we think about aids - altheal · interview 14 huw christie talks to lord baldwin, joint chairman of...

CONTINUUM VOL 4, NO 3 1

The orthodox view on AIDS holds thatit is caused by a virus known as HIVthat is transmitted through theexchange of body fluids. Once infect-ed, a person will remain well for a time,though infectious to others, beforegoing on to develop AIDS and dying.

Despite the huge sums of moneyspent on medical research, there is stillno cure, just drug therapies said toslow the progress of the disease, andregular T-cell counts to measurehealth.

A whole industry has evolved aroundAIDS, on which many careers and busi-nesses depend, but which offers littlehope to those affected. It works on thepremise that HIV=AIDS=DEATH.

Continuum began as a newsletterencouraging those effected to empowerthemselves to make care and treatmentchoices. As we look further, anomaliesin the orthodox view continue toappear.

Are you aware, for example, that thelink between HIV and AIDS has neverbeen more than hypothetical? That agrowing body of scientists and doctorsthroughout the world doubt that HIVcauses AIDS?

At the onset of the “epidemic”, thehysteria that resulted from the linkingof sex, death and an infectious viruscreated a climate where to question the“facts” was considered reprehensible.Many of those who dared to do so weresilenced or ridiculed. Since the growthof the orthodoxy, those who questionhave also had to contend with theweight of vested interests.

Twelve years after HIV was first asso-ciated with AIDS many predictionsbased on the viral hypothesis are failingto materialise. Continuum is a uniqueforum for those in the scientific community challenging the orthodoxyand those whose lives have in someway been touched by the hypothesis.

WHY CONTINUUM?

CHANGING THE WAYWE THINK ABOUT AIDS

FOCUSFocus 8Global concern on virus isolation

Duesberg’s HIV 8PETER DUESBERG responds to our challengeand argues that HIV, though not the cause ofAIDS, exists and has been isolated

Anti-HIV antibodies 10Do anti-HIV antibodies belong to the group ofautoantibodies against cellular structures?

FEATURESInterview 14Huw Christie talks to LORD BALDWIN, jointChairman of the Parliamentary Group forAlternative and Complementary Medicine

AIDS and decadence 18Controversial critic and theorist CAMILLEPAGLIA gives her views on the historical development of the AIDS discourse in theCounterCulture section

Mopping up the microbes 22One of the most effective natural remedies forcombating many diseases is allicin, derivedfrom garlic

AIDS activism – no thanks! 24The second part of MICHAEL BAUMGARTNER’sessay examining the relationship between gaymen and “HIV”

HospitalWatch 27Multi-drug-resistant Tuberculosis has been inthe news recently – we give an inside story ofwhat’s really been going on

A spoonful of sugar 28All you need to know about blood sugar levels

How about safe sex? 30TOM WRIGHT seeks a new definition based onpersonal experience

NEWSNews roundup 2

DissentingView 4A look at protease inhibitors

HIV Watch 6A challenge to former Nature editor

Sir John Maddox

REGULARSReview 13

Neville Hodgkinson’s new book: AIDS: The Failure of Contemporary Science

DrugEffects 17Poppers explained

Letters 33Live, Live, Live 33EnquireWithin 34

Readers’ questions answeredSnarl 34

Hospitals can be bad for your healthClassifieds 35

Lust for Life 36An inspiring personal account of how

to overcome diagnosis

CONTINUUMVOL 4, NO 2

JULY/AUGUST 1996

Living exhibit at London’s Gay Pride ’96

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CONTINUUM VOL 4, NO 32

COMPLAINT UPHELDThe UK’s Advertising Standards

Authority has asked the free HIVmagazine Positive Nation to stoprunning an advertisement imply-

ing combination drug therapyimproves the health of T-cells

and increases their number. TheASA upheld a complaint by

Continuum, saying the advertis-ers “did not supply evidence to

support the implied claim”.

SALIVA TESTThe US Food and Drug

Administration has approved anunvalidated saliva test for HIV

called Orasure. The method elim-inates the supposed needle-stickrisk to medical staff while takingblood, since cotton wool is pulled

between the gums and cheek.

STANDARD REPLYOfficials from the Department ofHealth’s Communicable Diseases

Branch have been sending outstandard replies to Continuumreaders who wrote urging the

Government not to wastemoney on combination therapy.

The replies assert that “themajority of scientists accept that

HIV exists and cause AIDS” and“isolates are available”.

Dissatisfied readers have sentmore probing follow-up letters.

NEW CURETherapists at London’s Maudsley

Hospital say they are preparedto deal with homophobia as aproblem requiring treatment.But they accept that, as with

racism and sexism, those affected rarely realise they need

psychological help.

SWEDISH MEDITATIONFifty people gathered in

Rålambshov Park, Stockholm, tomeditate and join their thoughts

on HIV while using a bowl offlowers as a symbol of life.

Claiming the power of thoughtcould transform the virus, this is

expected to become a yearlyevent in Sweden each June 16th.

SURGERY SURVEYSurveys of HIV-positive patientsin the Kensington, Chelsea and

Westminster areas of Londonshow that more than a third fear

discrimination at their localsurgery. The report recommends

the introduction and display ofnon-discrimination policies.

FRENCH LESSONParis Gay Pride coincided with arow at Sidaction, France’s AIDS

research telethon on six TV chan-nels over six hours. There were

fifty percent fewer viewers thanlast year, and 75 percent less

money raised.

An HIV charity is promising notto blacklist any GeneralElection candidates holdingdissident views on AIDS.

The Manchester-basedGeorge House Trust, support-ing people with HIV in theNorth West of England, plansto canvass the views of all candidates from the threemain political parties and cir-culate them to their 4,000-strong mailing list.

Trust backs dissident MPs

UK holistic charities unite

Claims that Britain was threat-ened by a heterosexual AIDSepidemic have been exposedas a myth by latestGovernment figures.

Gay community leadersnow admit they deliberatelyhyped up the fear of AIDSamong heterosexuals in orderto attract maximum funding.

The figures reveal that of12,565 people who receivedan AIDS diagnosis in Britainsince 1982, only 161 were het-erosexual. The Department ofHealth claims this low figure isa direct result of its £1.5 billioncampaigns aimed at themajority, but does not explainwhy figures remain so high inthe gay community whichreceived the same message.

Some critics have accusedthe Government of wastingmillions of pounds when small-er sums could have beenspent aiming campaigns mostly at the gay communityinstead. But Jamie Taylor, ofthe London-based Gay MenFighting AIDS (GMFA) admit-

ted on Radio Four’s Todayprogramme that the gay com-munity deliberately hood-winked the Government.

“The type of money weneeded to combat the epidem-ic in the gay community wouldonly be forthcoming if the dis-ease appeared likely to affectMiddle England,” he said.

The figures sparked off arow among national news-paper columnists with AnnLeslie, of the Daily Mail,explaining how experts, doctors and politicians hadconspired to create a myth“wasting £1.5bn of yourmoney”. She pointed out thatthe Mail had spent ten yearssaying the threat never existedand that heterosexual AIDS inAfrica was now being ques-tioned.

Former Sunday Times editorAndrew Neil seized the oppor-tunity to remind readers thatduring his tenure the paper,through its science correspon-dent Neville Hodgkinson, hadcontinually challenged the

claim that heterosexuals wereat risk. He claims the establish-ment refused to listen at thattime because “AIDS hadbecome an industry, a job-cre-ation scheme for the caringclasses”. Neil points out that ifthe establishment has nowadmitted it was wrong about aheterosexual spread, it oughtto look at other areas, such asthe link between HIV and AIDS,where it remains dogmatic.

The Guardian’s FrancisWheen, who devoted severalhundred words to insultingNeil without answering hispoints, clearly demonstratedhow litt le such columnistsunderstand the complex sci-ence surrounding the HIV andAIDS debate.

A similar lack of know-ledge was shown by PrincessDiana and AIDS activist AileenGetty, daughter of billionaireart patron Paul Getty, whomade it clear they were contin-uing to cling to the heterosex-ual threat idea and would cam-paign for funds accordingly.

Heterosexual AIDS threatshown to be just a myth

US playwright Larry Krameropened Salford University(UK)’s three day Transmission’96 conference in early July.The international event includ-ed seminars and presentationsinvolving workers in the press,TV, film, radio and communityprojects.

Kramer told an audienceincluding AIDS activistsEdward King and SimonWatney that the new bookAIDS – the Failure ofContemporary Science by for-mer Sunday Times ScienceCorrespondent Nevil leHodgkinson [see Review]should be “spoilt, spat at, andrendered unreadable.” DrStuart Derbyshire, of theRheumatic Disease Centre,Manchester University, whoalso attended, described thecomment as “intellectuallyvacuous and censorious.”

Other speakers includedHuw Christie, Nick Partridgeand Hodgkinson himself, whowas well-received on the thirdday. Former Nature editor SirJohn Maddox cancelled hisappearance at short notice.

AIDS booksparks rowat seminar

Three of Britain’s leading holis-tic HIV and AIDScharities have joined forces tocreate a national branch of aEurope-wide organisation.

Equilibrium, the Heal Trustand Positively Healthy haveunited to form NATC-UK, theBritish branch of the NaturalAlternative TraditionalComplementary MedicinesCaucus Europe.

They hope the move will pro-mote greater awareness ofalternative therapies by:• promoting the institution ofgood clinical practice;• ensuring internationallyacceptable standards forstudy and research;

• the integration into orthodox clinical practice ofscientif ically validated alternatives;• establishing a pan-Euro-pean database to collect andcollate data on therapies cur-rently under investigation andin use by people diagnosedwith HIV and AIDS;• instituting a pan-Europeanpractitioner and user question-naire survey;• hosting a major pan-European conference in 1998to examine the issues surrounding the use of alterna-tive and complementary thera-pies in HIV and AIDS health-care management.

The trust hopes to makeadequate funding, discrimina-tion and support for develop-ing countries HIV issues in theforthcoming election.

But spokesperson TimPickstone said that providedcandidates broadly supportedthe idea of helping peoplediagnosed as HIV-positive, itwould not matter if they did notbelieve in HIV as a virus, or thatit was the cause of AIDS.


EARLIER DRUG USELuc Montagnier, discoverer of”HIV“, has set up a new £1.8 mil-lion AIDS research centre in Paristo study early use of anti-viraldrugs. While drug therapy usual-ly begins when CD4 counts fallbelow 200, he intends to findout whether treatment at countsover 500 will affect AIDS.

EXPANDING MARKETThe Japanese have approved thedrug ddC but remain under pressure to allow a further 15drugs already available in theUS. Japan, which has displayed aconservative approach to drugtherapy, had only previouslyapproved AZT and ddI.

POSITIVE MILESTONEBody Positive Newsletter’s 200thissue was produced last month.Originally one-page, it hassteadily grown. In May 1987 BPachieved charity status, the BPCentre in Earls Court wasopened in November 1988, andin July 1994 their survey showeda readership of over 14,000.Recent reports say they haveaccepted new computers fromGlaxo-Wellcome.

TESTING TIMESThe Terrence Higgins Trust is tohold a conference in London onSeptember 13th to debate viewson HIV testing. Key note speak-ers, discussions and open work-shops will look at the controver-sial question of whether THTshould actively encourage peo-ple to get tested.

DRUGS BOOSTRenewed stock market confi-dence in Glaxo-Wellcome anti-HIV drugs has greatly increasedshare prices. Managing directorSir Richard Sykes also told aSwedish newspaper that AZTwould “never disappear”.Cumulative worldwide sales ofAZT stand at $2.5 billion to date.

SWEET CHARITYManchester’s Village Charity is tohand out large cash rewards tothose of its employees who havedone outstanding work. Themove is being criticised by thosewho believe the money should bespent only on providing services.

DIFFERENT STROKESResearchers in Toronto arestudying children told they havethe “AIDS virus”. “Boys seem toput the information in their backpocket. They...carry it back there.”Girls become “more tearful...as if(they) have new lenses for theirglasses, and see the world in adifferent way.” The study “is at avery preliminary stage”.

Pride, July ’96: a large outdoor festival of celebration in London.The newly ratified South African Constitution is the only stateconstitution in the world in which the legal rights of gay and lesbian citizens are specifically guaranteed.

The sale of poppers by clubs,pubs and sex shops in the UKhas been clearly demonstratedas illegal after a test case wasbrought against a Londonshop in the Crown Court.

The Government has nowpromised to crack down onanyone, other than doctorsand chemists, selling the drugand has revealed that severalother investigations arealready under way.

But the judge refused togrant the £47,000 costs ofbringing the case to courtbecause he said the shopshould have been warned first.He did, however, f ine theCamden-based Zipper Store£100 after its owners, Millivres,

admitted illegally supplyingmedicines for human con-sumption.

The case against Millivres,which also publishes the magazine Gay Times, wasbrought by the RoyalPharmaceutical Society (RPS)after its inspectors, workingundercover, bought a bottle ofHi-Tech poppers from theZipper Store in March 1994.The society said it was notseeking to punish the store,but to bring a test case thatwould firmly prove alkyl nitrite(poppers) and its various forms– amyl, butyl and isobutylnitrites – were to be classed asmedicines under the 1968Medicines Act.

The society claims the successful prosecution ofMil l ivres, despite JudgeFinney’s reservations aboutthe way the case was con-ducted, proves poppers to bea medicine. The maximum sentence for illegal supply istwo years in prison or anunlimited fine.

Immediately afterwards, aspokesman for the Departmentof Health confirmed it was nowclearly an offence for anyone not a doctor or a pharmacist to supply poppersto the public.

“Any case of improper salesshould be reported to theMedicines Control Agency andthere are several investigationsin progress,” he added.

Poppers, once marketed byWellcome as a medicine forheart conditions, are claimedby many researchers to be notonly harmful but a possible co-factor in AIDS, and have beenspecifically linked to Kaposi’sSarcoma. [see Drug Effects]

Susan Sharpe, RPS directorof legal services, said:“Poppers are increasinglywidely used, and our concernsare that this open availabilitymeans people are ignorant ofthe possible dangers of use totheir health. This will, I hope,result in poppers droppingfrom sale.”

Manufacturers and suppli-ers of poppers have nowbegun to assess the legalimplications of the case.

But Terry George, of tele-phone chatl ine operationGayXchange, whose Leeds-based mail order firm AromasDirect makes three of its ownbrands – 100% Amyl, PureGold and Ice Diamond – whilesupplying several otherbrands, said he would contin-ue to sell them.

“We don’t sell it as a medicine – we sell it as a roomodouriser with clear instruc-tions on its use,” he said.

At the same time, shops inLondon’s Soho, and pubs andclubs throughout the UK havecontinued to sell poppers,most of them unaware of thecase.

Selling poppersisnowunlawful

Test case implications for pubs and sex shops

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DISSENTINGVIEWCOMMENTWe’ve not paid much attention to the recent Vancouver AIDSconference. The Economist (June 29) summed up its majorarticle on triple-drug-therapy – the thrust of the Canadianpharma-sponsored gathering – with “For the first time since1981, when a few inquisitive doctors noticed the outbreak ofa strange and rare cancer in gay American men, there ishope”. Has no-one told them Kaposi’s Sarcoma has beentaken off the list of AIDS-defining illnesses by some leadinginstitutions because it is not associated with immune deficiency? Or that Robert Gallo thinks poppers may be itsprincipal cause? The new anti-“HIV” drugs for AIDS are amarketing triumph and a human nightmare: chemicals toblock proteases – enzymes which the body needs for normalfunctioning. A new round of experiments is about to begin,and no prizes for guessing the outcome.

Instead this issue celebrates the voices of dissent, the criticalthinkers who keep enquiry alive, embracing the need to thinkfor ourselves, in today’s world more than ever with our masscommunications, mass production and mass graves. Despitethe best efforts and huge budgets of the “HIV” movement,now more than ever independent thought and clear analysisare finding a place in the general discourse. As Celia Farber of Spin Magazine has said, “Truth is like an aeroplane, it hasto land somewhere.” Bring your sense of humour and enjoythe ride!

172 Foundling Court, Brunswick Centre, London WC1N 1QETel: [+44] (0)171 713 7071 Fax: [+44] (0)171 713 7072

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CONTINUUM

Board of Consultants: Michael Baumgartner, (Chair), Switzerland; Leon Chaitow , ND, DO, Member of Register of Osteopaths, England; Prof. Peter Duesberg, Molecular Biologist, U.S.A.; Nigel Edwards, M.A. (Oxon),Journalist, England; Rev. Dr. Michael Ellner, D.D., M.S.H., CHt., President HEAL,U.S.A.; Prof. Alfred Hässig, Immunologist, Switzerland; Neville Hodgkinson,Author/Journalist, England; Christine Johnson, Science Information Co-ordinator,U.S.A.; Dr. med. Heinrich Kremer, Germany; Dr. Stefan Lanka, Virologist,Germany; John Lauritsen, Publisher and Writer, U.S.A.; Margaret Turner, B.Ed.,Writer/Equality Consultant, England; Joan Shenton, Broadcaster/Journalist,England; Prof. (emerit.) Gordon Stewart , Public Health, England; Michael Verney-Elliott, Writer/Journalist, England; Ian Young, Poet/Author,Canada

Views expressed in this magazine usually, but not necessarily, reflect theviews of the organisation. All reasonable care has been taken, but, toprotect itself against censorship, Continuum will not be held responsible for any inaccuracies contained herein. Inclusion in the magazine of therapy information or advertisements cannot represent an endorsement. Information should be used in conjunction with a trusted practitioner.Whilst articles remain copyright by Continuum and their authors, theymay be freely copied and distributed, provided that acknowledgment ismade clear and we are advised of the fact.

The advertising drums are beaten hard all over the worldtoday. The same doctors are calling for obedient candi-dates for their experiments and holding out the samepromise of a cure who have poisoned countless AIDSpatients by administering the DNA blocker AZT for the

past ten years in an attempt to hunt down the phantom HI virus.The same doctors are now trying to conjure up a substance

from the test tube under the magic name of ‘protease inhibitor’and to market it as having a limitless cure potential, althoughnobody in fact knows what long-term reactions this molecule,which has never been tested on man, may cause in the livingorganism.

The victims and perpetrators have only recently come torealise that AZT (also known as Zidovudine or Retrovir) has, incountless cases, brought about the inevitable and slow asphyxia-tion of the patient’s body cells, which are in particular need ofoxygen and hence the equally inevitable death by poisoning ofthose persons who are stigmatised as HIV-positive or diagnosedas suffering from AIDS and who trust their doctors. Despite thatrealisation, new test candidates are already being sought who willbe voluntarily prepared, through fear of death suggested by the

medical profession, not only to swallow AZT in combination withallied toxic substances, but in addition to take an inhibitor whichhas an incalculable impact on cell metabolism.

A guarantee of success is secured in advance, as with AZT,because any fatal ‘secondary effects’ of the mixture aredescribed as an outcome of the phantom HIV infection. Theseare the self-same laboratory doctors and clinical practitionerswho for years abused the confidence of anxious AIDS patientswith the assertion that AZT would reliably, and with total certain-ty, prevent the proliferation of their ‘phantom’ HIV.

Protease inhibitors and antiviral drugswith mitochondrial toxicity: AIDS treatment with consecutive death.

by H. Kremer, S. Lanka and A. Hässig

AIDS: death byprescription


In reality the substance AZT is absorbed by a primary routethrough the DNA gamma-polymerase into the energy centre of allbody cells, the mitochondria. Without the activity of the mito-chondria as former bacteria, no body cell can produce the neces-sary energy from oxygen and make it available for the whole cellmetabolism in the bound state in adenosine triphosphate (ATP).

The doctors who prescribe AZT have,however, denied this established factand wrongly diagnosed the fatal conse-quences of AZT medication as thesequels of AIDS following a prior “HIVinfection”. For example, clinical manifes-tations such as the wasting syndrome,HIV encephalopathy, cardiomyopathy,atrophy of the skeletal muscular systemand opportunistic infections of all kindsaffecting the patients are declared to betragic consequences of AIDS.

AZT manifestly also damages themitochondria of the same microbes (pro-tozoa and fungi) which have becomeadjusted to the cellular metabolism ofthe body in the course of evolution with-out being normally pathogenic. In thecase of serious damage to their energyproduction they may, however, undergomutation into aggressive pathogens andmay, under certain conditions, cause what are known as oppor-tunistic infections. The true opportunists therefore are the AIDSdoctors who prescribe AZT. They have sought to drive out devilswith Beelzebub!

And by doing so they demonstrate their ignorance of funda-mental biological processes in the human organism.

But the dogmatic AIDS doctors have invented new tricks.Although, despite all the assertion to the contrary, no scientisthas ever demonstrably produced a genome of the imaginary HIVwhich would be capable of causing infection they announce thatthey have traced minute fragments of the genetic material of HIVin RNA form and enriched these fragments; now they claim to beable to determine the precise quantityof HIV in the individual patient’s bloodserum. It remains a secret of the AIDSdoctors to explain how they are ableto identify the part as a whole, with-out ever having seen the whole. Bythe same token, researchers couldconclude from the sight of a footprinton the banks of Loch Ness that themonster of the same name reallydoes exist.

But they go on to develop adestructive logic on the basis of sucharbitrary definitions. As the doctorsclaim on the pars pro toto principlethat they can quantitatively determinethe active amount of the HI virus inthe individual stigmatised patient,they now prescribe “appropriate”quantities of AZT and similar toxicsubstances as a cocktail for thepatient. A sufferer who is purported tohave many fragments of the messen-ger substances of the genetic materi-al of the HIV phantom in his or herblood serum, is described as anunfavourable case and receives thepoison cocktail in correspondinglyhigh doses; sooner or later the patientwill be unable to escape his or herpredicted fate because of the fataltoxic effects of the “medication”, especially as, depending on theindividual patient’s reaction, the poison cocktails are varied andsupplemented by protease inhibitors.

The purported “viral load” hides nothing but the measurementof particular messenger substances (RNA) in the blood plasma ofselected patients. Sequences which resemble those that aredefined as HIV-specific are then demonstrated. But it must be

realised that such messenger substances occur in thousands ofdifferent variations, reflecting perfectly normal biochemicalprocesses in the body, thousands of which take place simultane-ously and in coordinated fashion in the metabolic interplay.Fluctuations, i.e. the increased or reduced occurrence of thesequences, are perfectly normal in this complex interplay of thou-

sands of simultaneous metabolicprocesses. In the case of persons with aheightened cellular metabolism, e.g. per-sons under cell-destructive medication(AZT, ddI etc.) and those suffering frommultiple infections, these molecules maysometimes occur with a higher degree ofprobability, precisely because of themetabolic acceleration. The isolated pre-sentation of measurements of a particularkind of sequence, which remains in anycase totally impossible to quantify, istherefore clinically irrelevant in theabsence of comparison with other mole-cules of this kind. There are also no com-parative values which would enable anysignificance whatever to be attributed tothese relative measurements.

Proteases are in fact protein enzymeswhich split protein molecules into thelength required in each particular case by

the metabolism. They are naturally rendered inactive within andoutside the body cells by special inhibiting molecules until theyare recovered by complex interactions between many differentmolecules. The body constantly produces such proteaseinhibitors, e.g. heparin and the heparinoids. The HIV hunters nowclaim to have produced protease inhibitors in the test tube whichwill specifically only inhibit those proteases that are said to beresponsible for the proliferation of the hypothetical HIV. They wantto measure the success of these protease inhibitors by a quanti-fied reduction of the arbitrarily defined viral load (see above) andthe relative increase of the T-helper cells.

In other words, one fiction (virus blocking) is legitimated byanother (virus quantification). Thetemporary increase of T-helper cellsis brought about by the partial dis-placement of cells of this type fromthe bone marrow and other compart-ments into the bloodstream throughtemporary inhibition of the catabolicmetabolism, which predominates in“HIV positive” patients.

However, in reality it is to befeared that sooner or later theunphysiological intervention in thecomplex interplay of body cell growthfactors through artificial proteaseinhibitors will disturb equally vitalfunctions of the basic tissue andcells, together with their mitochondri-al energy centres, as is already thecase when AZT and allied nucleoside-analogues are administered.However, as no animal model is avail-able for preliminary clinical testing,the “HIV-positive” patients and“AIDS-sufferers” who go in fear ofdeath must put their life on the line.Every test subject should therefore beaware that treatment with cocktails ofAZT and allied toxic substances plusprotease inhibitors may be equivalentto joining a suicide squad with a timefuse.

Finally, attention is drawn to the healthy organism where pro-teases and antiproteases are in equilibrium. Heparinoids at the cell surface are the normal antipro-teases. An imbalance can be corrected by oral administration ofheparinoids in the form of extracts of cartilage (chondroitinsulfate)and agar extracted from seaweeds. We suggest that anti-“HIV”-positive individuals take advantage of this simple and cheap pos-sibility to correct a possible deficiency of antiproteases.

At a recent AIDS meeting, an importantannouncement was made concerning protease inhibitors. The FDA will make asimilar announcement soon, with lettersand faxes to all AIDS healthcare providers.

DO NOT MIX ANY OF THE THREE PROTEASE INHIBITORS WITH ANY ANTIHISTAMINE (including Claritin).

Two known deaths from cardiacarrhymthia have already occurred becauseof the combination. Apparently, the pro-tease inhibitors cause concentration of theantihistamines to increase to possiblylethal levels. Because antihistamines are socommon, the danger is widespread.Antihistamines are used as treatments forhay fever, in some cough medicines, formotion sickness, and bites and stings, etc.

Body Positive Newsletter (UK, July 1996)lists a further 14 specific drugs with whichthe protease inhibitor Ritonavir must notbe mixed.

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WARNING!


H VwatchAN EYE ON THE MEDIA

The bitter end seemed finally tohave arrived when, to every-body’s great relief, Sir John out ofthe blue announced: “ProfessorPeter Duesberg from the

University of California at Berkeley is prob-ably sleeping more easily at night now thanfor five years, since he first took up thecudgels against the doctrine that AIDS iscaused by the retrovirus HIV. Duesberghas been pilloried for his heterodox views,and faced the threat that his researchfunds would be snatched away.”(AIDSResearch Turned Upside Down, 26 Sep1991).

The reformed Sir John went on toobserve self-pityingly: “Now there is someevidence to support his long fight againstthe establishment among which, sadly, hecounts this journal.” Duesberg will be saying “I told you so”. How’s that for anapology?

Could anyone reading this be under anyillusion that Maddox in his wisdom haddecided that enough was enough,Duesberg’s period in the scientific wilder-ness should come to an end? Maddox hadexpressed regret at the enormous blundercommitted in 1984, when that scientificjoker, Robert C Gallo, announced he haddiscovered HIV to be the cause of AIDS. Itwas always surprising that a polymath likeMaddox, with a truly wide overview of con-temporary science, should have fallen forthe American fanfare lauding the wondersof their medico-scientific establishment,given the absence of any evidence worthyof the word to support it in the first place:and by Gallo of all people, mention ofwhose name should have provoked onlysmirks of derision, given his impressiverecord of self-glorifying mistakes.

With hindsight, Maddox must just havebeen cleverly biding his time, and used thefigleaf of the rubbishy results of Stott et al

and Hoffman & Kion to highlight just howdumb things had become. Stott’s group ofresearchers used two groups of four mon-keys, and inoculated one lot with SIV [sup-posedly the monkey equivalent of HIV] -infected white blood cells and the otherwith the same cells but without SIV, ascontrols. Guess what happened: three outof the four SIV-infected monkeys devel-oped antibodies to SIV, but so did two outof the four that were never infected withthe stuff! How could that be? Answer: theyhad no idea what they were doing; whatantibodies they were measuring or evenwhether they were antibodies at all – prob-ably they were just stress proteins.

Hoffman and his henchwoman foundsomething equally zany. They treated onetype of mouse with T-cells from another

type, and found parts of HIV (sic) proteinsin the treated mice. How can mice thathave never been near HIV show antibod-ies to it, as if they had successfully over-come attack by it!

These findings were good enough forMaddox to launch his long overdue strikeagainst the HIV/AIDS orthodoxy. So bySeptember 1991, 41/2 years afterDuesberg first blew the whistle, and hun-dreds of thousands of needless deathslater, old Maddox finally had enough of allthese harmless viruses which had earnednothing but derision for much of medical

research, with its retroviruses that did notcause cancer, Epstein-Barr virus thatcaused neither Burkett’s lymphoma, norherpes, nor warts nor cervical cancer etc.It was high time to add harmless HIV tothis roll of dishonour.

As far back as 1988 Maddox hadvoiced his misgivings about the way mole-cular biology was just measuring thingswhich amounted to nothing at all. “Findingwood among the trees: is the reductionistambition for molecular biology in dangerof being thwarted by the volume of thedata it produces?” he asked, and con-cluded this perceptive piece by observing:“...the data will get so far ahead of itsassimilation into a conceptual frameworkthat [they] will eventually prove an encum-brance. Part of the trouble is that excite-ment of the chase leaves little time forreflection. And there are grants for pro-ducing data, but hardly any for standingback in contemplation.” (5 May 1988)

Sir John had clearly decided it wastime to do some serious reflection of hisown. Soon after launching his attack onthe AIDS orthodoxy he cast his net evenwider by asking “Is molecular biology yeta science?”, in which he correctly notedthat: “there is now an army of peoplecalled molecular biologists whose pub-lished papers are innocent of referencesto whole plants and animals and whichmay have little to say about their physiolo-gy either.” (16 Jan 1992)

But the dawn of a new realism in thevalue of molecular biology was short lived.As if he had taken leave of his senses, hepublished two long papers early last year(12 Jan 1995) which claimed that HIVcaused “virological mayhem”, by replicatingseveral billion times per day. Didn’t he stopto think how this could be, since it contra-dicted everything previously known aboutHIV? The manifest nonsense Wei & Ho had

Is Maddox mad or ishe just pretending?

Or is his greatest hour yet to come? by

VOLKER GILDEMEISTER

Maddox expressedregret at the

enormous blunder

JOHN MADDOX is the recently retired editor of Nature, which flatters itself to be the best scientificjournal in the world, and the occasion was marked by

the bestowal of a knighthood on him. While the circulation of Nature has increased impressively under

his leadership, its treatment of one of the greatest scientific bungles of our time has been anything butimpressive and has, despite the vast erudition of its

editor, followed convention (almost) to the bitter end

made of AZT, although it is crucial to theDuesberg case. Without people havingbeen inadvertently killed in their hundredsof thousands by AZT, AIDS would by nowhave largely disappeared, the whole theo-ry dismissed for its failure to produce any-thing useful. Without lashings of Wellcomemoney driving the blunder along, the AIDSbandwagon would have ground to a haltlong ago.

As if the Maddox cup of self-betrayalwere not full enough already, he then triesto discredit the Duesberg explanation ofHIV infection in haemophiliacs, with equal-ly ludicrous results. Someone like Maddoxwould know in his sleep that DNA, being avery large molecule, is sensitive to shear-ing (even by stirring in solution), andwould certainly not survive the shearstresses occurring during freeze-drying tomake Factor VIII. This would inevitablycause the DNA to be broken into smallerpieces, thereby destroying any biologicallyactive structures which might have beenpresent. He clearly never even consideredthe implications of the risible OxfordHaemophilia Study. It is so riddled withinternal inconsistencies that I have knowna semi-literate/numerate shop assistantfall about with laughter.

Its main finding is that HIV-positivehaemophiliacs have a 10-fold greaterdeath rate than HIV-negatives. Theauthors calculate a death rate of 0.8% foruninfected haemophiliacs; but they are sosilly not to realise that this implies an aver-age life-span of 100÷0.8 = 125 years – notbad going for people, who even a genera-tion ago, generally did not reach 20!Maddox pretended not to notice andcalled it “A thorough study ... which formost people will be sufficient proof thatthe infection leads to AIDS”. (7 Sep 1995)

To complete this grisly charge sheet,Maddox has recently disgraced his organeven further by publishing that most dis-mal scientific enterprise – the Delta Trial.

Untroubled by the insolence of Wellcome’sdenial of Concorde (implying that the MRCand the French had cheated) Maddox didnot bat an eye-lid at one of Delta’s mostridiculous conclusions. Although every-body (except Wellcome) now agrees thatAZT itself kills people (or more diplomati-cally does ‘no good’), Delta claims thatadding 1/1000 of the amount of ddC to itchanges everything. But only if you havenot previously attempted to administerAZT alone: as they impishly call that,patients are AZT-naive. The naivety of

churned out must be obvious to anyone. To explain, just in case anyone has

failed to see “the wood for the trees”: howcan HIV have been latent for the first 15years of its existence, yet all along havebeen replicating furiously without everhaving been noticed? Is this not the clear-est example of what Maddox had com-plained about back in May 1988?

In his short period of enlightenmentMaddox also asked: “Should molecularbiologists mend their ways by resurrectingthe Law of Mass Action (now conspicuousby its absence)? ... It would be a worth-while precaution against the quantitativedays that lie ahead that people shouldmake sure that published data are capa-ble of quantitative interpretation by thosewho have the zeal for that. As things are,that is far from true.” (16 Jan 1992)

Tut, tut! What delicate, polite terminolo-gy to tell these overbearing Yankees fromthe NIH, NCI, NIAID etc. to stop churningout meaningless data. But who else thanMaddox himself is responsible for thisdeplorable state of affairs! Or will he shuf-fle the blame off on Rupert Murdoch, theYankee convert and owner of Maddox’srag, pleading force majeure. That wouldbe a bit rich, since Nature’s out and outAmerican stablemate Bio/Technology isunder no such constraint. Its scientific edi-

tor, Harvey Bialy, rightly prides himself onhaving kept his journal completely free ofall the current AIDS alchemy.

So, what was the bottom line of SirJohn’s short-lived uprising against HIV on26 September 1991? Well, er, nothingmuch. On the grapevine it was said heplanned to give Duesberg the opportunityto state his case properly. Instead SirJohn commissioned a paper entitled Doesdrug use cause AIDS? (11 March 1993)

No half-way decent journal would everhave dreamt of publishing such a badpaper – it was embarrassing. How couldany serious scientist even attempt toquantify drug use based exclusively onself-confession (as opposed to indepen-dent verification – who would believe adrunk to tell the truth about how much hedrinks, all the more so if what he did wereillegal, as drugs are)? The paper lumpstogether drugs as disparate as marijuana,nitrites (poppers), cocaine and ampheta-mines (ecstasy). Marijuana is so obviouslydifferent from the others, to anyone withan ounce of common sense, because onlythe gaseous components (as opposed tothe impurities and adulterants) are inhaled,whereas with the other three, not only thedrug but also the contaminants (which willbe many and varied and toxic) are ingest-ed. Therefore, such quantitative assess-ment of consumption must be one of themost foolish gestures ever made. But nottoo foolish for Maddox to publish.

To cap it all, no mention whatever is


claiming that 1000 molecules of toxic AZTare changed from harmful to beneficial byjust one molecule of ddC, might strike achemist more forcefully than a physicistlike Maddox, except that Maddox has atleast 1000 times more savvy of contempo-rary medical research than an ordinarychemist has. It was the same Maddox wholectured molecular biologists that it wastime for them “to mend their ways by res-urrecting the Law of Mass Action conspic-uous by its absence from what they pub-lish”. Whose fault is it that they do not?

For the benefit of those unfamiliar withthe Law of Mass Action (and others whohave forgotten) it means that one molecule

of ddC can never in a million years nullifythe effect of 1000 molecules of AZT. Itwould be like saying a tiny amount ofcyanide is lethal to man, but a single mole-cule cannot be – everything has to be inproportion. Stupendous stuff this ddC, youmight wonder: in point of fact it is like AZT,just a dummy nucleotide, synthesised in thelab to stop DNA chains from being formed.

Since Maddox is known to preferwhiskey to pills, what quirk of humannature might be at work here–

(i) personal antipathy to Duesberg? (ii) blind loyalty to Wellcome and all its

works? (iii) a case of cherchez la femme –

Brenda, Lady M? (iv) a delayed Strohman effect? [Richard Strohman was until recently for

more than 30 years Professor of Cell andMolecular Biology at Berkeley, fundedthroughout by the NIH, a measure of hisscientific rectitude. For the last 20 years hetried to unravel the intricacies of musculardystrophy, caused by a single defectivegene. Not until he retired did he have thetime to stand back and think, and realisethat as a classical molecular biologist hehad been labouring under completely falsepreconceptions of how genes work.]

Come on Maddox: collect yourthoughts for a few hours and rattle off thatarticle which will re-establish your integrityand credibility, and blow HIV right out ofthe water. Lots of people, especially inAmerica, will say “the old sot has lost hismarbles”, but the elegant way in which youwill say it will make them squirm. All thecurrent pointless research on “how, why,perhaps, latently/billion-fold, directly/indi-rectly, overtly/covertly, this strain/thatmutant, with/without this/that co-factor”,this futile activity called ‘AIDS research’will cease. Countless people will be saved,by not having to bother with a virus thatcannot do anything anyway, and whichdoes not even exist.

In classical mathematics one form ofproof is reductio ad absurdum, ie. if a the-ory leads to an absurd conclusion, it mustbe wrong. How more absurd can you get,Sir John, than an average lifespan of 125years, or that one molecule can cancel out1000?

Maddox pretended not

to notice

No journal wouldhave published

such a bad paper

Sir John MaddoxSir John Maddox

In 1983, Montagnier et al isolated a retrovirus, now termedHuman immunodeficiency virus (HIV), from a patient with lym-phadenopathy and proposed that HIV may cause AIDS.Antibody against this virus has since been found in many, butnot all AIDS patients1 and in 17 million healthy people2.Eleni Papadopulos, Val Turner, John Papadimitriou, David

Causer, Bruce Hedland-Thomas & Barry Page3 and Stefan Lanka4

maintain that the very existence of HIV is dubious because (i) HIVhas not been properly isolated and thus could not have beenproperly identified (according to Papadopulos et al: “HIV hasnever been isolated as an independent particle separate fromeverything else”3); and (ii) antibodies against HIV are not specific5.They submit that the following evidence is not “specific” for HIV:identifying in the growth medium of infected human cell cultureseither the existence of virus-like particles with the electron micro-scope, or of reverse transcriptase associated with such particles,or of certain HIV antigens or proteins associated with particles,because each of these could be cellular materials or could befrom cell-borne (endogenous) retroviruses other than HIV.

Indeed, each of these criteria could reflect another retrovirus,and some of these criteria, eg. particles and proteins, couldreflect non-viral material altogether.

However, the Papadopulos-Lanka challenge, that HIV doesnot exist, fails to explain (i) why virtually all people who containHIV DNA also contain antibodies against Montagnier’s HIV strain– the global standard of all HIV tests – and (ii) why most, but cer-tainly not all people who lack HIV DNA contain no such antibod-ies. The presence of HIV-reactive antibodies in some uninfectedpeople reflects an inherent limitation of tests for antibodiesagainst viruses and other microbes. Since even the simplestmicrobes display thousands of antibody docking sites, termed“epitopes”, antibodies against a given microbe may cross react


FOCUS: GLOBAL CONCERN ON VIRUS ISOLATION

Peter DuesbergResponds

After Robert Gallo with Margaret Heckler, theReagan administration’s Health and Human ServicesSecretary, held a press conference in 1984 toannounce HIV as the “probable” cause of AIDS, hesucceeded in publishing an unprecedented fourpapers on the subject in the journal Science. Noother scientists had had time to respond to his opinions before he made them public; but Gallo hadwritten to the editor of Science concerning the virus-like particles his French competitors had presented which he was later convicted of havingmisappropriated, and which today are the benchmark for HIV, “no-one has ever been able towork with [the Montagnier team’s] particles.Because of the lack of permanent production andcharacterisation, it is hard to say that they are really‘isolated’ in the sense that virologists use the term”.

To this day, a vitally important debate with enormous implications continues over whether avirus can be said to exist if it can’t be unambiguously isolated. Proteins and genetic material (DNA andRNA) may be viral or cellular in origin. CalifornianAIDS dissident Professor Peter Duesberg, historicallya leader in virology and genetics, has argued

brilliantly for nearly a decade that HIV cannot causeAIDS; here he responds to the challenge byContinuum for proof of the isolation of HIV. In thenext issue, the Perth group led by biophysicist EleniPapadopulos-Eleopulos, and German virologistStefan Lanka, will respond.

Also in this issue, the latest paper from ProfessorAlfred Hässig and colleagues of the Study Group onNutrition and Immunity in Bern, Switzerland raisesserious doubts about the alleged specificity of HIV-antibodies, conventionally used not only as diagnostic markers but as an argument for the presence, and hence existence, of HIV. At least agood part of the positive reactions, they argue, areauto-antibody reactions against non-viral structuresof the body.

Because Prof. Duesberg’s preferred technique forretroviral isolation does not fulfil the PasteurInstitute methodology (1973) which was the criterion of the Continuum isolation prize, it has notbeen possible to grant his claim to the prize, albeit he argues that other isolation techniques exist.

The reward is still available.

245 DAYS...

...and still waiting!


with an otherwise unrelated microbe if the two share some epi-topes.

In view of the current controversy about the identification ofHIV, the British AIDS magazine Continuum has offered in itsJan/Feb 1996 issue a “Missing virus! £1000 Reward”6 for proof ofthe isolation of HIV, and the reward was re-posted “105 days later...we’re still waiting”7 inthe March/April, 1996 issue together with mypreliminary “Reward claim... Cordially yours,Peter Duesberg”8,9. The stakes have sincebeen raised considerably by a private rewardof £10,000 from Alex Russell from the DMSWatson Library, University College London10,and have now been raised even further by a£25,000 reward from James Whitehead fromthe International AIDS Freedom Network(IAFN), London11,12.

Here I take up these challenges. I will arguethat HIV exists, and has been properly identi-fied as a unique retrovirus on the grounds that(i) it has been isolated – even from its own viri-on structure – in the form of an infectious,molecularly cloned HIV DNA that is able toinduce the synthesis of a reverse transcriptasecontaining virion, and (ii) that HIV-specific, viralDNA can be identified only in infected, but notin uninfected human cells. In view of this I canbase my case for the isolation of HIV on the most rigorousmethod available to date, i.e. molecular cloning of infectious HIVDNA, rather than only on the much less stringent, traditional“rules for isolation of a retrovirus ... discussed at the PasteurInstitute, Paris, in 1973” that were stated criteria of isolation inContinuum’s missing virus reward6. Indeed I will show that mole-cular cloning of infectious HIV DNA exceeds the criteria of the old“Pasteur rules”.

(I) ISOLATION OF HIV The existence of the retrovirus HIV predicts that HIV DNA can beisolated from the chromosomal DNA of infected cells. This pre-diction has been confirmed as follows: Full-length HIV-1 and HIV-2 DNAs have been prepared from virus-infected cells and clonedin bacterial plasmids13-15. Such clones are totally free of all viraland cellular proteins, and cellular contaminants that co-purifywith virus. These clones produce infectious virus that is neutral-ized by specific antisera from AIDS patients. For example, virusproduced by infectious HIV-2 DNA is neutralized only by anti-serum from HIV-2 but not from HIV-1-infected people15.

Since infectious HIV DNA has been isolated from infectedhuman cells that is free of HIV’s own proteins and RNA as well asfrom all cellular macromolecules, HIV isolation has passed themost vigorous standards available today. In other words theseinfectious DNA clones meet and exceed the isolation standardsof the traditional “Pasteur rules”. Isolation of infectious HIV DNAsis theoretically the most absolute from of isolation – it is theequivalent of isolating the virus’ soul, its genetic code, from thevirus’ body, the virus particle. Thus HIV isolation based on molec-ular cloning exceeds the old standards defined as “Pasteur rules”by Continuum.

(II) IDENTIFICATION OF HIV The existence of HIV predicts that infected cells contain a unique,virus-specific DNA of 9150 nucleotides that cannot be detectedin DNA of uninfected human cells. The probabilities that cellularDNA and other viral DNAs would contain the same sequence of9150 nucleotides is 1 in 49150, or 1 in 104500 – extremely close tozero! Since the odds that a given nucleotide of any DNA is eitherA,G,C or T are in 1 in 4, the odds that any DNA has the samesequence of 9150 nucleotides as HIV-1 or HIV-2 are only 1 in49150.

Thanks to the outrageous interest in HIV as the hypotheticalcause of AIDS, many investigators have sought specific HIV DNAin humans with and without AIDS in an effort to confirm the ratherunreliable HIV antibody-test.1,5.

FOCUS: VIRUS SEARCHBut because only 1 in 100 T-cells are ever infected in humans,

virtually all such studies use Kary Mullis’ polymerase chain reaction, a technique that is designed to amplify a DNA-needleinto a DNA-haystack. Such efforts have confirmed the existence ofHIV-specific DNA in most (not all) antibody-positive persons with

and without AIDS – but not in the DNA of anti-body-negative people. For example Jackson etal have tested blood cells of 409 antibody-posi-tives including 144 AIDS patients and 265healthy people. In addition 131 antibody-nega-tives were tested. HIV-specific DNA subsets –defined in size and sequence by HIV-specificprimers (start signals for the selective amplification) – were found in 403 of the 409antibody-positives, but in none of the 131 anti-body-negative people16.

The high sequence specificity of HIV DNAsis translated into the specificity of their pro-teins, eg. antibodies against HIV-1 do not neu-tralize HIV-1 and vice versa15.

IN CONCLUSION HIV has been isolated by the most rigorous

method science has to offer. An infectious DNAof 9.15 kilo bases (kb) has been cloned fromthe cells of HIV-antibody-positive persons, that– upon transfection – induces the synthesis of

an unique retrovirus. This DNA “isolates” HIV from all cellular mol-ecules, even from viral proteins and RNA. Having cloned infectiousDNA of HIV is as much isolation of HIV as one can possibly get.The retrovirus encoded by this infectious DNA reacts with thesame antibodies that crossreact with Montagnier’s global HIVstandard, produced by immortal cell lines in many labs and com-panies around the world for the HIV-test. This confirms the exis-tence of the retrovirus HIV.

The uniqueness of HIV is confirmed by the detection of HIV-specific DNA sequences in the DNA of most antibody-positivepeople. The same DNA is not found in uninfected humans, and theprobability to find such a sequence in any DNA sample is 1 in 49500

– which is much less likely than to encounter the same water mol-ecule twice by swimming in the Pacific ocean every day of yourlife.

The existence of an unique retrovirus HIV provides a plausibleexplanation for the good (not perfect) correlation between the exis-tence of HIV DNA and antibodies against it in thousands of peoplethat have been subjected to both tests. The Papadopulos-Lankachallenge fails to explain this correlation.

Ergo: The Papadopulos-Lanka challenge is rejected. HIV existsand has been isolated.

References1. Duesberg PH: The HIV gap in national AIDS statistics. Bio/Technology 11:955-956(1993).2. World Health Organisation: The current Global Situation of the HIV/AIDS Pandemic.Geneva (Jan 1995).3. Papadopulos-Eleopulos E, Turner VF, Papadimitriou JM, Causer D, Hedland-Thomas B and Page BAP: A critical analysis of the HIV-T4-cell-AIDS hypothesis,Genetica 95:5-24 (1995).4. Lanka S: HIV reality or artifact? Continuum, 3/1:4-9 (April/May 1995).5. Papadopulos-Eleopulos E, Turner VF and Papadimitriou JM: Is a positive Westernblot proof of HIV infection? Bio/Technology 11:696-707 (1993).6. The Jody Wells Memorial Prize: Missing Virus! £1,000 Reward. Continuum 3/5:4(Jan/Feb 1996).7. Christie H: 105 days ... we’re still waiting. Continuum 3/6:5 (March/April 1996).8. Duesberg P: Reward Claim (letter). Continuum 3/6:18 (Mar/April 1996).9. Christie H: Letter to Peter Duesberg (1996).10. Alex Russell: Letter to Peter Duesberg (2/28/96).11. Letter from Fred Cline, San Francisco, Representative of the IAFN (2/4/96). 12. Alex Russell: Letter to Fred Cline, undated (April 1996).13. Fisher AG, Collalti E, Ratner L, Gallo RC and Wong-Staal F: A molecular clone ofHTLV-III with biological activity. Nature (London) 316:262-265 (1985).14. Levy JA, Cheng-Mayer C, Dina D and Luciw PA: AIDS retrovirus (ARV-2) clonereplicates in transfected human and animal fibroblasts. Science 232:998-1001 (1986).15. Barnett SW, Quiroga M, Werner A, Dina D and Levy JA: Distinguishing features ofan infectious molecular clone of the highly divergent and noncytopathic humanimmunodeficiency virus type 2 UC1 strain. J. Virol. 67:1006-1014 (1993).16. Jackson JB, Kwok SY, Sninsky JJ, Hopsicker JS, Sannerud KJ, Rhame FS, HenryJ, Simpson M and Balfour HH Jr.: Human immunodeficiency virus type 1 detected inall seropositive symptomatic and asymptomatic individuals. J. Clin. Microbiol. 28:16-19 (1990).

Prof. Peter Duesberg

c


Two years ago the working group of G M Shearer demon-strated that autoantibodies in the serum of patients withlupus erythematosus (an autoimmune disease), and in theserum of mice with experimentally induced lupus erythe-matosus, are capable of reacting specifically with glyco-

protein (gp) 120 and peptides of the HIV-1 envelope.1 The formationof antibodies with anti-HIV specificity against gp120 and the asso-ciated peptides in lupus erythematosus disseminatus is an indica-tion that the anti-HIV antibodies can be formed within the frame-work of B-cell activations in systemic autoimmune diseases. Thusthe question arises whether anti-HIV antibodies should generally beclassified in the large group of autoimmune antibodies against cel-lular structures. These are described as antinuclear autoantibod-ies.2,3

Lupus erythematosus disseminatus is the prototype of a sys-temic autoimmune disease with widespread involvement of the dif-ferent organ systems. This group of diseases also includes rheuma-toid arthritis, Sjögren’s syndrome, scleroderma and mixed forms ofinflammatory diseases of the connective tissues. In these diseases,as a result of an activation of polyclonal B-cells, one finds a largenumber of humoral autoantibodies against cellular and extracellularstructures.

HUMORAL AUTOANTIBODIES IN AIDSIn their review of chronic infections and autoimmunity, M Abu-Shakra and Y Shoenfeld mention that the following autoantibodieshave been found in AIDS patients: antinuclear autoantibodies,rheumatoid factors, antibodies against erythrocytes, platelets, gran-ulocytes and lymphocytes (T-cells), as well as antibodies againstsperms4. In fact, there is extensive literature available on humoralantibodies in AIDS patients, in which autoantibodies against actin,myosin, trinitrophenol and thymosin have also been described5-7. Inaddition, in many works attention is drawn to the close connectionbetween retroviruses and autoimmune diseases, without it beingpossible to explain the pathogenic mechanisms of these relation-ships8.

HORIZONTAL TRANSMISSION OF HIV STRUCTURES ASTRIGGERING FACTORS FOR AUTOIMMUNE REACTIONSRNA viruses which are transcribed by reverse transcriptase into theDNA of the host genome, where they are integrated as endogenous

self-structures, are known as retroviruses9. For this reason thehorizontal transmission of retroviruses may be considered as thetransmission of genetic structures between individuals of thesame species. The immunological reactions occurring in retroviralinfections are therefore to be considered as alloimmune reactionsand thus have to be classified as regularities of transplantationimmunology. In this respect it is seen that immune-competentrecipients of transplants react with an effective cellular immuneresponse and thereby reject the transplant. Moderately immuno-suppressed recipients of transplants, such as those under long-term treatment with cyclosporin, for example, are able to live withtheir transplant for long periods without problems. In contrast,transplant recipients with pronounced suppression of their cellu-lar immune reactions are as a rule adversely affected by the acti-vated immune system of the transplant, within the framework of a“graft versus host” reaction, which at worst can lead to the deathof the patient10. In blood transfusions, the elimination of alloreac-tive genetic structures of the donor through cellular immune reac-tions of the recipient is the norm. “Graft versus host” reactions(GVHRs) are extremely rare.

ACUTE AND CHRONIC “GRAFT VERSUS HOST” REACTIONS (GVHRs)

The study of GVHRs in mice that were injected with lymphocytesfrom the parent animals has provided important insights into themechanisms involved in acute and chronic GVHRs. With the injec-tion of donor lymphocytes which show differences in MHC loci ofClasses I and II, from the recipient animals, an acute lethalimmunosuppressive GVHR occurs in the receiver animals, charac-terised by anaemia and hypogammaglobulinaemia, with increasedmortality due to increased susceptibility to infections. If the differ-ence between the donor lymphocytes and the recipient lympho-cytes is limited to MHC loci of Class II a chronic GVHR develops,with stimulation of the polyclonal B-cells and the formation ofhumoral autoantibodies within the framework of a lupus-like syn-drome. The stimulation of the formation of autoantibodies is dueto the long-term persistence of alloreactive T-4 cells11.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE SHIFT IN THE TH-1/TH-2EQUILIBRIUM IN SYSTEMIC AUTOIMMUNISATION

As we have shown in our previous studies, an acquired suppres-sion of the cellular immune reactions is the leading factor in thepathogenesis of AIDS12. In this, the opposing behaviour of thehumoral and the cellular immune reactions plays a decisive role.Characteristic for this is the behaviour of the cytokine profile ofthe Th-1 and the Th-2 cell-groups of the CD4+ helper cells. TheTh-1 cells produce primarily IL-2, IL-12 and IFNg and throughthem stimulate the cellular immune reactions. The Th-2 cells pro-duce mainly IL-4, IL-6 and IL-10, and through them stimulate thehumoral (antibody) immune reactions. The Th-1/Th-2 equilibriumof the cytokine production of CD4+ lymphocytes is subject to thestress-induced neuroendocrine control of the immune system.Here, the relationship between cortisol and dehyro-epiandos-terone (DHEA) plays the decisive role.

HIV -can you bemore specific?Open Questions Concerning theSpecificity of anti-HIV Antibodies:Do they belong to the group of autoan-tibodies against cellular structures?

by Prof. A. Hässig, Prof. Liang Wen-Xi,Dr. Kurt Stampfli and Dr. H. Kremer

FOCUS: VIRUS SEARCH


As explained earlier, the study of alloimmune reactions inrodents has shown that systemic autoimmunisations are associated with a shift in the Th-1/Th-2 equilibrium of the CD4+lymphocytes. Chronic “graft versus host” reactions show anMHC Class-II-induced activation of the B-cells with increased IL-4 and decreased IL-2 activity. The excess of T-2 cells triggers the formation of antinuclear autoantibodies within the framework oflupus-like inflammatory reactions11.

Extensive literature is available on the activation of autoim-mune reactions within the framework of infectious and toxicinflammations4. We are grateful to A Schaffner and B Rager-Zisman for an excellent review on virus-induced autoimmunity13.Of special interest for the pathogenesis of AIDS in haemophiliacsare recent works on the activation of autoimmune reactions inhepatitis C14. The toxic induction of autoimmune reactions has forseveral years been the field of research of E Gleichmann who,with his working-group, has shown that toxic-induced autoim-mune reactions behave in the same way as alloimmune diseases,whereby in both cases a Th-2 profile of the CD4+ helper cellsplays the central role15.

The close connection between our retroviruses and autoimmune rheumatic diseases gave rise to discussions as towhether endogenous retroviruses play a role in the aetiology ofthese diseases. However, no conclusive results were obtained inthis respect16. The contrary idea, that antiretroviral antibodiesshould be classified in the large group of the autoimmune anti-bodies has to our knowledge not been considered up till now.

YIN-YANG SHIFTS OF MACROPHAGE ACTIVITY AS TRIGGERING FACTORS FOR AUTOIMMUNE DISEASESAs already mentioned, during the last ten years it has been recog-nised that in immune reactions a state of equilibrium exists betweenB-cell-dependent humoral and T-cell-dependent cellular immunereactions, which in all stress reactions is shifted in favour of thehumoral immune reactions and to the disadvantage of the cellularimmune reactions. Immune competence is defined as a state ofequilibrium between humoral and cellular immune reactions17.

The processing of the cell fragments resulting from the contin-uous cell metabolism is a permanent physiological task of theimmune system. The human organism consists of about 1014

cells18. The around 1012 apoptotic cell fragments that are pro-duced daily are recognised by the cytotoxic T-cells originatingfrom the thymus and by the natural killer cells, and are transmit-ted to the macrophages, which process them without any signsof inflammation. The macrophage activity corresponds to the Yinsituation. It is trophotropic and anabolic (such reactions involvethe formation of body constituents).

In contrast, every stress-induced adjustment of the immunesystem to the elimination of exogenous “non-self” structures byhumoral antibodies produced from B-cells is a special, temporarytask of the immune system. It is always associated with aninflammatory activation of the macrophages. In this process thestress-induced hypercorticolism causes a reduction of the Th-1lymphokines IL-2, IL-12 and IFNg. In the macrophages this caus-es an increased release of 02 radicals and inflammation media-tors such as IL-1 and TNFa. At the same time this neuroen-docrine situation weakens the containment capacity of themacrophages towards their intracellular micro-organisms. Inaddition, their defence against opportunistic micro-organisms isimpaired. This macrophage activity corresponds to the Yang situ-ation. It is ergotropic and catabolic and is generally described asan acute-phase reaction.

The Th-1 cytokine profile of the CD4+ lymphocytes corre-sponds to the Yin situation of the macrophage activity, while theTH-2 profile corresponds to the Yang situation of this activity19.

According to what has been said, autoimmune diseases are tobe understood as being the pathological effects of a continuousinflammatory macrophage activity, in which the increased perfor-mance of the immune system is directed towards endogenousstructures.

In systemic autoimmune diseases such as lupus erythemato-sus disseminatus the persistent hyperactivity of the B-cell func-tions is the principal factor responsible for these conditions.

From what has been said, it emerges that there is much thatspeaks for the fact that the close association between retroviraldiseases and autoimmune diseases is due to the same mecha-nism of a continuous hyperactivity of the B-cell functions. Itshould therefore be worthwhile to seriously address the questionwhether the anti-HIV antibodies can retain the individual identityaccorded them up until now, or whether they should be classifiedin the large group of humoral autoantibodies against cellularstructures. In this respect, clarification of the relationship of theretroviral proteins to the endogenous proteins plays a centralrole.

RELATIONSHIPS OF THE GLYCOPROTEIN GP120 OF THE HIV ENVELOPE TO ACTIN

In their work on the occurrence of anti-HIV antibodies with speci-ficity against gp120 and the accompanying peptides in patientswith lupus erythematosus disseminatus, the working-group of GM Shearer has shown that these antibodies differ from the anti-DNA autoantibodies of these patients1. As a result of this thequestion of the specificity of this autoantibody populationremained unanswered. The following arguments serve to indicatethat these could be anti-actin autoantibodies. Glycoprotein 120and protein 41 are generally considered to be fission products ofprotein 160, which is found in virally infected cells but not in theinfectious virus itself. Protein 120 is found only on the surface ofprotrusions occurring with the exocytosis of virus-like particles,but not in the released particles themselves20. Thus the questionarises whether these glycoproteins, which are described as enve-lope proteins of the retroviruses, are endogenous proteins. In thefirst description of the human immunodeficiency viruses (HIVs) bythe working-group of L Montagnier, they mentioned the possibili-ty that “the 45k protein may be due to contamination of the virusby cellular actin, which was present in immunoprecipitates of allthe cell extracts”21. In fact, the oxidation of cellular sulphydrylgroups leads to the polymerisation of actin, so that the binding ofanti-actin autoantibodies has been suggested as a sensitivemethod for the indication of a lymphocyte activation22-25.

Anti-actin antibodies are found in healthy individuals, but alsoespecially in patients with autoimmune diseases. In the lattercases their antibody profile speaks against cross-reactivity withviral antigens. In all probability they are natural autoantibodies26.They are particularly common in patients with chronic forms ofhepatitis, where they play the same role as disease indicators asdo the anticardiolipin antibodies in syphilis14.

In order to explain the relationship of the demonstration ofanti-HIV antibodies to viral or non-viral endogenous structures itseems to us to be essential to address, on a sound basis, thequestion of the anti-actin activity of anti-HIV antibodies againstthe envelope proteins of HIVs.

Based on these considerations, the sine qua non of an HIVinfection in a case of AIDS is in our opinion invalid.Pathogenically, stress-induced suppressions of the cellularimmune reactions are to be placed at the beginning of theprocess. Besides the weakening of the defences against latentinfections and opportunistic micro-organisms, the impairment ofthe thymus-dependent immune functions causes an activation ofthe polyclonal B-cells, which in turn gives rise to autoimmunereactions with increased production of humoral autoantibodies.The increase in the anti-HIV antibody level is to be understood asa marker of this activation of the polyclonal B-cells. Thereforeefforts aimed at the prevention of AIDS have to be directed pri-marily towards the correction of stress-induced suppressions ofthe cellular immune reactions, whereby suppression of theinflammatory activation of the macrophages is the most impor-tant objective27.

Finally, we would like to draw attention to the fact that at thetime when the working-groups of L Montagnier and R C Gallowere developing the anti-HIV antibody test, it was widely believedthat any synthesis and release of reverse transcriptase was anindication of the active production of retroviruses. Today, howev-er, we know that RNA-controlled DNA polymerases fulfil certainphysiological functions, for example as telomerases in the stabili-sation of the extremities of chromosomes28. It is therefore of inter-

FOCUS: VIRUS SEARCH

➾


est to consider this particular viewpoint in a critical examination ofthe development of these tests at that time.

SUMMARYTwo years ago the working-group of G M Shearer demonstrated thatantibodies in the serum of patients with lupus erythematosus and inthe serum of mice with experimentally induced lupus erythematosusare capable of reacting specifically with glycoproteins 120 and pep-tides from the HIV-1 envelope. On the basis of these observations weput to ourselves the question whether this group of anti-HIV antibod-ies are to be considered as autoantibodies against cellular structures.

A literature search has shown that humoral autoantibodies occurfrequently in patients with AIDS and display the same specificities asin patients with systemic autoimmune diseases.

We would further point out that the horizontal transmission of HIVstructures can act as the trigger for alloimmune reactions, whereby in

recipients with severely suppressed cellular immune reactions“graft versus host” reactions can appear, with the developmentof humoral alloimmune reactions.

Furthermore, we have shown that autoimmune reactions haveto be considered as pathological effects of a continuous inflam-matory macrophage activity, whereby the increased performanceof the immune system for the elimination of exogenous “non-self”structures is directed against endogenous structures. In this con-nection, in systemic autoimmune diseases such as lupus erythe-matosus the principal factor involved is the continuous hyperac-tivity of the B-cell functions.

Finally, we have shown that many observations point to thefact that anti-HIV antibodies with specificity against gp120 andthe associated peptides are autoantibodies against cellular actin.

The authors are grateful for the support given to this work by theHans Eggenberger Foundation in Zurich.

Graham Ross, of the Ross Park Legal Partnership specialising in medico-legal, product liability, environmental, personal injury and group actioncases, explains the developments in the pursuit of justice around AZT. The more people join the process,the more likely a successful outcome.

We are acting in a small number of AZT-related cases, some ofwhich are now in court. These cases all relate to the prescribingof AZT to persons who were asymptomatic at the time and havesubsequently become severely ill and, in most cases, died. Theallegation is that significant damage was caused by the drug asopposed to the virus.

The allegation that the drug can play a major role in causingillness is no longer as controversial as it may originally havebeen. The Concorde study showed that there was no benefit inproviding AZT to asymptomatics, in the sense that it did notdelay the onset of illness, and now the Concorde follow-up studywill reveal, according to the paper presented at Copenhagen lastyear by one of the Concorde team, Janet Darbyshire, that theyhave seen a significant excess of deaths in the group studiedwho had taken AZT whilst asymptomatic.

All these cases are covered by Legal Aid. An important consideration for the Legal Aid Board is to be satisfied that the

cost of this litigation is not so excessive as to make the litigationunjustifiable. Whilst the cost in respect of the running of thegeneral issues in these cases is high (on account of the complexmedical and scientific issues) they are divided amongst all clients.The more cases, the lower the cost per case.

However, there is still a rather small number of cases so fargoing forward with the result that the proportion of costs borneby each client is higher than it ought to be. It is possible, and thishas happened in other group-type actions, that the Board maydecide that, whatever the merits of the cases, the pro rata shareis too high and, as a result, withdraw support. If this were tohappen then the litigation could not be taken forward and theopportunity to examine these important issues would be lost.

In view of this I would like to say to anyone who considers thatthey may wish to take action but have remained on the sidelineson a “wait and see” basis, that they make a decision to instruct asolicitor as soon as possible. Quite apart from the fact that thedelay could prejudice claims (time limits do apply) we need morepeople to come forward to help share the cost burden. As partof a network called ALERT we have organised a team of twentyfour solicitors around the country and clients can be referred toa local member firm. We are very happy to talk through cases onthe telephone at no cost or commitment.

If anybody wishes to discuss this they can contact me or myteam on 0151 284 8585.

References1. Bermas BL, Petri M, Bergofsky JA, Walsman A, Shearer GM, Mozes E. Binding ofGlycoprotein 120 and Peptides from the HIV-1 Envelope by Autoantibodies in Mice withExperimentally Induced Systemic Lupus Erythematosus and in Patients with the Disease.AIDS Res. Human Retroviruses 10:1071-1077 (1994).2. Tan EM: Autoantibodies to nuclear antigens (ANA): Their immunology and medicine.Adv. Immunol. 1982; 33:167-240.3. Tan EM: Antinuclear antibodies: Diagnostic markers for autoimmune diseases andprobes for cell biology. Adv. Immunol. 1989; 44:93-151.4. Abu-Shakra A, Shoenfeld. Chronic infections and autoimmunity. Immunol. Ser. 1991;55:285-313.5. Matsiota P, Chamaret S, Montagnier L. Avrameas S. Detection of natural autoantibodiesin the serum of anti-HIV-positive individuals. Ann. Inst. Pasteur/Immunol 1987; 138:223-233.6. Calabrese LH. Autoimmune manifestations of human immune deficiency virus (HIV)infection. Clinics Lab. Med. 1988; 8:269-279.7. Papadopulos-Eleopulos E, Turner VF, Papadimitriou JM. Is a positive Western blot proofof HIV infection? Bio/Technol. 1993; 11:696-707.8. Krieg AM, Steinberg AD: Retroviruses and autoimmunity. J. Autoimmunity 1990; 3:137-166.9. Levy JA: The Retroviridae Vol 4 (Ed0 in the Viruses: Series Eds Fraenkel-Conrat H andWagner RR. New York Plenum 1995.10. Roitt OI, Brostoff J, Male D: Immunology, 4th ed. London: Mosby 1996.11. Rozendaal L, Pals ST, Gleichmann E, Melief CJM. Persistence of allospecific helper Tcells is required for maintaining autoantibody formation in lupus-like graft-versus-host dis-ease. Clin. exp. Immunol. 1990; 82:527-532.12. Hässig A, Liang Wen-Xi, Stampfli K. Ueberlegungen zur Pathogenese und Präventionvon AIDS. Schweiz.Zschr.GanzheitsMed 1995; Nr. 6:298-306.13. Schaffner A, Rager-Zismann B: Virus-induced autoimmunity, Rev. Infect. Dis. 1990;12:204-222.14. Clifford BD, Donahue D, Smith L et al. High prevalence of serological markers ofautoimmunity in patient with chronic hepatitis. Hepatol. 1995; 21:613-619.

15. Goldman M, Druelt P, Gleichmann E. TH-2 cells in systemic autoimmunity: insightsfrom allogeneic diseases and chemically induced autoimmunity. Immunol. Today 1991;12:223-227.16. Venables P, Brookes S. Retroviruses: Potential aetiological agents in autoimmunerheumatic disease. Brit. J. Rheumatol. 1992; 31:841-846.17. Hässig A, Liang WX, Stampfli K. Stress-induced suppression of the cellular immunereactions. Med. Hypothes. 1995; im Druck.18. Lehner CF: Zellteilungen in mehrzelligen Organismen. Wie viele, wann und wo? NeueZürcher Zeitung, 15 November 1995; Nr. 266:65.19. Clerici M, shearer GM. Is HIV associated with a Th-1 to a Th-2 switch? Immunol. Today1993; 14:107-110.20. Pinter A, Honnen WJ, Tilley SA et al. Oligomeric structure of gp41, the transmembraneprotein of human immunodeficiency virus type 1. J. Virol. 1989; 63:2674-2679.21. Barré-Sinoussi F, Chermann JC, Rey F et al. Isolation of a T-lymphotropic retrovirusfrom a patient at risk for acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), Science 1983;220:868-871.22. Papadopulos-Eleopulos E, Turner VF, Papadimitriou JM: Oxidative stress, HIV andAIDS: Res. Immunol. 1992; 143:145-148.23. Hinshaw Db, Burger JM, Beals TF, Armstrong BC, Hyslop PA. Actin polymerization incellular oxidant injury. Arch. Biochem. Biophys. 1991; 288:311-316.24. Bach MA, Lewis DE, McClure JE, Parikh N, Rosenblatt HM, Shearer WT. Monoclonalanti-actin antibody recognizes a surface molecule on normal and transformed human Blymphocytes: Expression varies with phase of cell cycle. Cell. Immunol. 1986; 98:364-374.25. Damsky CH, Sheffield JB, Tuszynski GP, Warren L. Is there a role for actin in virus bud-ding? J. Cell. Biol. 1977; 75:593-605.26. Girard D, Senécal JL. Anti-microfilament IgG antibodies in normal adults and in patientswith autoimmune diseases: immunofluorescence and immunoblotting analysis of 201 sub-jects reveals polyreactivity with microfilament-associated proteins. Clin. Immunol.Immunopathol. 1995; 74:193-201.27. Hässig A, Liang WX, Stampfli K: Can we find a solution to the HIV-AIDS controversy?Med. Hypotheses: in print (1996).28. Greider CW, Blackburn EH. Telomere, Telomerase und Krebs. Spektrum derWissenschaft, April 1996:30-36.

HAVE YOU TAKEN AZT?Joining the court cases will keep litigation costs down

FOCUS: VIRUS SEARCH

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REVIEW

Neville Hodgkinson’s paradigm-shiftinginvestigation into the mass-illusion thathas become known as the ‘HIV/AIDS’hypothesis will have a devastating effecton maintaining such a belief-system. Thisis the first book to be published statingthe arguments of researchers who pro-pose the non-existence of ‘HIV’.Hodgkinson states, in the most importantchapter in his book, ‘The Virus That NeverWas’: “In Perth, Australia, a small group ofscientists have been preparing themselvesfor what may prove to be the mostremarkable role of all in the AIDSsaga....They question the very existenceof the entity that has become known as‘HIV’. Their standpoint is so radical thatmost of their published work to date hasonly hinted at the potential bomb shellthat underlies it”.

In 1986, Hodgkinson, like the majorityof health and cultural journalists, sub-scribed to the ‘HIV’ belief system, dulyreporting the official consensus party lineon ‘HIV’ as being the cause of ‘AIDS’.Hodgkinson states: “Ten years of report-ing on HIV and AIDS, and three years ofdeep involvement in a controversy overAIDS causation, have led me to the con-clusion that a decade ago we becameensnared in a mass illusion surroundingthe issue.... As a medical correspondentof the Sunday Times during the secondhalf of the 1980s, I was responsible formany articles that accepted and promotedthe prevailing view of HIV as the universal-ly accepted cause of AIDS, and reportedwarnings that almost everyone could be atrisk”. It was not until 1992 thatHodgkinson, now as ScienceCorrespondent, became aware that a sci-entific challenge had been mounted to theorthodoxy by ‘AIDS dissidents’. The chap-ters on dissidents John Lauritsen(‘Drugged’), author of The AIDS War andDeath Rush, and Professor GordonStewart, (‘A Conspiracy of Humbug’) pre-sent cutting arguments against theHIV/AIDS hypothesis.

Hodgkinson noted that when he triedto engage in critical debate with thedefenders of the ‘HIV’ hypothesis, he didnot get a reasoned argument, just emotiveabuse. The followers of the ‘HIV Belief’behaved like a theologicalfreemasonry/protection racket defendingthe ‘faith’ rather than engaging in objec-tive scientific debate. Hodgkinson reiter-ates this in a quote from Michael Callen in

exclusively ‘active’ (sperm-donating) rolein sex did not develop AIDS, whereasimmune suppression was common inpromiscuous anal sperm recipients”. Theoxidative stress theory attributes thedecline of the immune-system to stresscaused to the cells by repeated toxic andmicrobial assault, which can include anallydeposited semen from multiple partners,repeatedly taken medical and recreationaldrugs, and impure Factor VIII concen-trates. Added to this, manyantibiotics/agents used for treating STDswere oxidising and immunosuppressive.Also, viruses such as CMV and EBV –(universally active in AIDS patients) –caused oxidation of their host’s tissue.

Hodgkinson observes that in the 1980sEleopulos wrote six papers on this oxida-tive stress theory of AIDS and from 1986had been offering a multifactorial theory ofAIDS causation. In 1989 she wrote adetailed letter to the Lancet, arguing forthe non-existence of ‘HIV’ – it was notpublished.

Dr Eleopulos says that: “...to me, thepresently available evidence does notprove even that it is an endogenous retro-virus, because what we see, the phenome-na collectively known as HIV, are non-spe-cific. RT is non-specific; virus-like particlesare non-specific; the antigen-antibodyreactions are non-specific; PCR is non-specific. You can’t even say you have aretrovirus there”. Prof. Papadimitriou,Eleopulos’s collaborator, states: “Theyhave not proven that they have actuallydetected a unique, exogenous retrovirus.The critical data to support that idea hasnot been presented. You have to beabsolutely certain that what you havedetected is unique and exogenous, and asingle molecular species. They haven’t gotconclusively to that first step. Just to seeparticles in the tissues, and fail to look forevidence that it is an infectious virus, iswrong. Are these particles that cause dis-ease? There is no evidence, ten years on,that the particles are a new infectiousvirus”.

Hodgkinson’s book constitutes an his-torical moment in ‘AIDS’ discourse; allother ‘HIV Belief’ coffee-table booksbecome Neanderthal relics to be placedunder a glass-case in a folk-lore museum,and sniggered at.

While journals such as Nature, Science,New Scientist and the Lancet uncriticallypropagate the multibillion dollar ‘HIV’fraud, Hodgkinson’s book will become thecatalyst in deconstructing the mass-illu-sion of the ‘HIV’ trance. It is worth notingthat the most hostile reviews so far ofHodgkinson’s book have been written bysome of those very journalists who havemerely re-hashed the official hand-outsand who now have a vested interest in try-ing to ensure that their shoddy journalismof some 15 years should not come tolight. As mere propagandists for the HIVMafia, they must be shitting their pantswith fear that the balloon is finally goingup, despite their best efforts to deflate it.

ALEX RUSSELL

1987: “Belief that HIV has been proven tobe ‘the cause’ of AIDS has many charac-teristics of religion: as ‘revealed truth’, it’snot wholly rational, but emotionally reas-suring and certainly influential. I oftencompare my attempts to generate debateon the cause(s) of AIDS to walking into afundamentalist revival meeting and askingthose present at least to consider the pos-sibility that God doesn’t exist.... It came asquite a shock to discover that the true dis-course of AIDS is theological. There arereceived truths; papal bulls (papal bullshit,more like it), and various sects anddenominations. It’s an unholy war...”

Hodgkinson reveals that Dr EleniEleopulos and colleagues have beensceptical about the very existence of ‘HIV’from the mid ’80s onwards and inBio/Technology, 1993, they finally nailedthe ‘HIV’ myth by exposing the non-speci-ficity of all ‘HIV’ testing procedures.

Eleopulos presented her own oxidativestress theory that extended Duesberg’sdrug/AIDS hypothesis (which was too lim-ited and reductive) by including multifac-torial elements, seeing AIDS as a collec-tion of biological phenomena associatedwith an overstressed immune system.Eleopulos argued that the assault on thebody by oxidative agents (like sperm andnitrites) could account for general viralactivation, AIDS-related conditions suchas KS and lymphoma and loss of immunecell activity. Hodgkinson asserts thatsperm itself may be considered acausative factor: “Several studies hadshown that homosexual men who took an

AIDS: The Failure of Contemporary Science(How a Virus That Never Was Deceived the World)

by Neville HodgkinsonPublished by Fourth Estate, 420pp, £17.99

c


LORD BALDWINis the Joint Chairman of

Britain’s Parliamentary Group for Alternative andComplementary Medicine.

HUW CHRISTIE went toWestminster to meet him

There’s a distinction between comple-mentary and alternative isn’t there?Is that an important distinction?

It’s rather like Catholics and Protestants,arguing as to how important these distinc-tions are. I don’t think myself it’s as impor-tant as some people do. There is oneschool of thought who maintain verystrongly that complementary therapists arethose who are subservient to doctors, andwill never diagnose, and can’t stand astherapists in their own right, and the alter-natives are the full primary care providerslike homoeopaths, acupuncturists or what-ever. And that the latter should be trainedup to a much higher level. I think I wouldgo along with that latter. As to how impor-tant that distinction is, as I say some peo-ple feel very strongly about it. It’s not gen-erally accepted, there’s no acceptable def-inition within the field, from the Departmentof Health or anywhere, even though somepeople think there ought to be. There’salways a search for a good word – theParliamentary Group for Alternative andComplementary Medicine: from time totime we think, should we change it?Natural Medicine, perhaps, but is osteopa-thy natural, is acupuncture natural? It’s dif-ficult finding the right word. When I initiat-ed a debate in this place in January, it wascalled eventually The Benefits of Non-con-ventional Medical Treatment for the Healthof the Nation. The Americans tend to call itNon-conventional. So what’s in a namereally?

At least the definition of non-conventionalwill always be relative to what conventionis.What I think one always has to bear inmind is there are some places in the world

as you probably know where homoeopa-thy is mainstream, osteopathy is main-stream. It’s always relative to the culturethat you’re talking about.

There are studies that dissuade peoplefrom bothering with complementary thera-pies or alternative therapies. The problemis that when it’s complementary, in AIDSfor example, it’s usually that people aretaking let’s say AZT with Chinese herbs,and because the primary drugs are sotoxic, little benefit is seen from the herbs,and people are told they’re not effective.With an alternative therapy things wouldbe different.Yes. It may be the same as my wife and Ifound in deciding to use a nutritional

approach rather than conventional drugtreatment for her recent breast cancer; andhaving gone beyond that to establish thatthe two don’t mix very well, we wanted tokeep to the one that worked best and notuse something toxic which detracted fromit. For example Gerson has much fewersuccesses with people who’ve hadchemotherapy because the aim of Gerson[cancer therapy] is to clear out the bodyand if you’ve got a lot of toxic stuff within,what they find is you’ve got to go terriblygently and slowly, otherwise the persongets overwhelmed as it starts coming out.They die of liver toxicity if you don’t watchout. So you have to go a lot slower andthat’s not strong enough to cope with thecancer. So we had this dilemma really.Pressed to go for chemotherapy, we said“No, no, no”, because we knew Gersonwould not be so effective.

If the therapy is powerful one can think ofpresenting it as an alternative rather thanas a complementary therapy.Yes, it’s whether they’re contra-indicatedin a sense. And with Gerson they are, andwe had the devil of a time getting ourorthodox doctors to get their minds roundthat particular problem, because theycouldn’t see how it could be so undertheir model of health and sickness andwellness. So we had to keep marching on.It’s difficult. We were extremely lucky in asense – being in this position here obvi-ously it’s much easier. Being able to quotestudies back at them. If you can’t dothat... A consultant can browbeat people.

Can you give a brief history of theParliamentary Group and your owninvolvement in it?What is a Parliamentary Group? It existsprimarily for MPs, peers and MEPs, and ifit’s called a Parliamentary Group asopposed to an All Party Group, paradoxi-cally it can have outside members, associ-ate members. So although it exists primari-ly to brief MPs and help formulate policiesthere, one of the strands of that with allthese groups is to have meetings in com-mittee rooms at which we get speakersalong to talk. There’s about half a dozen of

those a year which we’ve had on a varietyof topics, for the last few years. We’ve hada fairly good programme. I’m not a memberof many groups, but I’m a member of theParliamentary Food and Health Forum, andyou can get perhaps fifteen, twenty peoplecoming to their meetings. We reckon wehave some forty, fifty, sixty to ours. Ibecame more or less active in this placewhen I semi-retired from the education fieldin 1988. I came along and joined thisgroup, but it was fairly moribund. Therewas Bill Cash and Peter Ross, two MPs,who were jointly in the Chair. MPs are a lotbusier than a lot of us up this end and therewasn’t a great deal happening. There wereoccasional meetings and so on. Then PeterRoss retired at one of the elections, and Iwas put into the Chair with Bill Cash. Myhaving a bit more time and I think a bitmore hands-on interest meant we’ve had amore active programme since 1992. Andit’s given us about six open meetings ayear.

Is the purpose of the group to raise aware-ness amongst members of the houses?Yes it is really.

In the expectation that that will add wis-dom to legislation?Absolutely.

Are there examples of legislation whereyou’ve felt this has come into play?Yes. I mean I have to say that MPs arepretty rare attenders. That’s true of allthese groups. They’re very busy andthere’s a great conflict of meetings and itonly needs something happening down atthe Commons end for them to be unableto come at the last minute, even if they’vesworn they’ll come. So you don’t pull invery many of our members. We have morepeers coming actually than MPs to ourmeetings. But we do send out briefings onthe meetings, with the idea of keepingthem in the picture. Examples? Well, wehad a very interesting one in 1990/91 – theHealth Service and Community Care Bill,when one or two of us put forwardamendments. Lord Colwyn’s a stalwart onthis, and he and I together backed an

INTERVIEW

We wanted thetherapy that

worked best, andnot a toxic one


amendment to try and get some comple-mentary medicine on the NHS. And wevery nearly carried that. We only missedby four votes getting that. And that cer-tainly had an effect and was noticed bythe Department and very soon after thatin, I think December ’91, Stephen Dorrell,who was a junior minister for Health,issued a circular letter opening the doorsto complementary medicine, under certainconditions, in GP’s clinics. So I think therewas cause and effect with that one. Thenthere was the Osteopaths Act and theChiropractors Act. That wasn’t specificallyanything to do with the ParliamentaryGroup but obviously we were in there. Youmay remember that herbal hoo-ha theChristmas before last, when all of a sud-den from Europe through our own dearDepartment of Health, an edict came thatall herbal remedies had to go through thefull pharmacological rigmarole and so on,and do it by the New Year, when this is asort of twenty year programme. It was justplainly ludicrous. There was an outcry allthrough the country and again as theGroup we were able to be a focus there,demanding meetings with ministers andso on, saying this is not on. So we werevery much in the thick of it, though it waspeople power that did it in the end.

There’s a directive called MAL-8, a Euro-directive, which limits what supplementcompanies can say. Is that the samething?That had ramifications but not so much onthe herbal side. It’s more on the supple-ment front. It may come originally fromEurope, but now it’s a Medicines Advisoryleaflet from the Medicines Commission.They are refining the distinction betweensupplements and medicines, that greyarea: what is a medicinal product, andtherefore what claims can it make andwhat tests it goes through and so on.

Was it Hippocrates who said, “Let food beyour medicine”?Absolutely. I know.

Do you think this is an artificial distinction?I do actually. I’m glad you raised that. It’snot something I’ve had a chance to saypublicly but would like to do so. It won’tcut any ice I think for a long time but Ithink it has to be made philosophically.The whole thing’s one big continuum. I dothink it’s an artificial distinction. You seepapers in the medical press these daysabout broccoli and garlic. Well, where doyou draw this artificial line?

In whose interests is this distinction?I suppose, not being cynical, there aresafety issues, because if you’ve got a con-tinuum from say carrots down at one endand say AZT up the other, you need to dis-tinguish somewhere along the line at whatpoint what testing can be done. So it’s aquestion of arguing about where the linecomes and the safety tests get done. Myfeeling is on the herbal thing that they’veprobably got it about right at the moment,which is that they have these Licences ofRight on the basis that they’ve been

around for hundreds of years, there aremonographs written on them, there’s verylittle evidence of danger from them, andtherefore they have a sort of cheap andmodified procedure costing a few thou-sand pounds which herbal remedies gothrough. It seems to me that somethingherbal and natural is somewhere downnear the carrot end rather than the AZTend. If you ask me exactly where the divid-ing line is...I have a feeling that once youstart modifying things, synthesising themand so on, you’re in a new ball game, how-ever close you think you’ve got to the orig-inal.

You’ve mentioned AZT. You said in one ofyour speeches in the House of Lords:“The immense financial power of the phar-maceutical industry is now distorting ourwhole perception of medicine to a degreethat is positively unhealthy.” You werespeaking in Britain – is that applicable toBritain? I think it’s fairly worldwide isn’t it? I meanit’s no less true of America. It’s the domi-nance of one particular view reinforced byhuge, huge money which prevents oneseeing, as I think I said later in thatspeech, that one is inside a virtual mono-culture. Another speaker in that debate

picked up that point later on. Lord Desaithe economist, from India originally – theAyurvedic tradition – said it certainly struckhim too, the monoculture within the west-ern nations where, when there’s a healththreat, the immediate thought, the knee-jerk reaction is, “Right, let’s get a drug.”

Health is to do with maximising thestrengths, not zapping whatever you arbi-trarily may decide is the cause, becausevery often it’s the symptom anyway.Absolutely. It’s a whole alternative viewand I find it terribly hard to persuade doc-tors to get their mind round that possibili-ty. They’ve never been taught it in medicalschool, they’ve never really come acrossit, and then I’m sometimes astonished, totake Gerson again as it’s something Iknow well, at the simple thing of trying toexplain to them what it’s about. You cansee them wrestling with the idea ofstrengthening the body as a first lineapproach. I think that’s sad. We’ve reallylost something important. And that’s got tocome back in. They’ve lost sight of thepower of the body to regenerate itself.

You’re aware that AZT’s made by Glaxo-Wellcome. They obviously don’t fund yourgroup. There is an All Party Group on HIVand AIDS – do they come to some meet-ings of your group?We had a joint meeting actually at our

suggestion when the Bestyr College peo-ple – do you know who I mean? I thinkthey're hot stuff – were presenting theirStage One report and they came over andunfortunately at the last minute I wascalled away and couldn’t come to themeeting. I was told that it wasn’t a terriblyhappy marriage of the AIDS Group andour Group on it. But that’s the only onewe’ve had. It’d be a super idea if sometime in the future our Group had a presen-tation perhaps from the AIDS side – long-term survivors who have done well withcomplementary methods – and we askedthe Parliamentary AIDS Group along to lis-ten to that. But they at one stage certainlyhad some quite heavy funding fromWellcome. It seems to me you can’t havethat degree of input and not have an influ-ence. That’s why a lot of the ways thesethings are set up bothers me, like theinterlocking interests in the MedicinesControl Agency – the people who sit onthat and on the boards of drugs compa-nies and so on. Ok, they do not take partin decisions where their interest comes upbut it skews the attitude. You don’t have ajudge sitting on a case when it’s someonehe’s related to. He stands down and pullsout.

So in drug licensing there seems to be justnot the same professional standards thereare in other areas?That’s how it seems to me. It bothers me.It means essentially just one view getsheard. If you try and put a view across,such as that of empowering the immunesystem and targeting that, then you meetblank stares. What I object to is it’s not asif all these things have been thoroughlytested. The public probably does believethese doctors, these big names, have hada thorough look at all these other thingsand put them through stringent tests.Nothing like that has happened at all. Soit’s a belief system that says it can’t work,before you actually get down and look atit. Now if they say, this is an untried reme-dy and so on, then fair enough, I don’t dis-agree. In the article in the Daily Mail thatmy wife wrote, they put an expert’s view,somebody from the Royal Marsden. Well,expert he may be in his own medicine, butnot in this. At the same time I couldn’tquarrel with what he wrote there: “This isunproved.” True. But that’s not the sameas disproved. In a realm like cancer, andeven more so AIDS, where the successrate is so lamentable, I would have thoughtthat any promising line should beembraced.

Glaxo-Wellcome have adverts on TV now,purporting to show “live” HIV, and sayingtheir company is the greatest enemy dis-ease has ever known.This is despite Concorde? And despite thePanorama programme?

And despite the fact that you cannot get amoving picture through an electron micro-scope! People are not aware of simplefacts like that. But people believe.We’re into belief systems a lot aren’t we?One of the really difficult ones, and I guessit appears with AIDS stronger than any-

The limitations of the drug-based

approach are very clear


thing else, is the feeling that if all these bignames, the Royal Colleges, have said it isso, then obviously it must be so. And theolder I get the more I tend to distrustexperts. There was an interesting thinghere in one of our debates on education,Lord Skidelsky, a bit of a free thinker, wastalking about nursery education. If justabout all the experts agree something's agood thing then he’s almost certain itmust be wrong. Having said that, just toredress the balance a little bit, certainlymy wife’s experience of this cancer thinghas tempered our view to some extent inthat while resisting the chemotherapy shefound that except when she was out atthe Gerson place itself, where we couldwatch the little tumour nodules disappear-ing from her chest as the weeks went by –visibly vanishing – when we got backunder less than optimum conditions, theycame again. I’m convinced that theGerson had stopped any distant spread.On the other hand nothing we could docould stop little nodules from reappearingin the chest area, until Tamoxifen, andthat’s a drug, though not a terribly toxicone. So I have to say, but for Tamoxifen,she would be worse off than she is. It’sjust possible the co-enzyme Q10 she wastaking at that stage in high doses wasbeginning to bite as well. Given the timingI would put my money on the Tamoxifenhaving done that. So I would love in asense to have been a purist and say wedid it entirely by natural methods andthat’s what we wanted to do. She wasalways a difficult case anyway – the natureof the cancer and the stage it had got to.Certainly we bless the help we have hadfrom that direction, while regarding theother natural approach as perhaps themain line one.

What do you think the future for comple-mentary and alternative therapies is goingto be in this country? Does your grouphave these questions in mind?I don’t know to what extent we reallyworry about the very long term. It has tobe said we’re a poorly funded group. Wedon’t have any Wellcome Foundationbehind us. We scratch around, we keepgoing on a part-time secretary and so on.We would love to get together somemeans of legislating for natural medicinebut that I think is beyond us.

What would that involve, such legislation?In Australia they’ve got something whichhas put some natural medicine on a firmstatutory footing, so that it can’t be got atand undermined, so that it has a legislativebasis. We’ve got that at the back of ourminds, but we haven’t got the resources toactually do that. For the long-term future,well it’s extremely difficult to predict. I’mthinking back to the turn of the centurywhen for example homoeopathy was verystrong, particularly in America – somethinglike half the medical colleges taught itthere. Then came new developments indrugs and so on, and the high-technology,quick-fix idea took over with its obvioussimplicity and attraction, and homoeopathybecame marginalised. So we’ve got thesenutriceuticals coming and functional foods

and so on which may tip the balance, Idon’t know. What I’m saying is that newscientific things may appeal popularly andmay undo a lot of good that’s being donefor the complementary medicine move-ment. There’s a surge at the moment infavour of complementary medicine largelybecause the limitations of the drugs-basedapproach are becoming very clear. Thethings they can’t treat, the things they can’tcure, their costs in terms of side-effects,and sheer monetary costs. We’re on anupswing at the moment. My dream wouldalways be – my ideal place – would be tohave natural medicine as the mainstreamand to have what is now the mainstream asthe complement to it when natural medi-cine couldn’t do the trick. You’ll sometimesneed a bit of surgery, and there are timeswhen you’ll need the drugs and so on. Iwould never rule them out. But I would liketo see them subservient. Having said thatone recognises this will not come in my life-time.

What are the therapies in this country thatit would be acceptable to legislate for?Perhaps it’s more useful to look at whatmight actually happen here for the varioustherapies. We already have the Osteopaths

Act, three years ago, and the ChiropractorsAct, whereby those professions were puton a statutory basis with Protection of Title,meaning that nobody else can call them-selves an osteopath or a chiropractor. Theycan claim to use osteopathic techniques,but no more than that. That ties them in toultimately the Privy Council, and so on. It’swonderful in terms of prestige, havingarrived there. It’s very cumbersome andexpensive for them all. They’ve arrived,they’ve got their place in the sun. In asense they're now unassailable, and that isgreat. It doesn’t mean it’s going to be rightfor every therapy. There was a time whenthe government was saying: “Get yourhouse in order. Get together and thencome and speak to us.” But they weresoon persuaded, five or ten years ago, thatsome of the therapies were so disparatethere was no way they could come underone umbrella. So they said: “OK, therapygroup by therapy group, come forward. Getyour houses in order, get yourselves regu-lated and then come forward.” Neither thegovernment nor the complementary medi-cine movement necessarily thinks thatstatutory regulation is going to be right foreverybody, because it has some of thedrawbacks I’ve said. Probably the next inline would be the acupuncturists. I alsochair the British Acupuncture AccreditationBoard which is bringing some harmony intothe training of acupuncturists. Even withthem it’s too early to tell whether statutory

regulation is what they’re going to want or not.One of the dangers of statutory regulation isyou might end up finding yourself subservientto doctors, and you might not want that.Sometimes they’re urged to go down the routeof the Professions Supplementary to Medicine.Not everybody wants that. All the thinkinghasn’t yet been done on that and we’re somedistance away certainly from the next therapycoming forward to statutory regulation.Meanwhile the major ones are all beaveringaway now trying to bring their differing groupsand approaches together, to get a unified reg-ister of practitioners, code of conduct andethics and so on, governing body, complaintsprocedure, and all that. A number of things arenecessary, including the approval of the med-ical profession before legislation. The govern-ment’s not going to get legislation through ifits medical advisors say, “We object.” It’s veryinteresting to see how the medical professionis beginning to swing round and becomemuch more favourable to complementarymedicine. It’s a wonderful development. Withinthe Department of Health even they’re bend-ing over backwards to be helpful. There’s anold guard that still sticks to the old beliefs andregards alternative and complementary medi-cine as magic but by and large there’s a quitepowerful shift. It’s been growing over recentyears. It’s been hand-in-glove with populardemand. They’ve had to respond. I think if Iwere a GP I’d be quite embarrassed at someof my patients coming and telling me abouthomoeopathy and whatever and assuming Iknew when I didn’t. I think doctors are feelingdisadvantaged and thinking, “Gosh, I need tolearn about it”.

What do you feel about the genetic approachin medicine?I have great reservations about some of theassumptions about viruses and genes any-way. There is a big question mark. It may allturn out to be very different from what is cur-rently supposed.

You’ve written about the obsession with thegerm theory of infection. Do you think theidea of viruses is a publicly emotive concept?I do indeed. I quite see, in NevilleHodgkinson’s book, his argument that a killervirus strikes a chord in everybody and every-one wants to believe. I can easily go alongwith that. It’s the sort of drama that journal-ists and medics and all of us frankly like. It’sa concept that’s easy to latch onto. We go ona great hunt for this thing. I can quite seehow that touches the collective imagination.

People can find it hard to leave an orthodoxyunless they know what they’re going to.I’m a great believer in looking at people’s trackrecord. The track record of the drug approachto AIDS is absolutely abysmal. The drugapproach to cancer is not a great deal better,though they’ve convinced themselves it is. Youlook at the people who’ve done hard epidemio-logical work on this and they say that the battleagainst cancer is a, quote, qualified failure. Idon’t know how many billions we’ve giventhem to do the job. What other group is sounaccountable in public? There is somethingwrong with a society that abdicates so muchpower to scientists who are going round in cir-cles. If you look at the track record of thesethings it is very very bad. Commonsense saysit’s time to look in other directions. At one levelit’s as simple as that.

My dream wouldbe to have

natural medicineas the mainstream

c


A recent successful prosecutionby Britain’s Royal PharmaceuticalSociety against a company mar-keting isobutyl nitrite resulted inclarification that it is illegal tosupply the drugs except as amedicine, through a doctor orpharmacist. A UK Departmentof Health statement said in theirview the volatile nitrites current-ly considered recreational “pop-pers” – an allusion to their earlypackaging as capsules that were“popped” open for inhalation –included the full range of knownclose chemical analogues.

These medicines were firstused in the 1860s (sic) by inhala-tion to treat angina pectoris, acondition of the heart in whichblood flow is diminished causingsevere pain. They are seldom ifever used for this purpose now.They may be employed byinhalation in the immediatetreatment of patients with defi-nite cyanide poisoning, toinduce formation of methaemo-globin – an oxidised form ofhaemoglobin, the moleculetransporting oxygen in redblood cells – which then com-bines with the cyanide to formnon-toxic cyanmethaemoglobin,but the value of this treatmenthas been questioned. They havealso been suggested for use inthe management of hydrogensulphide poisoning.

Poppers are clear yellowinflammable liquids with a pun-gent odour. Their volatility canlead to explosive mixtures withair or oxygen. “Recreational”samples usually contain around96% eg. isobutyl nitrite, withsmall amounts of isobutyl alco-hol and vegetable oil to makethe liquid less volatile.

Amyl nitrite is absorbed intothe blood circulation frommucous membranes by inhala-tion, the rate of absorptionbeing most rapid in the lungs. Itis rapidly inactivated in thebody, probably by hydrolysis(reacting with water). Amylnitrite is the fastest in action ofthe nitrites, the effect being evi-dent within 10 seconds. Theblood vessels of the neck andhead are most rapidly affectedby vasodilation (widening ofblood vessels) and within 30 to40 seconds after inhalation theface flushes, the head and neckperspire and the heart-rate

increases. The action is of shortduration and usually lasts aboutfive minutes.

Isobutyl nitrite is inhaledmore often than swallowed, andinduces profound though tran-sient vasodilation, with blurredvision, headache, flushing, a“warm feeling”, and a wide-spread throbbing sensation.Reflex vasodilation follows, with

tachycardia (heart rate ofgreater than 100 beats perminute). Other reported effectsinclude nausea, burning in thenose, syncope (fainting), facialdermatitis, eye irritation, cough,bronchitis, coma and respiratorydistress.

At the molecular level, thenitrites are potent oxidisingagents and may cause oxidativestress to the red blood cellswhich manifests as methaemo-globinaemia. Methaemoglobincannot serve as an oxygen carri-er and high methaemoglobinconcentrations are associatedwith significant hypoxia(decrease in oxygen uptake);without antidotal treatmentconcentrations greater than 70%may be fatal. The likelihood of afatal outcome will be influencednot only by the rate but also theduration and frequency of expo-sure, the person’s genetic com-plement of reducing (the oppo-site of oxidising) enzyme and thepresence of ischaemic (blooddeficiency) heart disease, oranaemia, which may limit thebody’s ability to withstand oxy-gen deprivation. It has also beensuggested that as frequent usersof nitrites tend also to be heavycigarette smokers, the presenceof carboxyhaemoglobin (thecompound formed when carbon

monoxide instead of oxygenreacts with haemoglobin) maycompound the isobutyl nitrite-induced tissue hypoxia.

Several scientists point to theoxidative, and therefore cancer-causing, effect of volatile nitriteson the tissue of blood vesselwalls, one of the primary sites ofthe effect of these drugs. Theblood vessel cancer, Kaposi’s

Sarcoma (KS), was first describedin the 1870s in Europe, some tenyears after the introduction ofvolatile nitrites in the treatmentof angina, though certainly notall risk groups for KS – whichinclude elderly Sicilian men andWest African teenagers – willhave used poppers. Other oxidis-ing factors may affect these peo-ple. Professor Peter Duesbergonce calculated that inhalationof 10ml of poppers would resultin some seven oxidising mole-cules in every cell of the body.

Treatment of short term toxiceffects is as for fainting, keepingthe person lying down withhead lowered. Severe poisoningshould be treated in hospitalwith stomach pump and oxygen.If methaemoglobinaemia occurs,

give methylene blue 1 to 4 mgper kg bodyweight by intra-venous injection. The circulationmay be maintained with infu-sions of plasma and/or elec-trolytes.

A letter in the Journal of theAmerican Medical Association(1976) suggests, “The use ofamyl nitrite is then, like so manydrugs used for hedonistic pur-poses, safe and pleasurable formost, unpleasant for some, anddangerous for a few. The dan-gers of abuse of the drug will bemultiplied if its popularityincreases and “street” amylnitrite surfaces, bringing with itproblems created by use of adul-terants and even more toxic sub-stitutes.” The advent of theselatter occurred long ago, andthe illegal nature of any futurerecreational use of nitrites prob-ably means consumers will beincreasingly unlikely to knowthe exact contents of any suchproduct.

SourcesOxford Textbook of Medicine, 2ndedit., Weathrall DJ, Ledingham JGG,Warrell DA. Oxford Med. Pubs. 1987British National Formulary,Alternative Edit., 1957Martindale 21st edit. 1977Martindale 31st edit. 1996J. Am. Med. Assoc. Vol 236, No.14Bradberry SM et al: FatalMethemoglobinemia Due toInhalation of Isobutyl Nitrite.Clinical Toxicology, 32(2), 179-184,1994Papadopulos-Eleopulos E, Turner VF,Papadimitriou JM: Kaposi’s Sarcomaand HIV. Med. Hypotheses 39:22-29,1992

HUW CHRISTIE

The group of chemicals called poppers are all variants of alkyl nitrites – amyl nitrite, butyl nitrite, and isobutyl nitrite.

These old drugs have been reported as popular in recreationaluse among homosexuals and some heterosexuals since the1970s as it is alleged their effects include enhancing sexual

pleasure, facilitating anal penetration through their propertiesas smooth muscle relaxants, and prolonging orgasm.

DRUGEFFECTS

Poppers

Two non-toxic legal “highs” have recently been given atten-tion in the gay and straight press. The Energy Bomb is a herbaldrink containing guarana (presented as an adrenal tonic,rather than a stimulant), muir puama, lapacio, ginseng andfresh Royal Jelly. It gives a sustained energy boost allowinglong work and play. The Cama sutra is an aphrodisiac variation. They seem to work! Any adrenal activator may be contra-indicated for people with cellular immune suppression,as stress hormones deplete levels of circulating T-cells. Noenergy is free – nutrition and rest are necessary. [see Nutrition]£1.99/15ml vial from various outlets, including the main suppliers, Human Nature, 25, Malvern Road, London NW6 5PS.

Natural Highs

c

the most rigid kind of post-modernist discourse, whichI believe comes from their own discomfort with theirown sexuality, their early alienation from their bodies.There again it’s much much better now. As I say I wasconstantly compared to Hitler. The Advocate did it.And now of course, the changes are so much abroadthat I am a columnist for the Advocate.

The speed with which the discourse has opened uphas really amazed me. Let me give you an example.When I was reviewing these books on classics, onGreek antiquity, that the scholarly journal Arion askedme to do – I would have been doing it late 1990, 1991and these books which came out from Routledge hadon their cover, “Half of the profits from this book will bedonated to the San Francisco AIDS Organisation”,something like that – now I spoke out against that. I feltthat that was absolutely outrageous. You cannot haveadvertisements for charities on the back of scholarlybooks. There should be no political agenda attached toany scholarly book of any kind. Plus I thought it was theworst kind of Pharisaism, saying, “Look how charitable Iam – half my profits.” Now why not 100% of the profits,why only half of the profits? And in effect also it wascoercive of the reviewer, saying in effect, “If you givethis book a bad review, you are letting people die. Youwill reduce the profits of this book and fewer moniestherefore will go to the care of the sick and so on, theterminally ill.” So I spoke out against it. But the thing is, Iremember at that time, to even dare to do that, to evendare! I remember I went through agonies about it, know-ing how I was setting myself up for the worst. As it hap-pens there were a few voices like mine that would nottolerate this kind of overcontrol of the discourse: peoplewere absolutely intimidated to silence.

There was only one view of the epidemic. Only oneview. And that was that this was an accident that hap-pened, it just fell out of the sky, OK? The people whoreally caused AIDS? Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagancaused AIDS, OK? He is the cause of the AIDS. Therewould be no AIDS if Ronald Reagan had given muchmuch more money for AIDS. There was never any con-nection with behaviour, OK, and if you said, “Gee,there was a connection between the sexual revolutionand the sudden upsurge in promiscuous sex , gay andstraight. That that is the reason for this epidemic,” youwere called every name in the book. There wasabsolutely no connection whatever. You must notallege there was any such connection. At this point itbecame ridiculous. So many gay voices have nowcome out and said, “Well of course you have a situa-tion where people are having forty men per night, inthe baths and so on, in that period, or on Fire Island.”For Heaven sakes there are houses on Fire Islandwhere [people were] vacationing at that time, whereeveryone is dead! Everyone is dead now. Thirty peoplewho were at one weekend are totally dead. At thispoint it’s hard even to imagine what it was like in theearly 1990s in America in this question of the AIDS dis-course. So now it’s much much better. So my writing,whatever the date was that I wrote those things, thatwas true at that moment.

But I will never forget one of the first times I wentout, one of the very first times I was invited to a confer-ence, at the State University of New York at Purchase,and I saw for the first time the incredible pressure.There’s this fellow who’s very active still in gay activismin New York city, a prominent gay activist there, I’dnever heard of him, I had never had this experiencebefore, and I gave my presentation whatever it was, itwas on various topics, it wasn’t on AIDS, it was onthings like feminism, there was this screaming. I havenever in my life seen a character out of Dostoevsky


You’ve written, “My admiringmemory of [gay men’s] revolu-tionary, philosophe-like icono-

clasm makes me most regretful aboutrecent infringements of free speech bya few overzealous AIDS activists, whomade themselves the arbiters of anew dogma and enforced it with ter-rorist tactics.” What do you see as thedogma and what have been the tac-tics?Well, I think it’s somewhat better now,OK. But when I came on the scene,which was not very long ago – I meanit seems like centuries, but when myfirst book [Sexual Personae] was final-ly published it was only 1990 so it’sreally 1991 that I started encountering

these people – ACT-UP in its earliest incarnation wasan absolutely fascist organisation. I know that they diddo some good, but I have felt very directly the irra-tionality of AIDS activists, at one of my first appear-ances. The most insane and vicious and intolerantpeople I have ever met in my life are AIDS activists. Icame into direct confrontations with them. If I wouldbe speaking, sometimes lecturing, these people wouldpop up and be screaming, I mean screaming at me,OK? The way they controlled the discourse, their arro-gance – they were like little Hitlers, stormtroopers, whobelieved that they had the truth, and anyone who triedto have a different view of AIDS, or the origins of AIDS,or anything like that, that we should not be permittedto speak.

It took me quite a long time, even a number ofyears, before I was even able to speak openly. Mygod, Sexual Personae, which is a great scholarly bookfor Heaven sakes, Sexual Personae was treated, wascalled...let me give you an example of this: in the MLA(Modern Language Association) Gay and LesbianNewsletter, so overcontrolled was the discourse onhomosexuality and AIDS that I got a review there ofSexual Personae that called it the most evil book everwritten, compared me to a Nazi, compared me toHitler, OK? This was going on constantly, in fact ithappened in London – with one of your prominent gayactivists on the stage of the Institute of ContemporaryArt. You know these people, they’re enamoured of[French gay cultural theorist] Foucault, enamoured of

COUNTERCULTURECAMILLE PAGLIA

is Professor ofHumanities at the

University of the Artsin Philadelphia. Her

books SexualPersonae, Sex Art

and AmericanCulture and Vamps

and Tramps havecaused quakes of

delight and contro-versy. An outspoken

critic and theorist oncultural, social and

sexual issues sheexperienced first

hand the historicaldevelopment of theAIDS discourse. She

spoke with HUWCHRISTIE in this

exclusive interview.


right, this man burning with rage! This man mentallyoccupied the borderline between rationality and irra-tionality. I, as a person who is very keyed to psychologycould clearly see that his rage, you know, had nothingto do with me, had nothing to do with AIDS, had noth-ing to do with homosexuality, it had to do his ownproblems with his own family, OK? I say this again andagain: these fanatics who took over the political dis-course are in fact trying not to think about themselves,not to analyse themselves, and they’re projecting out-ward all their rage against Mommy and Daddy andeverything else. But it was unbelievable, you could notbelieve the poor people in that room. The academics inthat room, the people who came to the conference,were shrinking. No-one would speak. That man effec-tively silenced an entire auditorium of people. I will nottolerate that, because I have been out there. I was outthere before Stonewall! Before Stonewall was, I wasopenly gay when it cost me something in my career. Iwas the only openly gay person, male or female, at theYale Graduate School from 1968 to 1972! I will not tol-erate that! I have been out there. I was madly unpopularfor years! Now it’s much much better.

I don’t know what the situation is in England ofcourse. All I know is that obviously one of the main rea-sons you’re calling me, is that even the scientific dis-cussion on AIDS has been very much crippled by thiskind of intimidation, so that truly neutral and rationalscientists have stayed away from this entire area. Youwant to talk about counterproductive!? People havefled this field of research, because there’s no way toconduct yourself in a dispassionate scientific manner init because of its overpoliticisation. The attitude is: it’sdue to homophobia. The reason why there was not

enough money? Homophobia! Excuse me? This was abrand new disease. What are they talking about? It’sonly recently people have started to realise how manymore deaths occur yearly among women from breastcancer, and how little there was research in that areafor Heaven sakes. It was like, “Me, me, me! Wedemand, we demand! We want an entire rearrangementof the apportionment of money for other diseases!Now! This minute! Us! We, we! We middle class men,who have this one disease. If you don’t listen to usimmediately then you are homophobic, you are this,you are that.”

All that did was, yes there was more money, but theinvestigation of this disease was very much held backby the flight from it of truly, it seems to me, talentedscientists, the most talented scientists, the ones, espe-cially later, the ones who would have been most likelyto come up with working theories, working hypotheses,they have fled. Any rational people would flee from thecraziness OK, and the solipsism and the infantile, infan-tile attacks on science itself. The AIDS activists wouldsay simultaneously, coming with their stupid Foucaultideas, post-modernist ideas, “We demand that sciencethink only about us.” At the same time, ”Science iscompletely ideological and science is meaningless.”How can you simultaneously be attacking science anddemanding that it produce an instant cure for you?Everyone knows we can’t even solve the common cold.

You wrote, “Science and society are our frail barriersagainst the turbulence of a cruel indifferent nature.”Careful scientists, particularly Dr Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos and her group and others, are saying HIVdoesn’t exist, its proteins and enzymes are products oftoxified cells. If a big mistake has been made what

hope is there for science and how reliable are thesebarriers against nature? Well the point is we are just at the very beginning ofunderstanding what AIDS is, much less what causes itor how to cure it or anything of that sort. Now withoutcommitting myself to any of the hypotheses that havebeen put forward, I as a scholar have been completelysceptical right from the start about everything.

It’s not that I’m saying HIV does or does not exist.It’s just that whenever I would see reports in the newsmedia, even in the New York Times, in the news maga-zines and so on, I would say, “There’s somethingmadly wrong with the way this material’s being gath-ered.” I have been always sceptical about it. I havenever accepted anything, anything about this, at anypoint from the beginning. And the way in which youalmost immediately got a kind of received opinion anda received attitude about this disease seemed to mejust a form of superstition.

You have the idea of an integration of science and his-tory going way back. Well I feel that I’m a product of the Graeco-Romanside of Western culture and I feel that is the fount ofour thinking about the world. What I see in the fifth andthe fourth centuries coming out of Greece is an extra-ordinary kind of virtuosity of artistic thought and scien-tific thought – our whole idea of the scientific method,of gathering evidence, examining it. I think that to be agreat scientist or to be a great doctor you have to be akind of artist. That is, you have a series of suggestionsmerely in the evidence and it’s up to you to come upwith a hypothesis that is only a working hypothesis. Itlasts only until someone has a better hypothesis,which is usually a more economical explanation of theavailable evidence.

I’ve always been interested in internal medicine,which is definitely artful. A person presents with aseries of symptoms, and I’ve seen again and again, inmy own experience and among people I know, the waya doctor can be madly wrong. Totally wrong aboutsomething. Whereas it might be a lay person might beable to guess better. It’s like a policeman coming to thescene as well, where a crime hasbeen committed, and you haveclues, and you have a wholenumber of speculative scenariosthat are in your head. And therecould be twenty different possi-ble scenarios and you’re alwayscomparing them. The idea thatwe’re going to immediately find acure for AIDS, and the only rea-son that we haven’t found a cureis because of homophobia andinsufficient money is absolutelycrazy!

People seem too ready to allegehomophobia.The reason why SexualPersonae upset people was justa few remarks in there aboutAIDS that were declared to bepolitically incorrect and unac-ceptable. I stand on the remarksin there and I believe in a hun-dred years from now, people willlook back and realise that I knewwhat I was talking about. I said

The AIDS activists over-controlled the discourse

that the idea that this disease came out of nowhere, that all of a sudden in1981 it was like, “Oh, my god, what happened here?” – I believe that thesigns that something bad was happening were already there in the mid-sev-enties.

I have written and spoken about this. That period just after Stonewallwhen the men’s bars exploded suddenly in number and in luxury – thewomen’s bars always remained much poorer compared to that – I describe

this moment when I had beenused to going with my male gayfriends into bars and I suddenlywas no longer welcome. Andthis was a tragedy for me, itwas like a break in my life, whenmale gay friends who had beenmy confederates in anguish andin questing, you know, for loveand so on, all of a sudden I as a


woman was persona non gratain the men’s bars, and it wasexactly the moment when theorgy rooms came into existence,and when there were only nowthese black or dark rooms withpeople rolling around with verypoor sanitation there, OK? Youbegan to have sex shows, andfist fucking was coming in, menin swings, that kind of thing. Iwas no longer welcome. That’show I remember it, very accu-rately, I suddenly had this senseof abandonment by my malefriends who went off into this

paradise garden of earthly delights. And almost immediately, this was in the mid-seven-

ties, I remember reading this in the New York Native orsomething like that, and it reported – now also, myfriends started talking about having this – trouble withamoebas, these parasites that would not go away. Istarted hearing about this from my friends. And then Isaw this – this is the mid-70s – this article that said aparasite had been identified in the intestines of gaymen in New York that had never been identified inhuman medicine before. Only veterinary medicine wasable to recognise it. It was an animal parasite. A chillwent through me. This can not have been more thansix or seven years after Stonewall. I’m saying that thesigns that something terrible was about to happenwere already obvious within a few years afterStonewall. The idea that this came out of nowhere –this is a piece of historical nonsense.

You’re saying the pagan promiscuity of the 60s wasresponsible?Yes, yes. What I did say was, “OK, I don’t want toblame gay men. Let’s go back to the Mamas and thePapas!” It’s my generation, the free love, which Imyself tried to practice, and indeed was not very goodat particularly. This sudden upsurge in promiscuity – Icompared it to the Roman Empire. People said, “Ohthat’s terrible! You shouldn’t be doing that!” Well, ofcourse! The social conditions and historical changeswere similar.

What happened in my generation, the sexual revo-lution, was the biggest thing in terms of numbers ofsex acts by the greatest number of people since thetime of the Roman Empire. And if we do not look backat that and realise that there are parallels there!Normally it’s only conservatives who talk like that. I,however, am a student of history. I am an admirer alsoof decadent phases in history.

It was a tremendous experiment attempted by mygeneration, and I’m still committed to all the great prin-ciples of my generation, that’s the subject of my work.But I’m saying, “Wow! We hit the wall!” We hit the wallof reality in a lot of ways, and AIDS is one of the wayswe hit that wall. There’s been an absolute slaughter ofthe talented men of my generation.

You’re saying that the moral responsibility should beaccepted?I’ve constantly said of the gay men of my generationthat they challenged Nature and lost. But I’m sayingthat that is noble and worthy! It’s like the great

Romantics. It’s like Keats, Byron and Shelley. It’s likeCaptain Ahab, I constantly say, in Moby Dick, whoshakes his fist at the heavens. That’s fantastic, that’sthe way the human imagination gains. Humanity gainsfrom risk-taking. But then, accepting the conse-quences of your risk. This idea of blaming what hap-pens to you on Ronald Reagan, blaming it on homo-phobic authority figures, is infantile! We must takeresponsibility for our gambles, OK? We gamble and welose, we must take the cost to ourselves and notblame it on others.

I think in Europe there’s been less tendency to blamethe paternalistic figures perhaps because the paternal-istic figures aren’t so overwhelming. I think it’s com-plex. There is more than one book coming out nowshowing that are at least very serious questions aboutwhether a human immunodeficiency virus exists. Well I’m not at all surprised. I think there has been arush to judgment in terms of the working hypothesisthey had. The working hypothesis about this diseasewas accepted as confirmed fact, and the people whowere doing that in the media and among AIDS activistsare just incompetent in terms of science or how sci-ence works.

There’s something potent about the fiction of invisibletransmission that almost helps a community defineitself in the absence of other parameters.I do feel what we see here in point of fact is repeatedinsults to the immune system. The original theoryabout poppers, amyl nitrate, was excluded! First peo-ple suspected it, then they excluded it. And I thought,“Why are they so quickly excluding this?

Just two days ago, poppers were confirmed illegal inthis country. There was an important case, and themedical case against recreational amyl nitrate is tragi-cally convincing.Absolutely. It really happened at that very moment.Poppers were coming into the scene at that verymoment when the bars suddenly went wild. Men werestaying up all night, and drinking. I think that women,just by virtue of the menstrual cycle and so on, learnvery early on how to conserve the body. I’ve alwaysfelt that gay men were pushing the limits of the humanbody throughout that period, also keeping thin andtrim at that period, eating very little and drinking a lot. Iwould see this manic lifestyle. And now we hear moreand more – people used to whisper this – how theywould get gonorrhoea or whatever they might get, andthey would go get penicillin month after month aftermonth. These infections were signs that somethingwas going wrong in their bodies.

Now women seem to have this instinct for preserva-tion. You have an infection? Wow, pull back, conservethe body, save the body. I have no idea whetherthere’s something biological or cultural here, but I whohave defied every possible cultural pressure in termsof my identification as a woman and so on, I have thissense about the body. There’s like a little signal, some-thing’s wrong, pull back, OK? Go slow. Conserve. AndI notice men don’t seem to have that. There was thiswild, wild scene. It was like the Masque of the RedDeath, and the wild party scene in that play, it wasvery much like that. And the band played on, as RandyShilts says.

What did you mean when you said of Michel Foucaultthat if what you’d reliably heard of his public behaviourafter he knew he had AIDS is true then he should becondemned by any ethical person?People say this was not true, blah blah blah. I’m sorry, Ihappen to believe it. This information came to me veryreliably. There were only two people between me andFoucault. Foucault told a famous gay writer, who toldmy close friend, who told me, that when he realised he


had AIDS, he was so angry that he determined he wouldtake as many with him as he could. He would take asmany to death as he could. That he deliberately went tobars and would deliberately have sex with people andnot tell them and try actively to take them with him.

I’ve heard this about other people and I don’t think it’san uncommon response. If there’s no virus it’s absurdhowever. You’re on the record as being pro-pornogra-phy, pro-prostitution, pro-drugs. I think one of thethings Foucault did before the end of his life was use alot of drugs. What practical social measures couldbring about responsible drug use?Well now I’m someone who doesn’t take drugs, yousee. My view of drugs is that it’s an age-old privilege ofhumankind to alter the mind for expanded conscious-ness or for a sharper perception about existence.Priests have done this in rituals from time immemorial.I myself do not take drugs merely because of a physi-cal antipathy to it, but I regard liquor, which is theancient drug of my people, as equivalent to other peo-ple taking marijuana or LSD.

Now, I’m very committed to the psychedelic view ofreality even though I have never taken LSD myself. AndI feel that the international war on drugs is the biggestwaste of money of states in the world. Any attempt todeny people what they really want in sex or in drugssimply leads to an underground economy and drainsthe world’s resources. It’s destroyed the inner cities inAmerica because obviously young people can earn athousand dollars working the drug trade as opposed tolike $3.95 an hour, or whatever it is, working inMacDonalds flipping hamburgers. I think this is just amassive delusion to ever imagine that we can stopwhat is clearly a human craving to alter consciousness.

At the same time I think we all must face the realitythat drugs can destroy. They can indeed destroy. Ithink that LSD did indeed destroy a lot of my genera-tion. Many people, their brains are pudding after toomuch taking of LSD. I think that similarly heroin is oftremendous concern now in the music industry. In factthere’s a rising pressure about that in America afterKurt Cobain’s suicide. I don’t want to minimise that. Ido think that drugs play their role in weakening theimmune system in some way that also is related towhat appeared to be such a sudden emergence ofAIDS in the early 1980s.

In Britain recently, the Medical Research Council hascome under the auspices of our Ministry for Trade andIndustry. What do you think that means about thefuture of independent research?Well that’s been the case for a very long time in Americawhere the pharmaceutical companies invest heavily inresearch and they’re only interested in drugs which areessentially synthetic and that therefore they can control.Whereas things that come from natural plants, like mari-juana and so on, they have no interest in.

In gay activism, and in AIDS activism, what may be theeffect of the dramatic resignations and realignmentswere are now seeing? I think that AIDS activism has pretty much lost itssteam here in America anyway. It’s staggering. Theprincipal AIDS organisations like AMFAR and so on aretrying to revive themselves. They’ve got Sharon Stonenow to be a spokesman and so on. I think that theywere pretty much set back on their heels in the lastfew years. I think there’s a kind of dispirited vacuumthat’s occurred here in the last few years. I don’t thinkit’s going to be as big a change here. People are justnot as arrogant. There was a moment when the AIDSorganisations had a kind of a stranglehold on themedia . They were able to coerce the media . Therewas a lot of media attention given to AIDS and it’s real-ly receded here I think.

Liza Minnelli in the States has built a career on it. LizTaylor, Princes Diana, now Sharon Stone. And yet the CDCis saying that there was a conscious attempt to encouragepeople to believe there would be a heterosexual problemfar beyond what there ever would have been or has been.There was a period of absolute hysteria, cover stories justconstantly in the public eye. And that would have been inthe late 1980s and early 1990s. I think there’s been a slowdecline in the attention paid to the issue at all here. Part ofit was that ACTUP was very very active at that time. Theturning point may well have been the election of Clinton.The AIDS groups were very politically partisan. That’sanother way I think they damaged themselves. They werevery politically partisan and they were ways to mobiliseagainst Republicans, and the gay activist organisations ingeneral were of course 100% behind the Clinton electionwhen he was a fairly unknown figure.

So the thing is with the election of Clinton everyonethought, “Oh, now there’s going to be Nirvana for the liber-al organisations,” and so on. Within two short weeks therewas the gays in the military controversy that was mishan-dled by Clinton. Very badly mishandled. And suddenlyeverything fell apart. I think that the morale of the gayorganisations in America never recovered from that. We’retalking about two weeks after the inauguration of Clinton.Let’s see, that would have been in January 1993 then. Hewas elected in the fall of ‘92. That’s when everything start-ed to unravel. The arrogance of the media, leading up tothat election in the fall of 1992, their arrogance, the pranc-

ing around, the parading of the gay activist organisations,they all felt that they had mobilised the gays to vote forClinton and they felt they had maximum power over poli-tics and they felt it was going to be a tremendous change.

And then when the gays in the military thing was a fias-co – [David] Mixner [Clinton’s number one gay advisor] hadgiven very bad advice to Clinton in terms of how to handleit and so on – they essentially became exiles, they allbecame exiles. The administration then realising the dam-age, the fallout from this, from the gay issue, how flawedtheir information was coming from the gay activist organi-sations, the whole administration turned its back on thegay establishment, OK?

And then what we had was a rapid disintegration of allthe gay organisations here. That is, the leadership. Therewas this woman whom I despise, Urvashi Vaid, who’s writ-ten a recent book, terrible book, and so on, these peoplewere like Stalinists but in charge of these organisationsand they all lost power so fast in that one year when theylost their access to Clinton. There have been a lot of arti-cles in the gay press here about that. The way that gayleaders here in America, all the ones that were very promi-nent in that period leading up to Clinton’s election, havelost status. This is the very period in which I have gained. Imean I’m in no way a gay leader. I mean there’s no way.I’m a very controversial thinker. I have many followers, butthere are many people who hate me and so on. But thereis no strong leader who has emerged.

So that’s what’s happened here. AIDS, the way AIDShas gone to the back burner here in America, is simply apart of the general loss of prestige of the gay leaders. Wedon’t have a Martin Luther King. There’s been no figurewho’s been particularly talented. And I think again it’sbecause of the ignoring of the cultural aspect of humanlives by the gay political leadership.

And then what we had was a rapid

disintegration of all the gay organisations

c


Over the last few months, anincreasing number of articleson the potential benefits ofusing allicin in the treatmentand prevention of AIDS related

conditions have been appearing in theHIV/AIDS media. Allicin itself, (also knownas diallyl trisulfide or DTS) is one of theactive ingredients present in garlic andhas been used in China to treat a widevariety of complaints for over twentyyears. John Stevens, editor of Equilibrium,has taken the lead in increasing aware-ness of allicin therapy for people withHIV/AIDS and first reported on its benefitsin April 1995. Since then, the Heal Trusthas made this product available at tradeprices from its Buyers’ Club for people inthe UK wanting to use it as part of theirtreatment protocol.

Dr. Qing Cai Zhang, an AIDS physicianand Chinese medical practitioner workingat the Sino Med Research Institute in NewYork, has been pioneering work withallicin in his practice for a number ofyears. Zhang has no reservations in claim-ing that “Allicin is one of the most effectiveChinese herbal remedies for treating andpreventing the OI’s (opportunistic infec-tions) of AIDS.”

The reason Zhang has become soexcited about the use of allicin in thetreatment of AIDS is that he believes itpoints to a whole new class of AIDS treat-ment medications. Because AIDS is multi-factorial in its origins and multi-faceted inits expressions, Zhang believes we needto find treatments which reflect this com-plexity. In this context he refers to Allicinas a ‘MOPP’ – a multiple opportunisticpathogen prophylaxis. His criteria for amedicine being termed a MOPP is that thetreatment must be safe enough for long-term use and therefore have a low acuteand cumulative toxicity, it must have avery wide anti-infectious spectrum in itsapplication and it must be affordable. The

found that allicin has a very wide spec-trum of anti-infectious ability. It is ideal touse for multi-agent co-infections.”

Hi-tech, Western pharmaceutical use isalso increasing the number of multiple-drug-resistant strains of AIDS-relatedmicrobes at an alarming rate (e.g. MDR-TB, MDR-Staph. aur., MDR-Candida). AsZhang found bacteria which were resistantto penicillin, streptomycin, chlorampheni-col and chlortetracycline were still sensi-tive to allicin, the need for more researchin treating these ‘superbugs’ with allicintherapy becomes self evident.

Coupled with existing studies, Zhang’sresearch at the Sino Med ResearchInstitute has found allicin to have anti-bac-terial, anti-myco-bacterial, anti-fungal, anti-viral and anti-protozoal properties. Zhangfound Allicin to be significantly bactericidal(bacteria kill ing) against many of themicrobes involved in AIDS-related condi-tions: Staphylococci (causes folliculitis,boils, carbuncles, abscesses and fluid filledblisters), Neisseria meningitidis (causesmeningococcal meningitis), Streptococcuspneumoniae (causes pneumonia), Shigelladysentry (causes fever, abdominal pain andtenderness and bloody diarrhoea),Escherichia coli (causes infections in thegall bladder, bile ducts and urinary tract),Salmonella (causes fever, chills, sweats,weight loss, diarrhoea and septicaemia),Mycobacterium tuberculosis (causes tuber-culosis) and Mycobacterium avium intracel-lulare (causes high fevers, severe anaemia,night sweats, chills, weight loss, loss ofappetite and weakness, chronic diarrhoeawith malabsorption of nutrients andabdominal pain).

Allicin’s anti-fungal repertoire includesCandida albicans (causes oral and vaginalthrush, chest pain, difficulty in swallowing,malabsorption and can infect lungs andbrain) and Cryptococcus neoformans(causes cryptococcal meningitis and caninfect the lungs). Zhang also comments

beauty of allicin is that it meets all theabove criteria.

Apart from the strong odour of allicin(which lingers less as use is established)and the corrosive taste, the only reportedside-effects are mild gastric discomfort.Some people suffering with sensitive oralor oesophagal thrush and ulcers, havereported pain on swallowing. Aside fromthese, there are no other reported side-effects. Allicin use is not recommendedorally when these conditions are present.

In terms of its ability to inhibit a widerange of microbes all at the same time,allicin appears unrivaled by its pharma-

ceutical counterparts. As Zhang pointsout: “Most chemical drugs are designedspecifically for one kind of infectiousagent, necessitating that the patient hasto consume an arsenal of different drugs.The cumulative toxicity of these drugsmakes this regimen unsafe and thereforeunacceptable. Sometimes conventionalantibiotics which suppress bacterial infec-tions are made from fungi, which thenpromote the growth of fungus. In thesame way, Western anti-fungal drugssometimes encourage bacterial infections.Instead of solving a problem a new one iscreated. Pharmacological studies have

ALTERNATIVESWith multi-drug-resistant strains of various microbes on theincrease as an ever-widening range of pharmaceutical drugs

is being prescribed, perhaps it’s time to look for naturalalternatives that really work. Allicin is one of the most

effective remedies for treating a number of opportunisticinfections, as homoeopath GARETH JAMES reports

Allicin has showneffects againstmany protozoa

which cause infections

during AIDS

MOPP-ing up the


body through a number of routes: orally,anally as a retention enema or intravenous-ly. Most clients using allicin from the HealTrust choose to drink it. Zhang is currentlydeveloping an enterically coated, timerelease capsule containing 20 mg of allicin.This form spares the mouth and throatdirect contact with the ‘battery acid’ tasteand keeps the levels of allicin in the bloodfar more stable.

Zhang recommends allicin therapy asthe primary prophylaxis for all hispatients with CD4 counts below 200.

Zhang uses allicin in a similar way to pen-tamidine inhalation through a nebuliser toprotect the lungs as well as an aerosolspray carried by most of his patients toprevent against airborne infections.

that he found the inhibitory dose of allicinfor Cryptococcus to be the same as foramphotericin-B but demonstrated no toxic-ity.

As an anti-viral agent, a number ofstudies have reported inhibitory effectsagainst cytomegalovirus (CMV, can causeinflammation and detachment of the retinaleading to blindness and ulcerative colitisas well as some lung infections). There isalso some, albeit minimal, evidence show-ing allicin has some anti-viral effectsagainst the herpes simplex viruses.

Allicin has also shown inhibitory effectsagainst many of the protozoa which causeinfections during AIDS. Allicin has been

shown to be effective in the treatment ofmicrosporidiosis and infection withCryptosporidium parvum, both of whichare responsible for diarrhoea and weightloss and against which there is no estab-lished effective orthodox medical treat-ment.

The doses of all icin required forinhibitory effects against all thesemicrobes are far from standardised.However, for the direct treatment of clinicalsymptoms Zhang recommends 30mg per30 kilos of bodyweight per day and forprophylactic treatment, the same dosereduced in frequency to 1-3 times perweek – this roughly equates to 2 vials perday or 2 vials 1-3 times per week respec-tively. Allicin can also be taken into the

condition, preventing his symptoms frombecoming worse, but despite a one monthcourse showed no real improvement. Afterfinishing the course, John came to the HealTrust and immediately started on 2 vials ofallicin a day. After one week, his stools hadreturned to normal and his appetite startedto improve. After four weeks, he had put onjust over a stone and aside from a short tripabroad when he stopped using allicin, hashad no return of the diarrhoea.

Despite such impressive results, allicinhas, in the main, been ignored by themajority of the orthodox medical pro-

fession as a potential treatment forCryptosporidium and other microbial condi-tions. The greatest obstacle to furtheringresearch into allicin stems from the hardyreluctance of the orthodox medical estab-lishment to provide funding for trials. Asallicin can no longer be patented by thepharmaceutical companies, their interest inresearching a product from which they canmake no direct profit is shamefully lacking.Zhang made an official proposal to theOffice of Alternative Medicine at the NationalInstitute of Health (NIH) and although in hiswords he received a ‘courteous evaluation’,no funding was forthcoming.

Despite some positive reporting on garlicin the National AIDS Manual’s HIV and AIDSTreatments Directory, their pharmaceutical-fr iendly, bi-monthly publication AIDSTreatment Update (which must surely berenamed Pharmaceutical Treatment Updateowing to its disappointingly narrow focus)has also been predictably sceptical regard-ing favourable reports on allicin.

Although Dr. Mike Youle at London’sKobler Centre has recently become interest-ed in the possibility of some allicin trials, todate only AIDS ReSearch Alliance have con-ducted Phase I Pilot tr ials withCryptosporidium parvum. The encouragingresults which were published in the Springedition of Searchlight this year concludedthat “the use of high dose garlic concen-trates appears to be a feasible therapeuticregimen to consider for HIV-positive patientswith CD4 counts <100.”

Dr. Qing Cai Zhang MD is also co-author ofAIDS and Chinese Medicine (1995), Keats.

Sources and further readingDr. Qing Cai Zhang. The Applications of Allicin in Preventingand Treating Opportunistic Infections of AIDS. Sino MedResearch Institute, 141 East 44th Street, Suite 712, New York,NY 10017, US. (1996) (available from the Heal Trust)Stevens J. Allicin: The Goodness of Garlic. Continuum. 3/5: 25& 30.Donnelly P. Got The GI Blues? Equilibrium. Issue. 1, Spring1996.Fareed G et al. The use of a High-dose Garlic Preparation forthe Treatment of Cryptosporidium parvum Diarrhoea. AIDSResearch Alliance, 621 N. San Vincente Blvd, WestHollywood, CA, US. (8/1/96) (available from the Heal Trust)Guo-Nai Lan et al. Demonstration of the Anti-Viral Activity ofGarlic Extract against Human Cytomegalovirus in vitro.Chinese Medical Journal. 106(2): 93-96 (1993).Passwater R. An Interview with Professor Eric Block: TheChemistry of Garlic’s Health Benefits. Whole Foods. 22-26June 1992.Yen T et al. Anti-viral properties of garlic: in vitro effects oninfluenza B, herpes simplex and coxsackie viruses. PlantaMedica 5: 460 (1985). Davis L. Garlic as an anti-fungal agent: Laboratory studies.First World Congress on the Health Significance of GarlicConstituents, Washington DC, August 28-30 1990.Cai Y. Anti-viral and Anti-cryptococcal properties of garlic:clinical studies. First World Congress on the HealthSignificance of Garlic Constituents, Washington DC, August28-30 1990.Sandhu K et al. Sensitivity of Yeasts Isolated from cases ofVaginitis to Aqueous Extracts of Garlic. Mykosen. 23: 691-698(1980).

ments, rarely complained of any dangerousnew infections, such as Pneumocystiscarinii pneumonia (PCP). I have a fewpatients whose CD4 count is less than 10,but as long as they adhere to these treat-ments on a regular basis, they can remain ina very stable condition for years.”

One of Heal’s clients, Tony, had beensuffering with Cryptosporidium parvum fora number of weeks before finally beingadmitted to Ealing Hospital NHS Trustwith debilitating diarrhoea and dramaticweight loss. He was prescribed anti-diar-rhoea drugs and Gabbroral, neither ofwhich, Tony said, made any significantdifference to his condition. His CD4 count

was <50 at this time. After six weeks inEaling hospital he decided to change tack.At his request and in cooperation withconsultant physician Dr. Stephen Ash,Tony started using allicin through his dripfeed. His diarrhoea stopped within 48hours and Tony was discharged from hos-pital two weeks later. Before leavingEaling, repeat tests on Tony’s stool sam-ples found that he had completely clearedthe protozoal infection from his gastro-intestinal tract and tested negative forCryptosporidium. Over the following threeweeks Tony’s appetite increased and heput on one and a half stone.

John was diagnosed HIV-positive atthe end of February this year after suffer-ing from constant diarrhoea for about a

For the clinical applications of allicin inAIDS, Zhang states: “If we protect the respi-ratory and digestive tracts, most infectionscan be prevented. From my observation, allpatients who complied with these treat-

month. His CD4 count at that time was<50. Six weeks later, after some insis-tence that his diarrhoea was becomingsteadily worse, his doctor tested him forCryptosporidium parvum which gave apositive result. About one week later Johnwas admitted to the Chelsea andWestminster hospital as his diarrhoea hadbecome debilitating and he had lost abouta stone in weight. He was also started onthe drug Gabbroral which did stabilise his

For more information on allicin or to purchase allicin in the UK contact:

The Heal Trust Heal House

375 Kennington LaneLondon, SE11 5QY

Tel: 0181 265 3989, fax: 0181 265 3973

Postal service available throughout the UK

with allicinmicrobes

c


What did we gain in the 15 years of AIDS? In this second part of his essay on the effect

of “HIV”-dogma on homosexual lifeMICHAEL BAUMGARTNER examines gay men’s

attitudes towards sex, survival and society

The gay movement coming out of the sexual liberationmovement, tired of the constant fighting for gay rights,became worn out with having to defend its achievementsin a persistently ignorant society, leaving space for grow-ing numbers of homophobic fascist groups like the Moral

Majority founded by Jerry Fallwell in the late ’70s. Outspokenlyhateful, these groups sought to deny us the basic right to life. “Killa queer for Christ!” became the credo of self righteous religiousgroups campaigning for a totalitarian shift from the previous liberalpolitical leadership. When few came to the defence of homosexu-als, even many of us started believing that “Only a dead homosex-ual is a happy homosexual”.

This growing underlying group depression was nurtured by theoccurrence of AIDS, the new deadly threat to the gay community,offering an end to the increasingly unbearable gay life. Thereceived shame of being a homosexual combined with guiltaround promiscuity led, with a certain sense of relief, to the“HIV”-dogma. AIDS released the oppressed tension of depressedemotions into hysterical outbursts much like the cries of concen-tration camp maids once the gas was dropped, having silentlyentered the camouflaged chambers. Decorated with the pink tri-angle, we were now socialised into red ribbon-wearing by the“HIV” establishment, adding another symbol of victimhood to ourkitschly decorated sacrificial lives.

After 10 years, “HIV” has become the new identity of gay menand the new identity crisis. We came out of the closet introducingourselves proudly to the world with “I am gay” – we now introduceourselves equally proudly with “I am HIV”. In common with all iden-tity crises it seemed to leave us with no future but the confrontationof death. The reality for many homosexual men unable to identifyas “I am HIV” was equally devastating. Since homosexuality is notinherited and many of us experienced abandonment by our physi-cal families, we had been building our own gay families over manyyears. Suddenly “HIV+” challenged those ties, leaving the touchedon one side and the untouched on the other – identified ironicallyby blood testing, the very fluid that does not bind us to our biologi-cal families. Much like in those families, friends now started isolat-ing themselves on the grounds of a reality that the “not HIVs” couldnot relate to. While some moved into another even more isolatingstage of being, others were simply left behind.

The effect of a negative “HIV-test” on many homosexual menis devastating. Depressed, having to cope with survivor guilt andfeeling left out, many dive into the night with the unspoken desire

of becoming “HIV”. A positive diagnosis gives the victim thechance to be vindictive: inviting victimisation of ourselves overand again on the grounds of one’s own homosexuality, we couldget our own back on the “negatives”, both homo- and heterosex-ually oriented – albeit on the grounds of an unspecific, unreliableblood test.

Rather than understanding the presumed deadly disease,dumped on us, we started to enjoy the grapes of death-monger-ing: unbearable life coming to a glamorous end. Kitsch picturesof “HIV+” individuals carried away by their suffering, or accusing-ly facing the bad world, became the staple of “HIV” -fundraisingart exhibitions.

While the “infected” – I should say the indoctrinated – becamepreoccupied with their death career, the “uninfected” “HIV”-parasites mostly focused on the career of their homosexuality. Re-setting the political agenda became the powerplay of theAIDS ’90s. AIDS activists at the beginning of this tragedy gaveimportance to making AIDS an all-endangering epidemic – thequeer agenda was now to “re-gay” AIDS. It was the fear of thehomosexual AIDS leaders that they would lose out to mainstreaminterests and could be forced into supporting rather than leadingroles in this dance of decay.

The mainstream political agenda did not intend to spend moremoney on AIDS anyway, because after so much time there wasso little incidence. There were so few straight nice white upper-class families affected. The homosexual interest in death-by-diagnosis had to be officially re-installed or the homosexual play-ground would vanish. Of course this latest discourse of the self-appointed “HIV-leaders” could attract little interest. How many“AIDS edicts turned upside down” can one take and still be trust-ful and obedient to authority?

Books by former closeted homosexuals, now wanna-be-gays, about their fucked up emotional lives and “HIV”enlightenment collected like flies around rotten fruit, claim-

ing pieces of the AIDS-celebrity-cake with this suffering-justifica-tion-document, their biography. While gay life-stories seem toattract only an insider readership, the On-top-of-it -“HIV”/AIDS-diagnosis text seems to find a chink in the mainstream mind. Toa nabnormal life belongs an equally illustrious death, and then theunconscious morals of the straight self-identified open mind canbuy into the homosexual experience. While being gay was simply

To AIDS-activism – thanks for

They were not willing to address other issues,

nothing!

because there would not be a simple cause


a non-status in Hollywood, being “HIV” could get you an Oscar.Just what does that tell us?! Our living is not interesting enoughto be addressed or even accepted but our dying due to bad luckis glamorous!? AIDS became the key for apparent homosexual interests to enter the world of celebrity and superficial power. Butthere was little besides de-homoeroticised movie portraits of sacrificial death rites and victim dramas: some were entertainingbut most not at all enlightening. It is less threatening to the selfimage of the plain homosexual man in America to fight death in amacho way, or give in to victimisation to the extent that all you

powers. The self-appointed queer experts realised that whateverthey had learned would only be good in the era of “HIV”/AIDS.They reached a dilemma. Should they advise their fellow gay mento stop listening to the nonsense of “HIV” science and start doingwhat they themselves felt best about, the only reasonable coursein this disaster created by pseudo-science? Or should they con-tinue to urge them to listen to their equally stressed MDs and takewhatever the latest outcome of “HIV” research is? While the roadto the self-responsibility and independence of others would leavethese “experts” jobless, the other road would keep them as medi-ators in power. Mostly the second decision was made by thereckless queer AIDS-careerists. After all, some sacrifice seems tobe needed to stay in power. A homosexual AIDS-foundation direc-tor once told me, “Let’s face it, AIDS is the best thing that everhappened to us. We are important now. Where would we be with-out AIDS? Unimportant homosexuals doing unimportantwork?...And there are very few affected anyway, mostly drug-addicts!” – the last remark made with a rather negative undertone.

How many homosexual men really were affected by AIDS?According to the epidemiological statistics – to date the only“proof” for the “HIV/AIDS hypothesis – in the US about 3% of themale homosexual population is directly affected by HIV and evenless by AIDS. Since diagnosed “HIV+” cases usually get regis-tered more than once, this is most likely an overestimate. This fig-ure is less than die every year of other causes and less than the20% of gays and lesbians affected by alcoholism. However after10 years, the “HIV”- dogma diminished all other gay-relevantissues, regardless of their importance. This is not about making ahit-list of our issues of concern, yet when we simply drop our engagements in such issues to get involved with the latest flameof homosexual life, we have to accept criticism for being neglect-ful. Just because AIDS was created out of the pool of homosexualexperiences and established as the latest and ultimate threat to allhuman life by the CDC and the WHO (wishful thinking?) does notmean that we can afford to neglect our other burning issues. TheCDC today reveals that as early as 1987 it was clear to them thatAIDS would be insufficient to do the damage they had proposed.They deliberately abused a health concern of a disenfranchisedgroup in order to fund their mostly useless careers, and created adisaster. Instead of waking up to such abuse of power, revealingmedical science’s true face, we embraced their manipulations andcounted on them as our supporters. At what deadly cost?

The young community was left with homosexual-related alcohol abuse, drug addiction, suicide and poverty, whileour leaders attended brainwashing sessions learning how to

handle AIDS pseudo-scientifically correctly. They did not seemwilling to address these other issues, probably because therewould not be a simple cause and answer as had been proposedfor AIDS. “Early intervention” – a popular expression for preven-tion – seems so easy in AIDS, just drop the latest claimed-to-bebeneficial “HIV”-poison. Prevention strategies for the real issuesof homosexual and therefore gay-related health/life threats aremore difficult to come up with, far more complex and hard to getfunding for because they are of no interest to the straight healthpolice, the CDC and the WHO (when did we last hear of a nationwide gay-sensitivity-campaign in schools to combat gay-bashing?). The homosexual policy seems still, “Let us not ask fortoo much and stay with what seems easy and fundable” – even ifit leaves just one possible outcome for us, death!

Up to the present, with one exception – the New York Native –the press geared to male homosexual and gay culture pushes a“just-listen-to-your-doctor” approach as if they are initiated gay“Fuhrers” camouflaged in white drag, telling us to “use a rubberwhen you fuck and you’ll be just fine.” In the face of death any-thing else becomes unimportant anyway! Even the truth.

HIV=AIDS=Death became the excuse for many of us to nurturethe subconscious incapability for living. Giving in to the forces oflife, growing gaily older (for those who know of Quentin Crisp), inthis society seems to some more difficult and less attractive thandying young and rather glorified. Homosexual life-style encouragedliving fast, doing “it” all, not worrying about the consequences, forgetting the future. Living fast, meaning unhealthily, and dying

can come up with is a blue screen by which the world can remember you as a rebellious queer artist.

While the medical AIDS-czars still stressed the lie that “HIV” isinevitably fatal, the great conquest of AIDS, sponsored with bloodmoney, has always been built on sand, failing to stage thepromised great heterosexual AIDS epidemic amongst non-IV-drugaddicts. Once that fact was publicly known, the sources of moneystarted to dry up fast. It seems that as far as the establishment wasconcerned, AIDS stayed where it might as well be, in the homosex-ual world, reducing gay power by numbers, getting rid of pervertsand druggies. Therefore an increasing number of these overpaidAIDS-lords, both hetero- and homosexual, and including somecharity bunnies, began grabbing their hats and coats and startedleaving the party – the more queer, the more flamboyant theirdeparture. Other homosexual men, doomed to death and still needy of support, gotfed with wrong, even dangerous information and burdened with

dubious comradeship. Pharmaceutical company Wellcome, bynow married to the even bigger pharma-giant Glaxo – probablythrough fear of losing its capital to litigation claims for health dam-age from AZT – saw the market diminishing as AZT finally fell fromgrace with suspicious gays who realised AZT users are the onesdying fast and painfully. With more and more consumers turningtheir back on AZT, Glaxo-Wellcome now uses television to aggres-sively market its poison, pure or as cocktails, into the already well-exploited homosexual market.

With AIDS activists increasingly clear about the flaws in the“HIV”/AIDS-myth or at least about the toxicity of treatments, theaverage homosexually active man was left to their mercy to findhis way through the “HIV”/AIDS jungle with its thousands of publi-cations and suggestions about “HIV”’s dangers and possible

Many dive into thenight with the

unspoken desire ofbecoming “HIV”


young became the reality for many homosexually active men in theAIDS era. “HIV positivity” as a consequence of “liberated” misun-derstood gay living was worn as an emblem to the world.

What did we gain in the 15 years of AIDS? Towards theend of the twentieth century sex is seen again as a dan-ger to human life, a threat to society, like some moral

mediaeval curse. No reformation of religion, no understanding ofnature, no liberation of the human mind prevented this backlash!What value is human growth and the development of science,when the outcome is new dogmas cast in an old-fashioned way,and fascist attitudes?

“HIV”/AIDS has been established as a fatal disease in people’sminds. The homosexual link persists. Fighting for AIDS to be ofgeneral concern made us visible and connected with it, as well asits premier target. Homosexual awareness today has most likelyto do with fear of AIDS in both the homo- and heterosexual mind.AIDS gave us a reason to be out: the ones most affected by it, wemight as well die loud and angry. But many of us were ill-pre-pared for what hit them once they came out. Little ego structureleft many vulnerable to questionable opinions and dangerousadvice e.g. by doctors and/or the media. It was not only the sudden experience of homophobia nurtured by the homosexual-

plague-carrier-myth, but also peer pressure leaving many in astate of constant confusion. Nevertheless we became more visi-ble. Just let us not waste time focusing on our living – instead getready for extinction through AIDS!

Stereotypical gay flamboyance and macho male homosexualAIDS death made the big screen. Would Hollywood and thereforethe rest of the public world be “gay sensitive” if it weren’t forAIDS? I doubt it. Identified we are, as the living end of AIDS. “HIV”still diminishes every other gay-relevant issue, like gay bashing,gay-related substance abuse, suicide, neglect and poverty, evendomestic violence. One might argue that visibility does notachieve much when we are caught in the “HIV” trap. Homosexualrecognition has most likely more to do with exploitation than concern. After all, we laid the financial ground for “AIDS research”,demonstrating the power of the “pink dollar”. Political powershould be measured by achievements through arguments and notachievements through manipulation and piteous generosity. That “straight” politics is no better is no consolation.

In the AIDS era homosexual rights became a political issue, asif governments wanted to make dying homosexuals at least legalbefore death carries them off. Other political forces bound homo-sexuality with AIDS to punish the dangerous plague-carriers byreinforcing or trying to reinforce fascist homophobic laws. In manyparts of the world same-sex partnerships have become legallyrecognised, while HIV+ individuals, mostly homosexuals, can nolonger travel freely, much less emigrate e.g. to the US or Japan.Understanding that these laws are not based on science mightjust show that homophobia in liberals’ minds has gone under-ground. Legally too we would be better off without the “HIV”dogma.

How much freedom has “HIV” brought to us, gay and homo-sexually active men? It is quite trendy to be “gay” – in looseusage either a stereotypically flamboyant queer or a plain homo-sexual – we even have our own disease now! Yet “gay aware-ness” today is not enough anymore, you have to bow your headfrom estranged orthodoxy and confess to “HIV”-fundamentalism,called “HIV” awareness. Young men and women drawn to homo-sexuality are coming out at a much younger age than many of theolder generations did. The newer generations however have aburden to carry: there is not much freedom in how to be gay.Superficial political awareness is as trendy as the simulation ofsafe sex. Partying is expensive these days because the “pink

economy” has to have a big turnover. We all know, only withmoney can one be really “gay”! And we need company, to feelconnected with gays or gay-friendly crowds, especially for thosewho are young and new to the queer world.

It may be harmful for a healthy emotional life of young humansto be constantly reminded of an intimate, inevitable “deadlythreat” that will catch you when you don’t stay vigilant. In claim-ing to know how to be protected against AIDS, we don’t only giveout false information to the young but make them feel guilty whenthey do get an “HIV+” diagnosis. Of course we continue having “HIV+” diagnoses and AIDS in a group whereuninformed drug use is part of the good vibe, the culture. Whilefearful of blame from straight parents for being gay, the youngergenerations now fear blame from their older peers for not playing“it” sexually safe enough. “Safer sex” is not irrelevant, but there isno such thing as “safe sex” unless it means no sex. The only freedom there is in being “gay” today is: to be out, never mindthe real risks and to behave stereotypically, never mind the dan-gers. Isn’t it just that stereotype, well exploited by organisedcommerce and corrupted by pharmaceutical money, that keepsthe myth of the “gay community” alive?

The creativity surrounding AIDS, mostly by flamboyant queers,is notable. I personally am not impressed with celebrities finallycoming out to “rescue” us from AIDS now that we are “doomedto death”. Where have they been, when we marched for legalrights and struggled without role-models? Who needs that senti-mentality dumped on us by Elton John and co. like rice after awedding ceremony?

Taste aside, the psychosocial support networks we createdare impressive and deserve credit. Too bad that too many ofthem were and still are absorbed with making people feel goodabout their mostly unnecessary and far too early death. Welearned to care and came up with often very good quality help foro u rpeople in need. Why not put these energies, strategies andefforts (including the perception of one’s death) into living, for allof us, rather than just fiddling in the shadow of death?

There is something to cherish however, something gay spiritshave achieved in the midst of the AIDS-genocide: the survival ofcritical voices! Along with many courageous scientists – well-hated by the AIDS establishment – there were and still are a growing number of wise gay men and women speaking up andfighting the deadly, but for some very convenient, lies. It is finding these people and being impressed with how much justone person’s courage can achieve that makes me continue rais-ing my inconvenient voice, despite the hatred we get from fellowhomosexuals just for raising appropriate questions and reachingeven more appropriate conclusions after 15 years of nonsense.

Looking back to the many homosexual and gay men who Ihave known who believed they had been invaded by “HIV”, itsaddens me how stubbornly many held onto a nonspecific

diagnosis, how they took the most toxic substances to kill something inside them that has never been verified, as if theywere trying to kill their very being. Their death then seemed theultimate victory, successfully destroying the “evil” inside, whichwas not “HIV” but some metaphor – most likely their negativeself-image and the lifestyle that has grown our of that. It saddensme that they succeeded in killing something called gayness thatmade them different from normal, something I came to cherishand nurture over the years. We have lost many wonderful people,lovers, friends, colleagues, etc., people of potential that is lostdue to unnecessary suffering and early death.

If even just one person has to die for others to wake up, was itworth it? We have lost many more than just one member of thefabric that might deserve to be called a “gay community”.

This essay is dedicated to Michael Verney-Elliott, JerryTerranova and Huw Christie for their love, inspiration and

friendship and Connie Hartquist, Pansy-John Bradshaw andJudy Grahn for their loving guidance;

in memory of the late Michael Callen, Caspar G. Schmidt,Jody Wells and Mark Alampi, and all the others who raised

their necessary yet often ignored voices, to their inspirations and

achievements; and with thanks to the work done by gay men like Darrell

Yates Rist and Ian Young, encouraging me to put together myown thoughts and observations.

And finally thanks to Continuum for publishing my controver-sial essay and Huw Christie for taking trouble to edit it!

Sex is seen as a danger to human life

like some mediaeval curse


Tommy’s: you boobed, and you killed my part-ner. While he was in your care, he picked upmulti-drug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB).Because of your negligence, I don’t have apartner and three people are fighting for theirlives. You are irresponsible, you got it wrong and I hope thatit redefines your whole treatment strategy. Youcould start with diagnosing correctly, andget off being so specialist. An “Iam sorry” phone call amonth after your patientdies, from a senior consul-tant confirming that Johncaught MDR-TB in Novemberwhilst being treated by her isdiagnosing a little late in theday.

John first got ill in Augustwhen we returned from holiday inGreece. His chest was tight, soreand restricted, so he went to seehis GP who told him he was suffer-ing from pollution, prescribed anantihistamine drug and advised him to get out of London.He went straight to Ireland. Three days later he was inhospital fighting for his life.

PCP was diagnosed, without a sputum test, a bronchoscopyor any explanation as to why John’s chest was so painful – suchpain is not usually associated with PCP. DF118s were prescribed,along with steroids, two antibiotics and oxygen therapy. Well, theX-ray “said” PCP – not TB, not another chest infection, but PCP –well, it’s an AIDS-defining illness, this patient has HIV, it’s a logi-cal conclusion and we know best.

Radiographically John was clear after three weeks. Literally,he was still very unwell and still had a searing pain in his chestwhich the consultant could not explain. Steroids mask infectionand DF118s are Dihydrocodeine, strong pain killers given to drugaddicts when they’re coming off heroin. John’s treatment onIreland was a fair cover-up job.

So to London, and St Tommy’s a week later, where John wastold the PCP was back. They did an X-ray and PCP doesn’t looklike anything else – does it? So, the same antibiotics with nosteroids, no oxygen, were administered and, after 11 days athome, I had to wheel John into hospital. He was very ill and, ontop of his illness, he had a dreadful reaction to the drugs. Onceagain, he was admitted with a PCP diagnosis. He was putstraight onto Pentamidine to which, after a week, he had still notresponded and the doctors told me that he might die.

It was then that they decided to do a bronchoscopy and lo,“abnormal amounts” of CMV were reported, and very abnormalamounts of Ganciclovir were administered, and once where natural blood was flowing there were now outrageous amounts of

every now and again. Little did I know that shewas coughing and spluttering MDR-TB all overme, John and the whole ward.

After a four week stay at St Tommy’s, Johnwent to stay at the London Lighthouse for respite

care. He was doing amazingly well andthe doctors were aston-ished that he hadbounced back. I wasrelieved and everythingwas on the up. We spentChristmas together upnorth and travelled back aweek after New Year. Bythis time, John’s hair wasfalling out and he had ared rash all over his face.He wasn’t feeling too well

either, so he revisited St Tommy’s. When he cameback home that evening, he was crying and he toldme that the doctors said that the PCP had comeback. I was shocked, scared and desperate and, atthe same time, trying to reassure him. I rememberwondering if it was going to be like this forever, andhow John and I were possibly going to manage.

For the next ten weeks John’s condition slowly deteriorated. Thedoctors didn’t seem to know what was wrong with him, his treat-ment seemed very hit and miss and non-specific. On reflection, Ithink it was a complete mess. He was at home for the ten weekswith me. I looked after him as best I could but he was very ill. Histemperature often went up to forty degrees centigrade. He wasdizzy, had no appetite and we were on a desperate and futilecourse of popping pills that did nothing, trying to stay positive in theface of extreme circumstances. The period culminated in yet anoth-er admission to St Thomas’ where John’s treatment was forMycobacterium avium intracellulare (MAI). It was after 3 weeks ofJohn being in isolation that the microbiologist came up with MDR-TB – the strain matched his neighbour’s at St Tommy’s from theprevious November – and John was moved to Kings College wherethey had proper isolation rooms.

At this stage John looked like he was on death’s door – he waschronically malnourished according to the Kings College consultant, jaundiced as a result of one of the drugs, with chronicdiarrhoea and liver failure. He died three weeks later. There were nodrugs that could treat the MDR-TB and he was made comfortable.This story covers a period from August 95 to April 96. John hadbeen antibody diagnosed in November 93.

I’m disgusted at John’s treatment, tired and weary after havingfought a long and losing battle, not to mention the loss of my part-ner – and so unnecessarily too. And I know that if the specialists didn’t constantly jump to conclusions, refuse to listenand insist on their “we know best” attitude, then I wouldn’t be writ-ing this and you wouldn’t be reading it.

HOSPITALWATCH

John Kennedy’s unnecessary death

His partner TOM ASHFORDtells the real story

TB or not TB:

This is indeed an honour for both Continuum readers andmyself – an opportunity to tell the uncut version of the latestfuck-up at St Thomas’ Hospital, London.

If you’ve never heard of this establishment, unlike in otherabattoirs, the patients are given a mycobacterium (drug resistant,of course) so that they are not only left untreatable, but canspread it around to as many people as possible before they die,weak, wasted and confused.

When the fuck will there be an end to this appalling catastro-phe? When will the “HIV specialists” realise that actually they havebitten off more than they can chew? They really are pumped upwith a sense of their own importance. I can write these words, St

toxic drugs. John was told by one of the most eminent consul-tants that they never found PCP but they treated for it anyway.John thanked them for their kind consideration.

Whilst feeling understandably at a very low ebb John contractedpseudomonas from the hospital and was moved to his own room.It was a pleasant room with a sunny disposition and a wonderfulview over south London. His neighbour was a lovely girl who spentmost of her time in bed. “You look awful,” I remember thinking as I passed her room, and she would look out with anexpression in her eyes of, “O my god! What is wrong with me?Why can’t they find out what is wrong with me?” There were timeswhen she obviously felt better because I would see her strugglingdown the ward with her drip as a walking stick, stopping to cough

c


Fluctuating blood sugar levels aredepressing whether you are HIVantibody positive or not. For manypeople the daily mood swingsfrom manic, in-your-face energy

to depression and wanting to go to bed inthe afternoon is a shocking reality. Notonly that but any symptom you have fromany other imbalances in your body will beexacerbated when your blood sugar islow.

Blood is one of the most sociable,uncomplicated components of your body.It flows around veins and arteries with awelcome push from the heart every sec-ond or more delivering oxygen, nutrientsand protection and taking away the nasty,mucky toxins which we all produce at anastonishing rate. Everything in your bodyis geared towards keeping all biochemicallevels in your blood constant, a processcalled homeostasis.

If you have too much calcium floatingaround in your blood, your body says hey,too much, and it finds a weak place todeposit the calcium. If it gets dumped inyour kidneys you will get kidney stones. Ifit was your gall bladder you would bedown the doctors with gall stones, jointsand it would be arthritis, arteries and aheart attack or stroke will be almost visibleon the horizon.

It is a similar story with sugar, in that awhole host of problems can arise whenwe let too much sugar into our blood-streams and place strains on the control-ling mechanisms. Everyone has their ownindividual level of sugar in their bloodwhich your body goes to great lengths(using hormones) to maintain at a constantlevel. This amount is usually between 70and 100 grams of glucose in every 100 mlof blood. It is an amount known as theresting level.

Deviations (especially a drop) from nor-mal blood sugar levels can have majoreffects on how you feel. It can govern ourmoods, energy, feelings of health and can

tance of chewing your food, so that the carbohy-drates and saliva have a decent chanceof meeting each other. An enzyme calledamylase, found in saliva, breaks the polysaccharides (long chains with manysugars) down into disaccharides (twosugars joined together). Like plants,we have a way of storing unused sug-ars. We turn them into glycogen withthe help of the pancreas and storethem in the liver and muscles asenergy reserves. The liver and mus-cles can store about 100g each. Ifthe energy does not get used upstraight away and there is no roomin your liver or muscles for more glycogenthen the leftovers get turned into fat.

Glycogen stores can last for about 12hours and after three days of not eatingyou start to draw on fat reserves from thebody.

This slow break down of carbohydratesis really important because it implies thatthere is an opposite, and there is: eatingsugar. Your body does not have to do anywork in breaking it down, because sugarin single units provides an instant fix. Thefix is great for the short while afterwardswhile you are on a sugar high but afterthat when your blood sugar drops youmight as well have suffered a triplebereavement and a relationship break-down for the amount of pleasure it willbring you!

If you eat refined sugar you will soon findthat your energy levels go up and downand that you don’t feel too good a lot of

the time. It is much better to eat somestarchy carbohydrates instead. You findthem in rice, millet, buckwheat, potatoes,quinoa, wheat and all the other grains. It isbest to use the whole grain, so use brownrice instead of white rice etc. at least a fewtimes a week. The whole grain containsfibre which is good for your intestines andthe husk contains the vitamins and miner-

be a dominating part of your life. Sounds abit like HIV to me. Low blood sugar canspoil your life and can make you irritableand aggressive. The results are immedi-ate. Other effects can be headaches,migraines if someone is prone to them,fatigue, anxiety and depression.

Low blood sugar is very common andthe complete list of symptoms is huge.Doctors who regularly use glucose toler-ance tests as a diagnostic tool haveoffered figures ranging from 10 to 50% oft h epopulation for the incidence of hypogly-caemia. Hypo meaning deficiency, glyc

denoting sugar and aemia meaning a specified condition of the blood.Hypoglycaemia means a deficiency of glucose in the blood and is the oppositeof hyperglycaemia which means there isan excess.

Carbohydrates are the foods that giveus energy and they come in the forms ofstarches and sugars. Starch is lots ofsugar units all linked together in longchains, courtesy of the plants whichstored them that way. When you eat car-bohydrates these long chains of sugarsget slowly broken down releasing bits ofenergy during a period of digestion whichusually takes about three hours. Digestionof carbohydrates starts in the mouth withyour saliva, which highlights the impor-

NUTRITIONMary Poppins might have recommended it with

your medicine, and “HIV” dietitians generally advocate it to combat wasting, but if you want to

live healthily, your body doesn’t need refined sugars.The energy buzz it gives is far outweighed by moodswings, problems absorbing essential nutrients and

other detrimental effects

The fix is greatfor a shortwhile whenyou are on asugar high

A Spoonful of


als that you need to properly utilise theenergy from the carbohydrates.

The amount that you eat shoulddepend upon the amount of work that youdo. If you are exercising a lot or runningaround after young children all day then itis important to include lots of carbohydrate in every meal. If you eatmore carbohydrate than your cells canuse your body will thank you for the extra

and store it as glycogen or fat in caseyou need it at some time

in the future.

If you findyour energy levels aredropping in the day have a snack ofcarbohydrates, such as rice cakes. Thiswill give your body some energy which itfinds easy to use. You can buy these inhealth food shops and supermarkets.

When sugar, from starches or simplesugars, reaches your bloodstream it getsmonitored by your pancreas, specifically aglandular area known as the Islets ofLangerhans which produces insulin. Highcirculating blood sugar stimulates the pro-duction of insulin which increases the rateof oxidation of glucose in cells and therate at which glycogen is deposited in theliver and in the muscles. It decreases therate at which glycogen gets broken down,stimulates the production of fat from glu-cose and also reduces the rate of gluco-neogenesis – a process in which protein isbroken down to produce glucose. Whatthis means is that all sugar storage meth-ods are activated and production of sugarfrom other substances is slowed down.

Sugar dependency is really commonnowadays. Since the industrial revolutionwhen some bright spark decided thatsugar was a great source of energy, aswell as profit, we have mainly been

encouraged to eat more sugar. Between1835 and 1961 there was a six-foldincrease in the consumption of sugar perhead. By 1961 sugar represented 18% ofthe total calories consumed (40% wasfat). Saturation point reached about 60kgper person each year which is 5.75heaped tablespoons daily. Many people’sjobs now depend on sugar, and the sugarmanufacturers spend lot of money onadvertising to convince us that toothdecay isn’t really caused by sugar as wellas investing heavily in trying to find a vac-cine for tooth decay. Sound familiar?

All this sugar consumption puts abig demand on the pan-

creas by get-ting itto pro-

d u c ei n s u l i nat higherl e v e l sthan itwas everdes ignedfor. Theu l t i m a t e

outcome oftreating thepancreas inthis way isdiabetes, acondition inwhich the pan-creas has

b e c o m eexhausted andcan no longerproduce insulin.

The followingmineral deficien-cies adverselyaffect the Islets of

Langerhans: zinc,manganese, chromi-um, potassium andmagnesium, all ofthese deficiencies arefairly common in thisjunk-food, McSnackworld.

Low blood sugar is an emergency situ-ation in the body. The cells in the braincan only use glucose as an energy sourceso when supplies run low in the blooddrastic action needs to be taken. If yourbrain is about to conk out (coma) throughlack of available energy, then adrenaline isreleased by the adrenal glands whichincreases the levels of sugar circulating inthe blood. If this becomes a daily routineyou will ruin not only your pancreas butyour adrenals too, which will be less ableto respond in real emergency situations.Your adrenal glands also get stimulatedby coffee, cigarettes, drugs and stress soif you are trying to sort out your bloodsugar then think seriously about givingthese up. Hard as it is, you will not getvery far down the path to good health andstable sugar levels if you don’t.

Sugar never used to be a contentiousissue for people interested in health work.Sugar was bad, end of story. Things aredifferent now, thanks to that lone traderHIV which has turned around perceptions

on sugar and just about everything else.“You need more calories. You’ll be wastingaway soon, you need to add calories toeverything you can from every source avail-able,” is now a familiar cry from HIV dieti-tians up and down the land. This is a crazysituation to be in because it does notaddress the issue of what is causing thewasting, all it does is to make you fat righthere and now which isn’t easy in this body-conscious, washboard stomach era. Sugaris a bulky substance with no merit other thanproviding energy. It’s called refined sugar,which sounds like refined petrol – everythinghas been taken out except the substanceitself. It is just sugar. Unlike petrol it is not agood fuel, for humans anyway – there is talkof sugar-powered cars but I think we are abit more advanced than even the mostadvanced engineering.

If you consume sugar in its natural state itcomes with all the necessary nutrients thatyou need to use it effectively but sugar cour-tesy of Mr Tate and Mr Lyle comes with nofurther support. So not only does it give youno nutrients, but it inhibits the absorption ofcertain minerals (especially magnesium) andfills up loads of space inside you which pre-vents you from eating other, more nutritiousfoods. So far, so bad.

To sort out your blood sugar levels it isimportant that you look after your fun-damental macromineral levels. This can

be done with the help of a nutritionist and awhole food diet. Your trace mineral levelsalso have to be pretty good too, with zinc,manganese and chromium being of particu-lar importance. There is a supplement madeby several companies called Chromium GTFwhich stands for Glucose Tolerance Factorand it helps you do just that. It is worth pop-ping into the Nutri Centre or phoning themup if you live far away (remember to use yourdiscount voucher from this magazine) andasking about their different formulas.

Your diet must have no sugar. Absolutelynone. So think carefully about that drinkingchocolate powder (73.8%), chocolate bis-cuits (up to 38.2%), tomato ketchup (22.9%)and all the others. No sugar. This alsoincludes limiting the amount of fruit that youeat to one piece a day, possibly two, but nomore. Snack on celery or rice cakes instead.Eat small meals often, instead of aiming forthree big ones throughout the day. Four orfive small meals with a bit of brown rice, mil-let, potato or whatever is a much better ideabecause it will give you a steady stream ofenergy. Protein helps to maintain bloodsugar levels too, so make sure that you areeating high quality protein – it’s quality notquantity that counts so go for the easy-to-digest pulses variety wherever possible.

Sorting out your blood sugar levels canbe quite hard work, but as your energyswings become less dramatic along withyour moods you will notice the benefits. Allchronic diseases have underlying imbal-ances of which blood sugar levels are one ofthe most common. As you begin to respectyour body and provide nutrients in theamounts that nature intended you will reapthe benefits on all levels.

BOO ARMSTRONG

Sugar?Sugar?PH

OTO

: KA

LLO


As we neared the herbaceous garden,came the ominous, “I’ve got something totell you”. Now I knew something was verywrong, but my imagination couldn’t pre-pare me for what came next. “I’m HIV pos-itive.” I slumped to the ground. I cried, shecried, we cried together.

Until then it seemed to have the poten-tial of a marriage made in heaven. Mygrander fantasies ran to ripe old age andgrandchildren. My more immediate fan-tasies were of sex. Melting, succulent,oozing, running in and out of each other’sbodies sex. At that moment it seemed thatfantasises were all they could be.

I was well informed. I had a friend whowas involved with ACT-UP. I knew the for-mula. HIV=AIDS=DEATH. There were hugeamounts of money being invested in drugsto counter the virus. There had been somesuccess in by-passing the red tape to getthose drugs out to the people in need.New, better drugs were being developed allthe time. There was the promise in time,just in time perhaps, of a vaccination, of acure. There were long-term survivors, self-help groups, alternative therapies too. Inthe face of certain death, there was hope.There’s always hope, thankfully, wherehumans are involved. Hope enough for menot to turn away from what at that time wasone of the most positive aspects of my life.

It was hard to believe she would get illand die. She looked so well. The initialshock subsided. We talked a lot. In timewe got back to sex. I still wanted it , shewanted it. But I was terrified of catching“it”, and she was terrified of passing “it”on to me. In fact, I was terrified of kissingher, of having kissed her, of having shareda bed with her, however chastely, of hav-ing shared cups and cutlery with her. It felt

weird to hold her in my arms, so close toall that lethally-infectious blood pumpingaround only a skin’s depth away. Fearful.And rightly so. I’d seen the ads, and readthe papers. I was well informed.

Enter the health advisor. First shewarned me of the folly of starting a rela-tionship with someone who would die infive to ten years and of the risk I wouldrun. But there was always hope. Then Iwas initiated into the “at risk” rules ofsafer sex. They were at one-and-the-same-time crushingly clear and full ofquestionable anomalies. No fucking with-out a condom, no sex during a period, nobiting or scratching or anything that mightdraw blood, no oral sex either way aroundif there were any lesions or ulcers in themouth, and no kissing or oral sex for 20minutes after brushing your teeth if there

were bleeding gums. More generally:beware of accidental blood spillages, mopwith bleach; beware of passing on anyinfectious diseases to my partner; don’thold out any hope of a cure, that wasyears away; and, of course, don’t dreamof having any children.

There was more. Had I had a test? HadI done anything risky in the past? Maybe Ishould get tested regularly to make sure Iwas clear. But then that could only clearme for the time up to three months beforethe test, so as long as I continued havingsex with Meg a negative result wouldnever be definitive.

The effect of all this was to push myemotions in many different directions atonce. I was reassured that what little we’d

done till then was “absolutely safe”, I feltconfident to kiss and cuddle again. I wasoverjoyed that at least oral sex was “safe”.I was gutted that I’d never know skin-to-skin penetrative sex with Meg, and envi-ous as hell of the men who had known itwith her in the past. I was sad we couldn’tfuck on her period (I’d always loved thatmessy time of sex). I felt a void where myfantasy of a child had been.

And I was confused about the finerpoints of all this. There seemed to be somany grey areas and I wondered why thelines had been drawn where they were.Why was transmission possible throughthe soft delicate skin of the vagina andpenis, but not through the mouth? Wasn’tthe skin lining the rectum much more deli-cate still? Well, the skin of the vagina cansuffer microlesions during intercourseapparently. OK, but what of mouth ulcers,cracked lips and bleeding gums? Why notmicrolesions in the mouth too, they’re fullof teeth after all? Why could my mouth gowhere my cock couldn’t? And if a largeamount of virus was needed for infectionthen why were microlesions so important?If they were, then why couldn’t mosquitoestransmit the virus? Wouldn’t soft, slowthrusting be safer than hard, fast thrust-ing? Couldn’t I just put myself there verygently to feel that skin-to-skin touch? Justonce?

But that would have to wait. I felt luckythat I could have sex at all. Albeit with theoff-putting smell of warm rubber and nox-ious spermicides, the feeling of missingout on something, and, always hovering inthe background, fear. Big fear. Despitehaving weighed up the risks and foundthem minimal. Fear of a grizzly death.

Over the course of the following year

SEXUALHEALTH

by Tom Wright

In the palm house at Kew Garden.Ascending the intricately-patterned white

wrought-iron staircase, the atmospherewas getting increasingly hot and sticky.

Sex was in the air.

Safe sexseeking a ne

I’d met Meg about three monthsearlier. We’d both reached turn-ing points in our lives in the previ-ous year and, sensitive to ournewfound selves, were enjoying a

sweetly-chaste old-fashionedcourtship. Now it felt ripe for some-thing more.

At the top of the staircase, sur-veying what felt like our own gardenof Eden, I stood behind her, wrap-ping her in my arms. I planted a kisson the top of her shoulder and feltmy cock begin to grow between us.For a moment it was all hot stickysexiness. And then it was gone.“Let’s take a walk outside now,”she said. The sudden change ofatmosphere began to worry me.


and a half I had cause to fear for my lifeon many occasions. It felt like RussianRoulette. My gums used to bleed some-times when I brushed my teeth beforebed. Bed, bedtime, feeling horny, shall Ikiss now or wait five minutes, or 10 or 20?Even after 20 minutes could I really riskrunning my mouth over those soft, mushynether lips, oozing body-fluids? Yes, no,yes, no, ohh yes , yes, YES! I’d bit my lipearlier in the day, should I or shouldn’t I?No, yes, shit no, I can’t. Or noticing a sub-tle new flavour, her period’s started, run towash my mouth out over and over, shit,what have I done, will I get “it” now. Ornoticing blood on the condom, on me, onmy skin, running to the shower holding thecondom in place to wash away the bloodbefore I can let my cock free. Moments ofterror punctuating pleasure.

I tested a couple of times, always neg-ative, but terrifying. A slow building fearthat became a cold-sweaty panic justbefore hearing the result. And yet neverrelief. There’d always be some incident in

survivors who’d survived as long as AIDShad been named; one fifth of AIDS casesin US hospitals until 1984 were in peoplewho were HIV negative, and then the waythe data was collected was changed tohide this fact; the commonsense idea thatantibodies are good and usually mean thatan infection had been successfully foughtoff; doubts about transmission, HIV beingsaid to be necessary in large quantities tocause infection, quantities not found insperm or vaginal fluids, or presumablyfrom the microscopic amount of bloodfrom microlesions, and HIV being very unstable; and finally the assertion thatfemale to male transmission was very diffi-cult and rare, 4000 acts of intercourse toachieve infection.

I met a woman at a support groupwhose husband was in the last terminalstages of AIDS. He’d been a closet gayand positive for seven years before hecame down with AIDS and couldn’t hide itany more. She’d taken a test, sure itwould be positive, but it wasn’t. In the

asked questions of the orthodox view. Butthose open enough would usually end upconceding at least that the matter was notas cut and dried as they had thought.

But it was one matter to get people toquestion the common assumptions aboutHIV and AIDS, quite another to take it thatstep further into the implications of it all. Infact in all the “dissident “ material I’veread none has touched the last big taboo.

The first time Meg and I had sex with-out a condom was on a secludedbeach while we were on holiday. We

were both very nervous. The joy of it allsoon took over. It was such a relief. It wasso, well, natural. The smell of the sea, thefeel of the air on our bodies and ohh thosesweet body fluids mixing and mingling.Tasting those smells in the back of ourthoughts. True intimacy in a loving rela-tionship at last. After nearly two years offear-induced separateness. Yes, yes, yes.If ever two people deserved that pleasureafter all we’d suffered in the name of what

Surveying what felt like our own Garden of Eden

the previous three months not coveredwith certainty by the test.

While all this was going on we weredelving deeper into the subject of HIV andAIDS. Cracks in the HIV=AIDS=DEATHmonolith were beginning to appear, and inthe cracks new hopes took root andbegan to grow.

Some were saying that HIV was only acofactor for AIDS, some that HIVwasn’t necessary at all and was

merely a marker; there was the possibilityof seroreversion with Chinese herbs andQi Gong; negative babies born to positivemothers, and curiouser still, positivebabies spontaneously seroreverting a yearor two after birth; there were long term

cracks hope began to grow.Sometime in all of this Meg and I both

began new careers in areas related to thebody encompassing Chinese medicine,bodymind disciplines and nutrition. Wegot healthier, clearer, and stronger. Andmore questioning, more sceptical andmore cynical. Voicing doubts about thevalidity of HIV=AIDS=DEATH out in themedia-informed world became charged. Ifit was touched upon at a dinner party orwhatever, it would inevitably monopolisethe evening. Our position grew from fearto greater and greater hope. It was hardfor people with no personal experience tohear what we had to say. Harder even forthose with experience, who maybe hadlost someone to AIDS, but had never

w definitionI now believe was atbest a flawedhypothesis, then wedid.

But that is jump-ing ahead some. Atthis point we stillbelieved that HIVcould in the pres-ence of cofactorscause AIDS. We didwhat we did then inthe belief that therisk of transmissionto me was minimal. Itwas still shrouded byfear. We did it softly,to avoid those micro-scopic lesions, andafterwards I wouldwash thoroughly.Sometimes wewould use condoms,sometimes not. Attimes I doubted thewisdom of it. I tookspecial care to eatwell, took loads ofsupplements anddidn’t have condom-less sex if I felt at allunder the weather orstressed or overtired– conditions which

might compromise my immunity. Weavoided sex on her periods and remainedvigilant for small cuts.

Over the next couple of years welearned more of the intricacies of thewhole HIV=AIDS=DEATH industry: thatthe existence of the virus itself had neverbeen established; that the formulaHIV=AIDS=DEATH was never more thanan unproven hypothesis, announced at aUS government-sponsored press confer-ence, by a man with a history of scientificmalpractice, and never subject to the nor-mal peer review process; that AZT was ahighly toxic drug developed in the ’60s tokill cancer cells but put on the shelfbecause it killed the test animals, and wasnow being given to asymptomatic HIV


positives, even babies, and probablykilling them too – AIDS by prescription;that the test did not in fact detect antibod-ies but only groups of molecular proteins,that are nonspecific to HIV and highlycross-reactive; that the two different typesof test often gave contradictory results,even that the same result could be inter-preted differently by different labs, andmost astonishingly that different countriesset different criteria for interpreting theresults; that there was virtually no moneygoing into researching other possiblecauses of AIDS; that there were eminentscientists who questioned the HIV hypoth-esis but who were being frozen out of the“debate”; and that the whole AIDS indus-try was so hopelessly riddled with vestedinterests, financial and political, that anyhope of objective truth reported objective-ly, let alone critically, had long since evap-orated.

I grew to enjoy carefree condomlesssex with Meg as over time my doubtsabout safety faded. The fact that she wasHIV positive was no longer an issue. Infact I’d now regard this as safe sex. Theonly pain and suffering we endured wasthat caused by the myth of HIV and itsassociated fear and stigma.

For her it all began with a positive testresult some time after a disease-riddentrip to India. She tested positive for Hep Bat the same time and these antibodies arenotoriously crossreactive to the HIV tests.I believe now that this was probably thesource of her positivity.

I acknowledge that people die from thediseases grouped together as AIDS, but Idon’t believe that HIV is the cause, in factthese days I have an open mind onwhether HIV itself exists – I’ve yet to seethe proof. HIV might have been a goodidea at the time, but one that should havebeen dropped long ago. It seems to me ithas been clung onto only for reasons ofpolitical and financial expediency, and thatmakes me angry. Angry for many reasons:not least for the impact it had on Meg andmy lives, specifically for the impact it hadon our sex lives for such a long time.

Writing this I’m aware of howshocking to most the idea that Ihad unprotected sex with an HIV

positive woman will be. But the strength ofour position is that we arrived at it after 3-4 years of dedicated researching and soulsearching. Certainly not lightly. Faced witha fearful unknown we sought to under-stand it to come to terms with it, but inasking the questions we did we foundAIDS to be a very different animal to theone we were facing all those years ago.The weakness of the AIDS orthodoxy isthat from the onset, the potent mixture ofsex, a deadly virus and death created amoral imperative to silence debate. A dan-gerous state of affairs.

So am I encouraging the abandonmentof condoms and a return to promiscuity?Well, no I’m not. I’m sad especially for thegeneration which has reached sexualmaturity during the course of the “epidem-ic” for the climate of fear with whichthey’ve had to cope. Though judging bythe rise in STDs over the last decade they

haven’t been so taken with safer sex astheir elders would like to think – more evi-dence for the impotency of HIV – but thefear has still been there.

Having “HIV” in my life has forced meto question deeply what sex is and what itmeans and could mean to me. I’ve cometo the conclusion that there is safe sexand unsafe sex, but that those categoriesare not dependent on whether a condomis used or not, and even that the idea thatusing a condom can make sex safe initself a very dangerous idea.

Somewhere in this story I began tostudy Shiatsu massage and a dance formcalled Contact Improvisation. In both dis-ciplines touch is the major ingredient andin both there is time before and after theevent to relax and lie still and feel thechanges in one’s body. And they can bedramatic. Mostly a sense of calmness andwholeness, of having done something thathas had a positive effect on body andmind. After an unskillful massage or dancethe effects can be quite the opposite,though thankfully those experiences arerare. Whatever, the question arose in me,if these are the effects on on my sense ofwell-being of a massage or a dance, then

what of the effects of sex? It is after allmore charged and intimate. My conclu-sion: there is nothing casual about sex,about any sexual encounter.

Long before “HIV” entered my life, Ihad cause to question the efficacy of themodern Western model of medicine. WhatI have learned through the whole HIVexperience has only served to increasethose doubts and strengthen my belief inthe value of the Eastern approaches tohealth and medicine. There is much writ-ten elsewhere on the contrasting para-digms of Western and Eastern approach-es to health. Suffice to say that while Iacknowledge Western medicine has muchto offer in some fields, I find the Easternapproach much more convincing in itsmodelling of health and disease.

Simply summed up, a person in balanceis a healthy person, able to meet life’sdemands and ward off disease-causingagents, a person out of balance is a weakened person and liable to disease.Person in this case includes body and mind(and spirit) and is in Western terms bestsummed up by attitude, which unites frameof mind with posture, how one is in one’sbody. Balance is a function of how oneleads one’s life. This encompasses every-thing, from the environments in which welive our lives to the quality of relationshipswe have with other people, from the food

we put into our bodies to the exercise wechoose to take, from the way we spend ourleisure time to the way we work.

In fact Eastern views on health are partand parcel of the art of living. And animportant part of the art of living is the artof loving. I’ll offer a more detailed view ofthis in a further issue, but for now it is sufficient to say that the ancient wisdom,as I thought, is that sex is a very powerfullife experience, anything but casual in itseffects.

So with this holistic view of life, ofhealth and disease, in mind, I offerthis conundrum. Which of the two

situations would be more likely to leaveyou out of balance and open to sickness.

1. A loving, tender, sometimes slow,sometimes fast, mingling, oozing, con-domless fuck with someone in goodhealth that you know very well, at the endof a relaxed evening or in a secluded spotafter a long walk in the country, who hap-pens to have tested HIV positive shortlyafter a Hep B shot or having recoveredfrom some exotic disease on a trip tosome far-off place. Or something similar.

or 2. A quick adrenaline-fired con-domed fuck in an alley at the back of anightclub at three or four in the morningwith someone of unknown HIV status, ofdubious health that you met a couple ofhours before while both of you are comingdown off a combination of legal and illegaldrugs. Or something similar.

(Please excuse the clichés but clichéshave a funny knack of carrying more thana grain of truth in them – in fact I’ve expe-rienced both variations in my life and Iknow which I felt safer with.)

Sadly, Meg and I split up recently. Apersonal tragedy for us both which therelationship couldn’t sustain, no more orless dramatic than any “normal” couple’sstory. We’re still talking. Such is life.

So I’m left wondering how I’m going toexplain this all to my next lover and whattheir response will be. The obvious choiceis to take another test. A test I don’tbelieve in to satisfy someone I haven’teven met yet, for it certainly won’t satisfyme. I’d expect it to come back negative,though I’d be careful to make sure I didn’ttake it if I had flu or a heavy hangover,though I don’t really have them anymore.And if by some chance it were to comeback positive then I certainly wouldn’t beworried about an early death. I certainlywould, in the current climate, be worriedabout the prospects for my sex lifethough.

I do have to admit to some small linger-ing doubt. When I began having condom-less sex with Meg I was 98% sure Iwouldn’t get infected by a virus I 100%believed existed but 80% believed washarmless by itself. Now I’m 99.9% sureI’m free of a virus I 15% believe exists but,if it does, 100% believe is harmless initself.

Having admitted to my small doubt, asI believe is reasonable for any humanbeing to have, doubt being as intrinsicallyhuman as hope, I only wish someone inthe orthodoxy would admit to theirs. Itmight at least improve my chances for anew sex life, if not make for less heateddinner parties.

It’s hard being a small fish swimmingagainst the tide.

The only painand sufferingwas caused bythe myth of

HIV itself

c


LIVE, LIVE, LIVE!Even though I’ve been ill with what the doctors thought tobe TB, not once did I give into them or all of the antibiotics. Granted I took them but I knew soon I wouldbe taken off them. I, as you see, have a guardian angelwatching over me.

Meanwhile it’s been a rough month and here I sit in theRoyal Bournemouth Hospital where there are wonderfuldoctors and nurses.

But the best part of this story is I don’t have TB. Theydon’t know what I have but it’s not TB or PCP. It’s just a badinfection. So I’m going to be kept here until it is gone,which I hope is soon as I do want to be able to get a sun tan.

I will leave you with a quote that one nurse said to mebefore I went to sleep: “I smoke, I drink and I party, party,party and in November I’m going to Italy.”

Well, have a sunny month!

Later:I’m home, thank God. Hospital life isn’t for me. But since

I’ve been home, I’ve gone to my first acupuncture sessionand was told there’s a lot to do but I will be better withoutall the tablets they want to give me.

Yes, your GP will be upset but whose body is it anyway?Friday 19th July I went back for a follow-up x-ray and thedoctor was as pleased as punch. The cavity is one half insize and getting smaller, so I must be doing somethingright! I suppose I must say, listen to your heart and live.Don’t give in to the medical profession.

See you next month (when I’ll have more news).

With love,

Michael G

AUSTRALIAN PRAISEPlease accept my congratula-tions on the last issue ofContinuum, and indeed on allthe others you have editedsince the departure of Jody. Ihave been the eager recipientof all the Continuums since thevery first edition and had thepleasure of speaking to Jody ona couple of occasions. You areindeed carrying on his traditionof challenging and truthful jour-nalism and expanding every-one’s minds in the best possi-ble way.

For your interest (and sympa-thy) I have enclosed an exam-ple of the awful turgid shitwhich passes for AIDS journal-ism here in Australia, the stuffwhich, when I read it, makesme feel like jumping on the firstBritish Airways flight toHeathrow. Really, when will weever get rid of this ego-drivenAIDS bureaucracy, I don’tknow? In the meantime it isinteresting to see just what theycome up with next in the eternalquest to save us all from this‘killer’ virus’!

As you would know by now,we lost Stuart Bennett fromHEAL very recently and I fearthat many from AIDS Inc. weresecretly delighted. [It wasStuart’s wish to record that hebelieved his death was iatro-genically caused. HC]

I could not let Michael UrsBaumgartner’s excellent articlego by unacknowledged. It is sogood, punchy and accurate Ifind it hard to believe the maturi-ty from such a young pen. Morepower to him. Thank you forpublishing it. I look forward toyour next edition.

Paul, Australia

HIV EXHIBITIONISMTony Kaye’s ‘AIDS-art’ exhibi-tion “Don’t Be Scared”, held inJibby Beane’s car-park-gallery,exemplified the modern-daymythology that ‘HIV’ hasbecome. Test tubes of so-called ‘HIV’-infected blood weredisplayed along with ‘live’exhibited models branded ‘HIV’.

On my first visit to the showthe test tubes of blood wereavailable for the public to‘touch’. On my second visit thetest tubes of blood were sud-denly exhibited under a glassfish-tank case. Islington Councilthreatened the show with clo-sure if the blood samples werenot caged up. The irony was,there was no ‘HIV’ blood in

sight! Such an entity is a non-entity.

I spoke to one of the ‘live’naked exhibits, namedGretchen Adams, who intro-duced herself by saying: “Hi,I’m an HIV Model”. I told herthat the model of ‘HIV’ was asynthetic construct of cell cul-ture technology. She replied bystating: “That may be youropinion, but I know I’m HIV”. Itold her that she did not exist.

Montgomery SchafferLondon

SURPRISED, BRISTOLJust a quick note to say that Ireally enjoyed the meeting onTuesday. It was great to meetsome of the ‘real people’involved in this issue instead ofjust names in the books I’vebeen reading.

I’ve had an interest in theAIDS/HIV controversy for thepast couple of years since read-ing an article in The Guardianabout Peter Duesberg’s theo-ries. During this time I feel I’vegained an increasing awarenessof the gross misdirection of themedical/pharmaceutical indus-try and in the course of myresearch I’ve come acrossnumerous examples of fraudand corruption. As a result Ithought that nothing could sur-prise me but reading RobertWillner’s book DeadlyDeception really opened myeyes and I began to glimpse thesheer enormity of this situation.

I sometimes feel ‘underquali-

fied’ to have an opinion on thisissue as I’ve neither tested ‘HIVpositive’ myself or, until this

week, knew anyone who had. ButI realise that if I had experienceda ‘positive’ diagnosis I would bevery grateful that there are peoplewho have chosen not to acceptmainstream opinions and havepersevered in getting their ideasheard.

Lynne SheppardBristol

LIGHT YEARS AHEADI don’t know whether or not “HIV”does or does not cause “AIDS”. Itseems to me that the argumentsput by both schools of thoughtcontain flaws and contradictions.

What I do know however is thatin terms of being informative,articulate, intellectually stimulating(I’m thinking of the AIDS Kitscharticle here) and thought-provok-ing, Continuum magazine is lightyears ahead of any other “HIV”publication.

Here’s to many more issues ofchallenging reading.

Alastair PatersonLondon

LETTERSWHITEWASH?

I was appalled by the racistarticle on AIDS in Jamaicawritten by Matthew Probert,(Vol. 3, No. 6). The catalogueof negative stereotypes wasoffensive and created animpression of Jamaica as alawless, culture-less, un-healthy and polluted society.

When assessing the issuesin other countries, theresearcher should go in withan open mind and be recep-tive to the positive aspects ofother people’s way of life.Clearly, this researcher wasfocused on a purely whiteeurocentric view of the worldas reflected in his damningjudgements of a whole nation.If you only look for negatives,you’ll only find negatives.

I am sorry that the editor didnot see fit to demand a com-

plete rewriting of the articleprior to publication. Perhapsanother example of whiteracism? Our subscription toyour publication will be can-celled if it occurs again.

Shirley MallonHIV Co-ordinatorBirmingham City Council

The researcher’s wife isJamaican, and the editor hasworked there. It is a beautiful

island where most peopleendure profound economic

oppression. The issues wereof health and stress: an article

about Bosnia could focus onthe positive, but that would

not illuminate the urgentsocial problems there – would

it be called racist, though?HC


by MAVIS CRUETa (Welsh) Fairy

ENQUIREWITHINHOME TESTING KITSQ. Do antibody tests give different results in different groups?

A. Smith, Manchester

A. The FDA recently approved the sale of antibody test kits forhome use to pick up people at risk for AIDS who refuse to gettested in a clinic but would do so at home. Thousands, perhapsmillions, not at risk are inevitably going to use the kit too.

People not at risk have something to worry about: Baye’s Law– a principle of statistical analysis that states: When you use atest in a population with a very low incidence of the disease youare testing for, you will get huge numbers of false-positives onANY test for ANY disease.

Every scientist researching HIV testing knows this includingthe American Medical Association, which on June 27th approveda recommendation for mandatory testing of all pregnant women.In low-risk populations, Xin M. Tu of Harvard School of PublicHealth estimated that 90% of positive tests are false.

Baye’s Law depends on what degree of infection actuallyexists in the population being tested. The lower the level of infec-tion, the higher the false-positive rate even if the specificity of thetest remains constant. (The specificity of a test indicates howoften uninfected people will test positive – a false-positive). A testwith eg. 99.9% specificity will perform worse as the prevalence of infection in the tested population gets lower.

The 1993 estimated prevalence of HIV infection in the generalpopulation is about 1 in 17,000, from a recent CDC publicationindicating an infection rate of .006 percent among 1993 blooddonors. So, out of 100,000 people, there would be six who wereinfected. The remainder – 99,994 – are not infected and shouldtest negative.

The home HIV test (called “Confide”) claims a specificity of99.95%, correctly identifying uninfected people 99.95% of thetime. The rest of the time (0.05%) it will test false-positive. Out ofevery 100,000 tests performed on those not at risk, 50 people(99,994 x 0.0005) would test false-positive for every six who wereactually infected! And if the specificity of the test slips evenslightly, only down to 99.90 percent there would be 100 false-positives for every six true-positives.

Isn’t the whole testing process perfectly accurate when youadd the Western blot to the algorithm? In fact, what matters inthis mathematical analysis is not whether you “confirm” a testwith the Western blot, but what the specificity of the full testingsequence is (think of it as the combined specificity of two ELISAsplus a Western blot). The CDC has estimated the specificity ofthe testing sequence as 99 to 99.8%. Giving them the benefit ofthe doubt between the two numbers, what will happen in a0.006% prevalence population if tested with three sequentialtests yielding a combined specificity of 99.8%? THERE WILL BE200 FALSE-POSITIVES FOR EVERY SIX TRUE-POSITIVES.

The idea that it is possible to perform widespread testing inlow-prevalence populations and obtain any degree of accuracy iscurrently based mostly on a study performed by Donald Burkefor the US military in 1988. Burke himself testified before aHouse of Representatives subcommittee that many public laboratories performed too inaccurately to be considered for themilitary contract to analyse blood samples. He used a multi-steptesting sequence and obtained a specificity of 99.999 percent.Without getting into weightier issues such as whether any HIVantibody test has ever been properly authenticated by a propervirus isolation gold standard, let us for now accept Burke’s findings at face value.

Burke’s testing sequence would still produce one false-posi-tive for every six true-positives in the general population ie. a 14percent chance of getting a false-positive.

ANY testing scheme, whether mandatory or voluntary, thatinvolves large numbers of people from low-prevalence popula-tions is a disaster in the making.

Christine Johnson is an alternative AIDS activist and layresearcher with HEAL, LA. This answer is edited from a larger

response prepared for Zenger’s, California ©1996.

HOSPITALSCAN BE BADFOR YOUR

HEALTH

Worrying reports, both anecdotal and in the tabloids in recentyears indicate that far from being the safe, hygienic environ-ments we all assume them to be, most hospitals are in factplaces where you are more likely to contract a serious illness.Notwithstanding the infamous “flesh-eating bug” scare, sever-al nasty infections are endemic in most hospitals in the UK.

According to the Handbook on Nursing Practice:“opportunistic organisms such as Pseudomonas aeruginosaand other gram-negative bacilli rarely cause infection inenvironments other than those found in a hospital. Theseparticular organisms are often resistant to many antibioticsand are able to flourish under conditions in which mostpathogenic organisms cannot multiply. Patients who are par-ticularly susceptible, as a result of receiving immunosuppres-sive drugs or because of certain diseases, are affected by anumber of normally non-pathogenic fungi and viruses whichcause severe and sometimes fatal infections. A number offactors adversely affecting patients’ general resistanceinclude diseases such as uncontrolled diabetes, leukemia,trauma such as severe burns, and poor nutrition...theunavoidable (sic) use of immunosuppressive drugs andsteroids...places a significant number of patients at risk.”

In many parts of the world – not least within our cash-strapped National Health Service – the epidemic methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is causing severe problems:

“This microbe is characterised by the ease with which itspreads – mainly via hands and even by airborne skin parti-cles. Outbreaks of MRSA have not always been associatedwith significant clinical infection (sic) but immunocompro-mised, debilitated patients...are at particular risk frominfection and deaths do occur.” (Phillips, 1991)

Results from the 1980 prevalence survey showed that 9.2% ofpatients studied were suffering from hospital acquired infec-tions. Of those persons so infected, 20% had chest infectionscaught in hospital, and 30% suffered urinary tract infectionswhich they would otherwise not have experienced, largely asa side-effect of catheterisation leading to Septicaemia:

“It is estimated that two in every hundred patientscatheterised in the UK die as a result of hospital acquiredurinary tract infections.” (Meers and Stronge, 1980)

Many Health Authorities woke up to the chilling facts surround-ing hospital-acquired infection in the early 1980s by appointingteams of Infection Control Nurses and Communicable DiseasesConsultants, but deaths are still occurring:

– The recent outbreaks of drug-resistant TB in London hos-pitals was the cause of illness and death of at least one per-son diagnosed HIV+. [see HospitalWatch]– In regional Health Authorities such as Gwent, where aproject aimed at “the reduction in the incidence of MRSAand improved communication of patients requiring barriernursing” was instigated in 1992, there are still reports ofindividuals who have been admitted to hospital by theirkindly GP with a minor complaint (“AIDS-related”, ofcourse), whose condition has deteriorated beyond control,and have died.

One wonders how many so-called “AIDS-related” deaths couldhave been prevented by resisting the urges of medical person-nel to put one’s health at risk by going into hospital?


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About twenty-five yearsago my tiny face popped intothe grey daylight of a smallNorthern town. My mum anddad were delighted, my oldersister less so. She demon-strated this one summerafternoon by slamming heryoung brother’s penis in thedoor. Our relationship hasnever been the same since,and all through Catholic highschool I was unsure who totrust less on the subject ofwhat to do with my privateparts – the nuns or my sister.

My intense hatred of schoolmeant that with no qualifica-tions to speak of theprospects on the career frontlooked limited. I went towork as a cook in a localhospital, which I enjoyed atthe time. The novelty of get-ting up at five o’clock to pre-pare porridge for eight hun-dred soon began to look lessthan exciting though; I beganto have serious doubtswhether a lifetime of prepar-ing NHS food was somethingto get worked up about. Oneevening after preparing dia-betic bananas and custard Idecided to get myself over toManchester for a night out. Itwas on one such night that Imet my first boyfriend,David; it was only a matter oftime before I was waiting onthe platform for the train toManchester, with a tooth-brush and some essentialitems in a bag; this smalltown boy was getting out.Looking back, I was proba-bly about as green as theycome. In Manchester Imoved in with David, andsomehow ended up workingin another hospital. Life car-ried on.

It was Christmas 1990, andwe were sitting tucked up inbed with a box of Kleenex

and some nibbles watchingThe Six Wives of Henry theEighth on tv. Earlier that dayDavid’s cold had got so badthat I had insisted he go tothe doctor’s; not beingexactly intimate with theinside of a doctor’s surgery, Ihad had to drag him down

the drive to get him on thebus. By this time David wasgasping for breath; the doc-tor decided that an x-ray wasnecessary, and somehow wemanaged to walk to the hos-pital with David gasping forbreath every step of the way.We got a taxi home, and set-tled down later to watch thefilm. The doorbell rang. Itwas the doctor. “I thinkyou’ve got AIDS. You shouldgo to the hospital.” Thiswasn’t quite the script I’d

had in mind when I left homefor Manchester. Love Storywas turning into Nightmareon Elm Street, and I wantedto wake up. As for treatment,we were both delighted bythe prospect of him livinglonger, and so I was asencouraging as possibleabout him taking AZT.Nobody ever bothered tomention that the chronicanaemia might just havesomething to do with takinga toxic chemotherapy drug.

David died one year later,after being visited by the

usual menagerie of AIDS-related bacteria, viruses andfungi. It hardly seems possi-ble that AZT did anythingother than speed up theprocess. I decided to put mymind at rest with an HIV test.It was negative. WhetherGod was getting me back fornot listening to the nuns atCatholic School I don’tknow, but by a monstrouscoincidence my best friendwas killed in a car crash notlong after David’s funeral.

Life seemed shit. But at leastI was negative.

About a year later I metsomeone else. I movedagain, this time to London, tobe with him. If I looked a bitgreen in Manchester, inLondon I was positively cab-bage-coloured. It wasn’t longbefore my boyfriend gave meNSU as a token of his affec-tion, so off I went to the clin-ic. They looked me up anddown and suggested I gettested for ‘everything’. TheNSU cleared up, but I wentback anyway to get myresults. “I’m afraid,” said thedoctor,” that you’re HIV posi-tive.” I stood up. Sat down.“You must be mistaken.”There was no mistake. Fatecan be very strange; on thesame day that I received myresult I visited a homoeopathwith my boyfriend. Henoticed that I was upset, andI told him about the test.“Don’t panic”, he said, “It’snothing to worry about. Youshould go and see a friend ofmine, Jody Wells.” Anotherloony on a mission, Ithought, but neverthelesswent a few days later. Jodywas kind and concerned,and sat talking to me forhours about AIDS.

It took a while to sink in,and I did lots of research andreading of my own. I becamedisaffected with the medicalprofession, except in asmuch as they were useful forgetting me subsidised to thetune of Sickness Benefit,Disability Living Allowance,and an all-zone Travelcard(what a shame you can’t useit on the night bus at five inthe morning).

I’m still in London, havingshacked up now with thisdodgy geezer from Essex. Ido the odd bit of poster artto get my message across.Act stupid and take the ben-efits, act smart and don’ttake the drugs. Don’t be agay lifestyle victim. AIDS isjust another consumer cate-gory – don’t buy it. I’m verywell, thank you.

Could your Lust For Life be an inspiration to others? Phone 0171 713 7071

Lust for LifePatrick is an artist and studentliving in London. He tells howhe came to disregard his diagnosis and get on with life.

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