- What five minute procedure can transform a healthy person
into a dying patient, turn a simple yeast infection into a symptom of fatal
illness, make it illegal to have sex in several states (even with a condom),
prohibit certain international travel, preclude insurance coverage, and
force a pregnant woman to choose between taking toxic chemicals or losing
custody of her child?
-
- An HIV test, of course.
-
- The power and authority of HIV tests are rarely, if ever,
questioned by mainstream media and conventional medical professionals although,
remarkably, no HIV test has ever been approved by the US Food and Drug
Administration for the actual diagnosing of HIV infection.
-
- Most experts do not know that HIV tests are approved
only as prognostic tests and intended to be used for predicting a possible
future outcome (prognosticating), not for determining if a person "has
HIV." The FDA's lack of approval for any HIV diagnostic test speaks
to the fact that no HIV test can directly detect or quantify HIV, or determine
the presence of specific HIV antibodies in human blood.
-
- Now it seems the FDA has become uncertain as to the role
of HIV in AIDS. The newest HIV test kit approved in November of 2002 (again,
as a prognostic, not a diagnostic) contains interesting new language regarding
the causal link between HIV and AIDS:
-
- "Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), AIDS
related complex (ARC) and pre-AIDS are THOUGHT TO BE CAUSED* by the Human
Immundeficiency Virus (HIV)." OraQuick Rapid HIV-1 Antibody Test,
OraSure Technologies, Inc.
-
- Previous test kits used this language:
-
- "Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) IS CAUSED*
by at least two etiologic agents...(HIV-1) and...(HIV-2.)" OraSure
HIV-1 WB Kit, Epitope, Inc.)
-
- (*Capital letters were added for emphasis and do not
appear in the original text. Thanks to Dr. Rodney Richards for supplying
this information.)
-
- So why does most of the world believe HIV tests tell
us with great certainty who is infected with the virus?
-
- Researcher and journalist David Crowe of Alberta Reappraising
AIDS Society offers some answers in this informative article reprinted
from RedFlagsWeekly.com
-
- See Part Two of this mailer for some of the human implications
of unreliable HIV tests and Part Three for news on an upcoming event with
journalist Liam Scheff.
-
-
-
- Manufacturing Certainty
-
- By David Crowe
- June 23, 2003
- Reprinted from Red Flags Weekly
- http://www.redflagsweekly.com
-
- "Tests indicate that you have a 90% chance of being
infected with a deadly virus. There is a 50% probability that it will cause
disease within the next 10 years, and a possibility that it never will.
If you take the drugs that I offer, there is a significant risk that you
will experience a great decline in your quality of life, and a possibility
that the drugs will kill you."
-
- Although it might be the truth, you are unlikely to hear
a doctor saying this, because neither the doctor nor the patient can deal
with the uncertainty that it admits.
-
- Technology is the practical application of science, and
one of the major distinctions is its need for certainty. Studying semiconductor
physics can be a beautiful thing, but it remains pure science until a discovery
results in products that can be reliably manufactured and used. Biological
systems, especially human beings, are far more complex and less predictable
than inorganic systems. Medicine, being the practical application (technology)
of human biologic science, requires a high degree of certainty before new
discoveries can be applied.
-
- Unfortunately, a feeling of certainty can be manufactured,
and there are many motivations to do so.
-
- On October 12, 2001, a CDC scientist phoned then mayor
of New York City, Rudolph Giuliani, to tell him that, "with a high
degree of probability", a sample of skin from an NBC employee in Manhattan
was positive for cutaneous anthrax. The CDC scientist had this confidence,
because he had confidence in a test that a colleague had previously developed.
But this was not good enough for Giuliani. "Don't give me that stuff.
Is it anthrax or not?" An unqualified "Yes" from the CDC
scientist kicked off the anthrax crisis in New York City. [Altman, 2001]
-
- A "No," under the circumstances, would have
been almost impossible. The consequences for the CDC and Giuliani, if others
had later confirmed anthrax, would have been devastating to their careers.
While reporters might have questioned the accuracy of a "No,"
there was not a whisper of dissent on the "Yes."
-
- Medical tests are a common way to manufacture certainty.
A test usually measures a 'surrogate marker' for a condition, something
that is otherwise invisible, or at least much more difficult, expensive
and time consuming to find directly. A nicely packaged test can instill
confidence and, in a sense, create a disease when a positive test result
is accepted without any symptoms being present.
-
- An HIV test is perhaps the best example. A positive test
is devastating to most people, particularly those who are outside the traditional
risk groups and completely unprepared. Feelings of doom come, not surprisingly,
even to those who are perfectly healthy at the time of the test [Gala,
1992].
-
- Desperate feelings lead to desperate actions, and, for
HIV, the desperate action is to take AIDS medications. Antiviral drugs
have fatal side effects, and even those who avoid that are likely to experience
a destruction of their quality of life, even if they were completely healthy
at the time of the test [Goodman, 2002].
-
- Obviously, the doctor and patient must feel certain that
tests are accurate. If the patient was told that there was only a 90% certainty
that the test was accurate they might be much less likely to take medications
carrying such risks.
-
- The almost universal impression among scientists, the
media, governments and the general public that HIV tests are accurate enough
to stake your life on is, strangely enough, so strong because there is
no absolute measure against which the tests can be validated. Instead of
accepting this as uncertainty over whether the tests are meaningful, it
is accepted as lack of proof that they are not highly accurate.
-
- All that Robert Gallo's and Luc Montagnier's research
teams found was a high correlation between their antibody tests and AIDS.
People with AIDS had a high probability (88% in the case of Gallo [Sarngadharan,
1984]) of testing positive, and people without AIDS had a very low probability
of testing positive. A huge conceptual leap over a chasm of uncertainty
was to conclude from this evidence that a positive test in a healthy person
proved they had a condition that would inevitably kill them.
-
- The science of HIV testing has progressed since then,
but only in technological ways (such as the use of monoclonal antibodies);
the original logical uncertainties still exist. Almost every scientific
paper concerning HIV tests still uses antibody tests as the "gold
standard." This is unusual because antibody tests, even if one ignores
the possibility of cross reactions, can only prove past exposure to a virus,
not current infection.
-
- HIV antigen tests, which are more direct, are only positive
in about half the people who are HIV-antibody positive [McKinney, 1991;
Semple, 1991]. This finding is explained away through an immune reaction
that masks the antigen. But, this implies that the HIV infection is conquered,
which is not compatible with the notion that HIV infection is incurable.
Virus cultivation, often erroneously called 'isolation' is an even older
method than antibody testing for HIV, but apart from being time consuming,
expensive and difficult to perform, it also is negative quite frequently,
and a positive antibody test usually trumps a negative culture [Layon,
1986] (and vice-versa [Eur Coll, 1991; Imagawa, 1989]).
-
- The major new test since the early days of AIDS is the
Polymerase Chain Reaction, often called 'viral load' when used for HIV
tests. This also takes a back seat to antibody tests [Roche, 1996], likely
because it is so ultra-sensitive that the risk of a false positive is high.
Furthermore, detecting a snippet of genetic material (RNA or DNA, depending
on the type of test) does not prove that the entire genome is present,
and obviously does not prove that infectious virus particles are present.
This test is particularly uncertain because the genetic material does not
come from purified virus. Even accepting the test's ability to specifically
detect HIV DNA or RNA, one research team estimated that only one infectious
virus particle was present for every 60,000 measured by viral load! [Piatak,
1993; Roche, 1996]
-
- All HIV tests are indirect, even virus 'isolation' by
culturing. Consequently, some 'gold standard' is necessary to validate
them [Cleary, 1987; Abbott, 1997; Meyer, 1987; Daar, 2001; Papadopulos,
2003]. The only standard that is reasonable for a virus is actual purification
direct from body fluids of people who are HIV infected and the inability
to purify from people who are not. Virus purification would allow the proper
characterization of the virus, so that antigens, antibodies, DNA and RNA
that are generally believed to be from HIV could be proven to be from HIV
(or not).
-
- Without a 'gold standard' for HIV infection the only
way to validate the test is by repeating the test or by comparing it against
different (also unvalidated) tests. This can establish the reproducibility
of the test, but not its specificity (ability to react with the target
and therefore avoid false positives) or sensitivity (ability to react to
cases of infection and therefore avoid false negatives).
-
- US army researchers claimed that the specificity of HIV
antibody tests was only 1 false positive out of 135,187 tests [Burke, 1988].
However, although they claimed to have established a high specificity for
antibody tests, they were actually verifying only reproducibility, and
the researchers did not actually prove that the 15 people from this low
risk population who were deemed to have had true positive tests actually
had the virus in them.
-
- Modern diseases that are blamed on a virus are often
little more than the test because the disease can exist without clinical
symptoms. There is an average of 10 years between becoming HIV positive
and the first signs of AIDS in both rich countries [Munoz, 1995] and poor
[Morgan, 2002]. In that time the HIV test is the only sign that anything
is wrong. Worse yet, a low CD4 cell count test can result, in the United
States, in a diagnosis of AIDS (not just HIV infection), again without
any clinical symptoms. But even without symptoms a diagnosis of HIV infection
or AIDS will still often result in treatment because of everyone's confidence
in the tests.
-
- Other viral diseases might not have a long incubation
period, but the test still plays the prime role in defining the condition.
West Nile disease, for example, is associated with no illness in the majority
of people who test positive, and serious illness in only about 1 out of
150 [Petersen, 2002]. The symptoms, when they do occur, are indistinguishable
from many other viral diseases [CDC, 2002]. This has not resulted in a
call to question the accuracy of the tests. Instead, the certainty that
any symptoms found along with a positive test are due to the virus is so
great that when the symptoms are uncharacteristic scientists want to add
them to the definition, rather than to ask whether the tests are accurate
and whether presence of a virus is proof of pathogenicity [Glass, 2002;
Leis, 2002]
-
- One of the strange phenomena with HIV and AIDS science
was overwhelming feeling of certainty that crept over scientists in the
mid-1980's. Only 3.4% of papers in 1984 associated a reference to Gallo's
original 1984 papers on HIV (HTLV-III) with "explicit and unqualified"
assertions that HIV caused AIDS but this increased to 25% in 1985 and 62%
in 1986, even when these papers were referenced alone. [Epstein, 1996]
-
- Kary Mullis, who received the 1993 Nobel for Chemistry
(ironically because of his invention of the Polymerase Chain Reaction)
has asked many scientists for a set of references that constitute proof
that HIV causes AIDS [Duesberg, 1996] and has not yet received them. Yet,
even without this proof being written down in a scientific paper, certainty
still reigns.
-
- SARS illustrates how quickly researchers can manufacture
certainty today. The mainstream media (which claim to be "responsible")
have ensured us that everyone knows SARS is caused by a Coronavirus. Reports
from Dr. Frank Plummer, one of Canada's top virologists, that a diminishing
percentage of patients (30% by mid-April) are testing positive do not dissuade
them from this belief [Altman, 2003]. Everyone knows that there is no possible
explanation for all the patients having some connection with the original
cases other than an infectious agent, even though for some outbreaks there
was no solid connection, and tautologically, the epidemiologic connection
is supposed to be present before diagnosing SARS (as opposed to some other
disease with similar symptoms). And, everyone also knows that there is
no other explanation for the severity of the disease, certainly not the
new phenomenon of aggressive prescription of steroids and the antiviral
ribavirin that occurred as the fear of the outbreak spread [Koren, 2003].
-
- What HIV/AIDS science took two years to do, SARS science
took only two months to accomplish. I predict that a Coronavirus test will
soon become part of the SARS case definition, which will immediately create
a 100% correlation between the Coronavirus and SARS symptoms. Just as with
AIDS, the same symptoms without a positive test will be another disease,
and not taken nearly as seriously.
-
- People demand simple answers to complex problems and
modern medical science delivers. We are told that tests are highly accurate,
that drugs will cure conditions or, if that is not possible, that they
are the best bet. We are told that environmental conditions play little
role in modern, emerging diseases. Alternative therapy is scoffed at because
it has not been 'proven' effective through randomized, placebo-controlled
clinical trials.
-
- The fundamental reason why this confidence game continues
to be played is because of human laziness. It is much easier to learn about
science by rote than by examining evidence and making up one's own mind.
Obviously, not every pronouncement on science can be taken seriously, so
the status of a person or publisher becomes the way to distinguish between
"good science" and "junk science." Many people do not
believe that they have the ability to understand scientific papers. The
media, even most science reporters, are much more productive if they also
adopt this attitude. Among scientists, there is a hierarchy that is constructed
from the anonymous peer review system for publication and grant support.
This allows longer-serving officers of science to anonymously subvert the
attempts of younger scientists (and outsiders) to reappraise current dogmas,
by denying them the ability to publish and obtain research funding.
-
- Further Reading
-
- [Abbott, 1997] Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1
HIVAB HIV-1 EIA.
- Abbott Laboratories. 1997 Jan.
-
- [Altman, 2001] Altman LK. When everything changed
at the CDC. NY Times.
- 2001 Nov 13.
-
- [Altman, 2003] Altman LK. Virus Proves Baffling, Turning
Up in Only 40%
- of a Lab's Test Cases. NY Times. 2003 Apr 24.
-
- [Burke, 1988] Burke DS et al. Measurement of the false
positive rate in a
- screening program for human immunodeficiency virus infections.
N Engl J Med.
- 1988; 319(15): 961-4.
-
- [CDC, 2002] Encephalitis or Meningitis, Arboviral
(includes California
- serogroup, eastern equine, St. Louis, western equine,
West Nile, Powassan):
- 2001 Case Definition. CDC. 2002 Sep 6.
-
- [Cleary, 1987] Cleary PD et al. Compulsory premarital
screening for the
- human immunodeficiency virus: Technical and public health
considerations.
- JAMA. 1987; 258: 1757-62.
-
- [Daar, 2001] Daar ES et al. Diagnosis of primary HIV-1
infection. Ann
- Intern Med. 2001 Jan 2; 134(1).
-
- [Duesberg, 1996] Duesberg P et al. Inventing the AIDS
virus. Regnery.
- 1996.
-
- [Epstein, 1996] Epstein S. Impure science: AIDS, activism,
and the
- politics of knowledge. University of California Press.
1996.
-
- [Eur Collab, 1991] European Collaborative Study. Children
born to women
- with HIV-1 infection: natural history and risk of transmission.
Lancet.
- 1991; 337: 253-60.
-
- [Gala, 1992] Gala C et al. Risk of deliberate self-harm
and factors
- associated with suicidal behaviour among asymptomatic
individuals with human
- immunodeficiency virus infection. Acta Psychiatr Scand.
1992 Jul; 86(1):
- 70-5. Also Serunkuuma R. Living with HIV/AIDS: a personal
testimony. AIDS
- Health Promot Exch. 1994; (3):7. Also Call to explore
HIV test and suicide
- link. Nurs Times. 1994; 90(30):9.
-
- [Glass, 2002] Glass JD et al. Poliomyelitis Due to
West Nile Virus. N
- Engl J Med. 2002 Oct 17.
-
- [Goodman, 2002] Goodman L. The problem with protease.
Poz. 2002 Sep;
- 33-8.
-
- [Imagawa, 1989] Imagawa DT et al. Human immunodeficiency
virus type I
- infection in homosexual men who remain seronegative for
prolonged periods. N
- Engl J Med. 1989 Jun 1; 320(22): 1458-62.
-
- [Koren, 2003] Koren G et al. Ribavirin in the treatment
of SARS: A new
- trick for an old drug? CMAJ. 2003 May 13; 168(10): 1289-92.
-
- [Layon, 1986] Layon J et al. Acquired immunodeficiency
syndrome in the
- United States: a selective review. Crit Care Med. 1986;
14(9): 819-27.
-
- [Leis, 2002] Leis AA et al. A poliomyelitis-like syndrome
from West Nile
- Virus infection. N Engl J Med. 2002 Oct 17.
-
- [McKinney, 1991] McKinney RE et al. A multicenter
trial of oral
- zidovudine in children with advanced human immunodeficiency
virus disease. N
- Engl J Med. 1991 Apr 11; 324(15): 1018-25.
-
- [Meyer, 1987] Meyer KB et al. Screening for HIV: can
we afford the false
- positive rate? N Engl J Med. 1987; 317(4): 238-41.
-
- [Morgan, 2002] Morgan D et al. HIV-1 infection in
rural Africa: is there
- a difference in median time to AIDS and survival compared
with that in
- industrialized countries? AIDS. 2002; 16: 597-603.
-
- [Muñoz, 1995] Muñoz A et al. Long-term
survivors with HIV-1 infection;
- incubation period and longitudinal patterns of CD4+ lymphocytes.
J Acquir
- Immune Defic Syndr. 1995 Apr 15; 8(5): 496-505.
-
- [Papadopulos-Eleopulos, 2003] Papadopulos-Eleopulos
E et al. High rates
- of HIV seropositivity in Africa - alternative explanation.
Int J STD AIDS.
- 2003; 14: 426.
-
- [Petersen, 2002] Petersen LR et al. West Nile virus:
a primer for the
- clinician. Ann Intern Med. 2002 Aug 6; 137(3): 173-9.
-
- [Piatak, 1993] Piatak M Jr et al. High levels of HIV-1
in plasma during
- all stages of infection determined by competitive PCR.
Science. 1993 Mar 19;
- 259: 1749-54.
-
- [Roche, 1996] Amplicor HIV-1 Monitor Test. Roche.
1996.
-
- [Sarngadharan, 1984] Sarngadharan MG et al. Antibodies
Reactive with
- Human T-Lymphotropic Retroviruses (HTLV-III in the Serum
of Patients with
- AIDS). Science. 1984 May 4; 224: 506-8.
-
- [Semple, 1991] Semple M et al. Direct measurement
of viraemia in patients
- infected with HIV-1 and its relationship to disease progression
and
- zidovudine therapy. J Med Virol. 1991; 35: 38-45.
-
- _____
-
- Christine Maggiore, Founder/Director
- Alive & Well AIDS Alternatives
- http://www.aliveandwell.org
- 11684 Ventura Boulevard Studio City, CA 91604 USA
- Tel 818/780-1875 National Toll-free 877/411-AIDS Fax
818/780-7093
|
