EPIDEMIC OR NOT?
AIDS is restricted to two primary groups - intravenous drug users and male homosexual drug users
BY DOUG FRENCH

Doug French, associate editor of Liberty Watch: The Magazine is an executive vice president of a Nevada bank. He is the 2005 recipient of the Murray N. Rothbard Award from the Center for Libertarian Studies. Other stories by Doug French

Most LewRockwell.com conferences are all about economics, gold and the evil doings of government. But this fall's "Healthy, Wealthy and Wise" broke new ground with an emphasis on alternative health and how the medical establishment and government health agencies are working in concert to kill us. 

To call most of the presentations "politically incorrect" would be an understatement. But the guy who pushed the envelope the furthest was the University of California at Berkley's Peter Duesberg's Friday night presentation entitled, "Is AIDS a Viral or a Chemical Epidemic? - a Multi-Billion-Dollar Question."

Duesberg is no quack. He isolated the first cancer gene through his work on retroviruses in 1970, and mapped the genetic structure of these viruses. Because of this and other work in the same field, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1986. He's the recipient of a seven-year Outstanding Investigator Grant from the National Institutes of Health.

Despite the awards and recognition, Duesberg is maligned for challenging the establishment dogma that AIDS is caused by a virus, and instead proposes the hypothesis that AIDS is brought on by lifestyles that include long-term consumption of recreational drugs, and the ingestion of the drug prescribed to AIDS patients - AZT. 

Duesberg, the author of Inventing the AIDS Virus, was celebrating his 70th birthday the night he spoke - a night that was ironically World AIDS Day. Duesberg made the point that most viruses are ubiquitous and totally harmless, and that we all harbor numerous viruses and other microbes almost from birth. These viruses are called passengers. 

Nobody cares much about passenger viruses because they are common and scientists can't secure funding to study them. 

Microbes aren't the primary cause of diseases, according to Duesberg. The two leading causes of death - heart disease and cancer - have nothing to do with microbes. But it is quite lucrative for scientists and doctors to develop tests and drugs to combat the microbes: $100 billion in the case of AIDS. Yet, no vaccine has been created. 

But, while the medical establishment constantly harps about how contagious AIDS is, Duesberg made the point that with 920,000 AIDS patients, not one single doctor, nurse or researcher is reported in the literature to have developed AIDS. Also, wives of hemophiliacs don't get AIDS, and non-drug using prostitutes don't contract AIDS.

If unprotected sex caused AIDS, the entire porn industry would be infected. It is not. In fact, Duesberg's work finds that only "1 in 1,000 unprotected sexual contacts transmits HIV, and only 1 of 275 U.S. citizens is HIV-infected. Therefore, an average un-infected U.S.. citizen needs 275,000 random 'sexual contacts' to get infected and spread HIV - an unlikely basis for an epidemic!" 

At the same time, the growth in the number of AIDS cases exactly tracks the growth in the use of recreational drugs during the '80s and '90s. Duesberg cited 25 papers in the literature showing that drugs cause many of the 29 AIDS-defining diseases.

Duesberg called AIDS medicine AZT, "AIDS by prescription." "AZT kills the exact same cells that HIV purports to do," Duesberg said, "but with much greater efficiency and toxicity to other cells."

If AIDS were a virus like the medical establishment says it is, it would be like all viral/microbial epidemics in the past - it would spread randomly in the population. But in the United States and Europe, AIDS is restricted to two primary groups - intravenous drug users and male homosexual drug users. 

Plus, the disease should be a pediatric epidemic by now, because mothers transmit HIV to their infants at rates of 25 to 50 percent. But, less than 1 percent of AIDS in America and Europe is pediatric, according to Duesberg. 

Three million people a year receive blood transfusions. And HIV-infected blood was not eliminated from the nation's blood supply until 1985. Yet there was no increase in AIDS-defining diseases in HIV-positive transfusion recipients in the AIDS era. 

Of course, this is all heresy to those milking the disease for government money. There is no grant money available for telling people to quit using cocaine, speed and ecstasy. No shinny new laboratories can be funded dispensing common sense. 

And now, Duesberg is not alone. During the conference wrap-up panel, Donald Miller, M.D., Cardiac Surgeon and Professor of Surgery at the University of Washington, told the crowd that he had been studying HIV/AIDS for 10 years and completely agrees with Duesberg, calling him "A Modern Day Copernicus."

Let's hope the world starts listening soon. LW