need them far less than they need clean living conditions and adequate nutrition.

It seems I never stop crying for my Beloved Country, too.

Rebecca V. Culshaw worked on mathematical models of HIV infection for almost ten  years. She
received her Ph.D. in mathematics (with a specialization in mathematical biology) from Dalhousie
University in Canada in 2002 and is currently an assistant professor of mathematics at the
University of Texas at Tyler. She is a celebrated internet author as a result of her writings on Lew
Rockwell, and "Science Sold Out: Does HIV Really Cause AIDS?", a book based on those essays is due
this December. (Hank)

Note: Because Dr. C. is such a popular personality, we expect that readers will have many comments
and questions they might wish to address to her. Send them to me, and I will pass on my choice
(anonified), and any that she chooses to answer we will publish under a new occasional column
called, Dear  Dr. Culshaw. Look for it ! (HB)