HIV: a few things your doctor might not tell you...
What does being "HIV positive" mean?
"HIV" tests don't look for a virus. These tests look for antibodies.
Usually, having antibodies to something is a good thing, but not with HIV and AIDS. Antibodies associated with HIV are suddenly something to be feared.
There are over 60 factors that can cause a person to test "HIV Positive." Among them: hepatitis, systemic lupus, flu and flu vaccinations, herpes, malaria, tuberculosis, and certain cancers. Sometimes healthy people are given a positive test result and remain healthy for many years without any remarkable ailments.
Being pregnant can cause a positive antibody result. Foreign proteins can cause the body to produce antibodies.
Many diseases can throw off HIV tests enough that some tests are not used in some countries.
The tests are not standardized from state to state, from country to country or even from lab to lab. One could test positive in one place and negative in another.
When a person takes an HIV test, the blood is diluted 51 to 400 times- Only in HIV testing is blood drawn diluted in these extraordinarily high amounts.
HIV stands for "Human Immunodeficiency Virus," yet this "virus" has yet to be isolated.
HIV testing uses a survey to help with diagnosis. The survey asks for such personal information as sexual preferences and history, drug use, as well as your race. In most tests, a person either has one diagnosis or another, regardless of who you are. However, in HIV testing, the test results come back as positive, negative or indeterminate. The profile you submit will determine what kind of result you will be given. This creates an unfair bias toward certain populations and is unscientific.
If you want to know a bit more about HIV tests see these links:
Everyone Reacts Positive on the ELISA Tests for HIV! - from Roberto Giraldo, MD.
60 Factors that can cause positive HIV- antibody test results - from Christine Johnson
Look for the book, Science Fictions - by John Crewdson, a Pulitzer-prize winning senior writer for the Chicago Tribune
- "A scientific mystery, a massive cover-up, and the dark legacy of Robert Gallo."
Patricia Nell Warren reviewed the book for A&U Magazine.
Robert Gallo is not a hero but a liar and cheat. Quotes and excerpts from the book coming soon...
Stories about people who have been diagnosed with HIV only to find out they weren't HIV positive at all.
Mario Roeder, Stanford University researcher, on CD4 T-cells - from 1997:
"The finding that HIV can't replicate in these cells -- and as a result can't directly harm them -- could lead to new weapons against HIV, said Mario Roederer, a genetics research associate at Stanford University School of Medicine. It also adds to the evidence that something other than viral infection destroys HIV patients' T cells. Though Roederer is not an "AIDS dissident," he raises some valid questions.---------------------------
How Accurate is the HIV Test?
from Mothering MagazinePeople often discuss the dreaded "AIDS test," as though it is AIDS itself that is being tested for. It is not. What the "AIDS test" actually detects is antibodies to HIV, which may or may not entail true infection with HIV.1 Traditionally, antibodies have signaled that an infection has been defeated. In AIDS, however, for reasons that remain unresolved, the antibody has come to be synonymous with bad news--a categorical signal that the person "has" HIV and perhaps even "has" AIDS.
Rarely, if ever, has a single diagnostic test had such an enormous impact on the lives of the millions of people who rely on it. Since 1985, the US government and various civilian institutions have performed more than 20 million HIV tests every year. Responses to positive tests have been melodramatic. People have been known to commit suicide or murder, lapse into depression, have abortions, become divorced, and take toxic medications.2 Tragically, these dramatic actions were triggered by a test that is far from foolproof.
In 1993, a group of Australian researchers published what would be the first substantial critique of the HIV antibody test. The article, entitled "Is a Positive Western Blot Proof of HIV Infection?" was published in the journal Bio/Technology, a respected scientific publication affiliated with the British magazine Nature. The Australian researchers stated that the HIV test is seriously flawed on several counts: It is not standardized, so different labs will interpret the same results differently; it is not reproducible (the test fails when tested against itself); it cross-reacts with other, non-HIV proteins; and it lacks a true "gold standard." Every diagnostic test must have a gold standard, which in this case would be HIV itself, but the authors argue this is impossible since the HIV virus has never been isolated in pure form.3
The scientists scrutinized the two most widely used HIV antibody tests--the "ELISA," which is used to screen blood, and the "Western Blot" (WB), which is used to confirm a positive result on the ELISA. The problems apply to both tests.
The ELISA test, first developed in 1985, is highly sensitive and also extremely nonspecific, which means it gives a positive result even when there is no HIV present. As many as four out of five ELISA tests cannot be confirmed by Western Blot,4 and yet it remains the most widely used test in the Third World, most notably Africa, where HIV is said to be rampant.
Citing the data from a mass HIV testing program undertaken by the US military, the Australian researchers revealed some startling findings. There were, for instance, 4,000 people who had two positive ELISAs followed by a negative WB. Perhaps worse, there were 80 cases of people who had two positive ELISAs, a positive WB, followed by a negative follow-up WB.
In other words, those 80 people, outside the context of this study, would have gone home believing they were HIV positive, since a single positive WB qualifies a person as positive. But in fact they were negative.
Another problem with the test is that it is nonspecific. The test looks for patterns of proteins thought to be specific to HIV. One protein in particular, P24, is "currently believed to be synonymous with HIV isolation and viremia," the study says. But the Australian researchers detected P24 antibodies in a number of people who were completely free of HIV, including one out of every 150 healthy people, about 13 percent of all people with generalized warts, and more than 40 percent of those with multiple sclerosis. On the other hand, they point out, P24 is not found in all AIDS patients.
But perhaps most troubling, the tests tend to cross-react with other microbes. The Bio/Technology article describes a tribe of Amazonian Indians who have never had contact outside their tribe and who have no AIDS. And yet, 3.3 to 13.3 percent were HIV-positive by Western Blot. "The above data," they speculated in their final report, means either that HIV is not in fact causing AIDS, "or, that the HIV antibody tests are non-specific."
The test’s greatest failing in the eyes of those who’ve had to rely on it, however, is that it is not standardized. In the Australian study, one particular blood sample was sent 89 times to three different labs. It was reported to be positive 64 times, indeterminate 23 times, and negative once. There is such a broad, gray, "indeterminate" zone, in fact, that it’s often merely chance whether a given lab reads the result as positive or negative.
Christine Maggiore, president of the dissident AIDS-activist group HEAL in Los Angeles, experienced this firsthand. After initially testing HIV positive, and going into the emotional tailspin that such a result often sets off, she subsequently repeated the test four more times, and got every possible result on the spectrum--positive, negative, and indeterminate. "This is why I tell people not to take the test," she says, emphatically. "It’s just too unreliable. It shouldn’t be how we measure our health."
NOTES
1. P. Duesberg, Inventing the AIDS Virus (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 1996) 207–209.2. J. Shenton, Positively False, 53–73.
3. E. P. Papadopoulous-Eleopulos and V. Turner, "Is a Positive Western Blot Proof of HIV In-fection," Bio/Technology 2 (June 1993): 696–707.
4. R. Root-Bernstein, Rethinking AIDS (New York: Free Press), 51.
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