In the following 15 years, my son and I learned a lot about hospitals, doctors, medications and home treatments. We found out that while a simple false step might cause a bleed, a major event like running over his ankle with the family car (this happened!) did not. We learned not to accept everything we heard, to challenge the dogma.
We also learned, in the mid-1980s, that HIV had been present in the blood supply that is used for Factor VIII, the concentrate used to treat excessive bleeding. It is believed that as much as 75 percent of the hemophiliac population my son’s age is HIV-positive. What would it mean to have antibodies to this retrovirus, to be HIV-positive? We knew what most people think: you will be dead soon. It was time to investigate this conventional formulation.
HIV is said to cause AIDS by infecting and wreaking havoc on the immune system, in particular the T cells; once this subset of the immune system is sufficiently depleted, the body succumbs to one of a wide variety of diseases, and the patient dies.
But Peter Duesberg of the University of California, Berkeley-one of the world’s leading retrovirologists-says that HIV is a profoundly conventional retrovirus, incapable of killing its host; not more than one in 500 T cells is ever actively infected by HIV. “Infection” at that rate cannot hurt the body. Such damage is equivalent to a nick on the face while shaving. In response to these facts, AIDS researchers have put forth more than a dozen complicated mechanisms to explain how HIV does its damage. None has stuck.
And then there is the treatment. AZT is currently being given to tens of thousands of both symptomatic and asymptomatic people who carry antibodies to HIV. Magic Johnson and Arthur Ashe are taking AZT. Ryan White, who also suffered from hemophilia, was given AZT until he died. So was Kimberly Bergalis. The U.S. government says AZT is effective in prolonging the lives of those infected with HIV, and it claims that double-blind clinical trials back up this contention.
But in three recent books, I found a different story. Business writer Bruce Nussbaum, in “Good Intentions: How Big Business and the Medical Establishment Are Corrupting the Fight Against AIDS,” details the cozy arrangements among government, business and science in the eventual marketing of AZT. John Lauritsen, an independent scholar, in “Poison by Prescription: The AZT Story,” chronicles how scientific principles were compromised by the unblinding of the clinical trials of AZT. Gay activist Michael Callen-who has been HIV-positive for a decade-claims in “Surviving AIDS” that the only long-range AIDS survivors are those who have not taken AZT. I will urge my son not to take this medicine.
What I have learned in my study of AIDS is that many of the common assumptions about its cause and treatment have been strongly challenged, even if such challenges have not been widely reported. What I hope for, as my son prepares to go to college and begin his adult life, is that scientists and public-health officials will take a new look at the AIDS epidemic.
There is in fact an international effort now underway urging just that. More than 40 doctors and scientists have signed a statement that reads “It is widely believed by the general public that a retrovirus called HIV causes the group of diseases called AIDS. Many biomedical scientists now question this hypothesis. We propose that a thorough reappraisal of the existing evidence for and against this hypothesis be conducted by a suitable independent group.”
One of the scientists who signed the statement is Kary Mullis, a biochemist who invented the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a sophisticated technique now used in nearly all HIV studies. “PCR has made it easier to see HIV,” Mullis says. “But human beings are full of retroviruses, and neither HIV nor any other retrovirus by itself poses any kind of threat. Which is not to say that there’s no such thing as AIDS-only that HIV doesn’t cause it.”
In fact, dozens of patients around the world are now reported to have AIDS symptoms without evidence of HIV infection. These cases galvanized this summer’s Eighth International Conference on AIDS, and scientists, predictably, have begun to search for a new virus. But why not pursue other possible causes of AIDS? Why not focus on the important point that different risk groups-gay men, drug abusers, hemophiliacs and the world’s malnourished-tend to have different AIDS diseases? Such new directions would be of great benefit to all who live under the threat of AIDS, HIV-positive or not.
My son, understandably, wanted to know his HIV status. He was, of course, hoping he would be “negative.” The odds, and the test, proved otherwise. But, when I first heard that my son is HIV-positive, my reaction was not the one I had when I had first heard about hemophilia-I was not floored. Both my son and I strongly support the effort to re-examine the hypothesis that HIV causes AIDS, a hypothesis that has yet to save a single human life. And both of us are determined that he will survive his exposure to this retrovirus, as he has hemophilia, and that his life will be as long and full as it can be.
