1. Peter Duesberg's new article on AIDS

2. Aids Myths ... Health Education Aids Liason San Diego

3. "AIDS in Asia ? killer epidemic in sex paradise" or just Hype?

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1. Peter Duesberg's new article on AIDS

The chemical bases of the various AIDS epidemics: recreational drugs, anti-viral chemotherapy and malnutrition.

PETER DUESBERG , CLAUS KOEHNLEIN* and DAVID RASNICK, Donner Laboratory, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA. J. Biosci. Vol. 28 No. 4 June 2003 383?412 © Indian Academy of Sciences http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/data/pddrchemical.pdf

A few extracts - I have re-arranged the order:

1.2 African epidemic

A new AIDS epidemic was also claimed to have emerged in sub-Saharan Africa in 1984 (Bayley 1984; Piot et al 1984; Seligmann et al 1984; Van de Perre et al 1984; Quinn et al 1986, 1987). In sharp contrast to its US/European namesakes, the African AIDS epidemic is randomly distributed between the sexes and not restricted to behavioural risk groups (Blattner et al 1988; Duesberg 1988; World Health Organization 2001a). Hence sub-Saharan African AIDS is compatible with a random, either micro-bial or chemical cause.

The African epidemic is also a collection of long-established, indigenous diseases, such as chronic fevers, weight loss, alias "slim disease", diarrhea and tuberculosis (table 2), (Colebunders et al 1987; Konotey-Ahulu 1987a, b, 1989; Pallangyo et al 1987; Duesberg 1992).

However, the distribution of AIDS-defining diseases in Africa differs strongly from those in the US and Europe (table 2). For example, the predominant and most distinctive AIDS diseases in the US and Europe, Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia and Kaposi's sarcoma, are almost never diagnosed in Africa (Goodgame 1990; Abouya et al 1992). According to the WHO the African epidemic has increased from 1984 until the early 1990s, similar to the epidemics of the US and Europe, but has since leveled off to generate about 75,000 cases annually (figure 1c), (World Health Organization 2001b, and back issues). By 2001, Africa had reportedly generated a cumulative total of 1,093,522 cases (World Health Organization 2001b).

However, there are three reasons for questioning these numbers: (i) During the African AIDS epidemic, the sub-Saharan African population has grown, at an annual rate of about 2.6% per year ? from 378 million in 1980 to 652 million in 2000 (US Bureau of the Census International Data Base 2001). Thus Africa had gained since 1980 274 million people, the equivalent of the whole population of the US! Therefore, a possible, above-normal loss of 1 million Africans over a period in which over 200 millions were gained is statistically hard, if not impossible to verify? unless the African AIDS diseases were highly distinctive.

(ii) However, the African AIDS-defining diseases are clinically indistinguishable from conventional African morbidity and mortality (see above).

(iii) Further the HIV-based definition of AIDS (see § 3) can not be used in Africa to distinguish AIDS-defining from otherwise indistinguishable diseases, because as of 1985 the WHO decided at a conference in Bangui, Africa, to accept African AIDS diagnoses without HIV-tests (see § 3). This was done because these tests are unaffordable in most African countries (World Health Organization 1986; Fiala 1998; Fiala et al 2002). Thus without the CDC's HIV standard (§ 3), the diagnosis of African AIDS is arbitrary. ...

5. Epilogue

5.1 Why is AIDS research not free to investigate non-HIV hypotheses?

The probable answer to the question, why HIV-AIDS researchers do not study or fund non-HIV-AIDS theories, lays in the structure of the large, government-sponsored research programs that dominate academic research since World War II (Duesberg 1996b). Such programs favour individual investigators who contribute to the establishment a maximum of data and a minimum of controversy. However, if individual researchers move into new directions, that threaten the scientific and commercial investments of the establishment, the establishment can impose various sanctions via the "peer review system". The most powerful of these are denial of funding and of publication.

The peer review system derives its power from the little known practice of governments to deputize their authority to distribute funds for research to committees of "experts". These experts are academic researchers distinguished by outstanding contributions to the current establishment. They alone review the merits of research applications from their peers, and they have the right to elect each other to review committees. Outwardly, this "peer review system" appears to the unsuspecting government and taxpayer as the equivalent of a jury system? free of all conflicts of interest. But, in view of the many professional and commercial investments in and benefits from their expertise, and even of the rewards from their universities and institutions for the corresponding overheads and partnerships? all legal in the US since president Reagan ? "peer reviewers" do not fund applications that challenge their own interests (Duesberg 1996b; Lang 1998; Zuger 2001). Since "peer review" is protected by anonymity, does not allow the applicant personal representation or an independent representative, nor a say or even a veto in the selection of the "jury", and does not allow an appeal, its powers to defend the orthodoxy are unlimited. The corporate equivalent of academia's peer review system" would be to give General Motors and Ford the authority to review and veto all innovations by less established carmakers competing for the consumer.

Even the professional journals and the science writers of the public media comply with the interests of government- funded majorities because they depend on their monthly "scientific breakthroughs", the lucrative advertisements from their companies, and the opinion of their subscribers. For example, an early precursor of this article was written in response to an open invitation from a pharmacology-journal over 3 years ago. But, after considerable pressure on the journal from anonymous "AIDS experts", the editor requested a reduced article, which was neither accepted nor rejected. Instead, the editor simply dropped all further correspondence. Subsequently, the editor of a prestigious German-based science journal invited another precursor of this article 2 years ago, which received two favourable reviews in short order. But before the manuscript could be revised, the editor informed us that the publisher was concerned about losing subscribers if our paper were published and ceased all further correspondence. It is this passive resistance that can grind down even the most determined truth seeker.

However, the mere potential to resolve the agony of AIDS by alternative hypotheses, such as ours, should be sufficient reason to replace the medieval "peer review system" by a modern jury system without conflicts of interest and with rights for representation and appeals of the applicant. If the current, unproductive AIDS establishment objects, because AIDS-science is too complex to be understood by non-HIV-AIDS scientists, funding should be withheld until the AIDS establishment finds ways to explain the complexity and merits of its expertise to other scientists.

Synopsis

In 1981 a new epidemic of about two-dozen heterogeneous diseases began to strike non-randomly growing numbers of male homosexuals and mostly male intravenous drug users in the US and Europe. Assuming immunodeficiency as the common denominator the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) termed the epidemic, AIDS, for acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. From 1981?1984 leading researchers including those from the CDC proposed that recreational drug use was the cause of AIDS, because of exact correlations and of drug-specific diseases. However, in 1984 US government researchers proposed that a virus, now termed human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), is the cause of the non-random epidemics of the US and Europe but also of a new, sexually random epidemic in Africa. The virus-AIDS hypothesis was instantly accepted, but it is burdened with numerous paradoxes, none of which could be resolved by 2003: Why is there no HIV in most AIDS patients, only antibodies against it? Why would HIV take 10 years from infection to AIDS? Why is AIDS not self-limiting via antiviral immunity? Why is there no vaccine against AIDS? Why is AIDS in the US and Europe not random like other viral epidemics? Why did AIDS not rise and then decline exponentially owing to antiviral immunity like all other viral epidemics? Why is AIDS not contagious? Why would only HIV carriers get AIDS who use either recreational or anti-HIV drugs or are subject to malnutrition? Why is the mortality of HIV-antibody-positives treated with anti-HIV drugs 7?9%, but that of all (mostly untreated) HIV-positives globally is only 1.4%? Here we propose that AIDS is a collection of chemical epidemics, caused by recreational drugs, anti-HIV drugs, and malnutrition.

According to this hypothesis AIDS is not contagious, not immuno-genic, not treatable by vaccines or antiviral drugs, and HIV is just a passenger virus. The hypothesis explains why AIDS epidemics strike non-randomly if caused by drugs and randomly if caused by malnutrition, why they manifest in drug- and malnutrition-specific diseases, and why they are not self-limiting via anti-viral immunity. The hypothesis predicts AIDS prevention by adequate nutrition and abstaining from drugs, and even cures by treating AIDS diseases with proven medications.

...

4. Chemical AIDS

"Historically, the first step in determining the cause of any disease has always been to find out if there is any-thing, apart from the disease itself, that sufferers have in common" (Cairns 1978). However, the traditional search for the cause is only completed, if something that sufferers have in common can also be shown to cause the disease; in other words if Koch's postulates can be fulfilled (Merriam-Webster 1965). This is true for viruses just as much as for drugs. Following this tradition, we try here to provide proof of principle for our drug and mal-nutrition hypothesis of AIDS ? alias chemical AIDS. ...

4.5 Prediction 4: No AIDS in the absence of anti-viral and recreational drugs, despite HIV

To test this prediction, HIV antibody-positive people, who are not using drugs, must be identified who survive the average hypothetical latent period from HIV to AIDS of 5?10 years (§ 3, table 4). The following examples meet this prediction.

In 2002 the San Francisco Chronicle described a small group of drug-free and AIDS-free long-term survivors of HIV. Among them is a healthy artist who is HIV-positive for 23 years (based on frozen blood samples) and was "chastised by his doctors when he refused to start taking medication" (Hendrix 2002). Further, a 1-year old HIV-positive, AZT-treated baby girl with severe muscle pain, insomnia, nausea and failure to grow was taken off AZT treatments in 1992 based on our hypothesis; as a result the baby immediately recovered (Duesberg 1996b). Now, at the age of 11, she is a completely normal, healthy kid, and a leading player in her school's soccer team (Sheryl and Steve Nagel, personal communication).

In addition, People magazine just described a healthy woman who is HIV-positive for an estimated 15 years, and "needs no medication". The woman has since founded a support group, termed Center for Positive Connections, for HIV-positive heterosexuals in Miami (Cheakalos and Rosza 2002). In Los Angeles, Christine Maggiore is HIV-posi-tive since1992, has given birth to two very healthy chil-dren, ages 1 and 5, and has never taken anti-HIV drugs. Maggiore, a former HIV-AIDS counselor, has since also founded a support group, Alive & Well, and has written a book, What if everything you thought you knew about AIDS was wrong?, to instruct HIV-positives not to use anti-HIV drugs (Maggiore 2000). An appendix of the book features letters from 34 Maggiore-graduates, all living over 10 years with HIV but without anti-HIV drugs, or after having discontinued such drugs.

Even HIV-AIDS researchers have inadvertently confimed our prediction of no AIDS in drug-free HIV-positives. For example, David Ho, signatory of the Durban Declaration, points out that in a group of "long-term survivors" of HIV studied in his lab, "none had received antiretroviral therapy" (Cao et al 1995). In a parallel pub-lication, Pantaleo et al studying a group of long-term "non-progressors" of HIV have made the same observation (Pantaleo et al 1995). ...

In an effort to obtain independent proof that abstaining from anti-HIV drugs and recreational drugs is sufficient to survive HIV-infection or even to recover from AIDS, one of us, CK, in 1985 initiated a study of AIDS patients from Kiel, Germany, who have volunteered to abstain from anti-HIV treatments. Remarkably, only 8% (3 of 36) of the patients not treated with anti-HIV drugs have died since their HIV antibodies were first detected, two of them 16 years and one 10 years after their first diagnosis of antibodies against HIV (table 8). Most have recovered from their initial AIDS-indicator symptoms. By contrast, 63% of all German AIDS patients (11,700 out of 18,700) of which most were treated since 1987 with anti-HIV drugs have died (Robert Koch Institut 2000). Thus our relatively small sample supports the hypothesis that without anti-HIV drugs and/or recreational drugs HIV fails to cause AIDS. Indeed without drugs AIDS patients recover, despite the presence of HIV.

4.6 In sum, the chemical AIDS-hypothesis explains the AIDS facts, and resolves all paradoxes of the HIV-AIDS hypothesis ... The chemical AIDS hypothesis could be readily refuted by any of the following experiments:

(i) Demonstrate that in two matched groups, differing only with regard to HIV infection, HIV-positives develop AIDS but HIV-negatives do not (above the low, long-established risk of AIDS defining diseases in the general population). HIV antibody-positive and negative recruits from the US Army, which tests routinely for HIV, would be ideal for this experiment since their health, lifestyles and age are closely matched.

(ii) Demonstrate that in two matched groups of intrave-nous drug users, differing only in the presence of HIV, only the HIV-positives develop AIDS diseases.

(iii) Demonstrate that in two matched groups of HIV-positive humans, differing only in the addiction to recrea-tional drugs, both groups have the same incidence of AIDS-defining diseases.

(iv) Demonstrate that in two matched groups of HIV-free humans or animals, differing only with regard to the addiction to or treatment with recreational drugs, neither group would develop AIDS defining diseases over time.

(v) Demonstrate that in two matched groups of HIV- positives, differing only in the treatment with anti-HIV drugs, the untreated group develops AIDS long before the treated group.

(vi) Demonstrate that in two matched groups of pregnant, HIV-positive mothers, differing only in the now standard treatment with AZT during the last two trimesters, those treated with AZT are free of abortions and deliver healthy babies, but those who are not treated either abort spontaneously or deliver babies with AIDS.

(vii) Demonstrate that in two groups of HIV-positive hemophiliacs matched for age and lifetime dosage of fac-tor VIII, differing only in anti-HIV treatments, those who are untreated have a higher mortality and a higher AIDS risk than treated controls. Although the controlled studies proposed here follow classical, scientific standards, they are not available in the huge AIDS literature. This is surprising in view of the many AIDS advocacy groups or "activists" reviewing AIDS research for flaws and for new clues. The lack of adequately controlled studies of the long-term effects of recreational drugs and anti-HIV drugs in animals is parti-cularly surprising, because all of these drugs and research funds for AIDS are abundant. Yet despite the scientific intolerance of current AIDS science for alternative hypo-theses (Weiss and Jaffe 1990; Cohen 1994; O'Brien and Goedert 1996), the pathogenicity of most of the chemicals proposed here to cause AIDS ? illicit drugs, antiviral drugs, and malnutrition ? has de facto already been proved ? even by HIV-AIDS researchers, despite their efforts to the contrary [see above, tables 6 and 7 and Duesberg and Rasnick (1998)]. Suppose the chemical-AIDS hypothesis were confirmed and accepted: AIDS would be entirely preventable by banning anti-HIV drugs, by publicizing that recreatio-nal drugs cause AIDS and by adequate nutrition. Moreover, many AIDS patients could still be saved from fatal damage by drug intoxication, if their AIDS-defining diseases were treated with time-proven, disease-specific medications. Such testable predictions are the hallmarks of a good hypothesis.

So, why do current AIDS researchers not investigate and not even consider the role of chemicals in AIDS or study other non-HIV-AIDS theories to solve the AIDS dilemma? The following is an attempt to answer this question.

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2. Aids Myths ... Health Education Aids Liason San Diego

http://www.healsd.org/lies.htm

Here are a few bits:

 1. Myth: AIDS is a disease of the immune system. Truth: AIDS is a disease of toxicity.

2. Myth: "HIV tests" detect antibodies to HIV. Truth: "HIV tests" react to cellular particles found in all of us.

3. Myth: "AIDS drugs" prolong life. In Poison by Prescription: The AZT Story, John Lauritsen chronicles how AZT, a deadly chemotherapy drug from the 1960s was resurrected in the age of AIDS.

PETITION OF SUPPORT for Thabo Mbeki

In science, no theory should be immune from challenge, and debate over an issue affecting millions of lives should never be declared over. I support South African President Thabo Mbeki's intention to investigate the definition, causation, treatment and prevention of "AIDS". http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/news/mbeki.htm

3. 'AIDS in Asia killer epidemic in sex paradise' or just Hype?

DANGER FROM THE FAR EAST

By Christian Fiala, 1998

http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/data/chrfthai.htm

The horror stories from Africa with their supposed six million AIDS deaths also could not escape the fate of all headlines, they were becoming dated, had worn themselves out, and no longer interested the readers. They had, so to speak, written off the "dark continent". People knew that civil war was raging there, that chaos ruled, that AIDS was snatching people away, and they had adapted their own behaviour to it.

The woman civil servant I once unwillingly listened to as she told her friend how she "spent the whole week with this enormous Black without leaving the room" has probably changed her holiday habits. Having sex in Africa was universally regarded as being risky, and so it was ? not least of course because of the number of sexually transmitted diseases raging there.

To the extent that "sex tourism" to Africa disappeared from consciousness, the fear that AIDS could leap from Africa to Europe generally died down. The African "AIDS catastrophe" had become a catastrophe that no longer concerned us.

The AIDS scare thus needed a new peg, and the newspapers quickly found one: Asia, preferably Thailand.

Once again Der Spiegel proved its market leadership: on the front cover under the headline "AIDS in Asia ? killer epidemic in sex paradise", an Asian woman peeks over a lace fan patterned with death's heads. The inside headline is certainly familiar: "AIDS ? a continent on the edge of the abyss". A huge abyss. After Africa has fallen in, now it's Asia's turn.

The lead-in is also remarkably reminiscent of the magazine's reporting on Africa: "On the world's most populous continent AIDS, the immuno-deficiency disease, is spreading like wildfire". And then the necessary escalation from the African to the Asian apocalypse. "Asia will soon have more cases than Africa. Experts are expecting millions of deaths and more victims than anywhere else if something isn't done soon".

To increase the horror of the domestic reader, whose attention has already been grabbed by the "sex paradise" headline, the first photograph shows an obviously German tourist with a group of Asian prostitutes. A doomed man, so to say.

And just as it had done in its first AIDS cover story, Der Spiegel gets poetic in its first paragraph. "The world is living in the age of the bloodthirsty goddess. But the devastating work of the mistress of all epidemics will soon be threatening to visit an apocalyptic plague on the whole continent of Asia, where her myth was born... it came, said the Thai epidemiologist Mitchai Wirawaidja, like an incredible flood overnight."

I am not a Thai epidemiologist, but this is one opinion that I can argue with on the basis of my own experience. AIDS did not come in 1993 "overnight" as described in the Spiegel article. It was already there when I visited Thailand in 1987/88.

Like all of my colleagues, after finishing university I had been looking for a post in a hospital in order to complete my training. I took the opportunity of an exchange programme to move to a clinic in Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok.

After a few months colleagues pointed out some rooms on the second floor of an annex that were not freely accessible because they housed special patients ? AIDS patients.

Officially AIDS did not exist in Thailand at the time. True, isolated cases had been described in particular examinations, but the understanding was that it was always a matter of foreigners or Thais who had been infected while abroad. Foreigners were deported immediately on diagnosis.

HIV tests were not carried out in any systematic way. Even blood donors only had to be checked after a law introduced in 1989.

The background to this approach was a political decision by the Thai government. People were afraid that reports of AIDS would endanger tourisme, the country's most important source of income.

Only over the course of time did the pressure become so great that the government was forced to abandon this strategy and from the middle of 1989 started investigating the HIV virus intensively. Logically, the next year the number of HIV-positive tests shot up, because all the long-existent cases were made public all at once. The statistics from Thailand thus provided what the statistics from Europe no longer showed ? an "explosive spread of HIV"? and so the medical journals competed with the tabloid press in coming up with gloomy prophesies. Talk was of "the fastest epidemiological spread of HIV by sexual transmission ever recorded", and no chance was missed to point out that "heterosexual transmission is absolutely dominant". In a study of soldiers, almost all those who were HIV positive admitted that they had been infected by prostitutes, and thus provided the "scientific" basis for the attendant headlines in Germany and Austria. "There are two million prostitutes in Thailand. The country is in danger of sinking into an AIDS hell. More than a third of the street girls are already HIV positive" Heidi Riepl reported live from Thailand for the Oberösterreichische Nachrichten, and put the emotional connection to the homeland in bold letters: "Europeans think that the whole of Thailand is a brothel".

They would have to, too, if they took Riepl's "two million prostitutes" at face value. In all, Thailand ? about the same size as France ? has a population of some 50 million. "Two million prostitutes" would mean that almost one in twelve Thai women, from babies to old women, was a prostitute. Prostitution in Thailand has in fact long been widespread.

Even the Government admits to a hundred thousand prostitutes. Estimates range from two hundred thousand to five hundred thousand. This prostitution is the logical flip side of a social system that is extremely strict on sexual matters.

If one disregards the major exception of Bangkok, with its estimated nine million inhabitants, most of the population lives in the countryside or in small towns. The country is blessed with a landscape that is not only particularly beautiful but also unbelievably productive, which is why Thailand has become one of the world's major rice exporters. Living standards, the infrastructure and medical standards are generally comparable with southern Europe and have little in common with those of developing countries. As far as levels of hygiene are concerned, Thailand need not fear comparison with Europe. On top of this, the kingdom is one of the few countries to have escaped colonialism, because France to the east and Britain to the west wanted a neutral buffer-state between the territories they occupied. It is thanks to this accident of history that Thailand has been able to retain its language, culture and tradition right up to the present day.

Part of this tradition is the very rigid division of roles between men and women, which subjects women to an extremely strict code of behaviour. Premarital sex is strictly forbidden. A kiss or holding hands in public is absolutely unthinkable. When visits do take place it is under strict supervision. A woman is expected to enter marriage as a virgin. Just as naturally, men are expected to have pre-marital sexual experience. The result is well-developed prostitution ? which is illegal, just as it is in particular European countries. As in the rest of the world, the law is not observed, and in particular areas ? some corners of Bangkok or Phuket and whole districts of Pattaya ? it is publicly flouted. But, as in all puritanical regions, the sex bars don't indicate sexual permissiveness but, quite the reverse, sexual restriction ? and naturally discussion of sex is taboo.

Since there is no registered prostitution, HIV tests cannot be carried out among prostitutes systematically: the girls who work in massage parlours or who work in the sex bars whose owner hasn't given the police a big enough bribe are rounded up. On such occasions, in 1992 one in four women was HIV positive, and in the north even one in two. How far this kind of result can be applied to all Thai prostitutes is unclear: the samples are by no means representative. On top of this, the most important accompanying questions are not asked. How often did these prostitutes practice anal intercourse? How many of them are drug addicts? (In northern Thailand ? as I will discuss below ? drug addiction is extremely widespread.) How often do women prostitutes live with the men who are selling their own services?

This is a second sexual characteristic of Thailand: homosexuality is unusually widespread. True, it is taboo, but is presumably encouraged by the strict separation of the sexes. Thus in various studies 25 per cent of men admitted to sexual experience with the same sex and up to 15 per cent had practised anal intercourse. The small ads in the two English-language Thai dailies that I read regularly during my stay in Bangkok carried almost as many references to gay bars as they did to other sex bars.

Apart from this, similar rules seem to operate as in heterosexual sex-life in Thailand. There is widespread homosexual prostitution, also used by foreigners, which is numerically almost as extensive as heterosexual prostitution. Thus scientists who carried out a study on syphilis and HIV infections in Chiang Mai (a northern city of about 150.000 inhabitants, the same size as Würzburg or Innsbruck) were able to get as many as 1,172 male prostitutes to participate.

Twenty per cent of them were HIV positive.

Another figure is noticeable: 57 per cent of those questioned characterised themselves as heterosexual, 14 per cent were even married.

For them, same-sex prostitution was just a kind of side job, the risks of which they were not remotely capable of assessing. Almost half of them never or only occasionally used a condom actively or passively, although anal intercourse is quite common.

"Outside work" more than half of the Chiang Mai male prostitutes said they preferred sex with a woman. It is safe to assume that many of them had a girlfriend who was also a prostitute.

On the basis that in long-term cohabitation there is a seven to ten per cent chance of HIV being transmitted from a man to a woman, and that this probability rises to 46 per cent if there is anal intercourse, this is undoubtedly the most important source of infection.

As in Europe, drug use is another source of infection. The border region between Thailand, Burma and Laos, the so-called Golden Triangle, is the world's largest opium-poppy growing area. It is well known that raw opium and subsequently Heroin is produced, and naturally nothing can stop part of the production being sold and consumed in the producing country.

Thailand thus has a considerable drug problem, and is just as incapable of solving it as the countries of the West. Officially, anything that could damage Thailand's image is treated with extreme caution, but nevertheless about a hundred thousand drug addicts, 0.2 per cent of the population, are admitted to (Germany has 0.15 per cent). About 40 per cent of these drug addicts are HIV positive, and presumable a not inconsiderable proportion of these men and women get the money for Heroin through prostitution.

Just as they are here, though somewhat more arbitrarily, the addicts are put in jail and there prevented somewhat less than they are here from continuing to shoot up their Heroin. Since it is not always possible to get new needles in prison, needles are shared ? an ideal way of transmitting HIV.

This explains the results of an investigation into Thai drug addicts, which showed that practically all those who were HIV positive had done time in prison, thus also explaining why northern Thailand is the region hit hardest by HIV and thus by AIDS.

For myself, as I knew all these circumstances, it was already clear to me in 1987 that AIDS would have to be more widespread in Thailand than elsewhere. It was also clear to me that this had nothing to do with Thai AIDS viruses having behaved differently to those in Europe and being transmitted through the vagina.

What is the basis of this conviction? This emerges in exemplary fashion from an investigation carried out among recruits in northern Thailand which triggered off a spate of horror stories. In contrast to my experience with young Austrian soldiers, among whom cases of HIV are found only rarely, here 7 per cent had already been infected. The findings in the Golden Triangle were even more shocking, where it was established that 15.3 per cent were HIV positive.

The authors of the study drew a simple conclusion: "All HIV-positive men in our study had been infected by sex with female prostitutes."

This was justified on the basis of statements by the men concerned, only very few of whom declared themselves as homosexual while three-quarters admitted having slept with a prostitute at least once. Since very many prostitutes in this part of Thailand are HIV positive, everything fits together, so to speak.

Only it also fits together that northern Thailand has the most drug addicts and a particularly high number of homosexual rent boys, and that soldiers are particularly averse to admitting to their homosexuality, let alone homosexual prostitution.

The authors of the north Thailand study were theoretically well aware of the problem. They expressly stated that it was not possible to verify the truth of the statements concerning contacts with prostitutes.

Nevertheless, they did not for one moment call into question their result, which contradicted all the results from Europe and the USA, but only noted laconically in a subclause: "The reasons for the frequent transmission of HIV from women to men in Thailand are unknown."

One of the few supervised Thai partner studies, within which the degree to which people who were HIV positive infected their partners was to be investigated, came to the same result as corresponding investigations in Europe: the danger of infection from women to men is as good as nil.

Nevertheless, the American Harvard virologist Max Essex travels the world presenting from lecture to lecture the thesis that, because HIV sub-type E is supposedly five-hundred times more infections than sub-type B which has so far been prevalent in Europe, the sub-type E common in Thailand is responsible for the rapid spread of the disease among heterosexuals? because the vaginal mucous membrane is supposedly particularly permeable to the E type.

As might be expected, a new wave of alarmed and alarming newspaper articles was triggered off. For Austria, the Kurier of 29 November 1995 saw the "second AIDS epidemic" looming, after "almost 50,000 Austrians visited Thailand last year", so that the Virologist Josef Eberle of the Pettenkofer Institute could be convinced that "individual cases of these extremely infectious sub-type already exist in Austria."

At the Austrian AIDS Congress in September 1996 'after a good hundred thousand more Austrians had visited Thailand' a researcher from the University of Graz reported with visible regret that in the investigation of HIV positive Austrians who had said they had infected themselves in Thailand, they had not come across the "aggressive" subtype, which the newspapers had given the title "supervirus".

In June 1997 the Institute for Virology at the University of Vienna struck gold: for the first time the sub-type E agent was identified in four Austrians. "All four are men and had been infected in Thailand," a researcher at the institute informed Die Presse.

He did not even raise the possibility that the four men might have been travelling as homosexual sex tourists, but explained that it was thought "that these viruses are responsible for the heterosexual spread of AIDS in the Far East". By the next paragraph Die Presse is already talking about the scientist who crops up most regularly in this context: Max Essex. "According to research by the US expert Max Essex, the sub-type E AIDS virus infects male and female sexual organs much more easily than other sub-types. Experts have thus warned of the possibly devastating consequences of this virus." At the Vienna University Institute of Virology, meanwhile, this point is regarded critically. Despite the spread of this virus that has already occurred in the USA, there has not been an explosive increase of HIV infections through sexual contact there.

In Germany, Josef Eberle first discovered a type E in 1995, and he has been able to establish this type in two out of the one hundred cases he investigated. According to a German ministry of health study, between 40,000 and 70,000 Germans per year have been visiting Thailand as sex tourists. Although homosexual tourism is hardly mentioned in the media, it can be assumed that some homosexual sex tourists must have visited

Thailand. If the type E was actually five-hundred times more infections than usual HIV viruses, and if it was actually spread through heterosexual contact, then on the basis of these figures it should have spread through German like a whirlwind.

In March 1996, in a special meeting called on the type E virus, an expert commission at the Robert Koch Institute came to the conclusion that there was no serious difference between the "supervirus" and other HIV viruses in relation to the method and speed of transmission.

In conclusion we can say that the "second AIDS epidemic" is not happening either. *

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for footnotes: http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/data/chrfthai.htm

Peter Myers http://users.cyberone.com.au/myers