Thursday, October 6, 2011

AIDS Rethinking presented in Mainstream Conferences


AIDS Rethinking was again disseminated to mainstream researchers, this time at the65th Annual Congress of the Italian Society for Anatomy and Histology  in Padua, 27-29 September 2011.
An extensive poster presentation (authors: Ruggiero, Pacini, Punzi, Morucci, Gulisano, Köhnlein, Bauer) discussed “The Clinical Significance of Immune-System Laboratory Tests”. The poster makes the following salient points:
→   Scientists accept conclusions of experts in fields outside their own specialties. The resulting mainstream “consensus” can remain unchanged for a long time even after the experts have modified or discarded their earlier conclusions.
→    That is so with HIV/AIDS, where evidence has accumulated that the original hypothesis was wrong:
♦    Kaposi’s sarcoma is not caused by HIV.
♦    Many clinical AIDS cases were found to be HIV-negative
(and renamed — entirely ad  hoc — “idiopathic CD4-T-cell lymphopenia”).
♦    Anti-retroviral drugs often cause clinical deterioration instead of
helping patients recover (“immune restoration syndrome”).
Patients on Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy (HAART)
experience more adverse non-AIDS events than AIDS events.
♦    “HIV” tests are anything but specific; false-positives arise from a host of conditions
that are not necessarily health-threatening.
♦    CD4 counts are not a good biomarker of clinical condition, nor a criterion of illness,
still less a reason for instituting HAART.

→   Treating manifest illnesses has a better record of good patient outcomes than does antiretroviral treatment.
→   CD4 counts can be increased quickly and safely by means of probiotic dietary supplements.
[The poster is available for download but takes appreciable time because of its size,~32 MB as jpg and ~50 MB as pdf]
Expanding on the question of CD4 counts and probiotics, Pacini, Punzi, Morucci, Ruggiero, & Cheney presented a study entitled “Macrophages of the Mucosa-Associated Lymphoid Tissue (MALT) as key elements of the immune response to vitamin D binding protein-macrophage activating factor (GcMAF)”:
→    Probiotic yogurt has been shown to increase CD4 counts in people living with HIV/AIDS.
→   The results were not replicated with encapsulated probiotics, suggesting the need for an additional factor. GcMAF has been found to act as such a factor.
→   Increased CD4 counts under such a regimen have been demonstrated recently in several control subjects, in an HIV-positive patient, and in two individuals affected by chronic fatigue syndrome.
→   Natural Killer (NK) cell counts increased as well as CD4 counts and CD4/CD8 ratio. The significance is that NK cells influence the quality of immune responses, are associated with the clinical prognosis for “HIV-positive” patients,  and play a major role in HIV elite controllers.
→   There were also favorable changes in hematological parameters indicative of bone-marrow function, and there was significant improvement in general health.
The substance of these posters is available in printed form in the Italian Journal of Anatomy & Embryology, 116 #1 (2011) respectively pages 157 and 136.

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