Why I Quit HIV - by Rebecca V. Culshaw

Rebecca V. Culshaw, Ph.D. (her book), is a mathematical biologist who has been working on mathematical models of HIV infection for the past ten years. She received her Ph.D. (mathematics with a specialization in mathematical biology) from Dalhousie University in Canada in 2002 and is currently employed as an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at a university in Texas.

As I write this, in the late winter of 2006, we are more than twenty years into the AIDS era. Like many, a large part of my life has been irreversibly affected by AIDS. My entire adolescence and adult life – as well as the lives of many of my peers – has been overshadowed by the belief in a deadly, sexually transmittable pathogen and the attendant fear of intimacy and lack of trust that belief engenders.
To add to this impact, my chosen career has developed around the HIV model of AIDS. I received my Ph.D. in 2002 for my work constructing mathematical models of HIV infection, a field of study I entered in 1996. Just ten years later, it might seem early for me to be looking back on and seriously reconsidering my chosen field, yet here I am.
My work as a mathematical biologist has been built in large part on the paradigm that HIV causes AIDS, and I have since come to realize that there is good evidence that the entire basis for this theory is wrong. AIDS, it seems, is not a disease so much as a sociopolitical construct that few people understand and even fewer question. The issue of causation, in particular, has become beyond question – even to bring it up is deemed irresponsible.

UC Berkeley professor denies link between HIV and AIDS

BY FRANKLIN KRBECHEK | STAFF

For over 20 years, UC Berkeley professor Peter Duesberg has believed that HIV does not cause AIDS, an opinion that he says has limited his academic career and alienated him from the scientific community.

“You cannot find the (HIV) virus, only antibodies, and it doesn’t spread via sex as it should,” Duesberg said. “HIV is a harmless virus. I have said that before, and I continue to say it.”

Learning Lessons from an HIV Cure

By Jason Bardi on June 16, 2011

For doctors confronting the AIDS epidemic, past ambitions always boiled down to two main goals: prevention, or finding ways to protect people not yet exposed to HIV, through vaccines, safe sex education or other means; and treatment, or discovering effective drugs and providing them to people with HIV/AIDS, helping them live longer.

Now, thanks primarily to one test case, many doctors are beginning to think about a new possibility: finding a cure.

This case involved an American living in Germany, Timothy Brown, known popularly as the “Berlin patient,” Did science really cure the first case of HIV  whose infection appears to have been eradicated after two carefully planned bone marrow stem cell transplants in 2007 and 2008.

Jay Levy, MD, professor of medicine and co-discoverer of HIV, has renewed hope for finding a cure for HIV/AIDS.

“There’s no evidence of HIV in my body after three years, even though dozens of tests have been done to look for it,” said Brown, now a San Francisco Bay area resident and a patient at UCSF and San Francisco General Hospital (SFGH). To this day, Brown is believed to be the only person ever cured of HIV.

While experts agree that the procedure used to cure Brown is not generally applicable to the tens of millions living with HIV worldwide, his story has changed the thinking of many scientists at the forefront of HIV/AIDS research.

Several UCSF-affiliated researchers interviewed for this story pointed to Brown’s experience as a seminal shift, giving them renewed hope for the possibility of developing a cure.

Neville Hodgkinson talks with "How Positive are you? His book "AIDS: The Failure of Contemporary Science"

April 13th, 2011

Neville Hodgkinson is a British journalist who began reporting on AIDS in the mid-1980s as medical correspondent for the Sunday Times of London. Between 1992 and 1994, as the newspaper’s science correspondent, he wrote a series of reports questioning the link between HIV and AIDS. His book AIDS: The Failure of Contemporary Science was published in 1996 by Fourth Estate. He has continued writing articles of dissent from the single pathogen theory of AIDS for publications including Continuum, New African, Mothering magazine, The Journal of Scientific Exploration, the Spectator and The Business Online.

In this hour-long discussion with David and Terry, Neville describes how he turned from being a promoter of “HIV=AIDS” to a critic, and how this latter position eventually forced him out of the Sunday Times. He shares his thoughts on this experience, and how he dealt with many different personalities, both in the UK and elsewhere, who both supported and condemned his work.

Listen here: 

No HIV epidemic in Italy

Posted by Henry Bauer on 2011/04/03

Italy has never experienced an epidemic of AIDS

Nor has Italy ever experienced an epidemic of “HIV”

Those facts are reflected in documents issued by the Italian Ministry of Health. By 2009, the Ministry had not required notification of cases of “HIV” — “HIV” was not regarded as a threat to public heath — and AIDS could be diagnosed in absence of “HIV”. Thus the Ministry did not accept HIV/AIDS theory, and this was described appropriately as “Aids denialism at the Ministry of Health” by Ruggiero et al. in Medical Hypotheses, accepted 3 June 2009 and published on-line shortly afterwards.
Elsevier, however, publisher of Medical Hypotheses, under harassment by John P Moore and other HIV/AIDS vigilantes, could no more countenance this remaining in its journal than it could allow Duesberg to point out that HIV/AIDS true-believers were claiming 20 times as many AIDS deaths as the official South African agency, Statistics South Africa, was actually reporting on the basis of death certifications. Accordingly, the article by Ruggiero et al., like that of Duesberg et al., was withdrawn as “potentially damaging to global public health”:

That the Italian Ministry of Health does not regard something as a threat to public health was evidently seen at Elsevier as a potential threat to global public health.