Duesberg & Rasnick Reviewed
CAN DRUGS ALONE EXPLAIN AMERICAN
AIDS?
Epidemiology professor Gordon Stewart, MD, reviews the latest
Genetica treatise by UC-Berkeley scientists Peter Duesberg
and David Rasnick
Buried deeply within the secretive and well-guarded
dogma that AIDS is a plague caused by a lethal virus HIV lies a
time-bomb of potentially explosive contrary information.
The chief guardians of this dogma are the selected,
sometimes self-selected, high priests and scribes of medical science
whose prestige discourages or threatens, and usually defeats, any
challenge from professional quarters. However, the academic publisher
Kluwer stands as a bold exception: once again its peer-reviewed
journal Genetica has published a challenge to the HIV-causes-AIDS
behemoth. Its 1998 issue features a new treatise by two scientific
heavy-weights at the headquarters of AIDS dissent at UC-California,
Berkeley: Peter Duesberg and David Rasnick. Their recent paper,
"The AIDS Dilemma: Drug Diseases Blamed on a Passenger Virus,"
expands the arguments Duesberg began to use in 1987, challenging
the view that HIV is a lethal virus capable of causing AIDS. In
the 38 pages of this article, he and Rasnick have compressed evidence
from many sources into a highly readable, amply referenced alternative
viewpoint which should be listed as required reading for high priests,
scribes, and professionals, and as helpful reading for patients,
their contacts, families, and indeed any other interested people.
DUESBERG'S ODYSSEY
Duesberg's AIDS heresy began in 1987, when Cancer
Research Editor Peter Mage invited him to contribute an article.
Mage wanted Duesberg, as a recognized expert, to evaluate the preceding
decade's data -- much of it generated by Duesberg himself -- popularly
interpreted as demonstrating a causal role for retroviruses in cancer
and leukemia. HIV had by this time become the most prominent of
the retroviruses, due to the postulate that held it as the cause
of AIDS, including its associated neoplasms,. Duesberg examined
this postulate in the paper which Mage published as "Retroviruses
as Carcinogens and Pathogens: Expectations and Reality" (1).
In it, Duesberg concluded that neither the virological nor epidemiological
evidence could justify the HIV-AIDS model. Doubts about AIDS causation
by any single agent had been expressed before by others (2-4). But
no doubts had issued from anyone with Duesberg's acknowledged status
among the inner circle of retrovirologists, all others of whom had
instantly and uncritically embraced the HIV-AIDS model as their
scientific passport to fame, funds, and fortune. Duesberg's peers
within this elite club greeted his contradiction first with flat
silence, then with orchestrated disapproval. This concerted effort
culminated in a continuing attempt to demolish him and anyone who
fails to applaud their condemnation. Duesberg's survival through
this ordeal is matched in courage only by those who have endured
the threat and suffering of AIDS itself.
The new Genetica paper testifies to
his impressive ability -- shared by Rasnick -- to deconstruct the
orthodox HIV-AIDS model and advocate his alternative drug-AIDS model
articulately and with rigor. Although I was among the first to doubt
a unique causative role for HIV (3), and then to defend Duesberg
(5), I have never agreed entirely with him or Rasnick. In some cases
I find their evidence over-argued and their conclusions debatable.
But, by comparison with my objections to the HIV-AIDS dogma and
the attitude and behavior of those who support it, my differences
with Duesberg and Rasnick constitute mere matters of detail.
A DRUG-INDUCED DISEASE?
Duesberg and Rasnick believe that various drugs
entirely replace HIV as main causes of AIDS. They point out (page
92), that the rapidly enlarging catalog of drugs now regarded as
recreational represent "the common denominator of AIDS in America
and Europe." Certainly some of these drugs, especially nitrite
inhalants, immediately damage vitality and slowly damage immunity
(7-9). And certainly these drugs, when used by homosexual men engaging
in anal intercourse frequently and with many partners, fuel the
downtown express to full-blown AIDS. There are also intermediate
levels of damage in which other drugs, either by their direct toxic
effect, by causing infections when given in contaminated injections,
or just by releasing reckless behavior, contribute to symptomatologies
registrable as AIDS, especially in female partners of men with AIDS
or at risk of AIDS. In the late 1960s, when drug abuse became rampant
in the USA, clinicians noticed in users the opportunistic infections
and loss of appetite, weight, and energy which officially constitute
AIDS-defining conditions under the classifications codified by the
US's Centers for Disease Control and the UN's World Health Organization.
INFECTIONS IN PATIENTS WITH AIDS
Among gay men in the US and Europe, the increase
in drug use overlapped an increase in both frequency of sexual intercourse
and number of partners. This expanded agenda of the pleasure principle
produced many health consequences for its adherents. They experienced
an enormous increase not only in all the traditional sexually-transmissible
infections, but also in amoebic and bacillary dysenteries, uncontrollable
diarrheas, oral, esophageal, and intestinal thrush, skin diseases,
and pulmonary, rectal, and post-traumatic infections. This led to
self-medication with antibiotics and cross-infections with resistant
organisms. First-hand accounts by insiders such as Jad Adams, Michael
Callen, and Randy Schilts explicitly detail the elements and consequences
of this novel lifestyle (9-11). As Duesberg and Rasnick note, drugs
played an essential role in this scenario, including the deterioration
of health later called AIDS. But the two researchers fail to acknowledge
the equally essential, health-destroying role played by the multiplicity
of concomitant, highly transmissible infections and some of the
drugs used to treat them (8).
OVERLAPS IN CAUSATION
Having helped investigate the transmission pattern
of AIDS since 1983, I find it impossible to overlook these overloads
of transmissible viral, bacterial, protozoal, and fungal infections
as main contributors to the pathogenesis of registrable AIDS. I
do not for a moment deny the equal and sometimes greater role of
psycho-active and other drugs. But the drug factors cited by Duesberg
and Rasnick do not currently predominate as they did among gays
who continue to develop AIDS. Meanwhile, groups in which these drug
factors currently dominate, such as in the heterosexual "rave"
scene, have failed to produce many AIDS cases. In several countries,
In the USA and Europe, AIDS is decreasing while drug-based raves
are exploding.
In saying this, I perhaps commit the academic fault
of agreeing while disagreeing with the authors. But the issue of
causation is far from academic because it affects how we detect,
treat, and control the spread of AIDS. Irrespective of other doubts
about HIV and the specificity of sero-testing (12) -- and this is
a book in itself (in need of publication) -- it is impossible to
deny that patients with incipient or established AIDS suffer and
die mainly because they develop unmanageable infections, some of
which are highly transmissible to their partners. I agree with the
authors that HIV is extremely difficult to transmit or, for that
matter, to isolate, cultivate, and recognize. This is why HIV seropositives
remain well until they develop the AIDS-defining infections which
spread among persons who engage in risk, i.e. infection-prone behavior
and life-style. HIV, with its low or zero infectivity to close attendants
and even to those who suffer needle-stick injuries, might well be,
as Duesberg and Rasnick conclude, a mere passenger
While needles can transmit serious illness by transmitting
pathogenic viruses (such as Hep B, HSV, EBV, CMV) and bacteria,
full-blown AIDS requires additional extraordinary efforts and circumstances,
like bath-house romps with many men harboring these and even more
intractable microbes, such as Pneumocystis and Varicella-zoster,
which officials rightly list as AIDS-defining.
I contend that such behavior can produce signs of AIDS in both sexes
even without the drugs cited by Duesberg and Rasnick. And where
they also cite anti-HIV pharmaceuticals, such as AZT, as causes
of AIDS, their critique fails to account for the many narcotics-
and poverty-free individuals who develop AIDS even without consuming
these pharmaceuticals.
OTHER ASPECTS OF AIDS
Nor does AIDS always appear where their model would
expect it. In the Third World, especially in sub-Saharan Africa,
they attribute AIDS to background or outbreaking poverty, malnutrition,
and traditional infections like tuberculosis. Certainly their explanation
applies to some Third World populations. But huge AIDS-free zones
exist in impoverished regions. Duesberg and Rasnick address neither
this apparent contradiction, nor reports of AIDS among the developing
world's privileged strata.
The local situation often defeats investigation
because evidence about intimate activities may be withheld or distorted.
Certainly, just as in industrial countries, life style plays a major
factor in the onset and distribution of AIDS. But there is a great
deal of doubt about the underlying reasons for this.
If these matters where reliable information is difficult
to obtain and impossible to verify are set aside, there is plenty
of room for agreement with Duesberg and Rasnick in their misgivings
about the reliability of tests for HIV and AIDS, especially in hemophiliacs
and their partners, and in children; in the reckless use of AZT;
and, in their call for a halt to monstrous and futile expenditures
boosted by misleading messages about risks. In deflecting attention,
knowledgeably, from the questionable role of HIV to the visible
role of recreational drugs in the pathogenesis of AIDS, they are
writing what needs to be read and said more widely and more often
so that the health authorities who accept the HIV dogma so slavishly
will finally learn the scale and danger of their deception .
Gordon Stewart is Emeritus Professor of Public
Health at the University of Glasgow, a consultant in epidemiology
and preventive medicine, and an RA Director. He
has served as a consultant to African and other AIDS programs, the
WHO and Britain's national Health Services. He challenged the orthodox
explanation of AIDS when, in 1989 and subsequently, he corrected
exaggerated predictions of the spread of AIDS in the UK and USA
and dismissed the likelihood of AIDS spreading into the general
population by sexual intercourse or mother-to-child transmission.
He can be reached in care of RA, or at g.stewart@gifford.co.uk
.