The debate over whether HIV actually causes AIDS goes on — and there is a MUST READ piece by Dean Esmay on Dean’s World today.
Here’s part of his introduction:
As of this writing, the CDC clearly shows the incidence of HIV infection in the U.S. today at between 850,000 and 950,000 exactly as described below. My own efforts to find the raw amount of HIV infection for earlier years from the CDC web site were frustrating; CDC does not make the historical national incidence of simple HIV infection easy to find. But by checks through historical news archives and what I was able to find on the CDC web site, I was able to confirm it: I can find no fudging of numbers below. No surprise; real scientists do not do such things. Still, if anyone can find CDC numbers on the incidence of HIV infection for any year between 1985 and 2005 which do not fall within the range described, I will publish it immediately.
We here at Dean’s World also wonder how it is that HIV could have shown up as a "new" virus in the 1980s when HIV has been found in frozen blood samples taken from people in the 1970s, at least one of whom was alive and healthy as of a year ago. The implications of that fact we leave as an exercise for the reader.
He presents links to a series of threads on this issue and issues this invitation to anyone interested in this topic:
Dean’s World also hereby issues an open invitation: we will publish a response from any public health official, epidemiologist, biologist, or other professional researcher who wishes to refute the data presented in this article, or the implications we have drawn from same.
You need to go to the link above to read the whole post. But we’ll tell you what follows next:
He posts an article Falsifying The Unfalsifiable Hypothesis, written by doctor Harvey Bialy. You need to read the WHOLE article (which has lots of info and a graph) but here’s Bialy’s conclusion:
Although there are reasons why a virus might stop causing a disease (such as immunity, or drugs that confer resistance – although neither apply in this case), there is no defensible reason in the clear light of these data for thinking that HIV ever began to cause one in the first instance.
We love comments on this site, but you might want to leave them on Dean’s World which is where the big debate will be on an issue that quite clearly can’t go away….because it won’t go away until a cure for this horrible disease is found.
FOOTNOTE: Dean Esmay has done a lot of private research on this — actual original reporting, which you don’t find on many weblogs. Whether you read his post and agree with his hypothesis or not (and it is a hot subject so the debate on this on his site and elsewhere will go on) he is actually using his blog as a form of journalism. (Many weblogs including this one often resemble long op-ed pages with opinions on already published or broadcast journalism pieces, versus original materials based on research and phone calls — which Esmay has also done).
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.