Denying AIDS and other oddities

Montagnier Joins Mullis in the Nobel Prize Crackpot Club

2012-05-30T08:34:00.000-04:00

Nobel laureate joins anti-vaccination crowd at Autism One

By Steven Salzberg for Forbes magazine

If you’re reading this from anywhere but Chicago, you just missed the Autism One conference, which ends today. This conference, run by Jenny McCarthy and Generation Rescue, purports to tell parents “the truth” about autism.

The conference is a veritable festival of unproven claims, offering a powerful but false message of hope to parents who are desperately searching for new treatments for their children. It’s also a nexus for anti-vaccinationists, who run special seminars educating parents about how to get vaccine exemptions so that they can enroll their unvaccinated children in public schools.

A look at the presentations reveals that rather than presenting “the truth,” one speaker after another is making unsupported, unscientific claims and then offering their own special therapy. The one thing that most of these presentations have in common is that the speaker is making money from selling their so-called treatments. For example, Anat Baniel offers her self-named “Anat Baniel method” and is promoting it through ads in the conference program. Other speakers are offering special diets, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, and in perhaps the most damaging treatment, Mark and David Geier’s chemical castration therapy. Mark Blaxill is there, still pushing the thoroughly disproven link between mercury and autism, and hawking his book on the topic.

The other major theme of the conference is conspiracies: how the government, big pharma, and the scientific establishment are all conspiring to hide “the truth” about autism, which the speaker will reveal to the audience. Coincidentally, many of the speakers also offer treatments, for a fee.

This year’s speakers include Jenny McCarthy and Andrew Wakefield, as usual, but also a new entry: Luc Montagnier.

Jenny McCarthy has been a leader of the anti-vaccine movement for over a decade. She’s a former Playboy playmate and MTV host, with no medical qualifications whatsoever, who is convinced that vaccines caused her son’s autism. She’s been spreading her anti-vaccine message very effectively, with particular help from Oprah Winfrey and Larry King, who gave her prime television exposure countless times. Oprah even offered McCarthy her own show, until McCarthy ditched Oprah for NBC.

Andrew Wakefield, the thoroughly discredited doctor who falsified data in order to push his false hypothesis that autism is caused by the MMR vaccine – whose medical license was revoked in the UK, and whose famous 1998 paper on autism and vaccines was retracted after it was shown to be fraudulent – claims that his talk ”offers solutions [that] will be ignored by those in power and the more dire of its predictions will result.” Too bad I missed that one.

It’s no surprise that Jenny McCarthy and Andrew Wakefield, leaders of the anti-vaccine movement, are speaking at AutismOne. Much more surprising is the presence of Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier, co-discoverer of the link between the HIV virus and AIDS. What is he doing at this festival of pseudoscience?

Well, apparently Montagnier has gone off the deep end into pseudoscience himself. He claims that his new group, Chronimed, has discovered in autistic children

“DNA sequences that emit, in certain conditions, electromagnetic waves. The analysis by molecular biology techniques allows us to identify these electromagnetic waves as coming from … bacterial species.”

What the heck? In what seems to be a desperate effort to stay relevant, Montagnier is promoting wild theories with little scientific basis, and now he is taking advantage of vulnerable parents (see his appeal here) to push a therapy of long-term antibiotic treatment for autistic children.

This is truly a wacky theory. Montagnier hasn’t been able to publish this in a proper journal, for a very good reason: it’s nonsense. He claims that quantum field theory – an area of physics in which he has no qualifications – explains how electromagnetic waves emanating from DNA can explain not only autism, but also Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, Lyme disease, and rheumatoid arthritis. Montagnier makes these claims and more in a self-published paper that heposted on arXiv.

Death by Denial: Maria Papagiannidou dies of AIDS

2012-04-19T16:44:00.001-04:00

"It is said that a cure for 'AIDS' cannot be found, but I was 'HIV-positive' for 10 years, had full-blown 'AIDS' for another 12 years and have now become perfectly fine again without any doctor's intervention or medication."
Maria Papagiannidou

Word has spread that Maria Papagiannidou has died. She became hooked into AIDS Denialism and paraded about by her pals at The Rethinking AIDS Society. She gained media attention in her home country of Greece when she proclaimed AIDS was a myth. She chronicled her denial in her book Goodbye AIDS! Did you ever exist?
Ms. Papagiannidou is the most recent in a long succession of AIDS Deniers who have died of AIDS. They made the misinformed choice not to take antiretroviral medications; dying earlier than they could have if treated.
Once again, the leaders of AIDS Denialsim -- David Crowe, Peter Duesberg, David Rasnick, and Henry Bauer are living to very (very) ripe old ages, while those who listen to them die young.
The leaders of Rethinking AIDS have much in common - they are all crazy old white men.
Those who listen to them and die have much in common too - they are young, men and women, racially and ethnically diverse, HIV positive, and refuse treatment.
Fortunately, the AIDS Deniers are becoming increasingly irrelevant.
I would like the old guys at Rethinking AIDS to hold one more AIDS Denier's conference before they completely disappear. I want one more chance to say Goodbye AIDS Denialists! Did you ever exist?

AIDS Denialist Marco Ruggiero: Destined for a Duesbergian Career

2012-03-19T14:53:00.005-04:00

Inquiry launched over AIDS contrarian's teaching

Academic freedom should not be misused to spread theories that opponents say lack scientific evidence.
Zoë Corbyn Nature News 19 March 2012

The University of Florence has launched an inquiry into the teaching activities of an academic who assisted on a course that denies the causal link between HIV and AIDS, and supervised students with dissertations on the same topic.

The Italian university's internal 'special commission' will examine the "teaching behaviour and responsibility" of molecular biologist Marco Ruggiero, a university spokesman told Nature.

The move follows a letter to the institution's rector, Alberto Tesi, by an Italian campaign group called the HIV Forum, which represents people infected with HIV and others concerned about the disease. It calls on him to disassociate the university from the "science and activities" of Ruggiero, who, the group says, is "internationally known" for denying the widely accepted link between HIV and AIDS, and promotes a potential cure for HIV involving an enriched probiotic yoghurt for which there is no proven evidence.

Tesi replied on 29 February to announce the special commission. This "will examine whether professor Ruggiero's conduct complies with the institutional guidelines on teaching contents and adherence to the objectives of the official curriculum of biological sciences", says university spokesman Duccio Di Bari, who adds that any misconduct would be dealt with internally. The commission comprises Elisabetta Cerbai, the university's vice-chancellor for research; Paola Bruni, the dean of the School of Science; Sergio Romagnani, an emeritus professor and expert in immunology; and Massimo Benedetti, who is responsible for university legal affairs. They will hold hearings behind closed doors.

Death denial

The investigation is the latest twist in the fallout from a paper published in December in the Italian Journal of Anatomy and Embryology (IJAE) by researchers including Peter Duesberg, an academic at the University of California, Berkeley, well know for denying the link between HIV and AIDS. The paper, which challenges estimates of HIV-AIDS death tolls in South Africa, has received heavy criticism from scientists, who have questioned how it could have passed peer review, and has led two members of the IJAE editorial board to resign in protest (see 'Paper denying HIV-AIDS link sparks resignation). That Ruggiero was one of the paper's nine co-authors prompted the HIV Forum to write to the rector.

The forum cites two student dissertations mentored or co-mentored by Ruggiero that argue against the consensus that HIV causes AIDS. “Most available evidence does not support a causative role for HIV in AIDS,” they both conclude.

The HIV Forum also refers to a short elective course, consisting of two half days, which Nature understands ran twice in the 2010/11 academic year, and which Ruggiero collaborated on, entitled: ‘The revolution of immunotherapy: prospects for the treatment of cancer and AIDS’. According to the description, the course teaches “the role of HIV in the pathogenesis of AIDS; association but not causation”.

“What devastating effects can such false teaching have on future physicians and their patients?,” asks the HIV Forum, stressing that although academic freedom is fundamental in teaching and research, it should not be misused to spread theories that they say are "lacking any scientific evidence”.

“We hope the Commission will be scientifically rigorous and we hope that it will state that the best way to protect academic freedom is to teach according to the worldwide recognized scientific method,” says a forum spokesperson.

Parallel lines

Ruggiero, whose supporters have also written to the rector, says he has always operated with scientific integrity and is confident he will be able to give any explanations that the committee asks for. He draws parallels with an inquiry the University of California held two years ago into the conduct of Duesberg, which resulted in no charges.

“Florence is famous for having been the city of Galileo Galilei, the worldwide recognized symbol of the predominance of scientific freedom over dogmas. I am convinced that freedom of teaching and research is a stronghold of our university system,” he says. He adds that the student dissertations and the course were approved by the university.

The commission was welcomed by Fabio Marra, a professor of medicine at the university, who says the institution must shed “full light on the events”.

“I believe that every researcher has the right to submit his or her work through peer-reviewed journals, no matter how little credibility that data may have,” Marra says. “What is not acceptable is that personal theories, that are not supported by the weight of evidence, are taught to students that do not yet have the skills to form an independent opinion and to discriminate what they are being taught from what the bulk of the literature has shown.”

The special commission is due to report by 15 April.
Nature doi:10.1038/nature.2012.10250

Death by denial: The campaigners who continue to deny HIV causes Aids

2012-02-21T11:21:00.000-05:00

As each of their followers dies, those who campaign against HIV treatments simply move on to the next level of denial

By Brian Deer, The Guardian, February 21, 2012

Karri Stokely is a poster girl for a different way to look at health. After receiving an Aids diagnosis in 1996, at the age of 29, she was treated for 11 years with a cocktail of drugs. But then she saw an internet video saying that HIV was a hoax, stopped taking her medicines – and felt terrific.

"I'm not getting any answers from the mainstream as to why I'm healthy, and why my husband is negative, and why I can quit these drugs," she explains in her own video, which is currently being promoted online. "I think it's a crime. It's crimes against humanity."

Her doctor was aghast – HIV treatment is for life. "He looked me right in the eyes and said: 'You have done a very stupid thing, and you will be dead very soon,'" Stokely recalls. "My response to him was: 'That's funny, because right now I'm feeling pretty good.'"

That was in April 2007. She died four years later, so her comments are a postcard from the past. "Karri Stokely passed away on April 27th 2011,"explains a website run by London journalist Joan Shenton. "She said she wouldn't go quietly so we are keeping her moving interview below on our homepage."

But Stokely's path (via pneumonia) was already well trodden. Dying in denial is a phenomenon. The first traveller on this path I knew was an American singer, Michael Callen, author of a self-help book, Surviving Aids. It was published by HarperCollins in 1990. Three years later, Mikey died.

Shenton is Britain's premier critic of what she calls the "completely wrong" science of HIV. Her site offers as examples the cases of Jody Wells and Huw Christie, the first two editors of a fringe magazineContinuum. Both chose not to follow medical advice and found death.

"We're waking up to the truth and the more of us that survive and live on in health to beat the odds, the more the lie will be shown up for what it is," Wells wrote in May 1994, 16 months before he passed away.

That was just before new therapies transformed life expectancy, and saw many young men who might have followed his denial path rise from their deathbeds and go dancing.

Shenton's site also showcases material on Christine Maggiore, a Californian businesswoman who helped found an international group, now called "Alive and Well Aids Alternatives". That was before her three-year-old HIV-positive daughter died of pneumonia and, in 2008, her own death.

"This was a woman of class, grace, integrity and wisdom," comments Stokely on an internet memorial wall put up after Maggiore's funeral. "From the time we found out 'the truth' surrounding the Aids debacle, Christine had always made herself available for help and guidance."

Here are intelligent, well-educated, idealistic people who wrestle their freedom from the grip of morbid sickness, big pharma products and despair. There's a heroic quality about storming towards your destiny, arms outstretched, eyes wide.

These crusaders' passing, however, gives paradoxical power to those who ushered them along in their journey. Like many health and science cranks (and shrewd defence lawyers), those who persist in the assertion that Aids isn't infectious brandish their embarrassments, thrust them in your face, before moving to the next level of denial.

Shenton, who is now archiving a quarter century of uninterrupted campaigning, assures me on the phone that "Karri is very important".

"I think she died from the side-effects of the drugs. She'd stopped taking them, but she'd been taking them for about 10 years before."

There's no answer to that, of course, but while Shenton comes across as the queen of denial, its pharaoh also has some words on Maggiore's fate. According to Peter Duesberg, the scientist who fathered this philosophy, about 6% of deaths in the over 50s are from pneumonia, and "she is one of those."

"Big deal," he snaps about her death, in a frankly barking podcast interview. "It's nothing. It's consistent with everything I know."

Two weeks' from now, Duesberg, 74, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, celebrates (and I have to suppose he will) 25 years of this stuff. For it was on 1 March 1987 that, in a 22-page paper, he set out his case that HIV is harmless.

"It is concluded," he declared in the journal Cancer Research, "that Aids virus is not sufficient to cause Aids and that there is no evidence, besides its presence in a latent form, that it is necessary for Aids."

Thus was born the "Duesberg hypothesis", which his critics say has led to sickness and death far beyond white, middle-class eccentrics. By some reckonings, in South Africa alone the denialist convictions of former president Thabo Mbeki led to more than 300,000 premature fatalities and 35,000 preventable infant infections.

In fact, Aids denialism predates the Duesberg hypothesis. It was born in the first months of the epidemic. Even in 1981, when I wrote my first report, there were what I then called "two competing hypotheses" for the disease, which had just been spotted by US government epidemiologists among East and West Coast gay men.

One proposed an infection, the other a crummy "lifestyle". And little has changed since then. Although science backed the first, the second limped on, blaming recreational drugs, pharmaceuticals and sexual practices in developed countries, and water, bugs and nutrition in Africa.

The website that features Stokely and Maggiore on its front page proclaims that it is "Rethinking Aids", but as 25 years have been torn from the calendar, little has been rethought. They still say HIV is harmless, or doesn't exist, and that leading Aids scientists are "criminals". Heterosexuals don't get sick from HIV and millions of Africans aren't infected. And there's apparently a global conspiracy to conceal this.

"My secret to staying healthy is really nothing magical," explains Stokely, meanwhile, in her, perhaps eternal, message in a bottle. "I think a very, very large part of it, as with any diagnosis you get, is the biology of belief. The mind is very, very strong on the health of the human body."

Brian Deer was named UK specialist journalist of the year at the 2011 British Press Awards

Southern Poverty Law Center's HateWatch and the AIDS Deniers

2012-01-12T22:36:00.000-05:00

AFA’s Bryan Fischer: HIV Doesn’t Cause AIDS

Posted in Anti-LGBT by Leah Nelson on January 6, 2012

It’s tempting to describe American Family Association spokesman Bryan Fischer as a close-minded, reactionary bigot. But when it comes to embracing fresh ideas that support his beliefs – heck, he pretty much outdoes us all.

Remember when he said that gays were responsible for the Holocaust? Or the time he claimed that states can require public officials to pass religious tests, directly contradicting both a 50-year-old Supreme Court decision and the express wishes of the Founding Fathers themselves? These are not exactly mainstream theories, but, ever open-minded, Fischer adopted them anyway.

And just when you think he’s reached the outermost limits of revisionism, Fischer one-ups himself by promoting a theory so breathtakingly outrageous that it makes his previous claims seem tame.

Well, he’s done it again, declaring during an anti-gay tirade on his radio show Tuesday that there is no connection between the HIV virus and AIDS.

He even had someone to back him up: Peter Duesberg, a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California at Berkeley whose hypothesis about AIDS has made him a pariah among his peers.

Once revered as a genius for his pioneering cancer research, Duesberg since 1987 has been a leading proponent of the so-called “denialist” hypothesis that HIV does not cause AIDS. He offers a range of possible alternative causes, claiming at different times that AIDS is a “fabricated epidemic,” that it is triggered by the use of recreational drugs, and that it is caused by the antiretroviral drugs that have improved and prolonged the lives of countless HIV-infected persons.

That’s not what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says.

“The scientific evidence is overwhelming that HIV is the cause of AIDS,” Dr. Jonathan Mermin, director of the CDC’s Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention, told Hatewatch via E-mail. “Infection with HIV has been the sole common factor shared by people with AIDS throughout the world. In addition, antiretroviral medicines developed specifically against HIV have been associated with dramatic reductions in the incidence of AIDS and mortality. Statements that AIDS is not caused by HIV are misleading and potentially dangerous.”

That seems an understatement. In 2000, Duesberg served on a commission charged by then-South African President Thabo Mbeki with determining whether HIV caused AIDS. Already inclined to disbelieve the connection, Mbeki accepted the conclusion that the two were not linked, leading to a disastrous public policy that caused an estimated 330,000 South Africans to die from AIDS, according to a 2010 report in AIDS and Behavior, a public health journal.

On Fischer’s show, Duesberg said that intravenous drugs are responsible for 50% of all cases of AIDS in America. “Most of the rest of the other half is male homosexuals – but not your all-American male homosexual from next door,” he said. “It’s the ones who have what they call ‘cruising,’ that have hundreds of –thousands of – sexual contacts in a short time. They can only accomplish that like our Olympians break records now, by taking lots of drugs.”

Fischer interviewed Duesberg in the context of discussing a proposed Los Angeles ordinance that would require performers in pornographic films to use condoms on the set.

Duesberg’s statistics – which suggest that half of AIDS patients are IV drug users and half are promiscuous gay men who use drugs to enhance their libido – do not quite square with reality. The CDC’s most recent statistics (here and here) do show that gay and bisexual men account for the majority of new HIV infections – 61% in 2009 – and that overall, 49% of Americans living with AIDS are gay or bisexual men. Neither numbers nor science say that all these men were drug-addicted sex fiends – and more to the point, 27% of those infected in 2009 were heterosexuals. Only 9% were IV drug users.

Asked to respond to the CDC’s statement about his hypothesis, Duesberg challenged the authority of the CDC, demanding evidence to back up this reporter’s characterization of the organization as an internationally recognized authority on epidemiology.

He also acknowledged that he had not heard of Bryan Fischer prior to speaking on his show. In response, Hatewatch provided him with several examples of Fischer’s most offensive and inaccurate anti-gay comments, reading verbatim his 2010 declaration that “Homosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and six million dead Jews.”

Duesberg – who, according to a lengthy 2008 profile in Discovermagazine, was born in Münster, Germany, in 1936 and grew up to the tune of air raid sirens, and whose father volunteered to serve in the German army – said he had never heard that theory before, and said he would need to see the context of Fischer’s comment before passing judgment. When Hatewatch forwarded him a linkto Fischer’s original blog post, he responded via E-mail, “I am not ready to comment on Bryan Fischer at this time, beyond our radio discussion of AIDS until I had a chance to talk to him directly. I have seen too many examples, including my own, where a scientifically correct point of view is twisted into a politically incorrect one, to diminish an opponents [sic] character.”

He also wrote, “I do not ‘marginalize’ male or female homosexuals. On the contrary, I have sacrifized [sic] status and career investments to find a scientific answer to AIDS, which is primarily a gay syndrome in the US.”

Duesberg may not seek to marginalize LGBT people (though, according to the Discover article, he repeatedly referred to them as “homos”) – but Bryan Fischer certainly does. Summing up his takeaway from Duesberg in a blog post yesterday, he wrote, “Bottom line? HIV does not cause AIDS. So let’s immediately stop spending billions of dollars trying to kill a harmless microbe. And secondly, let’s tell homosexuals to stop sleeping with other men, stop using poppers, and stop shooting up. If they listen to that message, public health will improve, everybody will live longer, and taxpayers will be able to keep more of their money. What’s not to like?”

“That,” responded Brian Chase of the Los Angeles-based AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which is pushing the condom ordinance, “might be one of the dumbest things Bryan Fischer’s ever said – and that is saying quite a bit.”

2012-01-05T13:13:00.001-05:00

NATURE | NEWS
Paper refuting HIV–AIDS link secures publication

Work by infamous AIDS contrarian passes peer review.
Zoë Corbyn 05 January 2012
A controversial research paper that argued “there is as yet no proof that HIV causes AIDS" and met with a storm of protest when it was published in 2009, leading to its withdrawal, has been republished in a revised form, this time in the peer-reviewed literature.

The reworked version of the paper, led by Peter Duesberg of the University of California, Berkeley, who is well known for denying the link between HIV and AIDS, was published in the Italian Journal of Anatomy and Embryology (IJAE) last month.

The manuscript was examined by two peer reviewers, one of them the journal's editor-in-chief, Paolo Romagnoli, an expert in cell anatomy at the University of Florence, Italy. But leading AIDS researchers and campaigners question how the paper could have passed peer review, and say that publishing it in a minor journal known to few does not give it scientific credibility or legitimacy.

"In my view this paper is scientific nonsense and should not have passed peer review. The thesis that HIV does not cause AIDS has no scientific credibility," says Nathan Geffen of the South Africa-based Treatment Action Campaign, who previously raised concerns about the article.

Romagnoli says he decided to review the revised paper because the original was withdrawn by Medical Hypotheses not for “flawed or falsified data” but for “highly controversial opinions” — which the IJAE's readers can make up their own minds about.

“Speculative conclusions are not a reason for rejection, provided they are correlated with the data presented,” he says.
Potentially damaging

The paper's initial publication in Medical Hypotheses caused a furore, with attention being drawn to the fact that the journal was not peer reviewed despite being listed in the MEDLINE citation database.

Retrospective peer review later led to the paper's permanent withdrawal from Medical Hypotheses. The grounds stipulated in the withdrawal notice were concerns over the paper's quality and that it contained opinions about the causes of AIDS “that could potentially be damaging to global public health.

The journal's publisher, Elsevier, revamped Medical Hypotheses to introduce peer review and fired editor Bruce Charlton, who resisted the changes. The University of California also bought charges of misconduct against Duesberg over the article's publication, but he was later cleared.

Duesberg says that the revised publication is a “new victory in our long quest for a scientific theory of AIDS”, adding that the new version of the paper was better documented and more up to date.

Although the revised version has been toned down, the article still makes many of the same points as the original — refuting the effectiveness of anti-retroviral drugs, as well as death-toll estimates from HIV and AIDS in South Africa put forward in a study led by AIDS epidemiologist Max Essex of Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts3. “We deduce ... that HIV is not a new killer virus,” Duesberg et al. write, proposing a “reevaluation of the HIV–AIDS hypothesis”.

But Geffen says the paper "contains no new arguments or evidence about the South African data, and these arguments have been rebutted before".

Duesberg admits submitting the revised paper to more than four other journals before it was accepted by theIJAE, and only alerted his co-authors to the publication after he was sure it wouldn't be aborted at the last minute.
Dangerous distraction

"It is just so far out that it is hard to respond in an intelligent way," says Essex, adding that it is "unfortunate" to see Duesberg continuing on a "dangerous track of distraction that has persuaded some people to avoid treatment or prevention of HIV infection".

Yet whether the publication will be officially challenged remains to be seen. John Moore, an HIV researcher at Cornell University in New York, who lodged a complaint with Elsevier when the original paper was published, believes that the movement to deny the link between HIV and AIDS is on its “last legs”. Geffen, meanwhile, thinks the likelihood the paper will have significant impact — and therefore warrant challenge — is small.

“Duesberg's views no longer have significant political support, like they did in South Africa in the 2000s,” Geffen says. ”No one of consequence in government is likely to take any notice.”

Kim Bannon has Passed Away

2011-11-17T16:09:00.001-05:00

Kim Bannon in AIDS Denialist film
'House of Numbers'

Kim Marie Bannon-Barber, 48, certified court reporter, passed away Tuesday, November 15, 2011. A celebration of Kim's life will be held, 1 p.m., Saturday, November 19, West Heights United Methodist Church. Private family inurnment will follow at a later date. Kim was born in Topeka, Kansas, graduated from Goddard High School as salutatorian of her class and was captain of the Roaring Wheatchix Drill Team. She loved to be outdoors riding horses, water and snow skiing and rollerblading. Preceded in death by grandparents, Gordon Barber, Mick Ewing and Erma McQuirk. Survivors: parents, Raymond and Anne (Ewing) Barber of Wichita; grandmother, Mary Barber of Topeka; her little dog, Daisy; aunts, uncles, cousins and many, many friends. Memorial established with Sweet Emergency Fund in memory of Kim Barber, 1010 N. Kansas, Wichita, KS 67214. Downing & Lahey Mortuary West. Tributes may be sent to the family via www.dlwichita.com

No comments will are being accepted on this post out of respect for Kim and her family. An earlier post on Kim can be found here.

The Truth, Nothing But the Truth: Celia Farber's Defamation Claim Against AIDS Activist Is Dismissed

2011-11-08T10:02:00.002-05:00

Journalist's Defamation Claim Against AIDS Activist Is Dismissed

Brendan Pierson

New York Law Journal

November 8, 2011

A state judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed by a journalist against a prominent AIDS activist for allegedly defaming her in a public dispute over an article she wrote challenging the scientific consensus that AIDS is caused by the human immunodeficiency virus.

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Louis B. York ruled last week in Farber v. Jefferys, 106399/09, that the journalist, Celia Farber, was a public figure for the purpose of the lawsuit and that her defamation claims against AIDS activist Richard Jefferys could not survive the heightened scrutiny required for public figures.

Ms. Farber began covering the AIDS epidemic for Spin magazine in the 1980s. While at Spin, she conducted a sympathetic interview with Peter Duesberg, a professor of biology at the University of California at Berkeley who rejects the scientific consensus that AIDS is caused by HIV. Mr. Duesberg claims the disease is caused by recreational drug use, and is sometimes aggravated by antiviral drugs used to treat it. He contends that HIV is a harmless "passenger virus" and has argued that the pharmaceutical industry has suppressed dissent in order to sell antiviral drugs.

Ms. Farber continued to give sympathetic coverage to Mr. Duesberg and write skeptically of the medical establishment on the issue of AIDS, culminating in a 2006 article in Harper's, "Out of Control," in which she castigated "so-called community AIDS activists" who "were sprung like cuckoo birds from grandfather clocks." Ms. Farber and Harper's drew harsh criticism for the article. A group of doctors and activists, including Mr. Jefferys, head of the anti-AIDS Treatment Action Group, published a widely circulated 56-point refutation of the article.

In 2008, the Semmelweis Society International, an organization formed to support whistleblowers in the medical field, announced that it was going to give an award to Ms. Farber and Mr. Duesberg for their dissent about AIDS. The group said the award was prompted by the Harper's article.

After learning of the award, Mr. Jefferys sent a Semmelweiss employee an e-mail saying that Ms. Farber and Mr. Duesberg were "not whistleblowers" but "simply liars." He said he could provide numerous examples of their dishonesty, including "altering of quotes from the scientific literature, false representations of published papers, etc." This e-mail is the core of Ms. Farber's defamation suit. She said the e-mail was circulated among members of Congress and the media, that it was false and that it was intended to destroy her reputation.

Mr. Jefferys filed a pre-answer motion to dismiss the lawsuit. He said the e-mail was true, and that Ms. Farber was a public figure, making her defamation claims subject to a heightened standard of scrutiny.

Justice York agreed. He noted that Ms. Farber has been writing about AIDS since the 1980s and has spoken at conferences on the subject. He also pointed to examples submitted to the court by Ms. Farber of hostile online statements made about her by AIDS activists. These examples, he said, actually hurt her case.

"Although her purpose is to show the animus of the traditional HIV/AIDS community and impugn defendants' motives in making their statements against her, it also illustrates dramatically that, to AIDS activists angry at the dissenters, Farber has a celebrity status and notoriety," he said.

"Finally, Farber acknowledges that the article 'Out of Control' appeared in Harper's magazine, which has a widespread reputation; that the publication of 'Out of Control' generated enormous attention and publicity not only for the article but for her as its author, resulting in a series of articles about both; that internationally known members of the traditional HIV/AIDS community felt compelled to publish a lengthy document refuting the contentions in 'Out of Control,'" the judge wrote.

"Thus, Farber's own complaint and the papers she submits in opposition to this motion establish that, in the limited context of issues surrounding AIDS and HIV dissenters and the question of whether HIV causes AIDS, she is a public figure," he said.

Furthermore, Justice York said, even if Ms. Farber were not a public figure, Mr. Jefferys' e-mail would be subject to a heightened standard because it involved a matter of public concern. Allowing the defamation claims to go forward would have a chilling effect on the public discourse on an important subject, he wrote.

The judge also rejected Ms. Farber's argument that the suit should go forward even under a heightened standard because Mr. Jefferys' e-mail showed gross negligence.

"Here, Jefferys relied on numerous reliable sources," the judge wrote. "Thus, Jefferys did not exhibit constitutional malice or gross irresponsibility when he relied on them and on his own prior professional research to reach his conclusions about Farber's work as a journalist in 'Out of Control' and her other writings."

Ms. Farber had focused on the word "liar" as an example of gross negligence. But Justice York said that "liar" was just an example of the heated rhetoric around the dispute, noting that Ms. Farber had used similar rhetoric herself.

"Through the various references to him and other 'so-called activists' in the Harper's piece, she strongly suggests that Jefferys and others lie, twist facts or hide data in order to remain in the good graces of the pharmaceutical companies which support them financially," he wrote. "She also accuses him of lying about whether there is a debate as to the cause of AIDS. …Indeed, in her affidavit in support of her opposition, Farber hurls accusations at Jefferys which are strikingly similar to those he has hurled at her."

Andrew T. Miltenberg of Nesenhoff & Miltenberg, counsel to Ms. Farber, said in an e-mailed statement that "We are undeterred and looking forward to appealing this important case. Ideology and belief trumped documented facts in this decision, which is precisely the matter at the heart of this lawsuit. To date, neither Harper's itself nor a single source in Farber's article have disputed her facts.

"We will continue to fight to preserve freedom of the press so that those who report true stories that are unpopular, or threaten industries, are not in a position to be professionally assassinated by the very people whose wrong-doings are exposed. This case is not about a single journalist but about the fate of journalism itself, which has been over-run by vested interests who deploy intimidation tactics to control the press."

Mr. Jefferys was represented by Joseph Evall of Gibson Dunn & Crutcher. He declined to comment.

Don't Tell it so Straight: New Scientist Magazine takes on the anti-science movement

2011-11-06T12:59:00.000-05:00

Published in New Scientist Magazine

October 31, 2011

by Peter Aldhous

Opponents of science are experts at winning the battle for hearts and minds. It’s time to learn their game and beat them at it, says Peter Aldhous

JOHN HOLDREN, science adviser to President Barack Obama, is a clever man. But when it comes to the science of communication, he can say some dumb things. In January, Holdren welcomed the prospect of climatologists being called to testify before Congress: “I think we’ll probably move the opinions of some of the members of Congress who currently call themselves sceptics, because I think a lot of good scientists are going to come in and explain very clearly what we know and how we know it and what it means, and it’s a very persuasive case.”

Fat chance.

In March, an impressive array of climate scientists did exactly what Holdren wanted, but their efforts seemed only to inflame the scepticism of Republicans opposed to regulation of emissions. For researchers who study how people form their opinions, and how we are influenced by the messages we receive, it was all too predictable. Holdren’s prescription was a classic example of the “deficit model” of science communication, which assumes that mistrust of unwelcome scientific findings stems from a lack of knowledge. Ergo, if you provide more facts, scepticism should melt away. This approach appeals to people trained to treat evidence as the ultimate arbiter of truth.

The problem is that in many cases, it just doesn’t work.

Perversely, just giving people more information can sometimes polarise views and cause sceptics to harden their line. “We can preach the scientific facts as long as we want,” says Dietram Scheufele, a specialist in science communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “This is replicating the same failed experiment over and over again.”

Soft science

The good news is that the latest research on communication and public opinion reveals strategies that anyone who wants political debate to be informed by accurate scientific information should be able to use to get their message across.

Indeed, given recent comments from some Republican presidential hopefuls, it may be high time US scientists put aside their own scepticism about the “soft” social sciences, and embrace what these studies have to say.

First, though, a bit of perspective. While some of the comments made recently by Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and others may seem alarming, it’s important to bear in mind the relatively narrow audience they were intended to reach.

This is presidential primary season, when candidates must appeal to the most ideologically committed voters to win their party’s nomination. When Perry invoked Galileo in contending that “the science is not settled” on climate change, it was a message crafted to appeal to hard-core Republican voters and big-money donors within the oil and coal industries – not to the majority of Americans who accept that our planet is getting warmer and that human activities are largely to blame.

In fact, few objective measures support the idea that fundamentally anti-science ideology has taken hold in the US. Scientists are generally held in high public esteem, scientific knowledge shapes up fairly well compared to other nations, public interest is high and investment in research remains healthy. “You can’t find a society that’s more pro-science,” argues Dan Kahan of Yale University. Even so, there are a few key areas of US public opinion where this picture begins to break down. People aren’t empty vessels waiting to receive information. Instead, we all filter and interpret knowledge through our cultural perspectives, and these perspectives are often more powerful than the facts. That poses a problem for some areas of science, which have come to clash with the values of a sizeable proportion of the US population.

Evolution provides the clearest example. Religion is a bigger factor in the lives of Americans than it is for citizens of most other developed countries. Evangelical Christian churches that preach literal interpretations of Genesis are especially influential. No wonder the US comes near the bottom of the pile in international surveys measuring the percentage of people who accept evolution (see “Darwin’s doubters”, p 41).

Cultural filters also explain why some social conservatives – including Bachmann – are willing to believe anecdotal reports that the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine can cause mental retardation. Here, evidence that the vaccine is effective and poses little risk is being filtered through the fear that a product designed to protect against a sexually transmitted virus will encourage promiscuity among teenage girls.

Such biases are not the preserve of the right – many of those who falsely believe that childhood vaccines cause autism are left-leaning supporters of “natural” medicine who distrust the pharmaceutical industry. But on climate change, again, it is those on the right who are butting heads with scientists.

Climate is especially interesting because polling indicates a relatively recent and strengthening ideological split on the issue (see “Divisive climate”, p 41). The most ardent sceptics are those who identify with the Tea Party movement, according to a poll run earlier this year for the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. For these voters, the cultural filter seems to be the idea that taking action to limit climate change means “big government” intervention in the US economy, anathema to staunch conservatives.

Hammering another nail into the coffin of the deficit model, Kahan’s latest survey of more than 1500 US adults indicates that far from overcoming our cultural biases, education actually strengthens them. among those with greater numeracy and scientific literacy, opinions on climate change polarised even more strongly.

Kahan’s explanation is that we have a strong interest in mirroring the views of our own cultural group. The more educated we become, he argues, the better we get at making the necessary triangulation to adopt the “correct” opinions. On issues like climate change, for most people these cultural calculations trump any attempt to make an objective assessment of the evidence. As well as explaining how intelligent and educated people come to misunderstand where the scientific consensus lies, Kahan’s work suggests a way to drag debate back towards what the science actually says: change the messenger.

Trusted voices

Kahan scores people on two cultural scales: heirarchists versus egalitarians and individualists versus communitarians. Liberals tend to be egalitarian-communitarian, while conservatives are more often hierarchical-individualist.

In one experiment Kahan examined attitudes to the HPV vaccine. When presented with balanced arguments for and against giving the vaccine to schoolgirls, 70 per cent of egalitarian-communitarians, and 56 per cent of hierarchical-individualists, thought it was safe to do so.

Kahan then attributed the arguments to fictional experts described so as to make them appear either egalitarian- communication (liberal) or hierarchical- individualist (conservative). The “natural” pairing, with an egalitarian- communitarian arguing in favour of the vaccine, and a hierarchical-individualist arguing against, drove the two camps a little further apart. But, crucially, swapping the messengers around had a dramatic effect: 58 per cent of egalitarian-communitarians and 61 per cent of hierarchical-individualists rated the vaccine as safe (Law and Human Behavior, vol 34, p 501).

These findings suggest that one way to change people’s minds is to find someone they identify with to argue the case. Climate scientists have almost certainly been badly served by allowing former Democratic vice- president Al Gore to become the dominant voice on the issue. His advocacy will Have convinced liberals, but is bound to have contributed to the rejection of mainstream climate science by many conservatives. So who might do a better job of carrying the climate message to conservative ears? Perhaps the US military, which is worried about the security implications of climate change, or senior figures within the insurance industry, who are factoring the risk of more frequent severe weather events into their calculations.

Of course, scientists themselves could step up to the plate. But their powers of persuasion may be limited. While it wasn’t always so, US scientists tend to lean heavily towards the Democrats’ camp – which helps explain why the idea of climatologists forming part of a liberal conspiracy to whip up alarm and keep federal research dollars flowing has become part of the climate deniers’ narrative.

The appeal of this story to those on the political right illustrates another key finding: how a message is framed in relation to the cultural biases of the intended recipients is crucial to its persuasiveness. The Seattle-based Discovery Institute, a conservative think-tank that seeks to undermine the teaching of evolution in US schools, has learned this lesson well. After failing to get biblical creationism taught in science classes, the institute came back with the “scientific” concept of intelligent design, and two carefully researched talking points: “evolution is just a theory” and “teach the controversy”.

Not only were these frames attractive to the religious right, they were also difficult for scientists to counter without seeming to endorse censorship. Especially clever was the use of the term “theory”. To many people the word is roughly synonymous with “hunch”, so the frame did its intended job of questioning Darwinism’s credibility.

Matthew Nisbet, a communication specialist at American University in Washington DC, has long argued that scientists need to do a better job of framing (Science, vol 316, p 56). Working with Edward Maibach of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, Nisbet recently found that framing action on climate change in terms of public health benefits prompts a positive response from a broad range of Americans, including those who are ambivalent when it is framed as an environmental issue (BMC Public Health, vol 10, p 299).

Another promising frame is the idea that climate change presents an economic opportunity for the US through the creation of “green jobs”, although in recent weeks this rallying cry has been muffled by the controversy surrounding the Californian solar power firm Solyndra, which went bankrupt despite being loaned more than $500 million by the Obama administration.

Still, Scheufele is convinced that the most effective frames for communicating about climate change will ultimately revolve around economic opportunities, as concerns about the economy are usually where political debates are won and lost.

For many scientists, talk of “framing” and “selling” ideas to the public sounds uncomfortably like misinformation through the dark art of spin. This misses the point, argue advocates of framing. It’s possible to communicate accurately about science in the context of an engaging frame, they say.

New research demonstrates the value of another mode of communication that should come more naturally to scientists. Jason Reifler of Georgia State University in Atlanta and Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, tested two different ways of presenting the same information about temperature records to people who identified themselves as “strong Republicans” sceptical about human-caused climate change. One was in the form of a line graph, the other plain text.

The text had little effect, but the graph made the strong Republicans more likely to acknowledge that global warming is both real and a consequence of human activities. “Given sufficiently unambiguous graphical information, people are much more likely to acknowledge the facts,” Nyhan and Reifler concluded, in a paper presented in September at the American Political Science Association’s meeting in Seattle.

Taken together, studies of communication provide a recipe to allow science to better inform US political debate: find frames that work with broad sections of the population and stick closely to those narratives; seek allies from across the political spectrum who can reach out to diverse audiences; and remember that a graph can be worth a thousand words. While there’s little evidence the US is in the thrall of a coherent anti-science movement, the penalty for failing to follow this recipe could be the election of a president who is blind to the true scientific consensus on some of the key issues of our time.

Experience elsewhere provides a cautionary tale, argues Seth Kalichman of the University of Connecticut in Storrs, who studies the movement that denies that HIV causes AIDS. Thabo Mbeki’s flirtation with this movement and his refusal to endorse the use of antiretroviral drugs during his tenure as South Africa’s president has been estimated to have caused more than 300,000 premature deaths (Journal of AIDS, vol 49, p 410).

“You could very easily end up with a US president who holds unscientific views, and that could be as damaging as Mbeki was inSouth Africa,” Kalichman warns.

READ THE ENTIRE STORY @ New Scientist Magazine

Surprise (NOT): AIDS Deniers Contribute to Vax Hysteria

2011-11-02T13:54:00.004-04:00

This article relies heavily on an interview with Rethinking AIDS Board Member Christian Fiala. It is no surprise that AIDS Deniers have their hands in anti-vaccine hysteria; but it is not any less disturbing.

Gardasil controversy soars, as Bachmann, Perry drop Drug blasted as 'money-making machine' that's useless in fighting cervical cancer
Posted: October 02, 2011
By Bob Unruh
© 2011 WND

Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann, two presidential candidates who sparred over the issue of Texas vaccinations, may be floundering in the polls, but the topic of Merck's controversial Gardasilis heating up – with an Austrian physician who studied the drug saying it is not only dangerous, but useless in reducing cervical cancer, the stated reason it would have been administered to young girls under an executive order from Gov. Perry.

Dr. Christian Fiala, who successfully fought the use of the drug in Austria, told WND this week "there is no proof of a causal relationship of HPV and cervical cancer (correlation is not necessarily causation) and there is no evidence that HPV vaccine reduces the overall number of cervical cancer (cases)."

'SCARY MEDICINE: Exposing the dark side of vaccines'

In an email, Fiala called the HPV vaccination plan "a money-making machine without any benefit for patients. But some inherent risks."

Officials report that there have been 17,500 or more "adverse" incident reports that have been made over the last few years because of the use of the vaccination.

Fiala, who fought the idea of vaccination with Gardasil as part of a national health standard in Austria, says he was targeted by the vaccine developers for his findings.

"The doctors involved in vaccine development submitted an official complaint ... accusing me of doing harm to the image of doctors," Fiala said. "The investigation did not go far, because I could show that I fully respect evidence based on medicine. Therefore, the investigation was closed. But it could have cost me the right to [practice] medicine. It was meant as a threat."

He said that while he was arguing over the application of the medicine, an 18-year-girl was found dead in her bed.

"She had been absolutely healthy before her death, except some central nervous symptoms in the few days prior to her death. … This happened three weeks post-HPV vaccination," he said.

Then, another girl, 16, was hospitalized with similar symptoms and was in intensive care for a week before she started recovering.

"For obvious reasons this slowed down the enthusiasm for the vaccine in Austria," he said.

As a result, the product is not greatly promoted in his country, "and it is used infrequently."

Dr. Jane Orient of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons also told WND that she battled Perry's plan in 2007 and 2008 to inoculated school girls.

"Our position was that this was a violation of parental rights and patients' rights, to mandate a vaccine without a really good public health reason," she said.

She pointed out that the HPV virus is spread only by sexual contact and not in routine school situations. And she said there were a lot of questions about the brand new drug, among them the direct link between the HPV vaccine and any side effects.

"It tends to worry me quite a lot if I give a shot and [a patient] drops dead," she said.

"It should be that the patient is the one to make the determination [to get vaccinated]; the state should not be demanding that little girls be subjected to this."

She told WND that it was good for the issue to be raised at the level of a presidential race, because the public needs to debate and decide such issues.

When Bachmann raised the issue,the traditional media attacked her for asserting that the vaccine could be dangerous and should not be imposed by government.

The Bachmann attack "may be hurting her considerably more than him," stated theInternational Business Times, citing her narrative about a mother who complained the treatment had injured her daughter. "Bachmann did not offer any scientific evidence to suggest there is actually a viable link between Gardasil and mental retardation."

The report said: "Of the 35 million doses of Gardasil distributed in the U.S., only about 0.05 percent of individuals who have been vaccinated have reported some kind of side effect, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Mental retardation was not one of them."

The Washington Post joined the criticism, saying, "Her offense quickly turned to defense when her comments were criticized by an extremely long list of groups and people, including Rush Limbaugh, the Washington Post editorial board, Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Centers for Disease Control.

"In the wake of Bachmann's comments," the report continued, "there doesn't seem to be a rush of stories questioning the safety of Gardasil. There appears to be only one such story: a WISH-TV Indianapolis report about Zeda Pingel, whose mother claims she's suffered health problems after being vaccinated."

The Student Life publication at Washington University accused Bachmann of making verbal gaffes.

"The virus itself is the most common sexually transmitted infection. According to the Centers for Disease Control, some 50 percent of sexually active American adults will contract HPV during their lifetimes. HPV is a very real problem, and this vaccine can help prevent its spread.

"With women comprising half our population, that this claim, which can do nothing but hurt women's health, was made is concerning," the publication said.

Some 17,500 individuals have suffered side effects such as Guillain-Barre Syndrome, Bell's Palsy and even death.

In the debate, Bachmann said Perry's act was "a violation of liberty interests."

"We cannot forget in the midst of this executive order, there was a big drug company that made millions of dollars because of this mandate," she continued. "Is it about life or about millions of dollars for a drug company?"

Perry said the donation from the vaccine maker, Merck, was only $5,000, and he was insulted if Bachmann was suggesting he could be "bought for $5,000."

"I'm offended for all the little girls who didn't have a choice. That's what I'm offended for," she responded.

Neither the Bachmann nor the Perry campaigns returned WND requests for comment.

But critics of Perry point out that the vaccine is supposed to address a disease only transmitted by sexual activity, and the issue isn't the mundane, clinical argument that Gardasil supporters portray.

At the What Doctors Don't Tell You blog, a campaign called Truth About Gardasil was highlighted.

"What they are not telling you is that thousands of girls are having adverse reactions to the HPV vaccines, some have even died – at last count, at least 103 lives have been lost. We have got to do something about this. These girls need our help! These girls are having reactions such as; seizures, strokes, dizziness, fatigue, weakness, headaches, stomach pains, vomiting, muscle pain and weakness, joint pain, auto-immune problems, chest pains, hair loss, appetite loss, personality changes, insomnia, hand/leg tremors, arm/leg weakness, shortness of breath, heart problems, paralysis, itching, rashes, swelling, aching muscles, pelvic pain, nerve pain, menstrual cycle changes, fainting, swollen lymph nodes, night sweats, nausea, temporary vision/hearing loss just to name some of them!"

Actually, the government itself has documented deaths from reactions to the vaccine, although the total doesn't match the blog's claim of fatalities.

Anecdotally, the government's documents confirm:

The case of a 19-year-old woman who was given Gardasil and reported, "Headache, nausea, dizziness, chilling, tiredness, shortness of breath, complained of chest pain, severe cramps." She died of "acute cardiac arrhythmia."

A 13-year-old girl was vaccinated and, 10 days later, developed fever. According to federal reports she "did not recover and was admitted to the hospital. … She developed dyspnoea and went into a coma … she expired [that day]."

And a 10-year-old developed "progressive loss of strength in lower and upper extremities almost totally ... nerve conduction studies [showed Guillain-Barre syndrome]." The case was considered "immediately life-threatening."

Those reports have been monitored over the years byJudicial Watch,a Washington watchdog corruption fighter, since the drug's approval by the Food and Drug Administration

"To say Gardasil has a suspect safety record is a big understatement. These reports are troubling and show that the FDA and other public-health authorities may be asleep at the switch," Tom Fitton, president of the organization, told WND when the death and injury reports were arriving.

Judicial Watch launched a comprehensive investigation of Gardasil's safety record in 2008 after the drug's manufacturer,Merck & Co., began a major effort to lobby in state legislatures to impose requirements that girls be given their product.

It was in 2008 when Judicial Watch obtained documents from the FDA documenting "anaphylactic shock," "foaming at mouth," "grand mal convulsion," "coma" and "now paralyzed" descriptions of the complications from Gardasil. The company wanted it to be mandatory for all schoolgirls.

The federal reports document some three dozen deaths in the United States, although an activist organization claims there have been almost 70 deaths, nearly 800 "serious" reactions and thousands of minor reactions.

Merck spokeswoman Jennifer Allen Woodruff told WND that the drug addresses a medical need, that of reducing the rates of HPV.

She said it has been approved widely around the world, with 120 countries having examined and approved its use.

"Nothing is more important to Merck than the safety of our vaccines and those who use them," she said. "The facts about Gardasil are clear and its efficacy and safety … were established."

She declined to say that Merck had not lobbied state lawmakers for laws that would force the vaccine on children and families, instead offering that the company focused on lobbying efforts regarding the "potential school requirements" in some states.

She said the company's goal was simply to provide information to those who made such decisions.

However, the vaccine has had a few bumps. Agence France-Presse reported in 2009 that Spanish authorities withdrew tens of thousands of doses of the vaccine when two teen girls were hospitalized.

In the United Kingdom, an investigation was launched after two young girls died following their injections of the drug.

And the Daily News and Analysis from India said the Indian Council of Medical Research suspended a cervical cancer control vaccination program for girls after four deaths and complications for 120 more.

The Truth about Gardasilhas launched a videocalled One More Girl that publicizes "questions" about Gardasil's safety.

Rethinking AIDS: When 99% of the world disagrees, we must be right

2011-10-23T10:12:00.005-04:00

The AIDS Denialists are planning their World AIDS Day conference. If you are in Washington on December 1, you should drop by the Washington Court Hotel. In case you find it hard to believe that anyone in 2011 questions the existence of HIV, seeing these guys is believing. Here is the latest announcement that Rethinking AIDS emailed to potential attendees. Remember, this is not a joke, at least it is not meant to be a joke.

UPDATE: As discussed in comments below, the AIDS Deniers have cancelled their 2011 Rethinking AIDS conference.
So sad.
The reason is obvious --
a clash of delusions.
The AIDS denier camps are fighting, again. There is a battle between those who say HIV does not exist (Perthians) and those who say HIV exists but is harmless (Duesbergians).
I am not sure why they just don't have a denialist debate? What are they afraid of? I would be happy to sponsor the debate and host it on this blog.
Any takers?
Have a few minutes for some mindless entertainment? Visit the Rethinking AIDS page in Facebook.
******************************************************************

RETHINKING AIDS 2011

99% of the world believes that HIV causes AIDS and quickly death, that HIV is sexually transmitted and that lifelong treatment with AIDS drugs is necessary.
We, at Rethinking AIDS, are the 1% who have the evidence that this is false. Join us at our December 1-3 Rethinking AIDS 2011 conference in Washington DC.For further details and information, please visit www.ra2011.org

Program

The conference will start with the keynote speech, "The Racist Face of HIV/AIDS", by Neville Hodgkinson, former Sunday Times science reporter. Neville was once a fervent promoter of mainstream views but, once he started considering the evidence, adopted the opposite viewpoint, eventually costing him his job. Click here to see the full program

Screening
Another highlight of RA2011 will be the North American premiere of "Positively False: Birth of a Heresy" by Joan Shenton and Andi Reiss. Joan is well known for the documentaries she made for major British channels in the 1980s and 1990s, eventually causing her to be blacklisted. Click here to learn more about this documentary

Speakers
There will be two full days of educational sessions on Friday December 2nd and Saturday December 3rd with participation from well known AIDS rethinkers like Duesberg, Rasnick and Giraldo as well as new voices like MDs Matt Irwin and Nancy Banks, breastfeeding advocate Marian Tompson, and long term survivor of the diagnosis, Raul Ehrichs de Palma. Click here to see all speakers

Free Session
If you know someone in the Washington DC area who could benefit from this information but might be reluctant to pay for the conference, suggest that they register for the free, two-hour, pre-conference session led by Rethinking AIDS president David Crowe, former Virginia Tech dean Dr. Henry Bauer and Nancy Turner Banks, MD.

Event details: December 1-3, 2011 | Washington, DC | Washington Court Hotel

An Open Letter to Clark Baker from Concerned Citizen

2011-10-14T10:36:00.001-04:00

Dear Mr. Baker,

You recently wrote a letter to Dr. Kalichman requesting his expertise in HIV Criminalization Cases. You made this request for the prosecution, even though you speciously claim to work for the defense. Would you consider this to be an ethical request? If you wish to be accepted as a serious, respected, criminal justice professional, a letter with such childish pandering does not bode well for your credibility. It is not only unprofessional to taunt a man credentialed and well respected in his field, it also gives you the appearance of a bully. It is also a waste of Dr. Kalichman’s precious time.

Strategy & Slander

First you mention the so called strategy of OMSJ. Your stated strategy in the letter is to go over the medical and scientific evidence to be used by the prosecution and “render opinions as to whether they have sufficient evidence or not.” That is the only truth I have ever seen you write. You admit that what you are offering is opinion; speculation; conjecture. How could you offer an educated opinion when you do not accept the current, accepted science of HIV? Or when you do not have the necessary education or experience to render a valid opinion? This obvious oversight on your part is not lost on logical, mentally stable people.

However, the true strategy as stated at your OMSJ site is to perpetuate an agenda of “HIV Science as incoherent gibberish”. You state that “HIV tests are worthless” and that “HIV tests are designed to do nothing more than market HIV as a disease.” You accuse HIV Scientists, Researchers and Doctors as being “Pharma Sluts” and anyone else who disagrees with you as “meth trannies.” How can you make these ridiculous, unsubstantiated and libelous accusations and expect to be taken seriously?

Specific Slander of Dr. Kalichman

In your letter to Dr. Kalichman, you write: “As you know, OMSJ has been extremely impressed by your knowledge and expertise in the field of HIV and AIDS.” And yet there are several examples of your extreme libel and slander of Dr. Kalichman at all 3 of your websites. In July of 2010 you wrote at your Ex-Liberal site that “Professor Kalichman is paid $17 Million Dollars to write (this blog), Denying AIDS and to write harassing emails.” That proves not only your insincerity, but your complete disregard for the truth.

Contradictions VS Proof

The contents of your letter were also contradictory as well as lacking in substance and facts. For example, you claimed that OMSJ has “been involved in several dozen cases since 2009.” However, you only list 28 cases at your OMSJ site not 36. Where are the other 8 cases, Mr. Baker? You also falsely profess a glowing success in “every case that defense attorneys have worked with OMSJ.” I have an entire website in which I meticulously document the truth behind those cases you list at OMSJ. Even though you merely list the name of a defendant and a link to an original news article of the arrest, I have spent a great deal of time documenting case numbers, court documents, attorney records, correspondence with attorneys and court clerks as well as current news articles specific to the outcome of the case. Here is a true summary of why charges were dropped in 8 of your 28 cases:

Charges Dropped Due to Precedent Established in Previous Case

1. Shan Ortiz

2. Darren Chiacchia

Charges Dropped Due to Defendant Testing HIV Negative on ELISA

1. Jose Alex Perez

2. Daniel Hay Lewis

3. Shan Ortiz - this defendant was also shown to be mentally unstable and did not commit the crime of molesting a child. Also, the physical examination of the child confirmed the child was not molested.

Plea Deals - Both Defendants Convicted; Received Incarceration and Fine

1. Cordlin Comer - This was a plea deal. The first time the plea was offered, the defendant turned it down "waiting for medical records". Once they received the medical records proving the defendant was indeed HIV+, the defendant accepted the exact same plea deal, not a reduced plea. One charge was dropped (and the defendant married that accuser who also gave birth to their child).

2. Jerome Walker - HIV Tests proved the defendant was HIV+. He was convicted of 2 of 4 charges and 2 years of confinement.

Attorney Confirmation via email

1. Daniel Allen - Attorney James Galen sent me an email verifying that Baker lied about being "instrumental" in this case. Mr. Galen went on to confirm Mr. Baker not useful at all.

All of these cases prove definitively that you have lied about at least 8 cases that you claim “complete success”. Several of these cases have charges dropped as a direct result of the very science and HIV Tests you claim to be fraudulent and worthless. How do you accommodate for those facts? Detailed information about these cases can be found at the HIV Innocence Project.

How else will you chose to embarrass yourself, Mr. Baker? How about coming clean and provide some transparency? How about providing specifics as to exactly how you have helped each case? How about providing some information about your staff of experts and attorneys? Or is OMSJ just one man perjuring himself with phony affidavits?

Vaccine Hysteria Takes Hold in the USA

2011-10-01T22:37:00.000-04:00

Vaccines not safe, say one of four Americans in new poll
Posted on October 1, 2011 by Stone Hearth News

ANN ARBOR, Mich. and WASHINGTON, Sept. 30, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — More than one-quarter of Americans are concerned about the value and safety of vaccines and 21.4 percent believe vaccines can cause autism, according to the Thomson Reuters-NPR Health Poll.

Thomson Reuters and NPR conduct the monthly poll to gauge attitudes and opinions on a wide range of health issues.

In the latest survey in the series, 26.6 percent of respondents expressed concern over the safety of vaccines. Households with children under the age of 18 demonstrated the greatest level of concern (30.8%). The lowest level of concern (18.5%) was found in respondents 65 years old and up.

Among those with concerns, 47.3 percent attributed their fear of vaccines to future long-term impact on health and 46.0 percent said they were worried about side effects.

Nearly one in five said they have questioned or refused a vaccine for themselves or their children — with a higher rate among those under 35 (28.1 percent) and a lower rate among those 65 and older (12.7 percent).

When asked about specific safety concerns, 21.4 percent of respondents said they believe vaccines can cause of autism, 9.2 percent said they believe vaccines can be linked to cancer, 6.9 percent believe they play a role in diabetes, and 5.9 percent cite a connection between vaccines and heart disease.

Overall, 24 percent of respondents said their opinions of vaccines have changed in the past five years. Of those, 59 percent say their views on vaccines have become less favorable.

“Ironically, these survey results are a testament to the effectiveness of vaccines: older people remember what illnesses like polio did to cripple and kill patients, but the younger generation has never seen someone with polio,” said Raymond Fabius, M.D., chief medical officer at the healthcare business of Thomson Reuters. “Because of the elimination of diseases through immunization, there is a lack of understanding that the benefit of vaccines greatly outweighs the minimal risks of side effects both short and long term.”

For a copy of the vaccine survey results. click here

To date, the Thomson Reuters-NPR Health Poll has explored numerous healthcare topics, including generic drugs, abortion, vaccines, food allergies, and organic and genetically modified foods. NPR’s reports on the surveys are archived online at the Shots health blog here.

The Thomson Reuters-NPR Health Poll is powered by the Thomson Reuters PULSE(SM) Healthcare Survey, an independently funded, nationally representative telephone poll that collects information about health-related behaviors and attitudes and healthcare utilization from more than 100,000 US households annually. Survey questions are developed in conjunction with NPR. The figures in this month’s poll are based on 3,011 participants interviewed from August 1-16, 2011. The margin of error is 1.8 percent.

Worst Case Scenario: Michele Bachmann Launches into Total Vaccine Hysteria

2011-09-13T13:04:00.000-04:00

On the national stage of presidential primary politics, Rep. Michele Bachmann is ranting that the HPV vaccine can cause permanent damage to children. The HPV vaccine is safe and over 99% effective in protecting against HPV - the cause of genital warts and linked to cervical cancer. Uptake of the vaccine is already low, with less than 1 in 3 US teenage girls being vaccinated. Coverage is worst among minorities and low income kids. 6 million people are diagnosed with HPV each year, and 12,000 women are diagnosed with cervical cancer. Her misinformed and irresponsible comments will likely do damage to public health, at least among those few who see her as credible.

Bachmann claims HPV vaccine might cause ‘mental retardation’
The Washington Post
Posted by Rachel Weiner at 11:02 AM ET, 09/13/2011

After piling on Texas Gov. Rick Perry in last night’s presidential debate, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) is continuing to attack the 2012 frontrunner for mandating that young girls get the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine.

Perry has apologized for the mandate, saying it was a mistake. One of his former top aides had gone on to become a lobbyist for vaccine-maker Merck & Co. and pushed the governor for an executive order.

Social conservatives argue that the vaccine, which protects against a sexually-transmitted disease that can lead to cervical cancer, encourages promiscuity. Perry’s decision has already riled up conservative activists; it might be Bachmann’s best hope to win back those voters.

Post-debate, the Minnesota congresswoman sent out a fundraising appeal on the issue with the title “I’m Offended.” In interviews after the debate, she suggested that the vaccine could do permanent damage.

“There’s a woman who came up crying to me tonight after the debate. She said her daughter was given that vaccine,” Bachmann said on Fox News. “She told me her daughter suffered mental retardation as a result. There are very dangerous consequences.”

Bachmann repeated the allegation on the “Today Show” this morning, adding, “It’s very clear that crony capitalism could have likely been the cause, because the governor's former chief of staff was the chief lobbyist for this drug company.”

And she’s getting support from a sometime-rival, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin. "You have to go up against the big guns," Palin said on FOX News last night. “And they will try to destroy you, when you call them out on the mistakes that they have made.” The phrase “crony capitalism” is one Palin used in a speech in Iowa last weekend and repeated last night.

The Center for Disease Control notes on its website that less than one percent of recipients reported “adverse events” after receiving the vaccine. Of those, 8 percent were “serious adverse events” — including Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare neurologic disorder that causes paralysis and muscle weakness, not mental problems. According to the CDC, “There has been no indication” that the vaccine “increases the rate of GBS above the rate expected in the general population, whether or not they were vaccinated.”

But Bachmann clearly thinks she’s found a powerful line of attack against Perry, whose entrance into the race helped precipitate her fall in polls.

A Decade Of Denial: 9/11 Truthers Alive and Well

2011-09-11T16:13:00.000-04:00

The Facts Speak For Themselves
Jon Gold
September 11, 2011

Before I begin, I would like to say that theorizing about what happened on 9/11, when you’re not being given answers to your questions about that day by the people who SHOULD be able to do so, is PERFECTLY normal. As is suspecting that the reason these answers aren’t being given is “sinister” in nature. As Ray McGovern said, “for people to dismiss these questioners as “conspiratorial advocates”, or “conspiratorial theorists”… that’s completely out of line because the… The questions remain because the President who should be able to answer them, WILL NOT.” When you think about everything the previous Administration did in 8 years, the idea that they might not be giving us the answers we seek because of something “sinister” is not crazy. In fact, it’s the most logical conclusion one can come to at this point. After years of obfuscation, spin, lies, and cover-ups regarding the 9/11 attacks, it is unavoidable to think that criminal complicity is the reason why.

That being said, we have not proven it beyond the shadow of doubt. We do not have documentation that shows they planned it. We do not have a signed confession from someone. We have pieces of the puzzle, and to most of us that have been doing this a long time, those pieces point to more than just Osama Bin Laden, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and 19 hijackers. If we could somehow download all of our knowledge to every person on the planet, this fight would be over tomorrow. However, we can’t do that. I wish we could. I wish the media would DO THEIR JOB. But, they’re not. Therefore, we have to be smart with how we approach people. This is America, and in America, you are innocent until proven guilty.

As I have often said, we don’t need to come up with a narrative (theory) because our facts speak for themselves. I am going to do my very best to prove my point. A lot of these facts are from mainstream news outlets. Yes, they do report the news, but they DO NOT put the pieces together, they DO NOT ask the tough questions over and over again until they get an answer, they DO NOT give these facts the attention they should, reminiscent of the attention that Britney Spears, Michael Jackson, The Swift Boat Veterans and the “Ground Zero Mosque” got, and they DO NOT portray us in any other light except as “Conspiracy Theorists.”

[See Posting for a discussion of 50 'Facts]
There are so many facts concerning the 9/11 attacks, that it is impossible to know them all. People like to laugh at, and mock our theories (that we all have) concerning the events of 9/11. However, they have a difficult time with the facts. I hope that I have proven my point.

In conclusion, I would like to say that I am convinced some elements within our Government, and others were complicit in the attacks of 9/11. As you can see above, the information that exists today clearly points in that direction. We have pieces to the puzzle, and we KNOW who refuses to give up the other pieces. However, as I said, this is America, and in America, you are innocent until proven guilty. Let’s have a real investigation, be it a domestic or international one, and do what can only be described as the right thing. Holding those responsible for the 9/11 attacks, whoever they may be, accountable. It is long overdue. Justice has never been more needed. The perverse usage of that day can no longer continue. It is time to take away the “9/11 Card,” and let those poor 2,973 souls finally rest in peace.

Clark Baker's Appeal

2011-09-09T16:22:00.002-04:00

Clark Baker with the late Karri Stokely
(died of AIDS after refusing treatment)

AIDS Denialist Clark Baker sent me the following letter. I thought you might enjoy it as much as I did. Does California just hand out Private Detective licenses to anyone who applies?
If you have experienced discrimination due to your HIV status, I recommend that you contact a legitimate legal aide group, such as the HIV/AIDS Law Project or a state organization such as AIDS Law Project Pennsylvania. To learn more about what Clark Baker is up to, particularly the 'cases' he mentions below, visit The HIV Innocence Project Truth.
***********************************
Professor Kalichman:

As you know, OMSJ (Office of Medical and Scientific Justice) has been involved in several dozen criminal HIV cases since October 2009. Our strategy is simple – we ask prosecutors to produce all of the medical and scientific evidence that they plan to use against the accused. We then examine the evidence and render opinions as to whether they have sufficient evidence or not.

In every case that defense attorneys have worked with OMSJ, prosecutors have been forced to significantly reduce or drop all HIV-related criminal charges. Not only is there no evidence that competent physicians have tested and diagnosed their patients, but prosecutors can’t find credible HIV experts who are willing to testify about HIV and AIDS under oath and under penalty of perjury. You’d think that after thirty years as humanity’s biggest existential threat, someone would know somethingabout the testing, treatment and diagnosis of HIV. Sadly, we can’t find any credible experts.

As a trained HIV/AIDS expert, you know that looks very bad. Those pseudo-experts blather all day long about AIDS and HIV but the moment they’re forced to tell the truth in a real courtroom, they recoil like vampires in church. And when asked about their sudden bashfulness, they are as indignant as chocolate-faced six-year-olds who are asked about the missing chocolate cake.

As you know, OMSJ has been extremely impressed by your knowledge and expertise in the field of HIV and AIDS. Because of this, we’d like to forward your name and copies of your CV to prosecutors who are handling our criminal HIV cases. As hopeful as we’ve been to secure a criminal trial, prosecutors are simply giving up when we’re involved. As strange as it seems, the only wins they’ve enjoyed since 2009 have usually occurred in small towns where the accused (usually black men) were defended by white lawyers whose families attend the same schools and ice cream socials as the prosecutors and judges. These lawyers usually say something like we don’t need your services. The next thing you know, their client is goes to prison.

So please let me know if you or Mrs. Kalichman would like to testify as AIDS experts. Prosecutors don’t pay as well as Tony Fauci, but think of the prestige that comes with being a leader in your field. With your help, they might start winning cases. BTW, can you ask Dr. Fauci if he wants to testify as an expert too?

On another note, how many people have written to you complaining about “denialists?” Your list must be getting very long. Let us know if you require any investigative assistance. We’re trained and licensed to do that too.

Cheers!

Clark Baker CPI #26869
PO Box 1507
Studio City, CA 91614-0507
(323) 650-6667
(323) 656-3909 (fax)
www.OMSJ.org
CWBPIØ1 (Skype)

Rethinking AIDS Convention 2011: Will the rooms be padded?

2011-09-06T23:39:00.002-04:00

AIDS denialists will hold their 2011 convention in Washington, DC on December 1, World AIDS Day. The conference will focus on uncovering the US government's and pharmaceutical industry's global conspiracy to sell HIV tests and medications. The conference organizers say "The myth that blames a single retrovirus for a complex multi-factorial syndrome has left in its wake millions of people terrified of an 'HIV test', a pharmacopeia of toxic drugs prescribed without informed consent and an effort by the myth-makers to shut down intelligent public discussion. Thousands of scientists, epidemiologists, academics, physicians, journalists, and activists who oppose the use of toxic medications and inaccurate tests have been called 'denialists', an attempt to equate dissent with those who deny the Nazi Holocaust."

Why Washington DC? Rethinking AIDS says "It was the Washington National Capital area at Robert Gallo's infamous press conference in April 1984 that the infectious theory of AIDS took hold, just before patents were filed and a month before any science had been published. The National Capital area is also home to the National Institutes of Health (Bethesda, MD) that provides the bulk of AIDS research funding in the USA and globally. Washington, DC also has a very large black population and sizable gay community, both of which are targets for AIDS medications. Washington is also the seat of the American government that is a leading promoter of the fear of HIV and AIDS around the world and the consumption of toxic antiretroviral drugs as the dominant means of addressing both treatment and prevention."

The conference is organized by Canadian freelance conspiracy theorist David Crowe, "a science critic and writer based in Calgary, Canada. He has a [Bachelors] degree in biology and [another Bachelors'] mathematics and has written extensively on HIV/AIDS, failures of modern medicine and telecommunications. He was one of the founders of the Green Party of Alberta, and is president of Rethinking AIDS and the Alberta Reappraising AIDS Society." David Crowe has also written extensively as a contributor to cancer screening and treatment denial as well as climate change denial.

Who will you see present at this conference?

Peter Duesberg will address major contradictions between HIV/AIDS statistics as measured in Africa and the classical bell-shape epidemic of an infectious disease.

Charles Geshekter will demonstrate how endemic poverty in Africa explains the fabricated AIDS epidemic, and how simple methods to improve health, rather than condoms and toxic pharmaceuticals, can address the real causes of immune deficiency and disease on the continent.

David Rasnick will explain how the book Disciplined Minds revealed to him the nature of his experiences with colleagues, who exhibited shock, anger and departure when exposed to discussions of flaws in the HIV/AIDS dogma.

Henry Bauer will talk about how HIV/AIDS is not Unique: It Exemplifies the State of Contemporary Medicine

Roberto Giraldo will explain how oxidative stress is a major factor in explaining both positive HIV tests and the various syndromes called "AIDS".

Who will be missing from the conference?

Kim Bannon, outspoken supporter of Rethinking AIDS, suffering from late stage AIDS

The late Karri Stokely, Rethinking AIDS activist, died of AIDS April 2011

The late Emory Taylor, Rethinking AIDS enthusiast, died of AIDS March 2011

The late Lambros Papantoniou, Rethinking AIDS enthusiast, died of AIDS 2009

The late Rex Poindexter, Rethinking AIDS enthusiast, died of AIDS

The Late Christine Maggiore, Rethinking AIDS activist, died of AIDS December 2008

The late Eliza Jane Scovill, daughter of Christine Maggiode, died of AIDS at age 3

Peter Duesberg: Wrong on AIDS and Wrong on Cancer

2011-08-25T22:08:00.008-04:00

Peter Duesberg continues to claim that HIV is a harmless passenger virus that cannot possibly cause AIDS. Although AIDS Denialists rely on Duesberg to spin their alternative universe, Duesberg himself has most recently been focused on cancer. He says that cancer, all cancer, is caused by environmental toxins/carcinogens, an idea dating back to Theordor Boveri in 1914 . Duesberg's assistant, David Rasnick, even claims that the HIV medication AZT causes cancer. Duesberg and Rasnick state that there are no genetic bases for cancer - none!

Peter Duesberg points to Aneuploidy - the abnormal number of chromosomes that are characteristic of cancer cells - as the cause, rather than an effect, of cancer. The article below published in The Scientist discusses important new discoveries that identify the genetic causes of Aneuploidy.

If we know anything about Peter Duesberg it is that the genetic evidence will not change his mind. The bad news is that Duesberg's failed ideas on cancer may be just as destructive as his nutty stand on AIDS. David Rasnick, David Crowe and other Denialists claim that cancer screening is a scam and cancer chemotherapy does not work. They use Duesberg's fringe science to bolster their claims. The article in The Scientist, which does not mention Duesberg, helps to keep people informed. A follow-up article is needed to correct the misinformation spread by Duesberg and his Denialist followers.

Chromosomes and Cancer

Two new papers identify how abnormal chromosome count, or aneuploidy, might relate to cancer.

By Jef Akst | August 18, 2011

Aneuploidy—when the cells of an organism contain more or fewer than the standard number of chromosomes for its species—is found in greater than 90 percent of all human cancers. But how exactly it relates to cancer, and whether it is a cause or merely a consequence of genomic instability, has long been a mystery. Two new studies published today (August 18) inScience show that it’s probably both, pointing to a gene defect that can cause aneuploidy, and elucidating the disastrous effects of aneuploidy on a cell’s genome.

“Aneuploidy is found in virtually all cancers, yet very little is known about its origins or its effects,” said a cancer biologist Bert Vogelstein at Johns Hopkins Medicine, who was not involved in the research. “These two papers provide some really excellent clues to what’s going on.”

The first paper, from Todd Waldman’s group at Georgetown University School of Medicine, identifies a potential cause of aneuploidy—a gene that encodes a protein subunit of the cohesin complex, which plays a key role in correctly separating sister chromatids during cell division. An MD/PhD student in Waldman’s lab, David Solomon, was examining brain tumors for missing genomic regions when he stumbled upon a sample that was missing the gene STAG2. He then looked at a dozen or so other brain tumors and found that several of them were similarly not expressing STAG2.

“And then we expanded our study to a variety of other tumor types and found that inactivation ofSTAG2 was actually quite common in a diverse range of human cancers,” Waldman said. Specifically, the team found evidence of mutated or missing STAG2 in some 20 percent of brain tumors, 20 percent of melanomas, and 20 percent of Ewing’s sarcomas, a pediatric tumor.

To see if this gene defect could indeed lead to the aneuploidy characteristic of the tumor cells they were examining, the researchers repaired STAG2 in two brain tumor lines, and found that the cells subsequently became less aneuploid. The cell populations showed less variation in the numbers of chromosomes they carried, and in some cases, the actual chromosome number was reduced, bringing it closer to normal. Conversely, when the team induced a STAG2 mutation in otherwise normal cells, the cells almost universally gained a chromosome. “I think that this work, together with some previous work, strongly implicates the inactivation of cohesin in general as a cause of aneuploidy in cancer,” Waldman said.

The second study looked at the consequences of aneuploidy. Geneticist Angelika Amon of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her colleagues had already shown that aneuploidy puts stress on the protein quality control pathways of the cell. “When you now have an extra chromosome or multiple extra chromosomes, all of a sudden thousands of proteins are imbalanced, and the cell has to deal with that,” she explained. “But we wanted to know if these protein imbalances could cause stress on the genome maintenance functions of the cell.”

So Amon and her team created haploid yeast cell lines with a single additional chromosome, and examined the cells for signs of genomic instability. Sure enough, the aneuploid yeast lines showed increased chromosomal instability, increased mitotic recombination, and increased structural abnormalities, such as those caused by double-strand breaks in the DNA. “Aneuploidy impacts basically all genome replication and segregation functions,” Amon said.

Exactly how an abnormal number of chromosomes causes such instability is unclear. One possibility is that having too many copies of a particular gene or set of genes increases the chance of genomic disruption. Or, the stress that results from the imbalance of protein levels overall could somehow lead to genomic instability. Additionally, it could simply be the increased number of chromosomes that causes the problem.

“I think the Amon paper emphasizes this, that cells with grossly abnormal numbers of chromosomes have some level of chromosome instability just by virtue of their abnormal chromosome count,” Waldman said. “When cells are in a state of aneuploidy, their mitotic machinery gets somewhat confused by the abnormal chromosome count and that perpetuates the instability.”

These results were obtained in haploid yeast cells, however, which is “a fairly reductionist model system,” said cell biologist Duane Compton at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, who did not participate in the study. “So the overall implications for human cancer are really not entirely clear.” Human cells, for example, have mechanisms that guard against such genomic chaos, such as the tumor suppressor protein p53, which signals the cells to stop dividing once the genome gets to be in such disarray.

Still, “I find the observation very, very interesting,” Compton said. “Waldman is showing that there’s a single gene mutation that causes aneuploidy. Amon is saying if you’re aneuploid, you get all sorts of other genomic changes. Taken together, the grand implication is that mutation of one single gene can be responsible for all sorts of instability seen in tumors, which to me is extraordinary.” Clearly there are some holes to fill in—namely whether aneuploidy will similarly cause genomic instability in mammalian cells, he added, but “if that were true, it would be hugely powerful.”

AIDS Denialist Henry Bauer Offers a Messy Cure for AIDS

2011-08-22T01:18:00.003-04:00

Posted by Henry Bauer @ HIV/AIDS Sketicism

A simple, inexpensive, non-toxic cure for AIDS that has no negative side-effects has been described by Pacini and Ruggiero at the 6th International AIDS Conference on HIV Pathogenesis, Treatment and Prevention (Rome, 17-20 July 2011).The basic mechanism involves stimulation of the immune system which increases CD4 counts and corrects CD4/CD8 balance, in “HIV-positive” people and also in HIV-negative people.
Recall that AIDS was discovered and defined in the early 1980s as Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, the immune deficiency being specifically a loss of CD4 cells. Later the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defined AIDS as being “HIV-positive” with a CD4 count below 200. Therefore an increase of CD4 above that level constitutes reversion of AIDS to non-AIDS.

Note in particular that Pacini and Ruggiero obtained increases in CD4 counts
of several hundred in a few weeks whereas the claimed benefits of anti-retroviral therapy cite increases of only about 90 per year.
That a healthy immune system can withstand HIV has also been emphasized by Luc Montagnier, co-discoverer of HIV, on several occasions. Two decades ago, it was shown in Montagnier’s laboratory that in fact HIV alone is harmless to immune-system CD4 cells but that the latter may be damaged by a mycoplasma that appears to be often present in some patients.

The immune-system stimulation described by Pacini and Ruggiero appears to act in a similar fashion as yogurt-type bacteria that are among (or are similar to) the beneficial microflora found in healthy guts. This work therefore confirms the intestinal dysbiosis hypothesis of Tony Lance which explains why “AIDS” first appeared as Gay-Related Immune Deficiency, restricted to fast-lane gay men, and why gay men still tend to test “HIV-positive” more frequently than others.

Rick Perry: Climate Scientists 'Manipulated Data'

2011-08-19T01:23:00.004-04:00

The Huffington Post August 18, 2011

Texas Gov. Rick Perry took his skepticism about climate change one step further on Wednesday, telling a New Hampshire business crowd that scientists have cooked up the data on global warming for the cash.

In his stump speech, Perry referenced "a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling in to their projects."

"We're seeing weekly, or even daily, scientists who are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what's causing the climate to change," Perry said. "Yes, our climates change. They've been changing ever since the earth was formed."

It isn't the first time Perry has accused climate scientists of fibbing. ThinkProgress' Brad Johnson reported on Monday that in Perry's book, Fed Up!, the governor calls climate science a “contrived phony mess.”

Among his fellow GOP presidential contenders, however, Perry's views are not so extreme.

Herman Cain has called the very premise of climate change "a scam," while former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) has referred to it as nothing more than a "trend," accusing the left of "taking advantage" of it by creating "a beautifully concocted scheme because they know that the earth is gonna cool and warm."

Back in 2009, meanwhile, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) argued on the House floor that the very concept of global warming is faulty because “carbon dioxide is a natural byproduct of nature!"

Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) has also become increasingly skeptical of climate change. In a 2009 interview with Fox News, he said, "the greatest hoax I think that has been around for many, many years if not hundreds of years has been this hoax on the environment and global warming."

As for former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), it's hard to say what he believes. In 2008, he appeared in an ad alongside then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) urging the country to address climate change. Since announcing his 2012 candidacy, Gingrich has walked back those views, but that hasn't stopped his fellow climate deniers from hitting him over the flip-flop.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney broke with Republican orthodoxy earlier this summer, telling a crowd of 200 in Manchester, N.H. that humans are at least somewhat responsible for climate change.

"I believe the world is getting warmer, and I believe that humans have contributed to that," he said at the town hall this June. "It's important for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may be significant contributors."

Green advocates' best hope within the GOP presidential field may lie with former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman. Huntsman has been an outright proponent of the need for climate action, going so far as to sign his state up for a regional cap-and-trade program when he was in office. In 2009 he called Republicans' failure to address climate change at the national level "immensely frustrating."

Magic Johnson says he should not have retired because of HIV

2011-08-15T14:20:00.000-04:00

Magic Johnson wishes he hadn't retired so early

Los Angeles Times

August 2, 2011

The devastating news proved more painful than any injury. Yet, Magic Johnson vowed he'd survive.

Delivering the news could have put strain on his marriage, but, in his eyes, it strengthened it.

The stigma could've hurt his legacy as a five-time NBA champion and, in the eyes of many, the greatest Laker of all time. But it actually enhanced it.

In a one-on-one conversation with Johnson at Loyola Marymount University, Times columnist Bill Plaschke appropriately remarked that nearly three months from now would mark the 20th anniversary of Johnson's stunning announcement that he had contracted HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The fact that Johnson was sitting there for a full hour reliving his Laker memories in full spirits and, most importantly, in good health, remains an accomplishment in itself.

Still, it pains Johnson to this day that he cut his NBA career short, frankly because he didn't believe it was necessary.

"If I knew what I know now, I wouldn't have retired," Johnson said. "But I didn't know that then. And you've just got to go with what happened."

At the time, many wrongly perceived that Johnson had contracted AIDs and that he could spread the disease through simple contact. His abrupt retirement in 1991 did little to quell that notion, but his participation in the 1992 NBA All-Star game and as a member of the U.S. Dream Team in the Olympics quickly put those qualms to rest. Still, Johnson retired before coming back in the 1995-96 season amid continued skepticism from even his U.S. Olympic teammates that he'd put everyone else at risk.

"They just didn't want the Lakers to be strong again," Johnson said. "I decided to retire because I didn't want to hurt the game."

Goat Blood HIV Cure Said to Be $20M Scam

2011-08-04T22:25:00.002-04:00

By DAN MCCUE
August 3, 2011
Courthouse News Service

The Securities and Exchange Commission claims the makers of a so-called HIV treatment made from goat's blood bilked investors of $20 million while concealing that the Food and Drug Administration had twice put human trials of the drug on hold.
     The SEC says Immunosyn Corp. called its drug SF-1019, and claimed it could treat a variety of diseases, including AIDS, chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, diabetic neuropathy and diabetic ulcers.
     Immunosyn misinformed investors that its parent company, Argyll Equities, "planned to commence the regulatory approval process for human clinical trials in the U.S.," according to the complaint.

     "In fact," the SEC says, "persons affiliated with Argyll had already twice submitted applications to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for approval of SF-1019, and twice the FDA immediately responded with a full clinical hold on the applications, putting an immediate halt to any possible human clinical trials."
     The SEC also sued Immunosyn CEO Stephen Ferrone and CFO Douglas McClain Jr., Argyll CEO James Miceli and Argyll's Chief Science Officer Douglas McClain Sr., who is the father of Immunosyn's CFO.
     "These defendants engaged in insider trading by selling Immunosyn shares while in possession of material, nonpublic information that the FDA had issued a full clinical hold on applications for regulatory approval of SF-1019 and while knowing that Immunosyn was making misleading statements about the status of the regulatory process," the SEC says.
     McClain Sr. is also accused of misrepresenting the drug's prospects with the FDA on a video on the company's website, and at a presentation at a Texas holistic clinic.
     Miceli is accused of ordering the issuance of a false press release that disputed "rumors" that Immunosyn was exploring a change in control.
     "In fact, when Immunosyn issued this press release, Miceli [was] actively exploring such a transaction by trying to take the company private," the SEC says.
The SEC seeks disgorgement of ill-gotten gains and fines.

See criminal complaint

New Website Takes on AIDS Denialists in the Courts

2011-08-01T23:01:00.002-04:00

HIV criminalization laws were borne out of fear and hysteria in the early days of HIV before much was known about the virus or modes of transmission. Originally these laws were meant to make those who were HIV+ think about the consequences of intentionally exposing another person to the virus. Unfortunately however, these laws have only furthered the stigma of HIV as well as stripped away the incentive for many people to be tested. Many people think if they do not know their status, then they can not be prosecuted. This too has proven to be false as many states (and other countries) have become increasingly aggressive in the pursuit of these charges. These prosecutors hide behind the claim that tougher laws will reduce or eliminate intentional, malicious transmission of HIV.

According to UNAIDS, this is simply not the case and can in fact prove the exact opposite:

"Such malicious acts in the context of HIV are rare, and the available evidence shows that most people

living with HIV who know their status take steps to prevent transmitting HIV to others.

There are no data indicating that the broad application of criminal law to HIV transmission will achieve either criminal justice or prevent HIV transmission. Rather, such application risks undermining public health and human

rights."

There are many legitimate organizations working to get these barbaric laws changed through education, logic and proper legal channels. The Positive Justice Project is one such initiative via The Center for HIV Law & Policy.

The Positive Justice Project is CHLP's response to this issue: a truly community-driven, multidisciplinary collaboration to end government reliance on an individual's positive HIV test result as proof of intent to harm, and the basis for irrationally severe treatment in the criminal justice system.

We believe that success in reducing and ending reliance on criminal laws to single out and stigmatize people with HIV, educating courts, prosecutors, media and, ultimately, in lessening stigma and discrimination, begins with a focus on the very real and serious public health ramifications of HIV criminalization. This in no way involves abandonment of civil liberties principles, but rather broadens the focus of advocacy to the public health consequences of ignoring individual rights.

Unfortunately the AIDS Denialists, forever the opportunists, have begun to infiltrate this area as well. However, their intent is not on improving human rights or ending stigma. Their sole purpose is to further their agenda of disproving HIV Science and they feel their best chance to spread their propaganda is through the court system. This fact is highly evident at their Rethinking AIDS Conference in San Francisco. Clark Baker stated on video that they must focus on the courts. And to that end, Clark Baker formed The HIV Innocence Project through his Office of Medical and Scientific Justice (later he was forced to changed the name to The HIV Innocence Group for legal reasons).

Clark Baker clearly states at his website:

OMSJ's (Office of Medical and Scientific Justice ) subordinate objective is simply to identify one high profile trial that includes, 1) an intellectually curious attorney, 2) a defendant with a lot to lose and shares a significant stake in society and 3) a community that pressures a prosecutor to not offer a plea bargain.

Because of Mr. Baker's transparent agenda of lying about HIV Science, I have started two new websites, both with identical content. The content will simply be to prove that Mr. Baker is being less than truthful about the supposed cases he has helped and the way in which this supposed help manifested. There are two sites because Mr. Baker was forced to change the name of The HIV Innocence Project to GROUP and because both names are still in use, I wanted to make sure that no matter which site was Googled, my sites would also come up to show the reality and truth about the content of Baker's sites.

Please visit The HIV Innocence Project for more information.

Note: This post comes from a reader who goes by the name "Truth Teller". Comments and questions specific to the post can be directed to Truth Teller.

South Africa: AIDS conspiracy believers less likely to condomise

2011-06-24T17:37:00.001-04:00

DURBAN, 22 June 2011 (PlusNews) -

Thirty years after the discovery of AIDS, conspiracy theories that posit the virus as man-made continue to enjoy support among a segment of South African youth - and these beliefs may be putting them at greater risk of HIV infection.

A representative survey of more than 3,000 South Africans between the ages of 20 and 29 years in the greater Cape Town area has found that black South Africans were eight times more likely to believe AIDS conspiracy theories, specifically that scientists engineered HIV.

Among black respondents, 20 percent believed that HIV was man-made and created by scientists as an attack on people of African descent, according to a University of Cape Town (UCT) study.

New research by Nicoli Nattrass, director of the AIDS and Society Research Unit at UCT, also found that AIDS conspiracy believers are 50 percent less likely to report having used a condom the last time they had sex than non-believers. Respondents with traditional values, and those who had lower socio-economic status but were not religious, were more likely to believe there was a conspiracy.

The Nattrass research, co-authored with colleague, Eduard Grebe and presented at the 1st HIV Social Sciences and Humanities Conference in Durban, South Africa, also showed that people who had heard of the Treatment Action Campaign(TAC), a South African AIDS lobby group, were much less likely to believe a conspiracy existed and twice as likely to use condoms.

"We picked up the effect of TAC in counteracting conspiracy theories," Nattrass told IRIN/PlusNews. "It's another way to show the importance of civil society resistance to the [former] government."

TAC strenuously opposed not only South Africa’s former health minister, Dr MantoTshabalala-Msimang, but also former South African President Thabo Mbeki over their AIDS denialism and his administration's delay in rolling out HIV treatment.

AIDS conspiracy origins

The research will be included in a forthcoming book by Nattrass on the effects and history of AIDS conspiracy theories, and their origins as a Cold War propaganda tool by the East German state security service, known as Stasi, and the national security agency of the former Soviet Union, the KGB.

The conspiracy theories were then taken up by right-wing white supremacists in the US and expounded in a book, "Behold the Pale Horse", excerpts of which were circulated by Tshabalala-Msimang to her nine provincial counterparts, according to Nattrass.

Given the deep distrust of Western science, and the history of racial oppression of African Americans and black South Africans, Nattrass said it was understandable that the prevalence of AIDS conspiracy beliefs would be higher in segments of both these populations.

"There's definitely a racialized aspect to this," Nattrass told IRIN/PlusNews. "Most anthropologists tend to look at it as a narrative of resistance against stigmatization; against imperialist discourses by policy-makers."

In a review of existing research on the prevalence of AIDS conspiracy beliefs by Nattrass, up to 80 percent of surveyed African-American respondents believed HIV was man-made. US studies have found a strong link between AIDS conspiracy theories and lack of condom use, not testing for HIV and not adhering to antiretroviral (ARV) treatment. In South Africa such theories have been associated with never testing for HIV.

Conspiracy theories may have gained traction in South Africa after the apartheid government's biological warfare programme, code named "Project Coast", was exposed. Local newspapers dubbed the former head of South Africa’s secret chemical and biological warfare project, Dr Wouter Basson, as "Dr Death” for his alleged role in the deaths of anti-apartheid activists, and he was eventually tried but acquitted of murder due to insufficient evidence in 2001.

Nattrass said the revelations about government-sponsored biological warfare programmes had made the notion of a man-made virus more believable to some.

“There’s some very nice ethnography work that shows that the stories that were put out by the press [at the time of Basson’s trial] were picked up in certain communities and twisted to form [theories like], ‘Well it must have been Wouter Basson, who, together with the Americans, was part of creating HIV in South Africa.”

But Nattrass cautioned that history wasn’t everything, and that leaders such as TAC, Tshabalala-Msimang, and former President Thabo Mbeki, also played a role in shaping people’s beliefs.

Survey respondents who had heard of TAC were less likely to believe myths and more likely to use condoms, yet participants of any race who said they trusted Tshabalala-Msimang were three times as likely to believe AIDS conspiracy theories.

Former President Thabo Mbeki’s denialist stance has also fuelled local conspiracy theories. Drawing on the work of prominent AIDS denialists, Mbeki questioned whether HIV causes AIDS, arguing that a variety of other factors, including poverty, were to blame.

In 2000 he told members of the ruling African National Congress party that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), working with large pharmaceutical companies, was part of a conspiracy to promote the view that HIV causes AIDS.

His distrust of ARV medicines delayed plans for the widespread public rollout of the life-prolonging drugs until November 2003, despite years of research establishing that they reduced AIDS-related deaths.

HIV testing, treatment

In a discussion on the research, Prof Alan Whiteside, director of the Health Economics and HIV/AIDS Research Division (HEARD) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, suggested that people reporting low condom use might say they believed AIDS conspiracy theories to justify their low condom use.

Nattrass agreed that there was a correlation between these beliefs and low condom use, but said it was not necessarily a cause-and-effect scenario.

"Several recent studies show that there's an association between believing in conspiracies and reduced likelihood of using condoms, or having an HIV test or adhering to antiretrovirals," said Clara Rubincam, of the London School of Economics and Political Science, who conducted related research with focus-group participants drawn from the Nattrass sample.

"Given the relevance of conspiracy theories to the successful design of HIV prevention and treatment, it's important to study the extent to which they are believed, and why they continue to be believed," Rubincam told IRIN/PlusNews.

The focus group discussions revealed that while many participants thought HIV was man-made, many others attributed South Africa's HIV epidemic to behaviour and socio-economic factors such as poverty, which they felt made more people vulnerable to HIV.

Many also did not understand the science of HIV treatment, mistakenly thinking that HIV prevention methods like prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) indicated the availability of a "cure" for HIV.

Rubincam said there may be a need to better explain how PMTCT prevents, but does not cure, HIV infection in babies born to HIV-positive mothers, so as to dispel such misconceptions.

"It's tempting to believe that... perhaps with the end of the Mbeki administration, the problems of AIDS denialism and conspiracy theorising might be over," Rubincam commented. "That doesn't seem to be the case."

AIDS Denialism in Action: Clark Baker and the HIV Innocence Project Part II

2011-05-15T23:18:00.004-04:00

Clark Baker and the late Karri Stokley

I received this email the other day. The writer's identity is concealed, although he did not ask me to do so. He nearly fell for Clark Baker's Innocence Project. Fortunately he had enough sense to recognize Baker was a sham. Baker's suggestion to stop taking his medications was a dead giveaway that he was dealing with a mad man. Good news is that this guy searched Clark Baker and found my blog. Mission accomplished! Below are the correspondences he gave me permission to post.

Dear Seth,

I just found out that the HIV innocence project is a fake! I was wrongly convicted for being HIV positive and spent two years in jail. I read about the Office of Medical and Scientific Justice (OSMJ) and thought I had finally found some help. But all I'm getting from Clark Baker is double talk. He won't take my case! I wonder if his project exists at all. Why won't he put me in touch with lawyers?

Worst of all, is this man trying to kill me? He wants me to go off medicines. I'm not a fool- I need legal help. But I want to stay healthy. Why would any detective tell me to go off meds? I'm reading on the internet about Karri Stokely. Is this what happened to her? Is this legal? Why is Baker harming his clients?

Is this Innocence project just a trap to get people off of meds? Why on earth would anyone not want to take life-giving medicine?

I hope you can use this message from Clark to warn people not to go off meds.

Do you know anyone who could really help? A friend of mine is still in jail for being HIV positive- I'm afraid he will get hurt in jail unless I find some real help.

----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Clark Baker <cb@omsj.org>
To: XXXXXXXXXX
Subject: Need Help- HIV innocent

Your story is one of millions that have occurred since 1984. I feel awful that you endured this.

The first thing you must do is establish exactly who diagnosed you and exactly how they did it. If you think you were lied to and are not HIV+, you can decide to stop the deadly drugs you’re taking – but do it slow. Atripla contains a highly addictive drug and will make you sick (withdrawal) when you stop. You’ll need to taper off of the Sustiva. If you get sick from withdrawal, your clinician will scold you for interrupting you drugs and try to convince you that you’re dying from AIDS.

Do you have access to your medical records? How far back do they go? If statutes still run, you may have a claim… but I suspect the better opportunity may come in the future when we begin to file class actions.

OMSJ is now focusing on new criminal cases to demonstrate the widespread incompetence and corruption that permeates universities and hospitals and interrupted your life. When we have a sufficient record, we plan to use our evidence in a wide case that should include you.

In the meantime, stay healthy, eat right, and stop trusting doctors who take bribes from drug companies.

I urge you to tell your story… write about it and blog on OMSJ’s website. We have a blog section for people like you to share your experiences. We can’t change the past – we can only try to change the course of our future.

cb