AIDS Denialism?

"What if most everything you think you know about HIV and AIDS is wrong?"

That's the message U.S. boxer Tommy Morrison is sending to Canadian sports fans -and the world-in a confrontation with the Regie des alcools, des courses et des jeux. The gaming board is asking the 42-year-old fighter to take an HIV blood test to qualify for meeting Eric Barrak in a main event Feb. 25 at Pierre Charbonneau Centre.

Regulating a sport that often draws blood, RACJ says Morrison must submit to a test much of the world wrongly believes indicates presence of a pathogenic virus, a string of genetic code in nucleic acid covered in protein. Basing its claimontheworkof Dr. Robert Gallo, the U.S. government 27 years ago announced "the probable cause of AIDS" was indeed such a virus. President Ronald Reagan's Health Secretary, Margaret Heckler, told a press conference April 23, 1984, that immune systems of gay men were collapsing from a retrovirus Gallo claimed to isolate, a virus he said was transmitted through blood during sex.

A researcher at the National Institutes of Health, Gallo's ethics were later the subject of two government inquiries and a major Chicago Tribune investigation of the claim he discovered the "AIDS virus" and "AIDS blood test." When hailed by Heckler as discoverer of HIV, Gallo had published not a single peer-reviewed scientific paper backing his claim. In what might be termed a split decision in boxing, the U.S. and French governments decided in 1987 to share the disputed discovery between Gallo and Dr. Luc Montagnier of the Institut Pasteur -and more importantly, to divide the lucrative profits from the widely used blood test.

That 1984 media event came in a presidential election year, when Reagan was accused of insensitivity to gay men, refusing to utter the newly minted acronym AIDS. Gays embraced the "discovery" offered by the science bureaucrat Gallo, who had been trying with virtually no success for a dozen years to relate his retroviruses to cancer.

A 19th-century germ theory answer to what first was called Gay Related Immune Deficiency was welcomed by the gay community. It made AIDS "everybody's disease," trumping growing evidence it was actually of multifactorial causation, that immune systems were collapsing from: (1) frequent, multi-partner exchange of old pathogens in incestuous urban gay enclaves, causing diseases like gonorrhea and syphilis, heavily treated with antibiotics, which destroy immune-healthful gut bacteria; (2) ubiquitous use of immune suppressive toxins, including alcohol, cocaine, amphetamines and nitrites ( "poppers"), which fuelled partying in a small but significant subset of urban gay culture; and (3) the suppressive psychogenic effects of anxiety and stress on naive, youthful gay male immune systems, from blowback by newly politicized religious fundamentalists, pillorying "unclean gay lifestyles."

I write this with first-hand knowledge. I am a 63-year-old gay man, who participated in that "lifestyle" and who witnessed politicizing of medical science while serving as press secretary in the mid-1980s at the Democratic National Committee, the party opposing Ronald Reagan and supportive of gay rights.

With that brief history, I return to Tommy Morrison and the blood-test-about-nothing Quebec regulators are asking him to take. In fact, the test is nothing more than an assay for some blood proteins that can result from 70 different conditions, including pregnancy and flu vaccinations. Morrison tested reactive -the correct term for the meaningless result -- when he had blood drawn by the Nevada boxing commission before a 1996 fight. He later took "the test" several times and was "negative" -but after being placed on highly toxic, "antiretroviral" chemotherapy, drugs still administered to millions of humans, mostly gay men and black Africans, convinced they carry a lethal bug, not just proteins declared by Gallo to be markers for HIV.

Morrison eventually learned the truth about the test and the chemotherapy, which he stopped taking after it almost destroyed his health.

Thousands of us in the worldwide community of dissenters from the single pathogen theory of AIDS understand Tommy Morrison is really looking for more than a fight in Montreal. He is offering an important teaching moment to Quebecers, Canadians, and millions worldwide who are victims of the multi-billion dollar HIV-AIDS Industry.

The HIV-AIDS story is complex. Many of us have devoted years of study to it, and have concluded there is not now and there never was a human immunodeficiency virus. We ask the world to reassess 27-year-old politicized junk science. Canadians can contribute to that fight for truth by opposing injustice being visited on an American athlete who should be allowed to enter a ring Feb. 25 without taking a test about nothing.

Terry Michael is executive director of the Washington Centre for Politics & Journalism.

© Copyright (c) The Montreal Gazette

MONTREAL - How I wish that the opinion article "Junk science and AIDS" by Terry Michael (Gazette, Feb. 5) had begun: "Once upon a time there was a wicked journalist preying on sick and dying people ..." Instead, the article brought us a seemingly reputable journalist publishing a vitriolic and prejudiced rant exhorting Canadians to know that "there is not now and there never was a human immunodeficiency virus."

Michael is wrong - as are the arguments he uses to deny that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) can cause the fatal destruction of the immune system that we call AIDS. Were his article to have been government-sponsored, people would in all likelihood be crying propaganda! It is incongruous and inexplicable that the executive director of what is claimed to be a prestigious and responsible U.S. journalism foundation could write such a misleading and harmful article.

I will not address the prejudiced, pejorative nomenclature Michael uses -such as "lucrative profits," "incestuous urban gay enclaves," "victims of a multi-billion dollar HIV-AIDS industry." Nor will I address his distorted presentation of the science and history of HIV/ AIDS with which he justifies his denial that HIV can cause fatal illness. Science establishes its truths through reproducible and peer-reviewed evidence, not by what politicians, journalists, or even individual scientists might "declare." The quality of science that explains the cause and disease mechanisms of HIV infection that lead to AIDS, and that underlies the development of highly effective anti-HIV treatments, resulted in a 2008 Nobel Prize being awarded to the two scientists who discovered HIV.

The biggest danger from Michael's article is that it might mislead people into failing to understand that HIV is a killer. Without treatment, almost everyone who is infected with HIV will eventually die from the infection. There is abundant evidence that HIV can be transmitted from infected mothers to their babies, through contaminated blood transfusions, by sexual intercourse from HIV-infected wives, husbands or gay partners, or by sharing bloody injection equipment.

Today, the most convincing argument that HIV causes AIDS is that anti-HIV medications -often called antiretrovirals or ARVs - are prolonging the lives of millions of HIV-infected people. The number of HIVinfected people progressing to the life-threatening immunodeficiency that is full-blown AIDS living in Canada or anywhere else has plummeted wherever these medications are being widely used. Blood is now safe thanks to HIV screening tests. Just as impressive is that babies are born uninfected when their mothers are effectively treated. And many of the millions who are taking ARVs are no longer dying or ill but, instead, are returning to work, having babies, and planning a long life.

As a physician and a researcher who has studied HIV infection and cared for HIV-infected adults for 30 years, I am very worried by the real danger that an article such as Michael's might persuade some infected people to forgo prevention that can protect their partners from being exposed to or infected by HIV. And, sadly, it might also persuade some people who are infected to forgo life-saving treatments.

Michael focuses on the case of American boxer Tommy Morrison, who is refusing to undergo HIV testing to be eligible to fight in Quebec. He describes a situation where the boxer's HIV test was initially reactive and he began ARV treatment. Those drugs are only used to treat people who are HIV-infected (i. e. they have reactive tests that are confirmed positive) and who are likely to benefit from being treated. Even if Morrison's subsequent tests became "negative" when being treated with ARVs -an extremely unusual result -he nonetheless remains infected. If Morrison was once found to be HIV positive and needed treatment, then, like everyone else who has been infected with HIV, his infection is a lifelong one, and he remains infected and potentially infectious. As a boxer, he would be a danger were he to be cut, because this could expose others to his HIV-carrying blood.

Morrison's denial is exactly the danger that this article is likely to exacerbate. It's essential that all HIV-infected people accept that they are infected and can, at times, be a potential danger to others. In contrast to Morrison and Michael, all of us, especially anyone who is HIV-infected, need to send a clear prevention message that will help to protect others, instead of one that denies HIV and that suggests being exposed to HIV is not dangerous. This is a universal response to HIV that we hope everyone -especially those who are infected -will understand and pass on.

Norbert Gilmore is professor of medicine (emeritus) at McGill University and a senior physician at the McGill University Health Centre.

© Copyright (c) The Montreal Gazette

Tommy The Duke Morrison
12:58 PM on February 12, 2011

to: DrErD
you wrote:
1)"and I described the HIV tests and their accuracy. As I told you, I've done these things myself, and they work. The tests are accurate and they detect HIV."
IF YOU HAVE PERSONALLY DONE THESE "ACCURATE" HIV TESTS that detect the presence or absence of the HIV VIRUS...WHICH ONE did you take?
2)" All La RACJ wants is for you to take one of these accurate tests. Why won't you do it?"
THE RACJ WON'T TELL ME WHAT TEST THEY WANT ME TO DO..THEY WANT TO TAKE ME TO AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION. I WILL DO THE TEST THAT DETECTS 100% THE HIV VIRUS-
3)"If someone accused you of fathering a child and refusing to pay child support, and you knew you didn't do it, wouldn't you step up and take the DNA test to clear your name? "
YOU CAN BUY PATERNITY TESTS AT WALGREENS. WHAT SHELF IS THE HIV VIRUS TEST DETECTING THE HIV VIRUS ON? DrErD...Gallo..FDA..CDC ...won't you tell me the name of the HIV VIRUS TEST?
WHY are you all avoiding this one specific reques

DrErD
1:49 PM on February 12, 2011

Tommy,
I gave several links to HIV test information. Pick any one , two, three or more of ten or fifteen available tests, some of which you can buy online to test yourself. Now, I don't recommend self-testing for HIV or paternity or anything else. It's more reliable to have an expert do the testing, just like it's better to have a qualified electrician install a new circuit breaker panel in your house than to try doing it yourself. But the at-home testing is available.
The reason La RACJ wants you to be tested under supervised conditions is because you have been accused of blood sample fraud, like other athletes "urinate" from a pouch of someone else's urine in their pants to fake a steroid test. Everyone thinks you're lying and you're HIV positive and you're too scared to take the test. That's why you're saying the earth is flat and HIV doesn't exist. Prove them wrong, prove you're not the coward they think you are. Take whatever test RACJ wants; they're all accurate.