Did science really cure the first case of HIV (aka AIDS)?

Monday, February 07, 2011 by: Brent Leung

(NaturalNews) "The first and only person ever to be cured of HIV/AIDS is a leukemia patient treated in Berlin with HIV-resistant stem cells." This statement by Daniel J. DeNoon from WebMD comes in response to a paper published this month by the American Society of Hematology on an individual named Timothy Brown who was allegedly cured of HIV infection.

But was he the first to be cured of HIV?

In the 1990s, boxing heavyweight champion Tommy Morrison tested positive for HIV, according to the screening and confirmatory tests he took. He also sustained a viral load and maintained an antiretroviral regimen for a period of time. In 2007 he tested negative for HIV multiple times and was allowed to return to the ring.

Then a few years ago in South Africa, I spoke with doctors whose patients tested positive, but after taking natural medications for their HIV infection they then tested negative.

The multiple cases above are not isolated, as there is much testimony documented regarding scenarios where people who tested positive were later found to be negative. These instances beg the question of whether these individuals were cured of HIV. An equally important question is: were they ever even infected with HIV in the first place?

As shown in the film House of Numbers and in additional interviews taken for the film, the issues with HIV testing are enormous.

Watch: How Accurate is the HIV Confirmation Test
http://naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=E9FEA...

Before we can state that someone has been cured of HIV, I would like to see the scientific community come to a consensus on criteria for testing whether someone is infected with HIV. It is not plausible to determine if someone is cured unless it is proven that they are infected in the first place.

Another question that should be posed is why so much attention is being paid around the new study published by the American Society of Hematology when Luc Montagnier, the Nobel Laureate for discovering HIV, has already testified that it is possible for HIV to be cured naturally, without drugs.

See the interview with Luc Montagnier where he makes this earth shattering statement: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQoN...

Intrigued by this study, I sent an inquiry to establishment scientists and The Perth Group for a comment. The Perth Group provided a brief response with a commitment to providing a full breakdown and response of the paper. The Perth Group writes:

"In the Subjects, Materials, and Methods Subjects section of this paper one reads: In February 2007, an HIV-infected patient underwent stem cell transplantation (SCT) due to a relapse of AML with a graft consisting of CCR5A32/A32 donor cells. The pre-transplant conditioning regimen included 100 mg/m2 of amsacrine, 30 mg/m2 of fludarabine, 2 g/m2 of cytarabine (day -12 until -9), 60 mg/kg of cyclophosphamide (days -4 and -3), 5.5 mg/kg of rabbit antithymocyte globuline (in three doses between day -3 and -1), and a 400 cGy total body irradiation (TBI; day -5). ART was discontinued on the day of transplantation, and 13 months later the patient received a second transplant with CCR5A32/A32 stem cells from the same donor due to a second relapse of AML. The conditioning regimen consisted of 100 mg/m2 of cytarabine (day -7 until day -1), 6 mg/m2 of gemtuzumab (day -7 and day -1), and a 200 cGy TBI (day -1)... Twelve months post-transplant, the patient underwent liver biopsy and histological examination confirmed GvHD grade I that was controlled with adaption of immunosuppressive therapy (cyclosporine A, methylprednisolone, mycophenolate mofetil)."

In other words, this particular patient received two transplants of foreign white blood cells, eight different drugs, anti-lymphocyte serum, and body irradiation, and had other drugs in the form of antiretroviral therapy, discontinued.

According to the title, all of this led to 'CURE OF HIV INFECTION BY CCR5A32/A32 SCT.' The administration of CCR5A32/A32 SCT constitutes only one part of a much larger experiment involving multiple drug and other therapies. All of these must be regarded as separate experiments, making it impossible to know exactly what 'cured the HIV infection.' If someone with hypertension is given multiple therapies, including non-pharmacological therapies, and blood pressure returns to normal, how can anyone say which treatment was responsible?

However, in order for the findings of the study to even have a valid platform for discussion, there must first be evidence that HIV exists. Until then, the question of whether someone can be cured of AIDS is moot.

Visit www.houseofnumbers.com to learn more about the HIV debate.

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/031232_HIV_cure.html#ixzz1DFwgVO5s

Luc Montagnier, Nobel Prize Winner, Takes Homeopathy Seriously

Dana Ullman

Dana Ullman, M.P.H. (Masters in Public Health, U.C. Berkeley) is "

Posted: January 30, 2011 11:49 AM

Dr. Luc Montagnier, the French virologist who won the Nobel Prize in 2008 for discovering the AIDS virus, has surprised the scientific community with his strong support for homeopathic medicine.
In a remarkable interview published in Science magazine of December 24, 2010, (1) Professor Luc Montagnier, has expressed support for the often maligned and misunderstood medical specialty of homeopathic medicine. Although homeopathy has persisted for 200+ years throughout the world and has been the leading alternative treatment method used by physicians in Europe, (2) most conventional physicians and scientists have expressed skepticism about its efficacy due to the extremely small doses of medicines used.

Most clinical research conducted on homeopathic medicines that has been published in peer-review journals have shown positive clinical results,(3, 4) especially in the treatment of respiratory allergies (5, 6), influenza, (7) fibromyalgia, (8, 9) rheumatoid arthritis, (10) childhood diarrhea, (11) post-surgical abdominal surgery recovery, (12) attention deficit disorder, (13) and reduction in the side effects of conventional cancer treatments. (14) In addition to clinical trials, several hundred basic science studies have confirmed the biological activity of homeopathic medicines. One type of basic science trials, called in vitro studies, found 67 experiments (1/3 of them replications) and nearly 3/4 of all replications were positive. (15, 16)

In addition to the wide variety of basic science evidence and clinical research, further evidence for homeopathy resides in the fact that they gained widespread popularity in the U.S. and Europe during the 19th century due to the impressive results people experienced in the treatment of epidemics that raged during that time, including cholera, typhoid, yellow fever, scarlet fever, and influenza.
Montagnier, who is also founder and president of the World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention, asserted, "I can't say that homeopathy is right in everything. What I can say now is that the high dilutions (used in homeopathy) are right. High dilutions of something are not nothing. They are water structures which mimic the original molecules."

Here, Montagnier is making reference to his experimental research that confirms one of the controversial features of homeopathic medicine that uses doses of substances that undergo sequential dilution with vigorous shaking in-between each dilution. Although it is common for modern-day scientists to assume that none of the original molecules remain in solution, Montagnier's research (and other of many of his colleagues) has verified that electromagnetic signals of the original medicine remains in the water and has dramatic biological effects.

Montagnier has just taken a new position at Jiaotong University in Shanghai, China (this university is often referred to as "China's MIT"), where he will work in a new institute bearing his name. This work focuses on a new scientific movement at the crossroads of physics, biology, and medicine: the phenomenon of electromagnetic waves produced by DNA in water. He and his team will study both the theoretical basis and the possible applications in medicine.

Montagnier's new research is investigating the electromagnetic waves that he says emanate from the highly diluted DNA of various pathogens. Montagnier asserts, "What we have found is that DNA produces structural changes in water, which persist at very high dilutions, and which lead to resonant electromagnetic signals that we can measure. Not all DNA produces signals that we can detect with our device. The high-intensity signals come from bacterial and viral DNA."

Montagnier affirms that these new observations will lead to novel treatments for many common chronic diseases, including but not limited to autism, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and multiple sclerosis.

Montagnier first wrote about his findings in 2009, (17) and then, in mid-2010, he spoke at a prestigious meeting of fellow Nobelists where he expressed interest in homeopathy and the implications of this system of medicine. (18)

French retirement laws do not allow Montagnier, who is 78 years of age, to work at a public institute, thereby limiting access to research funding. Montagnier acknowledges that getting research funds from Big Pharma and certain other conventional research funding agencies is unlikely due to the atmosphere of antagonism to homeopathy and natural treatment options.

Support from Another Nobel Prize winner

Montagnier's new research evokes memories one of the most sensational stories in French science, often referred to as the 'Benveniste affair.' A highly respected immunologist Dr. Jacques Benveniste., who died in 2004, conducted a study which was replicated in three other university laboratories and that was published in Nature (19). Benveniste and other researchers used extremely diluted doses of substances that created an effect on a type of white blood cell called basophils.

Although Benveniste's work was supposedly debunked, (20) Montagnier considers Benveniste a "modern Galileo" who was far ahead of his day and time and who was attacked for investigating a medical and scientific subject that orthodoxy had mistakenly overlooked and even demonized.
In addition to Benveniste and Montagnier is the weighty opinion of Brian Josephson, Ph.D., who, like Montagnier, is a Nobel Prize-winning scientist.

Responding to an article on homeopathy in New Scientist, Josephson wrote:

Regarding your comments on claims made for homeopathy: criticisms centered around the vanishingly small number of solute molecules present in a solution after it has been repeatedly diluted are beside the point, since advocates of homeopathic remedies attribute their effects not to molecules present in the water, but to modifications of the water's structure.
Simple-minded analysis may suggest that water, being a fluid, cannot have a structure of the kind that such a picture would demand. But cases such as that of liquid crystals, which while flowing like an ordinary fluid can maintain an ordered structure over macroscopic distances, show the limitations of such ways of thinking. There have not, to the best of my knowledge, been any refutations of homeopathy that remain valid after this particular point is taken into account.

A related topic is the phenomenon, claimed by Jacques Benveniste's colleague Yolène Thomas and by others to be well established experimentally, known as "memory of water." If valid, this would be of greater significance than homeopathy itself, and it attests to the limited vision of the modern scientific community that, far from hastening to test such claims, the only response has been to dismiss them out of hand. (21)

Following his comments Josephson, who is an emeritus professor of Cambridge University in England, was asked by New Scientist editors how he became an advocate of unconventional ideas. He responded:

I went to a conference where the French immunologist Jacques Benveniste was talking for the first time about his discovery that water has a 'memory' of compounds that were once dissolved in it -- which might explain how homeopathy works. His findings provoked irrationally strong reactions from scientists, and I was struck by how badly he was treated. (22)

Josephson went on to describe how many scientists today suffer from "pathological disbelief;" that is, they maintain an unscientific attitude that is embodied by the statement "even if it were true I wouldn't believe it."
Even more recently, Josephson wryly responded to the chronic ignorance of homeopathy by its skeptics saying, "The idea that water can have a memory can be readily refuted by any one of a number of easily understood, invalid arguments."

In the new interview in Science, Montagnier also expressed real concern about the unscientific atmosphere that presently exists on certain unconventional subjects such as homeopathy, "I am told that some people have reproduced Benveniste's results, but they are afraid to publish it because of the intellectual terror from people who don't understand it."

Montagnier concluded the interview when asked if he is concerned that he is drifting into pseudoscience, he replied adamantly: "No, because it's not pseudoscience. It's not quackery. These are real phenomena which deserve further study."

The Misinformation That Skeptics Spread

It is remarkable enough that many skeptics of homeopathy actually say that there is "no research" that has shows that homeopathic medicines work. Such statements are clearly false, and yet, such assertions are common on the Internet and even in some peer-review articles. Just a little bit of searching can uncover many high quality studies that have been published in highly respected medical and scientific journals, including the Lancet, BMJ, Pediatrics, Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal, Chest and many others. Although some of these same journals have also published research with negative results to homeopathy, there is simply much more research that shows a positive rather than negative effect.

Misstatements and misinformation on homeopathy are predictable because this system of medicine provides a viable and significant threat to economic interests in medicine, let alone to the very philosophy and worldview of biomedicine. It is therefore not surprising that the British Medical Association had the sheer audacity to refer to homeopathy as "witchcraft." It is quite predictable that when one goes on a witch hunt, one inevitable finds "witches," especially when there are certain benefits to demonizing a potential competitor (homeopathy plays a much larger and more competitive role in Europe than it does in the USA).

Skeptics of homeopathy also have long asserted that homeopathic medicines have "nothing" in them because they are diluted too much. However, new research conducted at the respected Indian Institutes of Technology has confirmed the presence of "nanoparticles" of the starting materials even at extremely high dilutions. Researchers have demonstrated by Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM), electron diffraction and chemical analysis by Inductively Coupled Plasma-Atomic Emission Spectroscopy (ICP-AES), the presence of physical entities in these extreme dilutions. (24) In the light of this research, it can now be asserted that anyone who says or suggests that there is "nothing" in homeopathic medicines is either simply uninformed or is not being honest.

Because the researchers received confirmation of the existence of nanoparticles at two different homeopathic high potencies (30C and 200C) and because they tested four different medicines (Zincum met./zinc; Aurum met. /gold; Stannum met./tin; and Cuprum met./copper), the researchers concluded that this study provides "concrete evidence."

Although skeptics of homeopathy may assume that homeopathic doses are still too small to have any biological action, such assumptions have also been proven wrong. The multi-disciplinary field of small dose effects is called "hormesis," and approximately 1,000 studies from a wide variety of scientific specialties have confirmed significant and sometimes substantial biological effects from extremely small doses of certain substances on certain biological systems.

A special issue of the peer-review journal, Human and Experimental Toxicology (July 2010), devoted itself to the interface between hormesis and homeopathy. (25) The articles in this issue verify the power of homeopathic doses of various substances.

In closing, it should be noted that skepticism of any subject is important to the evolution of science and medicine. However, as noted above by Nobelist Brian Josephson, many scientists have a "pathological disbelief" in certain subjects that ultimately create an unhealthy and unscientific attitude blocks real truth and real science. Skepticism is at its best when its advocates do not try to cut off research or close down conversation of a subject but instead explore possible new (or old) ways to understand and verify strange but compelling phenomena. We all have this challenge as we explore and evaluate the biological and clinical effects of homeopathic medicines.

REFERENCES:
(1) Enserink M, Newsmaker Interview: Luc Montagnier, French Nobelist Escapes "Intellectual Terror" to Pursue Radical Ideas in China. Science 24 December 2010: Vol. 330 no. 6012 p. 1732. DOI: 10.1126/science.330.6012.1732
(2) Ullman D. Homeopathic Medicine: Europe's #1 Alternative for Doctors. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dana-ullman/homeopathic-medicine-euro_b_402490.html
(3) Linde L, Clausius N, Ramirez G, et al., "Are the Clinical Effects of Homoeopathy Placebo Effects? A Meta-analysis of Placebo-Controlled Trials," Lancet, September 20, 1997, 350:834-843.
(4) Lüdtke R, Rutten ALB. The conclusions on the effectiveness of homeopathy highly depend on the set of analyzed trials. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology. October 2008. doi: 10.1016/j.jclinepi.2008.06/015.
(5) Taylor, MA, Reilly, D, Llewellyn-Jones, RH, et al., Randomised controlled trial of homoeopathy versus placebo in perennial allergic rhinitis with overview of four trial Series, BMJ, August 19, 2000, 321:471-476.
(6) Ullman, D, Frass, M. A Review of Homeopathic Research in the Treatment of Respiratory Allergies. Alternative Medicine Review. 2010:15,1:48-58. http://www.thorne.com/altmedrev/.fulltext/15/1/48.pdf
(7) Vickers AJ. Homoeopathic Oscillococcinum for preventing and treating influenza and influenza-like syndromes. Cochrane Reviews. 2009.
(8) Bell IR, Lewis II DA, Brooks AJ, et al. Improved clinical status in fibromyalgia patients treated with individualized homeopathic remedies versus placebo, Rheumatology. 2004:1111-5.
(9) Fisher P, Greenwood A, Huskisson EC, et al., "Effect of Homoeopathic Treatment on Fibrositis (Primary Fibromyalgia)," BMJ, 299(August 5, 1989):365-6.
(10) Jonas, WB, Linde, Klaus, and Ramirez, Gilbert, "Homeopathy and Rheumatic Disease," Rheumatic Disease Clinics of North America, February 2000,1:117-123.
(11) Jacobs J, Jonas WB, Jimenez-Perez M, Crothers D, Homeopathy for Childhood Diarrhea: Combined Results and Metaanalysis from Three Randomized, Controlled Clinical Trials, Pediatr Infect Dis J, 2003;22:229-34.
(12) Barnes, J, Resch, KL, Ernst, E, "Homeopathy for Post-Operative Ileus: A Meta-Analysis," Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology, 1997, 25: 628-633.
(13) M, Thurneysen A. Homeopathic treatment of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: a randomised, double blind, placebo controlled crossover trial. Eur J Pediatr. 2005 Dec;164(12):758-67. Epub 2005 Jul 27.
(14) Kassab S, Cummings M, Berkovitz S, van Haselen R, Fisher P. Homeopathic medicines for adverse effects of cancer treatments. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2009, Issue 2.
(15) Witt CM, Bluth M, Albrecht H, Weisshuhn TE, Baumgartner S, Willich SN. The in vitro evidence for an effect of high homeopathic potencies--a systematic review of the literature. Complement Ther Med. 2007 Jun;15(2):128-38. Epub 2007 Mar 28.
(16) Endler PC, Thieves K, Reich C, Matthiessen P, Bonamin L, Scherr C, Baumgartner S. Repetitions of fundamental research models for homeopathically prepared dilutions beyond 10-23: a bibliometric study. Homeopathy, 2010; 99: 25-36.
(17) Luc Montagnier, Jamal Aissa, Stéphane Ferris, Jean-Luc Montagnier, Claude Lavallee, Electromagnetic Signals Are Produced by Aqueous Nanostructures Derived from Bacterial DNA Sequences. Interdiscip Sci Comput Life Sci (2009) 1: 81-90.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/0557v31188m3766x/fulltext.pdf
(18) Nobel laureate gives homeopathy a boost. The Australian. July 5, 2010. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/health-science/nobel-laureate-gives-homeopathy-a-boost/story-e6frg8y6-1225887772305
(19) Davenas E, Beauvais F, Amara J, et al. (June 1988). "Human basophil degranulation triggered by very dilute antiserum against IgE". Nature 333 (6176): 816-8.
(20) Maddox J (June 1988). "Can a Greek tragedy be avoided?". Nature 333 (6176): 795-7.
(21) Josephson, B. D., Letter, New Scientist, November 1, 1997.
(22) George A. Lone Voices special: Take nobody's word for it. New Scientist. December 9, 2006.
(23) Personal communication. Brian Josephson to Dana Ullman. January 5, 2011.
(24) Chikramane PS, Suresh AK, Bellare JR, and Govind S. Extreme homeopathic dilutions retain starting materials: A nanoparticulate perspective. Homeopathy. Volume 99, Issue 4, October 2010, 231-242.
(25) Human and Experimental Toxicology, July 2010: http://het.sagepub.com/content/vol29/issue7/
To access free copies of these articles, see: http://www.siomi.it/siomifile/siomi_pdf/BELLE_newsletter.pdf

Pastor: "Jesus Was HIV-Positive"

A pastor in South Africa has shocked churchgoers with a series of sermons claiming Jesus was HIV-positive.


"Today I will start with a three-part sermon on: Jesus was HIV-positive," Xola Skosana said in a recent Sunday service in Cape Town, in a move intended to fight the stigma surrounding the virus.

Read more on Skosana's service on HIVPlusMag.com.

While some are outraged at South African Pastor's Xola Skosana's words because they portray Jesus Christ as possibly being sexually promiscuous, the pastor told followers that Jesus frequently put himself in the position of the poor or sick population.

Skosana also said he used the example to illustrate the stigma that HIV/AIDS still has on South Africans and people around the world.

"Of course, there's no scientific evidence that Jesus had the HI virus in his bloodstream," the pastor said according to the BBC. "The best gift we can give to people who are HIV-positive is to help de-stigmatise Aids and create an environment where they know God is not against them, he's not ashamed of them."

Watch House of Numbers to learn more about HIV and AIDS. 

Source: http://advocate.com/News/Daily_News/2010/11/01/Sermon_Jesus_Was_HIV_Positive/
Source: http://hivplusmag.com/NewsStory.asp?id=22044&sd=11/01/2010

One in 22 Blacks will get HIV, CDC Report Says

Written by Special to the NNPA from the Milwaukee Community Journal
Sunday, 31 October 2010 09:39
For years it was seen as the “gay, White man’s disease.” But the face for HIV/AIDS has long since changed, bearing a much darker complexion. According to published reports, health officials estimate that one in 22 African Americans will be diagnosed with the AIDS virus in their lifetime — more than twice the risk for Hispanics and eight times that of Whites. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported the numbers last week; noting the lifetime risk is one in 52 for Hispanics, and one in 170 for Whites. According to the report, Asian Americans had the lowest lifetime risk, at about one in 222. The data is no longer considered shocking. Earlier research has shown that Black Americans have an exceptionally high risk of HIV infection. Given the disproportionately high rate of risk for the disease, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently expanded its Act Against AIDS Leadership Initiative to increase prevention efforts in the African-American, Latino, gay and bisexual communities, which are hardest hit by HIV/AIDS. The initiative is a partnership of major community organizations and was launched last year to intensify HIV prevention in the Black community. As part of the new effort, the CDC has reportedly increased funding for the initiative from $10 million to $16 million over six years, brought in eight additional organizational partners, two of which focus specifically on gay Black men, and continues to build on outreach efforts already in place in the Black community. Partners include 100 Black Men of America, American Urban Radio Networks, the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, the National Action Network, the NAACP, the National Council of Negro Women, the National Council of Negro Women, the National Medical Association and the National Urban League.     Source: http://www.washingtoninformer.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4840:one-in-22-blacks-will-get-hiv-cdc-report-says&catid=44:health&Itemid=138

Inappropriate water kills more than war, Hiv/Aids

Luanda – The director-general of Eduardo dos Santos Foundation (FESA), João de Deus, said Tuesday, in Luanda, that the number of children that dies of intake of inappropriate water in the world is larger than those killed by war’s Hiv-Aids, malaria and road accident. 

João de Deus was addressing in his capacity as host for the 14th FESA events.

He on the occasion cited Maude Barlow, in his book “water-blue covenant” that states that as the ecological crisis deepens, so does human crisis.

Water global crisis, he added, became a powerful symbol of the world’s growing inequality. While the rich drink high quality water, whenever they please, millions of poor people only drink contaminated water, which becomes a true evil of humanity.

To him, in addition to the urgent reflections in the scientific field, there is need for this problem to be addressed, which requires a political public health and ethic approach.

The event comprises four panels and during the four days the participants will tackle such topics as “Water and food for end of poverty”, “Water, sanitation and health for all”.

“Monitoring of indicators associated with the millennium goals”, “Water and climatic changes and natural disasters”, “Water, environmental impact and situation of scarcity” and “The future of water policy and global crisis of environment”, are some of the topics for the event.

Other topics are “Interactive tri-party dialogue between Government, civil society and science, aiming at mitigating and managing disasters”, “Cooperation for adequate management of trans-frontier hydraulic basins” and Preservation of natural ecosystems in the integrated management of water resources”.

“The role of underground waters with strategic water reserves”, “The importance of steering plans on water and sanitation in the success of the implementation of respective projects” and “Water for energy, energy for water” as well as “The financial model for construction of hydrometric monitoring infrastructures, supply of water and sanitation”, are other topics for the meeting.

According to the note, the event will receive addresses from Angolan, Portuguese, Brazilian, Italian, British, American, German, Canadian and Spanish lecturers and will include the topics “Public-private partnership in water management: experiences and opportunities”, “Institutional reform and regularisation as fundamental factor of water and sanitation services”, “Water, juridical reflexes of national and international institutional scope” and the “Role of tariffs in water services”.

To learn more about HIV/AIDS and poverty watch House of Numbers.

Click here to see Luc Montagnier, Nobel Prize Winner for discovering HIV discuss clean water being key for the body and that HIV may be able to be cleared naturally. 

www.houseofnumbers.com


Story source: http://www.portalangop.co.ao/motix/en_us/noticias/sociedade/2010/8/38/Inappropriate-water-kills-more-than-war-Hiv-Aids,e0f9dd10-f390-418e-87af-91a6841231d7.html

	HIV tests a farce? False HIV positives produced by western blot tests

	(NaturalNews) Did you or someone you know test positive for HIV? If so, they probably weren't told that they might test negative if a different test were used... or even if the same test were conducted in another country. HIV tests, as you'll see here, are a wishy-washy, pseudoscientific gimmickry that has unfortunately ensnared many innocent victims into a false AIDS diagnosis. This is now being revealed in some rather shocking video footage released by Brent Leung, creator of the House of Numbers documentary (www.HouseOfNumbers.com) which tears apart the inconsistencies and dogmatic non-science found in the conventional HIV / AIDS industry. Watch the footage yourself right now at: http://naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=E9FEA... There, you'll see world-renowned scientists discussing the so-called "western blot," a highly subjective test that is now being used around the world to falsely diagnose people with HIV and, subsequently, AIDS. This western blot, as you'll learn below, is a spectacularly laughable test that seems to have been designed to make "positive" criteria as loose as possible in order to label perfectly healthy people as having AIDS. "I don't think the western blot is a useful diagnostic test. I don't think it's worth doing," argues Dr Robin Weiss in the video clip. Val Turner, an MD from Australia, adds, "It's ludicrous that you can be [HIV] positive in one country and not positive in another." Neville Hodgkinson, the Medical and Science Correspondent for The Sunday Times (London) adds, "Some people argue that we have a confirmatory test in some western countries, and that repeated testing can lead you to a safer diagnosis. But if the very basis of the test is faulty, then nothing works in fact. ...Because of the different criteria that apply in different countries, you can test HIV positive in one country and be given an AIDS diagnosis as a result of that, whereas in another country you won't test HIV positive and you won't be given an AIDS diagnosis." A full-blown AIDS patient will almost always show nine different "bands" on an HIV test. But in the 1980's, only one band was required -- P24 -- to diagnose someone as HIV positive (and subsequently having AIDS). The problem is that perfectly healthy people can also test positive for P24, even if they aren't HIV positive. "In the early days, people developed criteria that were too much like a screening test. So if you had just P24 [band], they might have called it a positive," said Robert Redfield MD, Director, Clinical Care and Research, Institute of Human Virology. Doctor Val Turner adds, "Many people were diagnosed using these criteria, and then it was realized that forty percent of people who are completely healthy have one or more western blot bands, most commonly a P24 band." A few years later, the FDA changed its diagnosis criteria for HIV, upping the requirement beyond a single P24 band. But people who had already been diagnosed as having AIDS were never re-tested! Dr Val Turner explains, "We don't know how many thousand people were testing using that western blot criteria before 1987, but ... shouldn't they all have been tested when the criteria changed in 1987 in case they were no longer positive? So there are probably people out there who would not be positive under the criteria which developed subsequently. Using the FDA criteria which existed before 1993, only 80 percent of AIDS patients had a positive HIV test, which means 20 percent were not positive." HIV tests depend on personal opinion, not rigorous science Even today, HIV tests are conducted in a wishy-washy, non-scientific manner where the results depend largely on the opinion of the lab technician reading the test results! (It's absurd, of course, but this is what's happening right now.) In House of Numbers, Brent Leung visited Claudia Kücherer, MD, a Molecular Biologist at the Robert Kock Institute in Berlin. There, he recorded this conversation: Brent: "When you're looking at this western blot, how do you determine what is a positive [result]?" Claudia: "You need a certain number of bands being present. It depends a little bit on the producer of the test." Brent: "It depends on the manufacturer?" Claudia: "Yes" Brent: "Is there a different criteria for what might be a positive?" Claudia: "Yeah, there are different criteria from the manufacturer." Manufacturers of the HIV test, in other words, differ in how they define a "positive." You might be "HIV positive" on one test, but negative on another. And the decision on which manufacturer's test to use is based on the opinion of the clinic, hospital or doctor ordering the tests. Astonishingly, this House of Numbers footage also includes a scene featuring two different HIV test lab technicians working in the same lab who disagree on the criteria for a positive HIV test result. While one lab workers says two bands are needed for a positive diagnosis, another worker says three are required. And they work in the same lab! Watch this footage yourself right here: http://naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=E9FEA... Western blot HIV test called into question But some scientists feel the western blot is not just a good test, but a great one! Robert C Gallo MD, Director of the Institute of Human Virology, says "This has a margin of error if done properly that's extremely low. In other words, it's one of medicine's better tests." One of medicine's better tests? Really? And yet it can be interpreted in different ways by different lab technicians, different definitions in different countries, different manufacturers and different medical opinions? The HIV tests, it turns out, is more a matter of opinion than scientific fact. And if you or someone you know has tested positive for HIV, maybe they should get a second opinion. Why not make the test more accurate? So why doesn't the industry tighten up its guidelines and require five, six or even all nine bands to show up before diagnosing someone as HIV positive? No one seems to know. I do, though. Isn't it obvious? The AIDS industry is much like the cancer industry in that it's focused on diagnosing as many patients as possible whether or not they actually have the disease. More patients equals more profits and a bigger "scare story" to feed the media propaganda machines. We already know that the AIDS industry fabricated evidence to try to exaggerate the scope of the AIDS scare (http://naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=D35F0...). So it's not surprising they would be promoting a "loose" test that potentially has already ensnared potentially tens of thousands of innocent people into a false AIDS diagnosis. Once a person is diagnosed with AIDS, you see, they become a profit generating machine for Big Pharma. AIDS pharmaceuticals are extremely expensive, and because they are protected under an FDA-enforced monopoly, they can be sold at practically any asking price. Even better, once innocent "healthy" people start taking AIDS drugs, they begin to show AIDS symptoms such as compromised immune systems. These side effects are caused by the drugs, of course, not by the disease, but in the minds of doctors and patients, the emergence of these scary symptoms proves that "they really had AIDS." It's all just loopy, circular logic with a single purpose: To earn more money for Big Pharma at the expense of human suffering. Now, I'm not saying there's no such thing as a genuine person with immune deficiency. Thanks mostly to our toxic environment, there are certainly people who suffer chronic immune system malfunctions. But it is in the AIDS industry's interests to convince even healthy people that they are ill and need pharmaceutical intervention to survive. And, by sheer coincidence (not!), today's HIV tests are specifically designed in a way that produces a disturbingly high number of false positives. See the complete collection of exclusive clips from House of Numbers at NaturalNews.TV: http://naturalnews.tv/Browse.asp?me...

House of Numbers Documentary – Directed By Brent Leung

House of Numbers, by newcomer filmmaker, Brent Leung, is a shocking documentary that packs a very powerful punch. So much so that what you have witnessed  stays with you long after you have switched the tv off.
This is a film thats going to make you think……alot.  And so it should. It’s about a very very serious subject.

I don’t think I know of a single other subject that creates so much debate amongst people. And  sometimes, I witness certain people, who really have no clue as to what they are talking about, show utter hatred to other fellow humans simply because they don’t agree, and have not questioned what they know.

And the debates I have witnessed are ugly, really ugly. Sometimes, in extreme cases there are even death threats involved, it gets that bad.  I have received a few threats myself, whenever I write about something similar to this, that goes against the mainstream medical beliefs.

I can also  guarantee that within a short amount of time goes by after posting this review, someone will leave a very one-sided comment about this film and attack me also for having the ‘audacity’ to review it.  There are people who are paid to simply sit and do Google Searches to see if there are any new posts on topics such as this.  So threatening are movies like this…….


House of Numbers is on a subject that most of us think we know alot about or  it’s something we push aside because we simply don’t want to know. Some were perhaps along time ago, scared into thinking a certain way, and have had that ingrained into our minds so much so, that its impossible for some, to think of another, new way.

”To think, ”What if they, are wrong?, ”What if, what I have thought is wrong too?”  ”And if we are wrong, what does that mean?”

House Of Numbers is a groundbreaking documentary about, AIDS.

Have you ever asked yourself, ”What is HIV? What is AIDS? And what is being done to cure it?’?
Do you know the answers?  Do you really know enough of the facts?

You might think you do, but I am telling you, you more than likely don’t know enough to paint the full picture. Ask yourself, what do you know and who told you this information and when? Has anything changed since you were told about AIDS?  Was it like  for me, from the Television through scary Grim Reaper Ads?

"This is the beginning of a war... to reclaim our health"

First time film maker, Brent Leung, asked himself these questions from a young age and didn’t really ever find out enough answers that made sense.
A few years ago, he set out on a world wide journey with a quest to find out these very answers he just had to know.
He set up interviews with prominent Doctors, Scientists, Researchers and Journalists, all who are experts in their fields.  He visits London, the USA, the slums of South Africa where disease and death are so common it has become normal and other countries also, to try and understand, do we all believe the same thing around the world?

He questions why, after 29 years, with so much press, billions of  pounds spent, and massive worldwide media attention, there is still no cure in sight and not much real understanding of AIDS, leaving plenty of misguided people unsure, of what it all even means.



What Brent uncovers in this documentary will leave you with your mouth gaping wide open.
He reveals a massive research establishment in total disarray with a health policy gone right off course.
Brent interviews and easily manages to get completely candid interviews with the most powerful, well known and influential people in the ‘AIDS’ Industry.

Some of these interviews and what is uncovered will be why your mouth is left dragging on the floor.  You can see snippets of them below.
Brent interviews the two Scientists awarded the ‘prize’ for discovering the HIV virus. He also talks in depth with highly acclaimed Nobel Laureates, Presidential Advisors, survivors, activists and the Executive Director of UNAIDS.

The answers they give to the questions that are asked, will at times, make you sit up in shock.
I have been researching AIDS for the last year and by far, this is the most eye opening film I have seen.

Brent’s relaxed interview style and non aggressive approach seems to bring out  shocking revelations and equally as stunning hypocritical contradictions.

This is a movie that is simply brilliant and one that is also extremely threatening because it is blowing the lid off a subject with completely misguided ‘facts’ and fallacies that have been kept in the dark from us for far too long.

House of Numbers has the power to completely change the way we see AIDS.  What is presented in this film is totally undeniable and presented in a way that is surprisingly unbiased and lets the viewer decide for themselves: what is really going on?

Let it be known though, that the documentary never denies the existence of AIDS or HIV.
”The HIV/AIDS story is being rewritten, and this is the first film to present the uncensored POVs of virtually all the major players — in their own settings, in their own words. It rocks the foundation upon which all conventional wisdom regarding HIV/AIDS is based. If, as South African health advocate Pephsile Maseko remarks, “this is the beginning of a war…a war to reclaim our health,” then House of Numbers could well be the opening salvo in the battle to bring sanity and clarity to an epidemic clearly gone awry.’

House of Numbers is a must see film, watch these snippets below to find out why……..
I will leave you with my thoughts and a whole bunch of stuff to investigate:
Every day, in the media, we as people,  are reading more and more reports that we are being lied to. The Governments lie to us, the Media controls what they let us know and Big Corporations control both.

The recent BP oil spill should make even the most skeptical of people start to agree with this after seeing the lack of care, concern  and CONTROL and Media block out for the clean up.  We are all seeing that Big Money equals Big Power.  I will say it again, Big Money equals Big Power.
Pharmaceutical companies are being involved in huge scandals, paying people to lie and get them on their side.  Drugs being released deemed as ’safe’ to use, only to cause many deaths and serious problems.  Then we read about the Drug Company ‘conflict of interest’ funded Medical Journals our Doctors are reading and believing. And information being released to the public is either hidden or exaggerated.

With more than 200 Billion dollars spent on AIDS funding, with more being requested, does that mean Big Money to you?

So now I ask you to think, could what we possibly think we know, be possibly, completely wrong?
WATCH FULL LENGTH ON AMAZON  - VIDEO ON DEMAND IN THE USA

To purchase DVD Visit House of Numbers.com

Below: House Of Numbers Trailer

More Clips can be seen here:


by Anna Rodgers on August 7th, 2010

Source: http://blog.missecoglam.com/2010/08/house-of-numbers-documentary-directed-by-brent-leung.html

Study reveals promise for HIV test

Early detection hope of S.D. researchers

By Keith Darcé, UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

Tuesday, June 15, 2010 at 12:05 a.m.

The evolution of AIDS from a deadly disease shrouded in fear to a largely manageable condition took another step forward Monday, when San Diego researchers unveiled results of a study looking at an early-detection method for the virus that causes the illness.

The report’s authors said a rarely used blood test can spot HIV weeks before the body recognizes the infection. They recommended that it be offered along with the more common screening method to people at high risk of contracting the virus, including gay men, intravenous drug users and people with multiple sex partners.

Among the 3,151 participants in a two-year study, the blood test identified HIV in 15 individuals who had falsely tested negative with the traditional saliva swab procedure.

False negative results occur in as much as 1 percent of those who take the swab test, which pinpoints antibodies produced by the immune system in response to infection. It can take as long as three months for the body to begin producing enough antibodies to trigger a positive reading.

During that lag time, people can unknowingly spread HIV through unsafe sex and miss early treatments that could improve their health in the long run, said Dr. Sheldon Morris, an AIDS researcher at the University of California San Diego’s Antiviral Research Center in Hillcrest.

Morris was lead author of the HIV-testing report, which appeared Monday in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine. His colleagues included other researchers from UCSD and San Diego County’s HIV, STD and Hepatitis Branch.

“If people got an antibody test alone and were told they weren’t infected when they were, they could be a strong infection risk until they get tested again, which according to guidelines could be six to 12 months later,” Morris said.

The latest findings reinforce similar conclusions from a 2005 study led by scientists at the University of North Carolina. Those researchers administered the early-detection blood test to a much larger sampling of people.

Participants in the San Diego study whose blood tested negative could get their results in person, through an automated telephone system or by logging on to a secured website. About 65 percent of those who sought their results used the automated options.

Morris said the pattern demonstrates a shift in attitudes about AIDS. The illness once was viewed as a death sentence that needed in-person counseling to deal with issues such as shame and secrecy. But advances in detection and treatment have turned it into a chronic, controllable condition for most patients — not unlike diabetes.

“HIV is not as mysterious as it once was,” Morris said.

The early-detection blood test, which homes in on nucleic acid RNA molecules produced by the virus, has been used to screen most of the nation’s blood donation supply since 2002, according to its maker, Gen-Probe of San Diego.

The FDA approved the test for use as an HIV diagnostic tool in late 2006, but its cost — as high as $100 — and more complicated administration have helped discourage widespread use, said Rowena Johnston, vice president and research director of the New York-based international HIV/AIDS research foundation known as AMFAR.

Samples for the blood test are obtained through finger pricks and must be sent to a laboratory, which can take up to two weeks to return results.

“The reason the antibody test is (widely) used is because of low cost and convenience,” Johnston said. The saliva swab method can produce a reading within a few minutes.

But identifying people with HIV within a few days or weeks of infection has become a public health imperative, in part because the virus level tends to be highest during the early infection stage — making transmission to others more likely, she said.

“This really is a key to preventing HIV transmission,” Johnston said.

Because of the blood test’s cost, health experts said, it probably isn’t practical to offer the higher-level screening to the general population. It makes more sense to focus on high-risk HIV groups because they record larger numbers of false-negative antibody test results.

In the San Diego study, participants were recruited from several HIV testing sites in the region, including those run by UCSD, the county and the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Community Center.

Each participant was given the saliva swab test, and then blood samples were taken from those who tested negative. The samples were sent to labs in San Diego and Emeryville in the Bay Area, where they were analyzed for HIV nucleic acid. Patients who tested positive for HIV after the blood analysis received the results from clinic staffers within a week.

Morris said the blood test is sensitive enough to detect the virus components within 10 days of infection.

“I think the time is coming where we will have to adopt a strategy for earlier (HIV) detection,” he said. “If you have a testing site with a high-risk prevalence, then you probably should be running this test on all of their samples” that tested negative for virus antibodies.

Keith Darcé: (619) 293-1020; keith.darce@uniontrib.com

See House of Numbers to learn more about HIV and AIDS.

Watch HIV scientists Dr. Niel Constantine and Robin Weiss talk about the accuracy of HIV Testing.

Watch Prof. Luc Montagnier, discoverer of HIV talk about clearing the virus naturally.  

House of Numbers Adds Additional Content to its Deluxe Edition DVD

House of Numbers has added full interviews to its Deluxe Edition DVD along with additional featurettes. A list of all the featurettes can be seen below and a list of full length interviews will be announced shortly. 

Deluxe DVD Special Features

Behind-the-scenes: The Making of House of Numbers

Extended Interviews

32 Featurettes:

HIV Testing

• HIV Testing 101
• False Positives: Causes and Factors
• History and Evolution of HIV Testing
• Reading the Fine Print: HIV Test Inserts
• The Changing Criteria of Western Blot Testing
• Deciphering Test Results for False Positives
• Examining the "Gold Standard" for HIV Tests
• Testing of High Risk vs. Low Risk Populations
• HIV Testing Campaigns

A I D S

• CDC: Initial AIDS Definition
• Creating an African AIDS Definition
• Bangui: AIDS By Numbers
• Bangui: Peripheral Psychological Damage
• Bangui Redux: National Variation in AIDS Definitions
• Through a Glass Darkly: African AIDS Statistics
• Clinical AIDS: A New Disease? 
• A Growing Family: AIDS Marker Diseases and Indicators
• Bangui Westernized
• Politics and Public Health: A Study in Conflict
• CD4 T-Cell Count Marker: Medical Application
• 1997 - CDC Tables 11 and 12: Addition by Subtraction

Deconstructing a House of Numbers:
Experts Examine Global HIV/AIDS Statistics

• Dr. James Chin
• Rian Malan
• Dr. Charles Geshekter (Archival, 2001)

A Second Look

• The "Probable Cause" of AIDS
• Dr. Don Francis on Dr. Robert Gallo
• Profile: Dr. Peter Duesberg

"Why I Began Questioning HIV" -
Five Skeptics' Stories

• Dr. Kary Mullis
• Rian Malan
• Neville Hodgkinson
• Dr. Rodney Richards
• Dr. Christian Fiala

Click Here To Purchase the DVD

Remembering AIDS 2000 – Hope and Controversy in Durban

by Joe DeCapua

While much attention is being paid to South Africa as the host of Africa’s first World Cup, the nation also made history 10 years ago when it hosted the 13^th International AIDS Conference.  It was the first time the world’s largest AIDS gathering was held in a developing country and it changed the way future conferences would be held.

The theme of the 13^th International AIDS Conference was “Break the Silence.”  And at the opening ceremony in Durban, performers chanted “No” to the fear and reluctance to talk openly about HIV/AIDS, which had already killed millions.

Monumental task

The conference – known as AIDS 2000 – faced many obstacles.  Could an African country host an international conference attracting thousands of participants?  Would South Africa’s high crime rate scare people away?  Would the idea of focusing more on the social aspects of the disease be successful?

We have a monumental task ahead of us.  And there’s not a second to look back to our yesterdays, to look back at our fears and frustrations.  We have no other choice but to go forward and to keep our minds on acting firmly on the knowledge we already have; and of uncovering new ideas and new knowledge on what should be done.”


AIDS 2000 chairman, Professor Gerry Coovadia, speaking on opening day, July 9^th, 2000.  Today, Dr. Coovadia, Emeritus Professor of Pediatrics and Child Health at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, considers the legacy of the conference.

“Without exaggerating its impact, it certainly is considered one of the landmark AIDS conferences in the world.  And that includes those that have been held recently.  And I think the reason it is considered a landmark conference is that quite a number of issues came to the fore,” he said.

Denial

Controversy surrounded the Durban AIDS conference even before it opened.  President Thabo Mbeki was at the center of it, skeptical a virus was the cause of HIV/AIDS.  He said his position was based, in part, on a World Health Organization report that outlined the many health problems facing South Africa and other nations on the continent.  Mbeki also said poverty was a major contributor to poor health.

It seemed to me that we could not blame everything on a single virus.  It seemed to me also that every living African, whether in good or ill health, is prey to many enemies of health that would interact one upon the other in many ways within one human body,” said Mbeki.

Critics feared if President Mbeki appeared to doubt the link between HIV and the disease, people would not practice safe sex and use condoms.

“One of the questions I’ve asked is: are safe sex, condoms and antiretroviral drugs a sufficient response to the health catastrophes that we face?”

The debate and anger over the issue drew the attention of former South African President Nelson Mandela, who spoke at the closing ceremonies.

“So much unnecessary attention around this conference had been directed towards the dispute that is unintentionally distracting from the real life and death issues we are confronted with as a country,” said Mandela.

He said it would be wrong for the controversy to overshadow the goals of the 13^th international AIDS Conference.

“This is not an academic conference.  This is, as I understand it, a gathering of human beings concerned about turning around one of the greatest threats humankind has faced.  And certainly, the greatest after the end of the great wars of the previous century,” Mandela said.

Professor Coovadia recalls Mbeki’s denial of the virus link and its consequences. “He disputed the efficacy of some of the (antiretroviral) drugs, which is in a way just as bad or even worse - because it prevented access to drugs, which could have been affordable at least to South Africa,” he said.

In the end, the words of Nelson Mandela became a battle cry for many at the Conference. “In the face of the great threat posed by HIV/AIDS, we have to rise above our differences and combine our efforts to save our people….  Let us not equivocate. A tragedy of unprecedented proportion is unfolding in Africa,” he said.

Professor Coovadia said Mandel’s words affected him personally.

“I came as close to weeping as I possibly could.  And I think more than that, you may not remember, there was an absolute, unqualified and spontaneous standing ovation for what Mr. Mandela said.
However, Coovadia describes the fight against HIV/AIDS during the Mbeki administration as the “worst years.” He says government policies delayed needed treatment and misinformed and confused the public.

Coovadia now serves on President Zuma’s 26-member National Planning Commission.
Many consider AIDS 2000 as the first major conference to put a human face on the epidemic.  UNAIDS estimates about 60 million people worldwide have been infected with HIV since the epidemic began about 30 years ago.  About 25 million have died from HIV-related illnesses.  The vast majority of those living with and dying from HIV/AIDS are in sub-Saharan Africa.

The next International AIDS Conference, the 18^th, will be held in Vienna July 18^th through the 23^rd.

Watch House of Numbers to see more on the 2000 AIDS Conference and the AIDS debate. 

10 Reasons Why Black People Should Not Take The HIV Tests!

Source:  http://www.blacknews.com/news/why_black_people_should_not_take_hiv_tests101.shtml


By Curtis Cost

Black AIDS organizations, as well as some Black Clergy, Black politicians and Black sports figures have been encouraging African Americans to take HIV tests and to take HIV/AIDS drugs. In making these recommendations it is clear that these individuals and groups have failed to research the debate over the validity of the HIV tests and whether HIV is really the cause of AIDS.
On the other hand, doctors, scientists and researchers for years have been challenging the HIV/AIDS hypothesis. Few in the Black community have heard their objections. The following is a brief summary of the controversy: 
 
1. None of the manufacturers of the HIV tests guarantee the accuracy of their tests. In fact, they warn that their tests should not be used alone to determine if someone is HIV positive or negative. If the manufacturers of the HIV tests don't have confidence in their own product then why should Black People?


2. There are about 70 different things that can trigger a false positive result on HIV tests. These include vaccines such as for flu, hepatitis B and others. YES, if you recently had a vaccine, it can cause you to test positive on an HIV test! Even pregnancy can trigger a false positive response on an HIV test. 
 
3. Test results vary over time. That is, you can test positive one day and go back to the same hospital or clinic a year later and test negative! 

4. Test results vary between hospitals. You can go to two different hospitals on the same day and take an HIV test and get two different test results! 

5. Test results vary between countries. There is no international standard on how to even interpret the results on an HIV test. This means that you could test positive in America, but in Australia your same test result could be considered negative! 
 
6. Test results vary depending on which test kit is used. This means that an ELISA test could indicate that you are positive, but a Western Blot test or PCR test could indicate that you are negative. 
 
7. The HIV tests do not look for HIV in your body. The tests just look for chemical reactions which have never been proven to have anything to do with HIV. This is why doctors will say that you are HIV positive, but they will not state in writing that you have an active infection of HIV. There is a big difference between being HIV positive and actually having HIV! 
 
8. The personal information you give at a testing facility will have a big impact on how they interpret the test results. That is, if you say that you are a homosexual or an intravenous drug user, this will drastically increase the chances that they will claim that you have HIV. 
 
9. If you are told you are HIV positive this will have a devastating emotional impact on you and your family. Even worse, if you start taking drugs like AZT, DDI and protease inhibitors you will be poisoning yourself and most likely die a slow horrible death. AZT for example was originally a chemotherapy treatment, but in 1964 it was deemed too deadly and its use was discontinued. It destroys the bone marrow which is where a person's blood cells are formed! Therefore, people who supposedly have an immune system problem are being given a drug which destroys their immune system! 
 
10. No HIV virus has ever been isolated. The early claims of isolation have been proven false and turned out to be nothing more than cellular debris! Even the person who supposedly discovered HIV, French scientist and Nobel Prize winner, Luc Montagnier, has publicly admitted that he never obtained a purified sample of HIV. This means that all of the HIV tests are worthless because there is no purified sample of HIV which can be used to measure the accuracy of those tests. It also means that all of the HIV/AIDS drugs are worthless because they are based on a virus that nobody has ever isolated. This is why scores of prominent doctors and scientists have been denouncing the HIV/AIDS hypothesis as a hoax!

We in the African American Community must wake-up and start thinking for ourselves! We must take a serious look at the debate over HIV/AIDS and start asking serious questions. We can not afford to passively rely on the recommendations of others. Those who are in a leadership position in the Black Community need to do critical research before continuing to make recommendations which are taking our people down the wrong path.

Curtis Cost is the author of the new book: "Vaccines Are Dangerous - A Warning to the Global Community 2nd Edition" which discusses the HIV/AIDS debate. His book is available at: www.vaccinesaredangerous.com, Amazon.com, and other book outlets. Mr. Cost has been featured in Ebony Magazine, The New York Times, The Village Voice and Tony Brown's Journal among others. Video clips of his lectures can be seen on YouTube.

PRESS CONTACT:
The Secrets Publishing
(347) 220-1149 or (407) 361-3122
curtiscost@gmail.com
  
Watch House of Numbers to learn more about HIV Testing  

AIDS ‘Next Big Thing’: Gilead Pill to Prevent Spread

April 1 (Bloomberg) -- Gilead Sciences Inc. may learn this year whether its drugs for treating HIV can also stop people from catching the virus in the first place.
The approach may help curb the AIDS pandemic in poor countries and bring Gilead $1 billion a year in additional U.S. sales, said Josh Schimmer, an analyst at Leerink Swann & Co. in Boston. Most investors aren’t alert to the potential benefit, he said. Researchers are compiling the first data from 10 trials involving more than 20,000 people, and initial results may be available in July.

“This could be very meaningful for Gilead,” Schimmer said in a telephone interview. “You’re potentially treating 50 patients to prevent one. Commercially that’s very attractive. I don’t hear anybody talking about this, and I think all of us should be more aware.”

If the strategy works, the pills from Foster City, California-based Gilead may promise the world a powerful tool for fighting AIDS, the deadliest infectious disease, after scientists’ failure so far to develop an effective vaccine or virus-killing gel.

Skeptics say the approach, called pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, may be too costly and impractical in sub-Saharan Africa, where 22 million people are infected with HIV -- putting millions of others at risk -- and per-capita income is $951 a year.

Side effects may also undermine the plan. While doctors regard Gilead’s drugs as relatively safe, nobody knows what the medicines do in people who are taking them for a disease they don’t have, or how eager these patients will be to put up with the diarrhea, dizziness and depression the pills may cause.

‘High Tolerance’

“People have a high tolerance for side effects if it’s saving their life,” said Mitchell Warren, executive director of the New York-based AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy group. “It may be harder for healthy people to accept the side effects that come with prevention.”
The trials involve giving Gilead’s Viread and Truvada, the world’s top-selling AIDS medicine, to HIV-negative people from groups most at risk of contracting the virus, such as gay men who have unsafe sex and drug users who share hypodermic needles. Results from five of the studies may be available this year, according to the researchers running them.

One trial, scheduled to report data at an AIDS conference in July, is testing Viread as a vaginal gel in women who apply it before sex. Another is measuring the preventive effect of a daily Truvada pill among 3,000 gay men in six nations.

A further three studies coordinated by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, based in Atlanta, are testing PrEP among gay men in the U.S., drug users in Thailand and heterosexuals in Botswana. Gilead, while donating drugs and technical advice, isn’t running the trials, the company said.

Behavior Monitored

The studies are also designed to measure whether people receiving the drugs become riskier in their behavior, in the belief they’re protected against the virus. Participants receive testing, condoms and counseling on ways to avoid infection.

If the tests are successful, PrEP distribution programs could begin in developing countries in 2012, said Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft Corp. and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, both of Seattle. He spoke to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee about global health priorities on March 10. The Gates Foundation is sponsoring three PrEP trials.

The CDC would try to issue guidelines on the use of PrEP to health-care providers within six months of successful test results, said Jennifer Horvath, an agency spokeswoman, in an e-mail.

First Defense

“PrEP is the next big thing,” said Warren of the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, in a telephone interview. “We have a level of biological plausibility and early data in animal studies that is stronger than anything we have seen in the other approaches.”

Gilead had revenue of $7.01 billion last year, including sales of $5.54 billion from its top three AIDS drugs -- Truvada, Atripla and Viread -- which are taken by 85 percent of HIV patients in the U.S. as a first defense against the virus.

Gilead rose 17 cents, or less than a percent, to $45.64 at 4 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market composite trading. The shares have increased 1 percent in 12 months. Investors aren’t sure what to make of the PrEP trials, said Jason Kantor, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets in San Francisco.

“This is not currently a focus for investors, and I have nothing in my estimates for this,” Kantor said an e-mail. “Positive data, if compelling, could be a small incremental benefit in the developed countries.”
Implications Unknown PrEP sales in the U.S. may range from “negligible” to as much as $1 billion annually, depending on the effectiveness of the drugs and how much patients and public-health agencies are willing to pay for prevention, Leerink’s Schimmer said.

Gilead itself doesn’t know what the commercial implications of PrEP might be, said Jim Rooney, the company’s director of clinical affairs.

“It’s going to depend upon the data,” Rooney said in a phone interview. “And it’s going to depend upon how the public- health officials evaluate the data and translate that into recommendations for clinical practice.”

Gilead will decide whether to seek regulatory approval of its drugs for prevention once results of the trials are known, Rooney said.
Doctors would be able to prescribe the medicines for prevention without the approval. A study published last year in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes found that among 277 gay men in Boston, one had used PrEP and 74 percent said they would use it if it were available.

Breast Milk

Drugs made by GlaxoSmithKline Plc of London and Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH of Ingelheim, Germany, are already used to prevent infected mothers from passing the virus to their babies in the womb or through breast milk. Glaxo’s Combivir is prescribed to prevent infections in men who take it after unprotected sex with an HIV-positive partner.

Those medicines show that using treatments as prevention can work, said Dawn Smith, a CDC researcher who is devising the agency’s plans to implement PrEP if the clinical trials succeed.
“I’m very hopeful that this approach will help to reduce HIV infection rates,” Smith said in a telephone interview. “But I’m enough of a scientist to be skeptical as well, and to want to see the trial results before I call myself a believer.”

Gilead’s drugs subdue HIV in infected patients by blocking an enzyme the virus needs to hijack cells in order to reproduce. Taken preemptively, the pills may prevent HIV from gaining a foothold when it first enters the body.

‘Good Reason’

A study presented at the Conference on Retroviruses & Opportunistic Infections, in Montreal last year, found Truvada cut the risk of infection almost 16-fold in monkeys. A 2007 trial of PrEP among 936 women in Africa concluded that a daily Viread pill cut the risk of infection by 65 percent, though the researchers said the trial didn’t produce enough data to prove conclusively that PrEP worked.
“From a scientific standpoint, there really is a good reason to believe that if properly done, it will work,” Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, based in Bethesda, Maryland, said at this year’s retroviruses conference, held in San Francisco in February.
There may be less reason to think PrEP is feasible, Fauci said.

“If we can’t get 70 percent of the people who are infected in low- and middle-income countries on therapy, how are we going to get people who aren’t even infected on therapy?” Fauci said.
If it does work, PrEP won’t come cheap. Giving Truvada to the 100,000 most at-risk gay men in the U.S. would cost more than $1 billion a year, the CDC said on its Web site. That sum covers only the cost of the pills, and doesn’t include marketing, HIV testing, and doctors’ visits.

‘Deep Down Horror’

Identifying people who are at sufficient risk of contracting HIV to receive PrEP will most likely be too difficult in Africa, where everyone who is sexually active is at risk, said Francois Venter, president of the Southern African HIV Clinicians Society, a professional group based in Johannesburg.
“Deep down I have this horror that we’ll have an effective intervention very few people are going to use,” Venter said in a telephone interview. “In America and Europe it’s probably going to be one of several interventions which are going to work. I worry that there hasn’t been enough focus on who’s going to take these drugs in my environment.”

To justify the expense of handing out drugs to people who don’t have HIV, the trials need to show that PrEP lowers the chances of infection by at least half, said Francoise Barre- Sinoussi, a French researcher who shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in medicine after helping to discover that HIV causes AIDS.

‘Little Bit Concerned’

“We will have encouraging information from those trials,” Barre-Sinoussi said in an interview in Singapore. “I’m just a little bit concerned about how to apply it at large scale.”
About 33 million people live with HIV, according to UNAIDS, the coalition of United Nations agencies formed to fight HIV. In 2008, 2.7 million people were newly infected with the virus and 2 million died from AIDS-related complications. Africa has 7 in every 10 of the world’s cases.
Assuming PrEP could prevent 50 percent of infections, it would almost cut in half the lifetime risk of catching HIV among high-risk gay men in the U.S., and almost triple the lifetime treatment costs, according to a computer simulation published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases in March 2009.

PrEP is “unlikely to confer sufficient benefits to justify the current costs” of Truvada in the U.S., researchers from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and Harvard Medical School in Boston wrote in the study. The model assumed a drug cost of $753 a month for each patient.

Drug Costs Gilead sells a month’s supply of Viread to U.S. wholesalers for about $643. A month of Truvada costs about $930, said Cara Miller, a company spokeswoman, in an e-mail. The company charges people in poor countries about $17 a month for Viread and $26 for Truvada, she said. About 700,000 people worldwide take brand-name or generic versions of Gilead’s AIDS drugs, Miller said.
When the first AIDS drugs were approved in the U.S. in 1987, critics said they weren’t affordable in poor nations, the CDC’s Smith said. Now, about 40 percent of the patients who need them are getting the medicines, according to UNAIDS. PrEP may also prove more adoptable than its critics think, Smith said.

“If it’s highly efficacious, and if countries and UNAIDS and WHO and other public health agencies believe that it has a role to play in reducing new HIV infections, then we will find a way to make it available,” Smith said.

To contact the reporters on this story: Simeon Bennett in Singapore at sbennett9@bloomberg.net; Tom Randall in New York at trandall6@bloomberg.net