]]]]]]]]]]]]] AIDS AND THE "INNOCENT VIRUS" [[[[[[[[[[[[[[ Peter Duesberg (12/30/1988) (Peter Duesberg is professor of molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley.) ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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. ----------------------------------------------------------------- (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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