Seth highlights on Tommy

Seth Kalichman’s Denying AIDS blog has a recent post on the rapidly declining health of boxer Tommy Morrison. Kalichman has bolded some paragraphs to support his case; I’m going to bold those which don’t. The dispute is not over Morrison dying of an AIDS-defining illness, but whether HIV is involved.

Morrison’s health issues began more than a year and a half ago, when a doctor left a 12-foot piece of surgical gauze in his chest for eight days. She declines to name the hospital or doctor, only that it happened in Tennessee. Things got worse, she says, when he contracted Guillain-Barré Syndrome, an ailment in which the immune system attacks the peripheral nervous system.

GBS is known to cause muscle wasting, thus giving the appearance of a typical AIDS patient. Being an autoimmune disease it is likely to flag as HIV.

His life before that was a decadent stream of parties, limos and sex that would’ve made Keith Richards blush. His life after that appeared lonely. He once lent/gave large sums of money to his entourage, a group that shared copious amounts of booze and women with him as he prowled the bars of Westport in Kansas City.

Drug and alcohol abuse. Though a number of people can reverse their health threats from abstaining, in some cases a lot of damage is already done. When money is no concern you can do quite a lot of damage.

Trisha [his wife] adds that she’s had unprotected sex with Morrison.

Is Trisha Morrison HIV+? That’s the billion-dollar question. If HIV- she’ll be painted as lucky, lying about condom use, or not even sleeping with him at all. But that’s not consistent with a woman who has a firm opinion on AIDS and shows her devotion by being at his bedside.

The power of belief

If you search today’s news for the keyword ‘HIV’ you’ll find other articles about this story also using correct words in the headline such as ‘believe’ and ‘may’. Let me walk you through some valid doubt in one of them.

• Watson met Assumang in 2007 and had a relationship for 18mths
• In 2010 police told Watson to take a HIV test as there was evidence that Assumang was HIV+; it’s been roughly 3yrs at this point since Watson first met Assumang
• Watson tests +

‘When the viral load test came back it also told me I had just six to nine months to live.’ [said Watson]

Ms Watson had however lived with the virus for three years without knowing and needed urgent treatment.

Luckily swift intervention after her shock diagnosis has managed to keep her alive.

Hold on, she had the virus for three years, and despite not suffering, needed urgent treatment, and despite being apparently well had only six to nine months to live because of the results of a highly-sensitive viral load test?

How are they sure that intervention is keeping her alive when she’s been seemingly well (i.e. there was no report of physical manifestation of illness) for 3yrs already? How are they even sure that Watson ‘caught’ ‘HIV’ from Assumang? How are they even sure that Watson wasn’t + before meeting Assumang, for many years?

All of this calls for belief.

[Source: Daily Mail]

Another vax to bite the dust?

Scientists from Brazil have declared that later this year, they will be performing tests on rhesus monkeys with HIVBr18, a new vaccination for HIV, according to a medical report from Edge.

…Rhesus monkeys, who are prone to the contraction of SIV, or Simian Immunology Virus, are thought to be instrumental in the crossover of infection from simian to human, the process of which, it has been documented, led to HIV in humans.

So why isn’t there an AIDS epidemic amongst rhesus monkeys who don’t practise safe sex? Back to the drawing board guys. In fact, please, scrap the drawing board for a fresh one.

…The vaccine itself is not able to completely rid the body of the virus, although it is expected to prevent transmission between an HIV-positive person and an HIV-negative person, which in itself, suggests massive break-though. 

How is this a massive breakthrough when this happens anyway? Christine Maggiore? Paul Michael Glaser etc.

…The virus itself has been known to hide deep within the patient’s DNA, rendering itself invisible to the immune system and therefore to drugs and in so doing, it becomes part of the person’s genetic code.

If it’s deep within a patient’s DNA, perhaps it originates from there? If it is there!

 

[Source: Las Vegas Guardian Express]

Bone loss is associated with HIV and also ART… Huh?

HIV infection is associated with loss of bone mineral density and an increased risk of fractures. Loss of bone continues after HIV therapy is started, and decreases in BMD of between 2 and 6% typically occur in the first two years of antiretroviral therapy.

…“We found that even after controlling for multiple confounders such as BMI that there was a robust relationship between low baseline CD4+ count and greater bone loss after ART [antiretroviral therapy] initiation,” comment the authors. “The underlying reason for the relationship between low baseline CD4+ count and bone loss with ART initiation is not known but suggests a potential role for the immune system in skeletal maintenance.”

Older age (each additional year, p < 0.001), female sex (p = 0.007), low BMI (p < 0.001) and a high HIV viral load (p = 0.002) were also associated with greater bone loss.

…There was also a significant interaction between lower CD4 cell count and higher viral load and BMD loss (p = 0.043). In patients with a higher viral load, the negative effect of a low CD4 cell count on BMD was greater than in individuals with a lower viral load.

The investigators note that the BMD changes found in their study were relatively “modest” and of unknown clinical significance. They also emphasise that they did not have data on some factors associated with bone loss such as tobacco and alcohol use, testosterone and vitamin D levels, and use of medicines that can affect BMD.

Perhaps the more immunity resources a body has to allocate for fighting infection/inflammation, the less is available for skeletal maintenance? In any case, if certain ART is associated with bone loss just like HIV is, then, unofficially, ART is contributing to an AIDS-defining illness; particularly if skeletal maintenance is intimate with the immune system.

Dodging blanks

One half of chart-topping duo Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, the hitmaker has opened up about his mum’s health battle in a new Rolling Stone article, confessing she contracted the disease years before he was born – but didn’t realise she was ill until her son was a baby.

Lewis reveals his sister was also born HIV-free, and the lawsuit over the transfusion put him through college.

The DJ admits his mother was given just three years to live when he was young, but she’s still alive.

How can you ever realise you’re ill when you’re not suffering, i.e. not ill? Is it not suspicious that both children were born HIV- from an untreated mother; one who was tested in a likely window of ‘false-positives’?

While his mother is thankfully alive, has she suffered any side effects from wholly unnecessary medication? We can never know if her HIV positivity was chronic enough to require some sort of intervention.

[Source: Express]

A Lighthouse of darkness goes out

A popular branch of the Terrence Higgins Trust, the London Lighthouse – visited by the late Princess Diana, amongst other luminaries – is set to close.

Ward said that the charity had owned the building since 2000, but had decided to sell the property after reductions in local authority and NHS funding for HIV support services, and following a drop in the number of people needing the services offered at the centre.

The charity has had financial difficulties in recent years and has made more than 100 staff redundant over the past four years. It currently has a workforce of about 300.

Local authority, NHS and public support dropped because we’re coming to realise that HIV is not a significant risk to most of the public.

[Source: Third Sector]

When you don’t know you’re ill

The UK Department of Health has released an infographic. Let’s break this down shall we?

• 25,000 (1/4) people in the UK don’t know they have HIV. If this figure is true, are these all ticking time-bomb recent infections, or is there a contingent that has been HIV+ for many years with little or no chance of falling will with an AIDS-defining condition?
• There is a 1 in 5 million chance of getting HIV from medical staff (dentists, surgeons) who will now be allowed to work as long as their ‘viral load’ is controlled. I think this is a bit conservative. There is likely zero risk of infection on the basis of dissident viewpoints, and even under orthodoxy we haven’t seen, for example, any statistically significant incidence of HIV infection from needle-stick injuries; even when from un-medicated patients.
• Early diagnosis and treatment is vital… But is that applicable to any of the figurative 25,000 who may have been HIV+ for many decades and will likely continue to live in ignorance?
• During 2011 half of new cases were diagnosed late… They were diagnosed with a disease branded AIDS-defining because it appeared with a HIV+ status. Did the disease and other health threats cause HIV positivity, rather than the other way round?

 

 

Home HIV testing

[A] quarter of people who have the human immunodeficiency virus are not aware they have been infected.

…Public Health Minister Anna Soubry said: “I hope that by removing the ban on self-testing kits people will be able to choose the right time and right surroundings to take a test and, if positive, help them get the best treatment available.”

Makes sense. You test HIV+ with no good clue as to when you were ‘infected’, as you’re not suffering, so you should be treated with drugs that have known detrimental effects on the immune system, on the basis of a test that has no gold standard due to no viral purification. Yes, that makes sense when you shut your mind.

[Source: Sky News]

Bitten by the bug?

When PC Moffat got into the vehicle ahead of McNeilly, he felt a sharp pain on the top of his head when he was bitten.

He is to be tested in October to determine if he has the disease [HIV/AIDS] and carries the burden of not knowing how it will affect him.

…McNeilly was taken to Helen Street Police Office and told staff he was HIV positive.

Constable Moffat was later treated at the Infectious Disease Department at Gartnavel.

Even under the orthodox viewpoint this is absurd. Viruses cannot be transferred by teeth, and not only would you need to be sure of bleeding gums for blood mixture, the findings that oxygen kills ‘HIV’ and minute quantities are not enough invalidates the need for testing. If Moffat is being treated with a preventative, we may be seeing a re-tread of the McNack case.

*This blogger’s comment on the linked article below has not been approved.

[Source: Glasgow Evening Times]

Stunted growth… HIV-associated?

Improving the quality of water and hand-washing could add half a centimetre on average to the height of children under five – as it is thought that dirty water and poor hygiene can increase the risk of infection in the child’s gut, reducing the amount of nutrients that can be absorbed.

…Undernutrition is a cause of 3.1 million deaths annually – accounting for nearly half of all deaths of children under five years old. Dr Dangour, who is also a senior research fellow at the Department for International Development (DfID), added: “Providing clean water, sanitation and hygiene is an effective way to reduce the incidence and associated deaths from diseases such as diarrhoea – which remains the third biggest killer of under-fives worldwide. For the first time our analysis suggests that better access to these services may also have a small but important impact on the growth of young children.”

…Five years ago, the World Health Organisation estimated that 50 per cent of childhood malnutrition is associated with repeated diarrhoea or intestinal worm infections. The authors hope that this report – the first to quantify how water and sanitation measures can aid growth – can inform new policy.

In 2005 the WHO released a report entitled Growth Failure in HIV-infected children. So… What’s the problem here again? The combined effects of poverty or a microbe? If you’re going to donate to a charity to help with African AIDS, the most rational choice would be WaterAid.

[Source: The Independent]