“By the way, on the 10 years thing: they’re now admitting cases will go 20, 30 years, possibly more of “HIV infection” and no symptoms at all. Starting to look like longer than that but we’ve only HAD 30 years to observe.”

We’ve been over this before. 10 years is (roughly) the median period between initial HIV infection and the onset of AIDS in untreated people. Median means half the people will have developed AIDS up to that point. Half won’t. Most of those who haven’t developed AIDS by year 10 will develop it at some stage after that. Maybe at 15, or 20, or 25 years. Some may never do so. The median “latency” has been known since the late 80s, when there were cohorts with a known date of seroconversion dating back to the late 70s. It was possible to find these cohorts by testing stored blood samples from that time once tests were developed in the mid 1980s.

There have been numerous natural history studies which have confirmed this. This paper reviews 38 such studies from Europe, North America and Australia:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10791375

There are similar studies of African and Asian HIV seroconverters:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18032940

“I will remind people as I have so many times, we were told originally this was a sexually transmissable disease and if you got infected you would likely be dead within a year so a positive diagnosis meant you needed to be on chemotherapy immediately.”

No, people were not told to go on therapy immediately after an HIV diagnosis. In fact, throughout the 1980s antiretroviral therapy was reserved only for those who had progressed to AIDS/ARC. From 1990 antiretroviral therapy could be used at an earlier stage than that, but only once there was evidence of disease progression. There was a brief period shortly after the development of HAART when some (notably David Ho) recommended to “hit hard and early” in the hope of knocking out the infection. More recently there is a trend to earlier treatment because there is increasing evidence that the benefits of early treatment outweigh the longer term toxicity of prolonged treatment. But there is still a lot of discussion about how early.

There has never been a time that a “positive diagnosis” was thought to have a prognosis of a year or so. That is complete nonsense. You are confusing a diagnosis of AIDS (which indeed had a median survival of about a year) with a diagnosis of HIV infection.

As to healthy gut flora having limited power to fix immune deficiency, cures are never guaranteed, pretty much not with anything (what exactly does Medicine cure??). But without healing the gut, a cure is absolutely and completely without reach. That would be the first critical step. And then, depending on how much damage has been done, and what kind of other immune support is available, a full recovery might just be within reach.

So let’s say Duesberg’s wrong; HIV can cause immune deficiency after all. But it can take decades before doing anything, possibly an entire lifetime.

Which is yet another blow to the orthodoxy–which I will remind people as I have so many times, we were told originally this was a sexually transmissable disease and if you got infected you would likely be dead within a year so a positive diagnosis meant you needed to be on chemotherapy immediately.

And while they still won’t admit this, usually, it means we likely killed a bunch of people by putting them on chemo prematurely at minimum.

And that’s not even counting Luc Montagnier (you know, the guy who got the nobel for HIV’s discovery) saying that a healthy immune system can fight off HIV naturally, surviving and fighting off many contacts with it on its own. Some have screamed that he was taken out of context and point to this or that other statement, but it’s the truth, it’s what he said: a healthy immune system can fight this thing off on its own. So even if you believe Duesberg’s wrong and HIV is pathogenic, we grossly, massively overstated its pathogenic potential.

And here we still have these millions in Africa dying of malnutrition and poor sanitary conditions, and we’re giving them chemotherapy before we begin giving them decent food or clean drinking water.

What a tragic mess. All because we believed this was the killer virus of all time.

The AIDS hysteria is over. All that’s left is to clean up what’s left of the mess. And start explaining the corpses with something other than just “the virus killed us, and we did our best at the time.” Obviously there was something wrong with “the best.” There’s no more getting away from it.

But no, let’s not do that. Let’s make blood-spattered photos of reporters who dared to report on the critics instead.

Some-one actually gets it.

Thanks, jrogge.

I read the article and finally pieced together what these people are calling the “largest part of the immune system” They are referring to the lining of the gut, and it having semi-permeable qualities to allow nutrients and disallow larger particles like cells (microbes) into the body. This is not an immune function. Also information regarding toll-like receptors is being misapplied to form a misleading conclusion.

These scientists are stretching a lot of facts to come to an absurd conclusion here. This is hardly vanguard research, they are using uncommonly known, OLD scientific facts, packaging this as “vanguard research” and boondoggling people who desperately want to believe in something.

The only time the gut has a serious effect on the immune system is early in life, when the lymphoid tissue associated with the area (lymphoid tissue is where the immune system actually produces cells, this is different from the epithelial tissue/lining that some people are describing) produces antibodies for invaders in the gut and learns to leave beneficial flora alive. In some cases the first type of bacteria to colonize an infants colon are probably going to a have the most influence on the type of intestinal flora that will appear throughout life.

Toll-like receptors (what I think the “scientists” involved with this lovely justification for a lowered immune response which is quite bogus I assure you) are in all epithelial tissue. Your skin, the inside of your airways, inside of your stomach, inside of your mouth, and etc. all contain cells that help mediate an immune response.

Where is this all going? The fact that studies have shown that using a probiotic to reenforce the gut flora has helped reduce the shrinking number of CD4 cells of children and adults with HIV probably because of oral tolerance and increased immune system stimulus (notice this is not production of cells, just stimulus this is a key difference) due to reinforcement of gut flora. Oral tolerance also helps mitigate auto-immune reactions and allergies.

Now where the truth is being stretched here is by saying that mediating the immune damage by bolstering the gut flora is the proof that it is not HIV but something happening in the gut. The person still has HIV, their blood cells still diminish, and stopping the probiotic will start the process of unmitigated, HIV caused WBC destruction all over again. What you are seeing here is mitigated WBC destruction, and while it is undoubtedly helpful to the HIV carrier it is not a cure or proof that the disease is not caused by HIV. Also, the time for studies such as these to go for more than a decade hasn’t been reached. Since it can take over 10 years for some people to develop AIDS; studies even going lengths of 2 years are insufficient. In addition, there are no studies done on people with a T-cell count of under 500 that I have read. The results of these studies done on HIV positive patients were positive benefits of maybe 200 more cells after a certain duration than the control group, which is really nothing when you count these things in thousands. However, it does stop many stomach problems and eases intestinal discomfort in people infected with HIV.

It is doubtful that a gut flora imbalance is the cause of AIDS and the people trying to sell you this are quite dishonest.

I agree, Dean: all the world’s coolest people were born in July. Celia, I hope it was a good dream, and have a great birthday!