HIV, AIDS, and Big Pharma: Confusing as Hell

Per a conversation started at tonight's meeting of Naked Suit:

In May, Harper's published an article about drug trials, politics, and HIV called Out of Control. The article, written by Celia Farber, starts out with an anecdote about a controversial death that occurred as part of a drug trial gone wrong. The patient in question, a pregnant woman who tested positive for HIV, was enrolled in a drug trial for an anti-HIV drug called nevirapine. She died of acute liver failure 38 days after starting the drug regimen. She never had any of the clinical markers of AIDS, and after her death it was revealed that there is some doubt as to whether or not she ever was HIV positive. False positive tests are more common among pregnant women.

The article--which you should all read for yourselves, but it's a mite long so I am synopsisisizing--goes on to talk about some more questionable drug trials for HIV drugs, and the political will that guides the structure of the studies and grant disbursement. Unsurprisingly, it is all a big greedy clusterfuck, with the added complication that double blind drug trials, the most scientifically rigorous, are rarely performed because no one wants to give HIV/AIDS patients placebos instead of a potentially therapeutic drug. It's politically impossible to do in this country. (What goes on in overseas drug trials is a whole 'nother kettle of fish.)

And now you're all nodding and starting to skim because you kind of knew or suspected that drug companies were bad and science was political, and here's where the crazy really starts flying. After Farber outlines why politics have damaged AIDS research, she starts talking about her claim that HIV doesn't cause AIDS. And you, intelligent blue-state Harper's reader, are like, What the hell? That is patently ridiculous, and you start shaking your head, and then she drops all of this confusing science on you and you're like, Uh-oh. I know this is bullshit but now I can't say why. Er, at least that is how a friend of mine reacted.

To wit: the article asserts that the politicization of research and funding has led to what is, essentially, the suppression of the "fact" that HIV doesn't cause AIDS, but rather is a passenger virus and that "AIDS is a chemical syndrome, caused by accumulated toxins from heavy drug use", including the drug therapies used to treat the disease, like AZT and the newer protease inhibitors, etc. It also says that "AIDS in Africa is best understood as an umbrella term for a number of old diseases, formerly known by other names, that currently do not command high rates of international aid."

The money quote, as a real blogger would say (emphases mine):

The classical tests of whether or not a microorganism is the cause of infectious disease are known as Koch's postulates. They state: 1) the microorganism must be found in all cases of the disease; 2) it must be isolated from the host and grown in pure culture; 3) it must reproduce the original disease when introduced into a susceptible host; and 4) it must be found present in the experimental host so infected. Although claims to the contrary have been made, Duesberg maintains that it has never been demonstrated that HIV satisfies all of Koch's postulates. His exhaustive analysis of the peer-reviewed scientific literature has revealed more than 4,000 documented AIDS cases in which there is no trace of HIV or HIV antibodies. This number is significant, because there are strong institutional forces deterring such descriptions and because the vast majority of AIDS cases are never described in formal scientific papers. In fact, most AIDS patients have no active HIV in their systems, because the virus has been neutralized by antibodies. (With all other viral diseases, by the way, the presence of antibodies signals immunity from the disease. Why this is not the case with HIV has never been demonstrated.) Generally speaking, HIV can be isolated only by "reactivating" latent copies of the virus, and then only with extraordinary difficulty. Viral load, one of the clinical markers for HIV, is not a measurement of actual, live virus in the body but the amplified fragments of DNA left over from an infection that has been suppressed by antibodies. Another embarrassment for the HIV hypothesis is the extraordinary latency period between infection and the onset of disease, despite the fact that HIV is biochemically most active within weeks of initial infection. This latency period, which apparently grows with every passing year, enables proponents of the theory to evade Koch's third and fourth postulates.

Is your brow furrowed yet? Is your mouth slightly agape? Read on:

Given that the evidence for HIV is coincidental, a number of research avenues suggest themselves, yet orthodox AIDS researchers have failed to demonstrate, using large-scale controlled studies, that the incidence of AIDS-defining diseases is higher among individuals infected with HIV than among the general uninfected population. Consequently, it could very well be the case that HIV is a harmless passenger virus that infects a small percentage of the population and is spread primarily from mother to child, though at a relatively low rate. (This hypothesis would tend to explain the fact that the estimated number of HIV-positive Americans has remained constant at about 1 million since 1985.) Nor have large-scale controlled studies been carried out to directly test the AIDS-drug hypothesis, which holds that many cases of AIDS are the consequence of heavy drug use, both recreational (poppers, cocaine, methamphetamines, etc.) and medical (AZT, etc.) Nor have controlled studies been carried out to prove that hemophiliacs infected with HIV die sooner than those who are not infected. Such studies might be expensive and tedious, but expense has never been a serious objection to AIDS researchers, who have spent many billions of dollars in the last twenty years on HIV research and practically nothing on alternative causes or even co-factors. (Even Luc Montagnier, the discoverer of HIV, has stated repeatedly that the virus cannot cause AIDS without contributing causes.)

And another bit that seems to make sense, but then really shouldn't because we all know better:

AIDS is a "syndrome" defined by twenty-five diseases, all of which exist independently of HIV. No one has ever demonstrated the cell-killing mechanism by which HIV is supposed to cause all these different diseases, and no one has ever demonstrated how a sexually transmitted virus can manage to restrict itself overwhelmingly to gay men and other AIDS risk groups instead of spreading randomly through the population, as do all other infectious diseases. The "overwhelming" character of the evidence for HIV's causation has always been epidemiological; which is to say, a correlation, a coincidence. Whenever we have AIDS, researchers say, we also have HIV. But this correlation is a result of the official definition of AIDS, which states that a disease counts as AIDS only if it corresponds with HIV antibodies. ("AIDS without HIV" has been given a singularly unmemorable name: idiopathic CD4 lymphocytopenia.)

Now, I've had lots of back and forth with folks on this topic, but this post is plenty long enough for my inaugural effort here. I will blather on some more in the comments after some of you attempt to answer my central question, which is this: Um, what does all this mean? Some of this is pseudo-scientific and I've gotten explanations that make more sense...by which I mean they fit better into my undertanding of this whole subject, which I think makes them right. But if this is all hogwash, why did Harper's print it?

What do you think?