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]]]]]]]]]]]]] AIDS AND THE "INNOCENT VIRUS" [[[[[[[[[[[[[[
Peter Duesberg (12/30/1988)
(Peter Duesberg is professor of molecular biology at the
University of California, Berkeley.)
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Peter Duesberg, an American molecular biologist, believes that
the human immunodeficiency virus does not cause AIDS. He is in
Britain this week to explain his case, and why he says the
scientific establishment has got it wrong.
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(From the New Scientist, 28 April 1988, pp. 34-35)
[Kindly uploaded by Freeman 10602PANC]
Most of the world's virologists believe that a virus causes
acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). They say that the
virus, of a type known as a retrovirus, kills the T-cells of the
body's immune system after a latency period of about five years.
Virologists call the virus the human immunodeficiency virus
(HIV).
The hypothesis that a virus causes AIDS is primarily based on
the correlation that most, but not all, AIDS patients in the US
have antibodies to the virus as detected by the blood test for
antibodies to HIV. In other words, virologists have equated the
presence of antibodies in the blood with the cause of the
disease. But antibodies do not cause disease; on the contrary,
they can prevent it.
Support for the theory that HIV causes AIDS comes form the
knowledge that some people who had received blood transfusions or
blood products later developed AIDS, presumably as a result of
receiving the virus in contaminated blood.
I believe that this is a presumption. For one thing, only 2
per cent of American haemophiliacs with antibodies to HIV have
some of the many symptoms of AIDS. Health authorities stopped
transfusions with antibody-positive blood early in 1985. Yet the
number of people with AIDS who also had blood transfusions
doubled in the year ending 21 March 1988, compared with the
previous year.
It is a presumption because transfusions can also transmit
other viruses, microbes or blood-borne toxins that may cause
disease. Another presumption is that nothing else takes place to
cause AIDS between infection and the onset of disease in people
who have received blood transfusions.
The hypothesis that HIV causes AIDS has become the basis of an
annual research effort in the US that takes $1 billion of federal
funding, and probably half as much again from individual states,
private foundations and corporations. This HIV the most
expensive virus ever studied.
The belief that the virus causes AIDS is also behind research
into the highly toxic drug, zidovudine, formerly known as
azidothymidine (AZT). Some virologists say that the drug should
be used as a therapy for people who are asymptomatic for AIDS as
well as those who have symptoms.
All of this would be justified if HIV were indeed proven to be
the cause of AIDS. However, in the rush to find the cause of
AIDS, virologists have given insufficient time to a thorough
analysis of the justification for naming HIV as the culprit.
Many questions remain unanswered, and -- even worse -- many
remain unasked. When last year I finally challenged the belief
that HIV caused AIDS, in an article in Cancer Research (vol 47, p
1199), virologists and the ``HIV establishment'' treated my
challenge with complete silence.
The basis for my case is that all viruses, except for HIV,
follow certain rules when they are said to cause diseases. A
principle rule is known as Koch's first postulate. This states
that a viral or microbial pathogen must be present in all cases
of the disease that it is said to cause.
Paradoxically, this does not seem to apply to HIV. Many AIDS
cases reported by the Centers for Disease Control in the US are
HIV negative. Indeed, the CDC's revised guidelines of 1987 on
the definition of AIDS stipulate how to diagnose AIDS when the
laboratory evidence for HIV is completely negative.
Another point is that all known viruses, when they cause
disease, kill or intoxicate more cells than the host can spare.
To do this, such viruses are biochemically very active and
typically reproduce copious quantities of new viruses. Examples
are the viruses that cause such diseases such as polio, hepatitis
and herpes.
Paradoxically, HIV actively infects less than 1 in 10 000 to
100 000 T-cells, even in fatal cases of AIDS. It is just as
paradoxical that HIV is no more ``active'' in fatal cases of AIDS
than in the 1 to 2 million Americans who are asymptomatic
carriers. Under these conditions, HIV infection cannot account
for the loss of T-cells observed in AIDS patients, even if all
actively infected cells died. This is because during the two
days it takes for a retrovirus to replicate, the body regenerates
about 5 per cent of T-cells, more than enough regeneration to
compensate for losses due to the virus.
The chronic dormancy of HIV between infection and the onset of
disease also explains the notorious difficulties in isolating HIV
from AIDS patients. Virologists must grow millions of cells from
infected people in cell culture, away from the host's suppressive
immune system, to activate a rare latent virus; even then the
success rate is only about 50 per cent, sometimes showing
positive only after 15 attempts.
In some people with AIDS, virologists failed to isolate not
just the virus itself, but viral DNA that had supposedly become
integrated into human DNA -- the proviral DNA. The very scarcity
of HIV in antibody-positive persons is also the reason why HIV is
never casually transmitted, unlike other viruses that are
abundant and hence readily transmitted during the contagious
disease-causing stage.
Viruses typically cause disease only in the absence of
antibodies to the virus, which neutralise the virulence of the
virus. This is why vaccination works so well. Nevertheless,
some viruses may persist as latent infections after being
neutralised by antibodies produced by the immune system. Such
viruses can again become pathogenic, or disease-causing, when
they are reactivated as antiviral immunity declines -- for
example, the herpes viruses.
But HIV is said to be the cause of AIDS only in the presence
of antibodies to the virus. This is all the more paradoxical
because this virus does not become activated when the carrier of
the virus develops the symptoms of AIDS. Thus HIV is the only
virus that seems to cause disease after rather than before the
development of antibodies.
If orthodox pathogenic viruses cause disease, they do so
within 1 to 2 months of infection. By that time, the host's
immune system either eliminates the virus or restricts it to
being latent, or the virus beats the immune system and kills the
host.
Indeed, clinicians report that in rare cases HIV causes a
disease like glandular fever (mononucleosis), when there is a
large number of monocyte cells in the blood soon after infection
but prior to immunity, presumably due to an acute infection.
Since this disease disappears as the body develops antiviral
immunity, it may reflect the true ``disease'' of HIV.
Paradoxically, HIV is said to cause AIDS only after a bizarre
latency period of about five years, by which time antiviral
immunity should have severely restricted the virus. Since all
genes of HIV are expressed during the replication of the virus,
HIV should cause AIDS when it first infects, rather than years
later.
If AIDS were only the product of time and the presence of HIV,
about 20 percent of the 1 to 2 million Americans (up to 400 000
people) estimated to be carriers of HIV should develop AIDS
annually. This compares to the actual number of annual cases of
10 000 to 20 000.
Furthermore, many AIDS cases would be expected in countries
such as Haiti or Zaire, where epidemiologists estimate that 4 to
10 per cent of the general population is HIV positive. However,
there are only 335 total cases reported in Zaire, and 912 cases
in Haiti.
HIV is a retrovirus. Unlike the viruses that kill cells to
cause degenerative diseases, retroviruses need a dividing and
viable cell for replication. During retroviral infection, the
genetic material of the virus becomes integrated into the genetic
material of the cell it infects.
Thus retroviruses are compatible with the cells they infect
and they often stimulate the growth and replication of these
cells. It is for this reason that scientists have for so long
considered that retroviruses are the most plausible viral
carcinogens. However, the Virus-Cancer Program in the US, set up
to test this hypothesis in President Nixon's War on Cancer,
showed that most animal and all human retroviruses analysed to
date are benign parasites that are neither pathogenic nor
carcinogenic.
Yet, HIV, a retrovirus, is said to behave like a virus that
kills cells, causing the degenerative disease AIDS by killing
T-cells. This happens even though T-cells grown in culture,
which produce much more virus than has ever been observed in AIDS
patients, continues to divide and remain immortal. The virus
does not seem to kill these cells.
A final reason why I believe that HIV does not cause AIDS
results from the observation that no known virus or microbe
discriminates between men and women, nor between homosexuals and
heterosexuals. Yet, 92 per cent of all the AIDS cases in the US
supposedly caused by HIV are male, even eight years into the
epidemic.
This, then, is why I dispute the notion that HIV causes AIDS.
If it is not HIV that causes AIDS, then what does? It is
unlikely that a unique virus or microbe causes the many different
diseases now covered by the term AIDS. I would suggest that the
variability of the latency period between HIV infection and the
onset of AIDS, and the nearly exclusive association of AIDS with
``risk groups'', argue against a single specific infectious
agent.
Risk behaviour, such as promiscuity, needle sharing and
receiving blood transfusions can involve the exchange of human
cells. It could just as easily involve the exchange of the real
cause or causes of AIDS as the exchange of retroviruses such as
HIV. The long ``latency period'' probably reflects the time it
takes for one of the many symptoms of AIDS to develop in those
who practice risk behaviour. Multiple factors, such as viral and
microbial infections on non-infectious toxins, may therefore
cause these symptoms.
The proponents of the argument for HIV as the cause of AIDS
often accept that the virus does not obey orthodox rules of
virology. I would argue that there is no room for the virus,
whose genetic structure is similar to other known retroviruses,
to be unorthodox. To believe that HIV causes AIDS is like
believing in miracles.
-----------------------------------
[The following is not part of the article above.]
Blattner, W. et al. `Blattner and Colleagues Respond to
Duesberg', Science, vol 241 (29 July 1988), p. 514.
Blattner, W.; Gallo, R.C.; Remin, H.M. `HIV Causes AIDS',
Science, vol 241 (29 July 1988), p. 515.
Duesberg, Peter. `Duesberg's Response to Blattner and
Colleagues', Science, vol 241 (29 July 1988), p. 515.
Duesberg, Peter. `HIV Is Not the Cause of AIDS', Science, vol
241 (29 July 1988), p. 514.
Weber, Jonathan. `Aids and the `guilty' virus'. New Scientist,
5 May 1988, pp. 32-33. (Reply to Duesberg's article in New
Scientist, 28 April 1988).
* * *
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