Recent AIDS Myth Exposed Question

Factor VIII

Since I can't respond to the forum as myself, I'll do so here, just in case someone might be interested.

In fact, us "mainstream guys" addressed this point quite recently (I personally replied on Jan 5th of this year). There are several things wrong with the Perth Group's assertations regarding HIV, as you might expect by now. They say:

QUOTE
In January 1994, the CDC (25) communicated the following experimental data and conclusion: "In order to obtain data on the survival of HIV, laboratory studies have required the use of artificially high concentrations of laboratory grown virus...the amount of virus studied is not found in human specimens or anyplace else in nature,...it does not spread or maintain infectiousness outside its host. Although these unnatural concentrations of HIV can be kept alive under precisely controlled and limited laboratory conditions, CDC studies have shown that drying of even these high concentrations of HIV reduces the number of infectious viruses by 90 to 99 percent within several hours.

Since the HIV concentrations used in laboratory studies are much higher than those actually found in blood or other body specimens, drying of HIV-infected human blood or other body fluids reduces the theoretical risk of environmental transmission to that which has been observed-essentially zero".

Since: (a) in most instances, if not all, the time between phlebotomy and conversion of pooled plasma to factor VIII concentrate is considerably greater than 3 hours; (b) factor VIII is made from plasma which is cell free; (c ) the late 1970s factor VIII has been supplied as a dry powder which may spend weeks or months waiting use; how can one reconcile the above facts with the view that haemophiliacs are infected with HIV via contaminated factor VIII concentrates?
END QUOTE

However, factor VIII is not made by simple drying. It's made by lyophilisation, which is a method of rapid freeze-drying that is specifically intended to preserve protein structure. One would almost expect lyophilisation to protect HIV against degradation!

In particular, there are experiments where HIV was introduced and recovered from lyophilised factor VIII [1]. Heat treatment and filtration both protect against infectious HIV, and heat-treated factor VIII is now the standard and fairly clearly protective [2].

The other point is ridiculous when faced with the work of Pantaleo, Jackson and Ho which I keep citing [3, 4, 5]. There is plenty HIV to go around - thousands of infectious units per ml - it's just not enough to get a decent EM image using peripheral blood samples. Gelderblom remember said he needed maybe 10 billion virions per ml. The idea that HIV was hard to find is a long-standing myth based purely on the fact that the very early culture techniques were inefficient. Ho et al for instance were probably detecting individual infected cells in their assay.

1. McDougal et al. J Clin Invest. 1985 Aug;76(2):875-7. "Thermal
inactivation of the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome virus, human T lymphotropic virus-III/lymphadenopathy-associated virus, with special reference to antihemophilic factor.

2. 8. Rouzioux, C., S. Chamaret, L. Montagnier, V. Carnelli, G.
Rolland, and P. M. Mannucci. 1985. Absence of antibodies to AIDS virus in haemophiliacs treated with heat-treated Factor VIII concentrate. Lancet. 1:271-272.

3. Pantaleo et al Nature. 1993 Mar 25;362(6418):355-8. "HIV infection is active and progressive in lymphoid tissue during the clinically latent stage of disease."

4. Ho et al NEJM 1989 321:pp 1621-1625 "Quantitation of human
immunodeficiency virus type 1 in the blood of infected persons"

5. Jackson et al J Clinical Mole Bio 1990 pp 16-19 "Human
immunodeficiency virus type 1 detected in all seropositive symptomatic and asymptomatic individuals"

Oh the irony!

One of the more eloquent and polite dissidents recently brought my attention to the following paper:

A new transmissible AIDS-like disease in mice induced by alloimmune stimuli.

Nat Med. 1997 Jan;3(1):37-41.

Ter-Grigorov VS, Krifuks O, Liubashevsky E, Nyska A, Trainin Z, Toder V.

Department of Immunology and Pathology, Kimron Veterinary Institute, Bet-Dagan, Israel.

The search for a suitable and reliable animal model for human AIDS that is easy to use on a large scale continues. Here we describe a new condition in mice that closely resembles human AIDS, namely, chronic lymphoproliferation with dramatic depletion of CD4-positive cells, progressive impairment of the immune responses, and Kaposi's sarcoma-like tumors or terminal B-lymphomas. The AIDS-like disease was primarily induced by mating BALB/c female mice to C57BL/6 males during a 1-year period (7-10 allogeneic pregnancies) followed by immunization with paternal lymphocytes. The disease is sexually and vertically transmissible, transferrable by cell-free plasma and is associated with autoimmune reactions to major histocompatibility complex antigens and CD4 cells. We hope that this becomes a model for studying the mechanisms of AIDS immunopathogenesis and immune-based treatment approaches.

He was clearly trying to show that an AIDS-like illness could be induced by something as mundane as cross-mating. I followed the paper trial however and discovered the following:

Characterization of a novel murine retrovirus mixture that facilitates hematopoiesis.

J Virol. 2002 Dec;76(23):12112-22.

Hook LM, Jude BA, Ter-Grigorov VS, Hartley JW, Morse HC 3rd, Trainin Z, Toder V, Chervonsky AV, Golovkina TV.

The Jackson Laboratory, Bar Harbor, Maine 04609, USA.

A new virus previously arose in BALB/c females mated repeatedly to C57BL/6 (B6) males and then injected with fixed, activated B6 male spleen cells (V. S. Ter-Grigorov, O. Krifuks, E. Liubashevsky, A. Nyska, Z. Trainin, and V. Toder, Nat. Med. 3:37-41, 1997). In the present study, BALB/cJ mice inoculated with virus-containing plasma from affected mice developed splenomegaly, which was caused by increased numbers of Sca-1(+) Lin(-) hematopoietic stem cells (HSC) and their differentiated progeny. Biological and molecular analyses of a new virus revealed a mixture of murine leukemia viruses (MuLVs). These MuLVs comprised ecotropic and mink lung cell focus-forming (MCF) virus classes and are termed Rauscher-like MuLVs because they bear numerous similarities to the ecotropic and MCF viruses of the Rauscher MuLV complex but do not include a spleen focus-forming virus. The ecotropic virus component alone transferred some disease characteristics, while MCF virus alone did not. Thus, we have described a novel virus mixture, termed Rauscher-like MuLV, that causes an increase in hematopoiesis due to activation of pluripotent HSC. Experiments using mice and a protocol that replicated the pregnancy and immunization strategy of the original experiment demonstrated that endogenous BALB/c mouse ecotropic and xenotropic MuLVs are activated by these treatments. Emv1 was expressed in the spleens of multiparous mice but not in those of virgin mice, and Bxv1Emv1-pseudotyped MuLVs were recovered following injection of fixed, activated B6 cells. Thus, multiple pregnancies and allostimuli appear to have provided the signals required for activation of and recombination among endogenous viruses and could have resulted in generation of the Rauscher-like MuLV mixture.

How ironic that the dissident quoted an article that shows a retrovirus can induce an AIDS-like illness :o) Basically, if something doesn't sound like it jives with the conventional view of HIV and AIDS, check the sources.

Staring them in the face

This thread from a dissident discussion group is telling. One person writes:

"If they're able to strip HIV of it's disease-causing components (which sounds like quite a feat), then why the hell can't they create a vaccine?".

A moderator steps in with:

"Well of course all those 'expert scientists' didn't want to bother us with too technical details on how in the world they managed to re-engineer something that no one can seem to find in fresh, uncultured human blood."

No one there seems to be thinking the obvious: maybe they were lied to about how much HIV there is in infected people.

The design of the construct is actually presented in the published paper, available as an online article from Nature. The supplementary figure 1 has the construct map. Engineering HIV is done every day - I've constructed at least 5 unique HIV plasmids and re-engineered several old ones using the designs of previous workers. Removing the pathogenic bits is relatively easy, but then you have a major problem in that the virus effectively dies! You need supportive DNA constructs in order to make more "virus". The safer you make it, the less effective the virus becomes: and judging from the maps they ripped the guts out of HIV. Practically the only stuff left is the regulatory regions and those structures involved in packaging and efficient gene insertion. There are no antigenic regions that I can obviously see, so this kind of approach is actually the exact opposite of what you would do to create a vaccine!

As for how much HIV there is - that all depends on how much you want there to be. If you don't have a pathogenic organism, then likely you won't have the problem of the virus hiding away in the lymph nodes. Despite that, in AIDS patients Ho et al found enough virus in a single cc of blood to seed 3,500 virus cultures. Most of that was from infected cells rather than cell-free virus, but it still highlights the amount of HIV in the body.

None of this is new, or unusual, or breaks any "rules" of genetics or virology. Why it is denied by the dissidents is difficult to understand.

Dissent only for the Dissidents

A few days back I tried replying to an article on a dissident webboard about cervical cancer and HPV (human papilloma virus). Someone was trying to make the case that HPV was another HIV/AIDS situation, an unsupported virus cause of an illness. I tried posting an article showing that HPV was found in 98% of cervical cancer specimens, and that was only looking for the high-risk serotypes!

They banned me. They stopped my login from even being able to view the site.

Today someone has posted a request for a virologist to explain a certain concept about HIV.

How, if the moderators actively prevent anyone with an actual education in the field from contributing to the discussion?

This is also a measure of the denial out there - that the moderators will go so far as to prevent scientific fact about unrelated illness from being made available to their readers. It seems the dissidents are being treated like mushrooms - kept in the dark and fed shit.

With friends like these...

Well, so much for appreciation! This rather long-winded discussion started off reasonably enough but quickly turned nasty when I pointed out that the source (Harvey Bialy) was wrong. Bialy promptly lost it... and has started spamming my work email with vaguely insulting messages. God Bless filters :o)

The host then turned rather nasty by jumping to a whole bunch of conclusions - but I suppose what can you expect from someone who swallows the AIDS dissident crap hook-line and sinker?

The good news, I have at least now got a discussion going on with Prof Duesberg, so maybe the next post here will be more useful.

In the meantime, the third link with contributions I made to the Esmay Blog is here.