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They keep appearing in ever-greater numbers on chat boards, websites, cafés, and off-the-grid support groups in people’s homes–all the traditional gathering places for dissenters. They gather where they cannot be blocked, or harmed, or fired, or deleted, or told they don’t exist, or that they are mad.

They are called “AIDS denialists.” These are people who deny and defy the belief of the mainstream medical community that HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) causes AIDS and death. They say they are living proof that HIV-positive people can have long, healthy lives without taking anti-HIV drugs.

The “denialists” say the HIV test is problematic and does not clearly establish a link between HIV and AIDS. Those who test positive for HIV are encouraged to take toxic drugs with serious side effects; those who do not comply face discrimination.

Nevertheless, the majority of scientists involved in AIDS research and the development of AIDS pharmaceuticals continue to treat such ideas as dangerous. The AIDS establishment says the dissenters’ message undermines safe sex practices and dissuades people from taking lifesaving medications.

A rift that began over 20 years ago has now developed into an international battle of two seemingly irreconcilable belief systems: Is HIV deadly or harmless?

A Pharmaceutical Disconnect

It is only in recent years that AIDS activists have relaxed their admonition that all HIV-positive people must go on medications as soon as they test positive or shortly thereafter. In the early years of AIDS, the drug of choice was AZT, a potent chemotherapy that some critics say hastened the demise of those who were placed on initial very high doses. AZT terminates DNA replication and decimates the cellular system, creating, like AIDS itself, immune failure. Side effects of the drugs ranged from the merely unpleasant (headaches, vomiting, bloating) to the seriously toxic (neutropenia, hematopoietic toxicity, anemia).

The drug fell from common use in the mid-1990s, and multidrug cocktail therapy displaced AZT as the mainstream treatment of choice. After a period of intense marketing of antiretrovirals (drugs that purport to attack the HIV retrovirus), the drugs are no longer universally seen as lifesaving.

A paper published in 2006 in The Lancet reported the results of a large study that tracked 22,000 HIV-positive people between 1995 and 2003. It found that the drug therapy they received, known as HAART (highly active antiretroviral therapy) did not “translate into a decrease in mortality.”

Weak Links

Another study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in 2006 found an uncertain link between HIV levels and decline in CD4 cells. Conventional AIDS theory is that HIV targets and kills CD4 cells (T helper cells, a type of white blood cell active in the immune system), and low CD4 counts are a marker for AIDS.

The JAMA study found, however, that HIV-positive status does not correlate strongly with or cause depleted CD4 counts. A separate study published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases in 2006 found that even HIV-negative people can have low-level CD4 cell counts, making CD4 levels even less of a conclusive marker for AIDS.

The science behind the HIV antibody test is also being questioned.

Testing Positive Isn’t

Because HIV was co-discovered in competing labs in France and the US, the test that we use to detect it is itself politicized. Critics of the test point out that HIV has never been fully purified, thereby lacking a gold standard (itself), which is the only way to create a dependable test.

HIV-antibody tests carry disclaimers in the package insert, addressing “sensitivity and specificity” that read: “At present there is no recognized standard for establishing the presence or absence of antibodies to HIV 1 and HIV 2 in human blood.”

Celia Farber’s writings have appeared in Esquire, Rolling Stone, Harper’s, Salon and elsewhere. Her book Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS (Melville House Press) was published in 2006.

Source: alive #296, June 2007