Apparently, HIV Doesn't Cause AIDS

[essence]

I too can cut and paste, but not very well.

On January 10, 2007, AIDS activists and scientists in the US, South Africa and London filed a complaint against the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) over a piece aired in 2004 called "Guinea Pig Kids" that was written and produced by HIV denialists--the people who claim variously that HIV doesn't exist, that it is harmless and not the cause of AIDS, that AIDS doesn't exist, that vitamins and patent nostrums can cure AIDS, and that antiretroviral medications used to treat AIDS are actually the cause of the syndrome.
The inflammatory film and companion written piece on the BBC website misrepresented as "human experimentation" on vulnerable children of color what were in fact crucial and successful efforts to make lifesaving treatments available to desperately ill foster children with AIDS through compassionate use of clinical trials of HIV drugs already approved for adults. Although the film was broadcast over two years ago, an article about it on the BBC website and the video, circulated by HIV denialists, continue to spread false and dangerous ideas about AIDS, antiretroviral treatments, the care provided to children at Incarnation Children's Center, and the importance of making lifesaving medications available to desperately ill children regardless of their family circumstances. The legitimacy accorded these erroneous ideas by the authority of the BBC facilitates the spread of disinformation, which in turn undermines prevention efforts and impedes treatment access, both by individuals and as government policy.
The complaint follows, and provides additional information.

Chitra Bharucha
Acting Chair of the BBC Trust
BBC Complaints
PO Box 1922
Glasgow G2 3WT
United Kingdom
10 January 2007
Dear Ms. Bharucha,
RE: "GUINEA PIG KIDS" AND "NEW YORK’S AIDS EXPERIMENTS"
We are herewith filing an official complaint against the BBC over the inflammatory, deceptive, error-filled and dangerous film "Guinea Pig Kids," written and produced by Jamie Doran, directed by Milena Schwager, based on research by Liam Scheff and Celia Farber, and broadcast in November 2004, and the on-line article "New York’s AIDS Experiments" by Jamie Doran, still posted at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programme...ld/4038375.stm).
"Guinea Pig Kids" and "New York’s AIDS Experiments" are both misleading, make false and damaging claims, defame the New York City Administration for Children's Services (ACS) and Incarnation Children’s Center (ICC), and promote dangerous, pseudo-scientific views about HIV/AIDS and treatments for HIV/AIDS.
We request that the BBC organise an independent investigation into the above reports. Should the film and the article be found to be substantially misleading and false—and we are sure beyond a reasonable doubt that they are—we request the BBC to implement the following sanctions:
1) Publish an apology and immediately withdraw editorial support for the video report and the written article.
2) Place a link to this apology in a prominent position on news.bbc.co.uk for a minimum of thirty (30) days.
3) Remove the text "New York’s AIDS Experiments" from the BBC website and place a link to the apology in its place on http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programme...ld/4038375.stm

with the accompanying text "This article has been found to be inaccurate and the BBC has withdrawn editorial support for it. We refer readers to our apology."
4) The apology should include specific corrections for deceptions presented, most crucially:

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The horrific claim that denying medications to children with AIDS will improve their health while appropriate treatment will kill them.

•

The implied claim that New York City’s Administration of Children’s Services, Incarnation Children’s Center, Catholic Charities, Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, and the National Institutes of Health effectively conspired to force helpless children of color into inappropriate and sinister "experiments" when in fact they made life-saving drugs already approved for adults available to children living with HIV/AIDS who were in the foster care system.

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The assertion that the children of HIV-positive Christine Maggiore,

　

featured prominently in the film, were healthy and indeed "never sick" because she had refused to have them tested for HIV and by extension would deny medication if they were HIV-positive. In fact, Ms. Maggiore’s 3 1/2 year old daughter died of AIDS last spring (see report by Department of Coroner, Los Angeles http://www.aidstruth.org/ejs-coroner-report.pdf).

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The misleading photo of a child with a terrible skin condition, shown while the narrator states that Stevens-Johnson Syndrome, a serious rash, is a side effect of AIDS drugs. Despite the implication, the child in the photo was not an ICC resident and no evidence is presented that ICC clinical trial participants ever developed this rash.

•

Another photo of a small child receiving medical attention from several masked medical personnel. The narration implies that this image is of an ICC child receiving a tube for medications. The image is not from ICC. Moreover, medical delivery systems that ease ingestion, especially for children, are not inhumane or unethical as the film suggests. Use of such systems is not a punishment for refusing to take medication.

•

The implication that only economically and socially vulnerable children would participate in clinical trials. Vera Sherav, a self-described advocate for human subjects, rhetorically asks in the film, "Why didn’t they provide the children with the current best treatment; that’s the question that we have. Why did they expose them to risk and pain when they were helpless? Would they have done those experiments to their own children? I doubt it." In fact, the medications offered then only through clinical trials were the "current best treatment." Moreover, her doubt is misplaced. Many parents with terminally ill children are eager, even desperate to get them into clinical trials—this is true for cancers as well as other diseases.
The facts are as follows:

•

Most of the HIV-positive children under the care of ACS who were placed on the antiretroviral clinical trials discussed by Doran are alive today because they were placed on these trials. The Vera Institute for Justice, an independent organization hired to investigate these charges, has released preliminary findings showing that the final discharge from ACS was a consequence of death for 15% of the children in care who participated in the HIV/AIDS trials. An astonishing 85% survived and were adopted into families, returned to their own families, aged out of the system, etc. (see: Vera Institute of Justice Clinical Trials Project Progress Report # 5, page 11). Children born with HIV who do not have access to the antiretroviral drugs that ICC children received have a very short life expectancy. A third die by the time they are two years old. Hardly any survive to become teenagers.

　

•

The medicines that were the subject of the trials were approved by the FDA for adults, but at the time the trials began they were not approved for the treatment of children with AIDS pending the determination of appropriate dosage levels—the main point of these trials.

•

Children with life-threatening illnesses who are not in state care can participate in drug trials with their parents’ permission, giving them the opportunity to access potentially life-saving treatments. In 1988 when ICC was founded, children in state care were denied the right to participate in drug trials. This meant that those with HIV/AIDS would almost certainly die without even having the opportunity to try potentially life-saving medicines. ICC and other advocates for children in foster care successfully campaigned for a change to the law that allowed such children to participate in clinical trials on the basis of ethical principles of humanitarianism and non-discrimination on the basis of family status.

•

Doran's characterization of the children as guinea pigs placed in experiments without parental permission is false and misleading. The children in question were the responsibility of the state because for various reasons their parents could not look after them. In the many cases where the parents were alive, written informed consent was obtained. However, where parents were unavailable, the state and the children’s institutional guardians had the responsibility for determining what was in their best interests. ACS and ICC determined that the best medical option for the children with HIV under their care was the same as for other children with HIV: to place them on antiretrovirals. But this option was only possible through participation in carefully monitored clinical trials. Otherwise these children would have almost certainly died.
• The trials were terminated in 2002 because the drugs tested were approved and the children participating in the trials could therefore access them directly from physicians without participating in clinical trials. The film presents the termination of the trials as somehow secretive and sinister—it shows ICC staff closing the door on a cameraman who claims to want to ask why the trials ended. In fact, the trials ended because they were successful. The on-line article by Doran, however, claims that the "experiments are still being carried out on the poor children of New York City." This is false.
A properly conducted investigation into ACS and ICC would have revealed that at ICC, highly competent staff have provided the best care and treatment available to vulnerable children with HIV. Instead, Jamie Doran appears to have pursued a pseudo-scientific agenda. The film’s researchers Celia Farber and Liam Scheff as well as Christine Maggiore and David Rasnick who appear in the film, reject the solid scientific evidence that the virus known as HIV is the cause of the
complex immune system breakdown known as AIDS, and that without treatment—the very treatment the children in ICC received through clinical trials— almost all HIV-infected people will die of illnesses related to the disease. None of them have any standing in the scientific community. Consequently, Doran defamed several institutions doing competent and important work. Doran's documentary is ignorant of the ethics of clinical trials, the role of state institutions who look after children and the science of HIV.
We call on the BBC to rectify immediately this betrayal of the public trust by taking the steps outlined above. Please respond at the earliest opportunity.
Yours sincerely,
Jeanne Bergman, Ph.D., Health GAP (Health Global Access Project, Inc.), USA
John P. Moore, Ph.D., Professor of Microbiology and Immunology Joan and Sanford I. Weill Medical College of Cornell University, USA
Mark Wainberg, Professor and Director, McGill University AIDS Centre, Montreal, Canada and Co-Chair International AIDS Conference 2006
Polly Clayden, Director, HIV i-Base, London, UK
Gregg Gonsalves, AIDS and Rights Alliance for Southern Africa
Andrew Feinstein, Chairperson, Friends of Treatment Action Campaign, UK

Nathan Geffen, Director Policy, Communications and Research, Treatment Action Campaign, South Africa

[Sa_artman]

Originally Posted by essence

I too can cut and paste, but not very well

Well by Mr wackos standard...you're a researcher!

[Sa_artman]

Housing Works AIDS Issues Update: GuestView: Denial Equals Death

It would be a pleasure to throw what little weight this blog has into the fray )

*************

Denial = Death: Defend Incarnation Children's Center and Access to HIV Treatment

For the last year and a half, a small skilled nursing facility in Washington Heights for children with AIDS called Incarnation Children's Center (ICC) has been under increasingly intense attack by HIV denialists, a dangerously deluded group of people who believe that HIV is not the cause of AIDS, and that people with HIV should not be given antiretroviral drugs. On May 5, the New York City Council General Welfare Committee held a bizarre hearing endorsing the HIV denialists' claims. It's possible that the outcome will be that children with AIDS in foster care will again be denied access to state of the art care.

HIV denialists have been around for years, annoying activists,
clinicians and service providers who regard them as crackpots whose antics shouldn't be allowed to distract us from our urgent work. We can no longer ignore them. In a world increasingly hostile to science, the lies spread by the denialists are having an effect, impeding access to HIV medication to people of color in U.S. cities and in Africa. We must respond. We must defend HIV/AIDS prevention workers and clinical and service providers like ICC. We must fight back with the truth: HIV causes AIDS. Antiretroviral treatments save lives.

The attacks on ICC began with a sensationalist story written by Liam Scheff, a self-described "AIDS dissent journalist," and circulated on the Internet. The New York Post picked up the story in March 2004, eliciting a spasm of misinformed grandstanding from a few City Council members. But the claims that children at ICC were "guinea pigs" who were being "tortured" in hideous medical experiments by a cabal of plotters including the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Catholic Archdiocese, GlaxoSmithKline, Columbia University and the city's Administration of Children's Services (ACS) weren't taken too seriously until the BBC2 aired a version of the story in November 2004.

Regrettably, the HIV denialists have since been joined by African-American nationalists affiliated with the December 12th Movement. Their rage is directed primarily at ACS, which placed the children at ICC. They have started organizing protests outside ICC, thus outing the residents as children with AIDS. The HIV denialists have successfully worked the independent media network; over the last six months, WBAI, NYC's Pacifica radio station, and "Democracy Now!" have repeatedly and uncritically reiterated the charges against ICC.

They've been joined by the extremist right: on May 6, the Traditional Values Coalition urged U.S. attorney general and torture theorist Alberto Gonzales to launch a criminal investigation into the NIH for supporting foster children's inclusion in clinical trials, "as well as [into] anyone who looked the other way or financed these atrocities."

What is the truth? When ICC was founded in 1988, children with HIV/AIDS who were in foster care in New York City were not allowed to participate in clinical trials. As new medications were developed--including those for AIDS-defining opportunistic infections and, eventually, antiretroviral drugs--they were tested on, and approved for, adult populations first, and only then considered for children. HIV-positive children lucky enough to live with their birthparents could be enrolled in clinical trials and get the best available care. But those in the foster care system, who were overwhelmingly black and Latino, could not. These children were denied access to life-saving drugs simply because they were in foster care.

ICC and other advocates for children with HIV successfully fought to have the policy that discriminated against foster kids changed. Almost all of the children from the ICC clinical trials period, children who would otherwise have died, are alive and well today because of what ICC and other advocates for children accomplished. Those children were not "guinea pigs." They were children with a deadly infection receiving state-of-the-art medical care and life-saving drugs already proven to be effective in adults.

The denialists emphasize the sometimes serious side effects of antiretroviral medications. Are these difficult drugs to live with? Yes, but the side effects are greatly outweighed by the benefits of treatment. And the children at ICC had the advantage of living in a structured, supportive setting that ensured that they could adhere to complex regimens with stringent dietary requirements, and on-site health care that enabled rapid identification of, and response to, any side effects.

The HIV denialists say that the young children at ICC could not refuse the drugs or fight off the "researchers" who gave them their medications. Should children of three, six or even 12 years get to decide if they will or will not take their medicine? Of course not, particularly when irregular dosing may result in multiply drug-resistant HIV. All responsible parents and caregivers understand that children can't make crucial life-and-death decisions for themselves, and the law recognizes this fact too, such that children can neither give nor withhold medical consent. [1] Columbia University ran the clinical trials-the only way the kids could get the drugs that kept them alive. They were closely monitored by the loving, expert and compassionate staff of ICC, and by the National Institutes of Health and the ACS. The HIV denialists see a conspiracy where there were in fact multiple layers of supervision.

The denialists suggest that there is something evil in the cessation of the "experiments" at ICC in 2002. Why were the trials "abruptly halted?" Because, as a result of the successful treatment of children in the clinical trials, those drugs were approved as safe and effective for pediatric populations. But the denialists see even this as sinister: Now foster kids with HIV are being given anti-viral medications not just experimentally but as routine "treatment," Scheff charged on WBAI on May 10. That's true. And that's good.

Were the children at ICC stolen from their parents to be used for experiments? Absolutely not. The parents of many children at ICC had died from AIDS; others were incapacitated by illness, drugs, and homelessness and unable to care for very sick children. That's why the kids were in the foster care system. Until ICC was founded, orphaned and unparented HIV-positive kids at Harlem Hospital were stuck there as "boarder babies"; too sick for regular foster care, they had to live in the hospital. The denialists represent ACS as not merely neglectful but complicit in a "full-blown criminal conspiracy" when it placed HIV-positive kids in ICC. ACS is always (and often justifiably) an easy target. But what ACS did then was, for once, really wonderful: It put kids with HIV/AIDS who had no other home into a cozy, first-rate specialized care facility where they had access to state-of-the-art combination anti-viral therapy under the expert supervision of a brilliant and compassionate staff. That's not a scandal to be investigated; it's an incredible accomplishment to be celebrated.

Thanks to other clinical trials proving the efficacy of nevirapine in preventing perinatal transmission of HIV, and in particular to the amazing community education and care provided to pregnant women by Harlem Hospital, the incidence of perinatal HIV transmission in Washington Heights and Harlem has fallen dramatically. Almost no new HIV-infected babies are born in northern Manhattan now, and the AIDS babies of ICC are nearing adulthood.

ICC is but one example of the reach of the HIV denialists. On the same day as the City Council hearing against ICC earlier this month, South Africa's Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang sang the praises of lemon, garlic and beet root as treatments for people with HIV/AIDS and said her government would not be pressured into meeting antiretroviral treatment targets set by the U.N. The next day, the Matthias Rath Foundation, headed by a German vitamin magnate, ran full-page ads in the New York Times and International Herald Tribune claiming that antiretroviral drugs are toxic and AIDS should be treated with vitamins.

We need to turn around this tide of misinformation. The protesters outside Incarnation Children's Center are vowing "No more Tuskegee Experiments." We need to remind everyone that the essence of the Tuskegee atrocity was that poor people of color known by doctors to have a devastating, probably fatal infection were lied to and denied lifesaving medication that was available to others. That is precisely what the HIV denialists are doing in Washington Heights and in South Africa. Let's expose their lies as we continue the struggle for HIV prevention and treatment.

1. (For a well-informed and rational discussion of the complexities of treating HIV+ children and delivery and dosage issues, see Emily Bass' article in HIV-Plus at: http://www.aidsinfonyc.org/hivplus/i...ids/treat.html.

Jeanne Bergman is an AIDS and human rights activist and the original editor and writer of the Housing Works Weekly AIDS Issues Update (1995-98). Contact her at HIVkills@earthlink.net to get involved in fighting back against the HIV denialists.

[Sa_artman]

Controlling the Flock

Peter Duesberg has always blamed AIDS in gay men on poppers and promiscuity; he dismisses those who say they didn't engage in either behavior as liars.
Within cults, the milieu is controlled and members are isolated. For denialists, who have no ashram, this happens online and in small groups. People worried about HIV are urged not to take the antibody test, to avoid mainstream information about AIDS, and to "stay as far away from allopathic doctors as possible."

Robert Lifton, a scholar of cults, identified the "principle of doctrine over person" as a characteristic feature. This doctrine "is invoked when cult members sense a conflict between what they are experiencing and what dogma says they should experience. The internalized message ... is that one must negate that personal experience on behalf of the truth of the dogma. Contradictions become associated with guilt: doubt indicates one's own deficiency or evil." Many HIV-positive denialists struggle with the reality of failing immune systems, which undermines their belief that HIV is irrelevant. The long list of denialists who have died from AIDS (posted on AIDStruth.org) contrasts with the fact that not one of the HIV-negative denialist leaders has died young, let alone with multiple strange infections that happen to be AIDS-defining illnesses.

Some HIV-positive denialists defy the prohibition on HIV treatment when they develop AIDS; they start ARVs and experience a rapid return to health. But instead of abandoning denial, many struggle to frame an alternative explanation for the success of the meds. Noreen Martin insists that her AIDS is not viral: "My own experience with AIDS was due to a lifetime of negative health issues. When extremely sick, I took the medicines, ate healthy, took over 50 supplements a day, and had a good attitude. So, within a few months I was as good as new." She stopped ARVs for three years. "During this time," she wrote, "my fatigue slowly came back, my CD4s dipped and my viral load increased to over 3 million. Nevertheless, I never placed much stock in either of these numbers because after extensive research, I realized that neither were [sic] related to health. It was other conditions that caused the problems and the ARVs were powerful enough to keep them at bay. ... Last fall, I became extremely tired again after being anemic for almost a year and fighting lymphedema for months, I took the ARVs, as I could barely get off the couch and could not function in life." Her health again improved.

Another denialist said, "I have seen many friends get better on ARVs, but my understanding has always been that these drugs are broad spectrum in their efficacy -- that they serve to kill virtually all pathogens, but also all the 'good stuff' in our bodies." Another, a thoughtful woman struggling to reconcile her recurrent illness with dogma, wrote: "All I can say is that I'm doing what seems to be working at the time. If it stops working, I'll make a new plan. And just because they call them antiretrovirals doesn't mean that's what they are." The only way they can remain alive and in the dissident camp is to pretend that ARVs, so precisely designed to target the ways that HIV infects T-cells, are a supercharged all-purpose germicide.

[Sa_artman]

BBC apologizes for promotion of misleading HIV denial film, "Guinea Pig Kids"
Category: AIDS/HIV • Clinical trials • Various viruses
Posted on: October 25, 2007 3:10 PM, by Tara C. Smith



For those of you who might not brave the comments threads on any HIV post, you may have missed this tidbit of information. I've written about "investigative journalist" Liam Scheff previously; he's an HIV "dissident" and author of a story from a few years back titled "The House that AIDS Built". In this, he claimed that HIV+ children had been removed from their parents' homes and force-fed "toxic" drugs to treat their condition (which of course, he claims is based on "inaccurate" HIV testing in the first place):

The drugs being given to the children are toxic - they're known to cause genetic mutation, organ failure, bone marrow death, bodily deformations, brain damage and fatal skin disorders. If the children refuse the drugs, they're held down and have them force fed. If the children continue to resist, they're taken to Columbia Presbyterian hospital where a surgeon puts a plastic tube through their abdominal wall into their stomachs. From then on, the drugs are injected directly into their intestines.
This story was picked up as the basis for the 2004 documentary "Guinea Pig Kids," an independent movie which was aired by the BBC--a move they now are apologizing for after an intense investigation into the claims made by the movie, and the people involved in creating it. More after the jump...

From the Guardian article on the debacle:

According to a source, the documentary - which was made by independent film-maker Jamie Doran - has caused considerable anguish within the BBC, which is still reeling from more recent fakery allegations, because of fears it deceived viewers by "playing fast and loose with the facts".
***

...following an investigation led by the BBC's head of editorial complaints Fraser Steel, the corporation has upheld complaints about several key parts of the film and a related article on the BBC website.

These included claims that the HIV medicines given to the children were "futile" and "dangerous" and that children were taken from their families because they resisted the "experimental" drugs.

In its adjudication, the BBC also said that the film-makers falsely tried to "create an association between the [clinical] trials and a loss of parental rights" while it also acknowledged that the film was biased towards the views of HIV "denialists"

...A film written by, produced by, and featuring interviews with HIV denialists, who never pause to mention that their views are outside of the mainstream medical establishment (to put it mildly).

A press release about the issue notes:

The false allegations about sinister medical experiments on foster children were a Trojan Horse cynically constructed to take advantage of those real concerns in order to spread deadly denialist lies about HIV in the communities most devastated by AIDS. These allegations about ICC have become something of an urban legend, untrue but widely believed, mainly because people trusted the BBC. The fact is that ICC and the more than 30 other agencies in New York that took part in the trials used the clinical trials framework to make life-saving medications, already approved for adults, available to children with HIV who would otherwise have died.
Again, scientists are of course outraged because Scheff et al have portrayed a clinical trial, aimed at better understanding drug dosages in children and providing them access to medicine, as something akin to a medieval torture device, and those who helped these kids are labeled "fascists" and "nazis" by Scheff. (Indeed, in a post on his blog on the topic, one of the categories it falls under is "eugenics.") But worse than bastardizing the science and painting doctors and nurses as mad scientists is the misinformation the documentary has caused in at-risk circles, as Jeanne Bergman notes in her piece describing the background of the documentary:

The attacks on Incarnation Children's Center began with a sensationalist stew of lies, partial truths and innuendo cooked up by an AIDS denialist and free-lance writer named Liam Scheff and circulated on the Internet in early 2004. The New York Post picked up the story in March of that year, eliciting a spasm of misinformed grandstanding by a couple of City Council members. ... Regrettably, the HIV denialists driving this hoax have since been joined by African-American activists affiliated with small groups like the December 12th Movement, whose rage is directed primarily at ACS. They started organizing protests outside ICC, thus outing the residents as children with AIDS and characterizing their home as a "slaughterhouse."
She notes that in the 1980s, kids in foster care (or those not living with their parents for a variety of reasons) were not allowed to participate in clinical trials. By 1992, this represented about half of the HIV+ kids in New York City--until Incarnation Children's Center and other advocates intervened. Kids could be enrolled in the trials and receive antiretrovirals; however, clinical trials ended at ICC in 2002. Why? Horror stories of children dying? Nope--because the trials had been completed, and the medications had been approved for use in pediatric populations. Because they are now standard of care, foster parents can indeed have their foster children removed from their custody if they refuse to treat--and this isn't unique to New York or the ICC. When one agrees to take on the responsibility for a child, that includes providing them with proper medical care.

Finally, I suppose it won't be surprising to many regular readers to find out that Christine Maggiore played a role in this tale, getting the ball rolling on the story that eventually led to "Guinea Pig Kids." According to Bergman, she introduced Scheff to the guardian of two children at ICC (I assume, Mona Newberg, who Scheff interviewed for "The House that AIDS Built").

Coverage of this story in The New York Times in 2005, and now this retraction and apology by the BBC won't serve to undo all the damage done, but it at least gives scientists and advocates places to point to that re-affirm the inaccuracies in this so-called journalism. The BBC did the right thing by making its statement about the film; too bad it's taken them 3 years to get to that point.

[Mr. Bill]

The Nurse’s Story

Jacklyn Herger is a pediatric AIDS nurse who worked at ICC in the early 90s. In 1996 she began the adoption process for two HIV-positive children from ICC through Catholic Home Bureau In 1998, the girls, Elaine, age six, and Liz, age four, came to live with Herger, her husband and five-year-old daughter as a family. A trained nurse, Herger gave AIDS drugs “by the book.” To her shock and amazement, it was only when she stopped giving the drugs that the girls got better.

Liam Scheff: What were the girls like when you first got them?

Jacklyn Herger: The girls had incredible psychological damage from growing up in medical institutions. They were both developmentally delayed, but in different ways. Liz could barely move. She couldn’t talk, play, or even walk; all she’d do was overeat. She was obese. She’d been on AIDS drugs since birth; she was put on AZT and Nevirapine shortly after I got her. Her hipbones were severely damaged because of the drugs; she had to have surgery to lengthen the tendons in her legs. She was also neurologically damaged, one of the side effects of AZT. She’d fall over and not feel it. She couldn’t respond. She wasn’t able to be a child.

Her sister Elaine was the exact opposite. She was intensely hyperactive, and she refused to eat. She’d come to the table, cross her arms, and say “I want my pediasure” – the drink that she lived on She had no connection to eating food. She’d been on AIDS drugs from infancy. She’d had debilitating glandular and ear infections. Elaine also had severe cognitive difficulties. The doctors told us she was born mentally retarded.

LS: How did you manage the situation?

Jacklyn: I gave all my energy to helping the girls heal and grow. We gave them healthy, expensive, organic food and lots of rest and sleep. They had speech and physical therapy, a good private school, tutoring. And lots of love. And we gave them the AIDS meds, by the book. Yet, after a year and a half of trying, there was no change. We were up against a brick wall

I was looking for answers, so I went to a lecture on HIV by Philip Incao, an MD with a background in Holistic Medicine. He talked about problems with the HIV diagnosis, the toxicity of the drugs and their effect on the immune system. What he said made me feel angry and threatened.

I confronted him after the lecture. I said, “I have two HIV positive children in my home right now, and you’re recommending that I take them off the drugs?” He said “Yes” “The drugs are too toxic for children.” He said that he had a better way to treat them and to strengthen their immune systems. He told me to read the book “What If Everything You Thought You Knew About AIDS Was Wrong,” by Christine Maggiore.

I read the book, and I spoke with medical professionals who all advised me that the drugs were harmful. I researched the drugs myself and reached the same conclusion. And for a good number of months, I struggled. I knew that Catholic Home Bureau and ICC wouldn’t support this, even if it was the best thing for the children’s health and survival. I had long consultations with Dr. Incao about what complementary and holistic medications to give the girls to support their immune systems. And after a great deal of research and thought, I took them off the drugs.

It wasn’t a dramatic, overnight change – I think it took their systems a while to clean out. Then, I don’t know how to say it - they became more and more… human. They became physically, psychologically, socially, cognitively - better, stronger. They were able to grow for the first time.

Eileen, who never ate, suddenly could eat me under the table. Her ear infections subsided and eventually disappeared. Her cognitive functions improved dramatically. The psychologist told me she was making incredible strides – past concrete to abstract thinking.

Liz, who’d been obese, began to lose the excess weight. She started to move more. Then, at five years old, she learned to walk. Within six months she was running, playing, laughing, riding a bicycle and jumping on the trampoline. The girls would giggle and dress up and put on plays together - everything normal children do.

The doctors at Nyack hospital, where the girls were seen, suspected I wasn’t giving the drugs, and didn’t approve. They were watching pretty closely. Then in 1999, Liz developed a blistering, peeling rash on her forearm. The doctors wanted to call it shingles (herpes zoster), which is an AIDS-defining disease, but it didn’t fit the clinical criteria, and they wouldn’t run the lab work to get it diagnosed.

What they didn’t tell me was that Nevirapine, the drug Liz had just been taking, caused the same blistering, peeling, potentially fatal rash (Steven Johnson’s Syndrome) that Liz had on her arm. We cared for her and she responded beautifully. She recovered, the skin healed, and the rash never came back.

But then Elaine came down with a glandular infection, and I wondered if I’d done the right thing by taking them off the drugs. And then, as if to answer my question, she got better. We cared for her, and she recovered and healed and was good as new.

Both girls had been on terribly toxic compounds for years. Their systems finally had a break and were becoming stronger. It was like their bodies finally had a chance to discharge toxins they’d accumulated from 6 years of AIDS drugs. They recovered like normal healthy children do from normal childhood illnesses. They continued on the same path of improvement – physical, cognitive and emotional – that they’d shown before the rash and inflammation. And life went on quite well.

But it didn’t. Even though the girls were quite healthy, the doctor claimed that we’d made them sick by not giving them the prescription AIDS drugs. The Agency for Child Services came to our house, unannounced, on a Saturday morning and took the children away.

We went to court for months to get them back. Medical experts from around the country came to testify about the toxicity of the drugs and the validity of alternate treatments. The judge wouldn’t even take their testimony. A psychologist told the judge how devastating it is to a child’s psyche – to be told that we were their family, to live in our home, to call me mom – then, in a moment, to have this wiped clean, never to see us again.

But that didn’t make any difference in light of the fact that I’d stopped giving the drugs, even though the girls were strong and healthy and the drugs are toxic. The judge ruled that the children be put into foster homes where their drug regimen would be enforced. We’ve never seen them again.

LS: You worked at ICC as a nurse, administering AIDS drugs. ICC participates in experimental drug trials. Was that always the case?

Jacklyn: Yes, we were doing trials back then too.

LS: What’s your clinical opinion of the drugs now?

Jacklyn: I was incredibly diligent with every aspect of the girls care while they were still on the drugs, yet they remained ill. They only improved when they stopped taking the drugs. Therefore it’s very clear that the drugs not only weren’t helping the girls, they were making them ill.

Jacklyn Herger did the impossible. She brought two girls, nearly dead from “AIDS” back to life, yet she was punished for her success. Herger’s achievement should be a model for pediatric AIDS treatment centers everywhere. Instead, the AIDS establishment has cruelly punished her. If we punish the innovators in AIDS treatment, then how do we expect to defeat AIDS?

.

[Sweet N Little]

IS THERE A CURE FOR AIDS?

There is no cure for AIDS. There are drugs that can slow down the HIV virus, and slow down the damage to your immune system. There is no way to “clear” the HIV out of your body.
Other drugs can prevent or treat opportunistic infections (OIs). In most cases, these drugs work very well. The newer, stronger ARVs have also helped reduce the rates of most OIs. A few OIs, however, are still very difficult to treat. See Fact Sheet 500 for more information on opportunistic infections.








...
A new study shows that HIV-positive babies with stabilized infections “will do just fine switching to a regime of nevirapine, a reverse transcriptase inhibitor,” from a more expensive protease inhibitor, Scientific American’s “Observations” blog reports (Harmon, 9/7). So far, HIV treatment options for children in the developing world “have been limited by concerns over the possible development of resistance to drugs they received as infants during failed attempts to prevent their infection in the first place,” according to HealthDay/U.S. News & World Report (Mozes, 9/7). The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, “followed 195 randomized babies and toddlers under 2 for a year” and determined that “[a]bout two thirds of the children with HIV that had switched to the nevirapine were able to maintain a level of fewer than 50 copies of the virus per milliliter of blood,” the lowest level technology could detect, “Observations” reports (9/7).




Sending love to Mr Basement Bill

[Mr. Bill]

The Aids Blunder
with David Rasnick PhD and Len Saputo, MD

Is AIDS caused by HIV? There is a longstanding debate between scientists and clinicians about the cause of HIV/AIDS that relates to what causes it. HIV is a retrovirus; none have ever been shown to cause disease in humans. All known viral diseases have demonstrable viral particles that can be isolated and shown to infect other humans. This has never been done with AIDS. The HIV virus is a passenger virus that is a marker of AIDS, but it is not its cause.

Retroviruses are not sexually transmitted. There is a selective population of people who get AIDS that makes it difficult to conclude it is an infectious disease. There are no scientific studies showing that AIDS is sexually transmitted.

Watch The Video Interview

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[Sweet N Little]

AIDS Drugs Lower the Risk of HIV Infection













Antiretroviral drugs have turned the AIDS epidemic around, by thwarting the virus in HIV-positive patients. But new research suggests that this powerful treatment may have another benefit — as a weapon against infection in healthy individuals.
In a trial involving nearly 2,500 HIV-negative, but high risk, gay men in six countries, researchers found that a combination antiretroviral pill called Truvada reduced the risk of HIV infection by 44%, compared with placebo. When scientists looked more carefully at the study volunteers who took the medication most faithfully, on a daily basis, they found that the risk of contracting HIV was even lower — 73% lower than the placebo group.
More studies will need to confirm the benefit of antiretrovirals in the prevention of HIV, and public health experts warn that even if the results hold up, it would not replace the best method of prophylaxis: safe sex and consistent use of condoms. That's because the way so-called pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, works is to load up high-risk people with HIV-disabling antiretroviral drugs before exposure to the virus, which allows the medication to hit HIV as early as possible. But the drugs do not work as a vaccine would, by priming the immune system to actually prevent infection.

[Mr. Bill]

HIV/AIDS Facts
w/ Dr. David Rasnick

Watch The Video

.

[Sweet N Little]

Scientists Find Trick to 'Disarm' HIV

Without its cholesterol, virus can't harm immune system


A group of US and European scientists have discovered a way to prevent the HIV virus from harming the immune system, in a breakthrough that could lead to an entirely new approach to fighting AIDS. They discovered that by extracting cholesterol, they could render the virus a sitting duck for the immune system’s adaptive response. “It’s like an army that has lost its weapons but still has flags, so another army can recognize it and attack it,” the study’s leader explained to Reuters. HIV harms the immune system by provoking an intense initial response that in turn weakens the subsequent adaptive response. “It’s like revving your car in first gear for too long,” the lead author said. “Eventually, the engine blows out.” Past vaccine attempts may have been unsuccessful in part because they were relying on the adaptive response. But drain the cholesterol from the virus, and suddenly it doesn’t produce that initial response, and the adaptive response can deal with it.

[Mr. Bill]

What is a Pharmaslut?

PharmaSlut: Any individual or organization that directly OR indirectly; a) receives funding from pharmaceutical companies AND; b) uses medical or scientific diplomas, political influence, governmental or academic positions, to c) promote the marketing, sales, distribution or delivery of drugs to d) clinicians, physicians or patients. (Journalist Shannon Brownlee calls them drug whores (page 218).)

To meet this definition’s corpus delicti, all of these conditions must be met.

Examples:

Medical Doctors: Daniel R. Kuritzkes MD uses his position as a Harvard University professor of medicine to market the HIV drugs in books and lectures. For his opinion that HIV a) exists, b) attacks cells and c) causes AIDS, Dr. Kuritzkes receives:

• Consulting Fees from Abbott Laboratories; Avexa Limited; Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc.; Bristol-Myers Squibb Company; Gilead Sciences Medical Affairs; GlaxoSmithKline; Human Genome Sciences, Inc.; Idenix Pharmaceuticals, Inc.; Koronis Pharmaceuticals; Merck & Co., Inc.; Millenium Pharmaceuticals, Inc.; Monogram Biosciences, Inc.; Oncolys BioPharma Inc.; Panacos Pharmaceuticals, Inc.; Pfizer Inc.; Roche Laboratories Inc.; Schering-Plough Corporation; Siemens AG; Trimeris, Inc.; Virostatics, srl; and VIRxSYS Corporation.
• Grant/Research Support from Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc.; Gilead Sciences Medical Affairs; Human Genome Sciences, Inc.; Merck & Co., Inc.; Roche Laboratories Inc.; Schering-Plough Corporation; and Trimeris, Inc.
• Honoraria from Abbott Laboratories; Avexa Limited; Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc.; Bristol-Myers Squibb Company; Gilead Sciences Medical Affairs; GlaxoSmithKline; Human Genome Sciences, Inc.; Idenix Pharmaceuticals, Inc.; Koronis Pharmaceuticals; Merck & Co., Inc.; Millenium Pharmaceuticals, Inc.; Monogram Biosciences, Inc.; Oncolys BioPharma Inc.; Panacos Pharmaceuticals, Inc.; Pfizer Inc.; Roche Laboratories Inc.; Schering-Plough Corporation; Siemens AG; Virostatics; and VIRxSYS Corporation.

Daniel Kuritzkes MD

This explains why Kuritzkes and other PharmaSluts signed this press release weeks before the documentary House of Numbers debuted. Like HIV, they identified the documentary as dangerous before they ever saw it.

Since its release, Cornell virologist John Moore PhD alleged that he and his co-signers were deceived and that the documentary was “deliberately edited to make AIDS scientists look bad…” Despite the filmmaker’s open invitation to address their allegations, none have identified a single excerpt where their statements were taken out of context or improperly edited, preferring instead to use their diplomas to prove their unfounded allegations.

For more information on corrupt physicians and academics, visit the Shill Factor.

Gay Activist Groups: The pathological connection between drug addiction, bath houses and anal orgies is no secret. But when well-meaning clergy suggested that God had something to do with their behavior-related diseases in 1981, outraged activists accused them of homophobia. (Some CDC scientists still do.)

At the time, infectious disease had become statistically irrelevant (p2) and many researchers faced unemployment. Their subsequent AIDS hysteria resulted in billions of wasted research dollars to find politically-correct excuses for promiscuous gay meth addicts who refused to admit that their illnesses were behavior-related. The CDC continues to market HIV today, despite its statistical nonexistence.

Gay meth addicts like Peter Staley founded activist groups like TAG, which has since received millions of dollars from well-meaning celebrities, philanthropists and PharmaSluts. Although the American Medical Association (AMA) reports that AIDS killed no more than 15 out of 100,000 Americans during the peak of the AIDS hysteria in 1995, Staley’s organization wants another $20 billion in AIDS funding (p5) despite already consuming 21 percent of all US medical research funding.

South Africa: While PharmaSluts like Aaron Motsoaledi, Jeanne Bergman and Nathan Geffen claim that hundreds of thousands have died from HIV in South Africa, the actual numbers are much different. Between 1997-2002, HIV-related mortality remained at or below 10,000/year (page 22). Although reporting climbed in 2006 and dropped in 2007, the 2.2 percent the numbers represent is far below (report) the 1000+ deaths per day reported by the PharmaSluts.

Additionally, the South African population actually grew from 44.8 million in 2001 to 47.9 million in 2007. As Harry Haveros MD explained, the higher the numbers the more money they get. In 2008, US taxpayers sent $48 billion to fight AIDS in Africa where the myth pays off politicians who allow 1600+ international mining companies to sack Africa’s mineral wealth.

The Victims: Along the way, heterosexual children like Ryan White and Lindsay Nagel were exploited to corroborate the myth of heterosexual AIDS. Condemned as HIV+, their parents were told that both only had months to live and prescribed AZT. As both children began to die, Peter Duesberg convinced Lindsay’s parents that the drugs would kill her. While Ryan stayed on the drugs, Lindsay’s parents stopped the treatments immediately.

Despite threats that she would never see her fifth birthday, Lindsay was a healthy teenage girl when she met Professor Duesberg in Nashville in 2009. While Ryan’s unnecessary death is still officially celebrated, Lindsay and Professor Duesberg are vilified by pharmaceutically-funded activists and marketers.

In House of Numbers Dr. Kuritzkes explained Ryan’s needless death and thousands of others: “In retrospect the dose we started with, with AZT, was a dangerous and poorly tolerated dose.” Immediately after AZT dosages were lowered in 1995, AIDS mortality plummeted.

Today, PharmaSluts market HIV drugs as improved, as if a slower poisoning improves the quality of life. On the bright side, the “improved” drugs like Atripla combine the addictive qualities of methamphetamines (Sustiva-Efavirenz) with the liver toxins tenofovir and emtriva so that gay men will feel better about poisoning themselves to death. By killing them more slowly, the PharmaSlut shareholders can prescribe and profit from the drugs for longer periods.

While HIV drugs don’t kill people as quickly as they did during the 1980s and 1990s, they still kill. Karri Stokely almost died from HIV drugs but made a full recovery when she stopped them in 2006. The hardest part of her recovery was breaking her addiction to Sustiva, which is as powerfully addictive as the gay drug of choice.

When longtime HIV/AIDS/gay advocate Howard Jacobs died last week at the age of 45, it was not from AIDS but from liver failure. Jacobs drank the Kool-Aid, paid the price and no one at the Advocate, LGBTPOV, POZ, LA Observed, LA Independent, WEHO News, Thinking Positive, or Positively Aware asked why. To these recipients of generous pharmaceutical advertising campaigns, gay bashing is worse than being poisoned to death for profit and gay politics. Talk about self-loathing.

Government Agencies:

CDC: Despite the statistical irrelevance (p2) of infectious disease, the CDC allocates nearly half of its $9.2 billion budget to HIV and immunizations. As of November 2009, H1N1 has officially claimed 1049 lives, which represents 0.00034 percent of the entire US population:

1049 of 305,529,237 = 0.000343 percent

If not for the hysteria, the CDC would not exist. Not surprisingly, the vaccine recall has begun.

FDA: Also controlled by the pharmaceutical industry. According to The Lancet editor Richard Horton:

… the FDA saw and continues to see the pharmaceutical industry as its customer – a vital source of funding for its activities – and not as a sector of society in need of strong regulation. Worse still, the FDA’s Office of Drug Safety co-exists in the same centre… as the agency that works most closely with industry to license new medicines… The inherent precedence that licensing of new drugs takes over safety evaluation is a serious flaw in FDA’s complex regulatory structure…

After fast-tracking deadly drugs like Vioxx (interview) between 1994-2005, FDA chief Janet Woodcock MD is only now coming under the scrutiny of HHS officials for her accommodating relationship with the drug industry.

NGOs: PharmaSluts like Women in Government (WIG) and the Global Health Council (GHC) have too many pharmaceutical sugar daddies to list. As Lucinda Marshall writes, WIG appeared along with hundreds of doctors who flocked like pigeons for Merck’s $4500 checks to pimp Gardasil. Fined billions for killing and injuring thousands, the maker of Vioxx hoped to recover their losses with the CDC’s HPV hysteria.

Useful Idiots: Like Dr. Kuritzkes, when PharmaSluts receive awards and recognition, the drug industry isn’t far behind. So when Seth Kalichman PhD received an “Outstanding Research Article Award” from the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care in 2006, their corporate sponsors included Abbott Laboratories, Boehringer-Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Bristol-Myers Squibb Company, Ortho Biotech Products, L.P., Tibotec Therapeutic Clinical Affairs, Virco Lab, Inc., Schering-Plough Corporation, Pfizer, Inc., GlaxoSmithKline, Solvay Pharmaceuticals and Tibotec.

Like his South African cohorts at AIDSTruth.org, Kalichman blogs to promote his unreadable books and justify his grant funding. Although I tracked my email to him last June, I don’t expect a reply.

Like Kalichman, Michael Specter attacks – as Denialists – those who ask why taxpayers spend billions to fight statistically irrelevant threats like HIV, HPV, H1N1, and ADHD with drugs like AZT, Gardasil, flu shots and SSRIs when adverse drug reactions (ADRs) kill more patients than the alleged diseases. Specter complains of distrust of our scientific institutions as if Benoxaprofen, Robert Gallo and Al Gore never existed. But when computer hackers are viewed more favorably than the scientists they expose, Specter’s arguments become as thin as his book sales. The fact that the GHC awarded Specter two media awards is also revealing.

According to Alessandra Stanley, Farrah Fawcett’s “incessant tabloid intrusion” might have been worthwhile if only she (and NBC) had allowed Merck to exploit her death for their flagging Gardasil campaign as NBC did for HIV in 2008. For Fawcett’s crime, Stanley wrote that anal cancer is sexually transmitted and that the “HPV vaccine is the most promising form of prevention.” One wonders why Stanley doesn’t share her husband’s name.

More names are listed here.

.

[Munchmasterman]

Here is something that punches a huge hole in the “Big Pharma” portion of the AIDS denial conspiracy. See the links below. I wish the meds I take were as cheap.

Notice “bill” stopped having any semblance of a debate and now just posts misinformation. Many people have replied with valid contradictions and he just keeps posting away.

"The trouble with conspiracies is that they rot internally. When the number is as high as four, chances are even that one is a spy." Professor de la Paz

A secret world wide conspiracy. Give me a fucking break.

http://www.clintonfoundation.org/news/news-media/press-release-unitaid-and-the-clinton-hiv-aids-initiative-announce-new-price-reductions-for-key-aids-medicines

http://www.avert.org/hiv-children.htm

Since it is a proven fact that HIV can be sexually transmitted, I think this thread is a disservice to this board and its members. It will only take one person (an ECCIE member) to go bare-back, contract HIV, and then claim he got the info that you can’t catch HIV by way of unprotected sex on “the hooker board”, ECCIE. Can you say Craig’s List murderer?

I think a case can be made that this thread couldn’t be MORE hobby related and does not belong in the Sandbox. Especially the National Sandbox There is not much more to be said on this subject. The OP made it sound like he wanted a discussion when he only wanted to hijack a slot on the front page of the thread list.

[essence]

I tend to agree. This thread makes me re evaluate whether I want to be a member here, and whether I should renew my subscription.

What would the owner of this board do if I started a thread suggesting that children who are seriously injured from accidents be gassed and put down? Or that women who become divorced be thrown onto a fire? Or men who sleep with a hooker be hung drawn and quartered?

Yet Mr Bill continues to recommend life saving treatments be denied to children, killing them in gruesome pain, and he encourages the spread of HIV (which of course doesn;t exist, does it) with unprotected sex and consequent death.

He might as well be suggesting we all go and play chicken on the I10/610 junction.

I think it is a disgrace this thread remains in existence. It should be completely deleted. Anybody interested in the issues can find them elsewhere. The debate has been closed and the science validated for a long time.

[Sweet N Little]

+1 Essence

Talk about giving eccie a black eye, anyone on an escort board dispensing medical info should at least show some sort of rational behavior..e.g. "PM me if your interested" however this copy and paste info for pretty much 24/7 since Mr Bill latched on to a 2010 thread clearly shows extremely irrational behavior.

However with all the nuts on here I'm sure they can't be prejudice. By posting those baby pictures (disturbing!!) and saying 911 is a fraud, well I pretty much feel sorry for him now.

What I do not understand is why Mr Bill does not copy and paste somewhere (perhaps a MEDICAL forum)else. Which clearly says he must be banned/run off from all other sites and this is being allowed here for now, I would think being an advocate for his cause and how much time he has spent here would be better suited (and possibly appreciated) elsewhere.

Hence the tinfoil hat I'm sure is spot on..

I wish you well Mr Bill and my advise is to try and find somewhere where your info is appreciated, I am most certain an escort board is not it. You are only coming across as a sad disgruntled man and embarrassing your self. You lost any credibility about 100 copy and pastes ago. If you are indeed mentally ill , my sincere apologies for all the tin foil hat pictures. Perhaps you could "Google" your cause and find other sites that would welcome you, discuss & debate.



All my best & good luck.
SNL
I got to post a few funny pictures but this has become sad so I'm out