proximoception | (no subject)

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Harpers published a remarkably brave piece on AIDS and Duesberg in March (though it didn't mention the latter's name till halfway through, after anecdotes of malpractice murders; that's the state of things), available online here: http://www.harpers.org/OutOfControl.html

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Don't know a thing about the magazine, but I've looked up literally every accessible response to Duesberg over the years and to my mind they invariably fall apart into a) referencing one another, b) anger, c) garbled and iffy specific objections, generally ones Duesberg's covered in print, and d) the kind of vague "there's scientific consensus by now" language you're using (perfectly justifiably, as a layman--but these were self-represented experts).

I think reponses by Gallo and others accompanied the article, which I'll have to dig up in magazine form to recharge that "literally" above...The article did follow Duesberg & Co.'s own words rather slavishly. But that's kind of the problem, as I've said: there is no coherent opposition (i.e. mainstream) statement. You think there is, and how could there not be? Then you look for it, and.

I have to say I think this (warning -- pdf) is pretty convincing, as well as its citations. I take seriously the fact that Duesberg has no practical experience. He may be right in theory (though I think the citations of the article show that he isn't), but he seems to be pretty thoroughly wrong in practice. If he is wrong he gave a lot of aid and comfort to murderous policies in South Africa. He also made friends of mine hesitate before taking life-saving drugs. I can't say they made a difference, though I am pretty sure they did in at least one case of a person living with AIDS since the mid-eighties, who researched him and eventually decided to go on AZT. And I do know someone who died because of her wishful belief that laetrile would cure cancer -- she rejected therapies that might have worked, and I think Duesberg's arguments feed into a similar wishfulness.

If he's wrong it's up to others to refute him, and why haven't they? And do you really find the eight-person Farber-pile-on that convincing? Check out the career-smearage at the bottom (hell, at the top--contrasted to their shining, underlined credentials); this document isn't out to debate facts. And here's one example of their layman-amazing overwhelmingly copious referencing:

Farber appears to agree with Duesberg's view that HIV is incapable of causing a single disease.

HIV causes a progressive decline of the immune system by depleting CD4+ T-cells. Eventually the immune system becomes dysfunctional and incapable of fighting off diseases that it normally would. People with advanced HIV-disease are more susceptible than the general HIV-negative population to about 30 different diseases, many of them with high mortality rates.64

"64" references an online government fact sheet about HIV and AIDS. An online government factsheet.

So they may have a case against Duesberg, but this isn't it, this is a greatest hits collection of anti-dissenter invective and assertions. Which doesn't necessarily mean they're angry because they sense they may be wrong: presumably most of them have experiences from the front lines of this similar to your own. But if D.'s so obviously wrong one of them needs to calm down and engage his entire argument.

Right in theory? Explain this?

"Right in theory" -- that is perhaps there is no mechanism that works according to the current theory. But that means the theory is wrong. The practical evidence is overwhelming (so my physician friends tell me).

I believe, a lot, in epidemiology. Duesberg refuses epidemiological evidence.

So he has no hands on experience and denies the power of sophisticated statistical analysis, which again I do know something about.

And yeah, they do fucking pile on, and Gallo is no saint. But they're angry with good reason. And Duesberg's critiques are ancient history. Partly because his enemies have stopped his funding -- of course a lot of what they say about peer review is bullshit, as again I know from the personal experience of friends in other scientific fields. But there's some real footnoting in their piece too -- 12, for example, is helpful.

I don't object to Duesberg's skepticism. I do worry about people's making more out of it than it deserves. It's like global warming. Skeptics fifteen years ago had a lot of legitimate questions. There are a lot fewer of them now. IMHO.

BTW, glad to see you posting again, even if infrequently.

I'm with you on global warming, but they're not analogous: AIDS hasn't behaved as predicted. Deaths declined the more they watered down AZT, AIDS didn't positive-feedback its way across the heterosexual population etc. The goal posts are being moved continually, you can see it in the progress of mainstream newspaper articles. Whereas they're as fixed as our coastlines, in regards to GW.

Your physician friends' assurances stem from superior knowledge or from how horrible the alternative possibility is, for them personally. I just bring this up to note the limits of an expert-consensus defense against this particular kind of charge. Any expert in the witness box is also a defendant.

Duesberg refuses epidemiological evidence? He's always accepted, with reservations, the correlations among the AIDS diseases--e.g. http://www.duesberg.com/papers/ch4.html [non-pdf]. He accepts that "AIDS" is a real thing, in the sense that these diseases are the first through the breach when the immune system breaks down. He even accepts the high correlation of these diseases with HIV, his point has always been that the specifics don't indicate cause. When did he deny "the power of sophisticated statistical analysis"? As a non-epidemiologist, Duesberg's argument has relied on nothing else. If you're saying sophisticated next-generation models have been applied by HIV->AIDS theorists, I'd like to see the results. Truly.

And I apologize if the pdf below was by quacks (admittedly, inevitably the vast majority of AIDS-dissenters), I'll have to look at that myself. Though I'd also like to know what the false-positive/false-negative tunings are like for diseases of comparable (alleged) fatality rates.

Also, though I know nothing about the writers of this, a couple people have put together a response to the Gallo et alia rebuttal (got this via Wikipedia): http://www.rethinkaids.com/documents/Popular%20Media/HivTestsCannotDiagnoseHivInfection.pdf

I know enough to know that this paragraph is BS (from the pdf above):

In the United States, a positive result on "the AIDS test" - ELISA and Western blot antibody tests - is indicative of HIV infection and predictive of AIDS (Feimberg & Volberding & Cohen 1994; Pins et al 1997; Metcalf et al 1997; Weiss 1998; Holodny & Busch 2003). Also in the United States a diagnosis of HIV-positivity can be done only after the same blood of a person has reacted positive four times in the ELISA test on two consecutive days and one time in the Western blot test. If AIDS is an infectious disease, it would be the very first infectious disease that requires the repetition of the same antibody test four times in order to know if those antibodies are present or not. If the ELISA test was as specific for HIV as claimed, why is it that this test needs to be repeated four times on the same blood specimen before declaring a positive HIV result? This does not happen with any other well-known infectious disease!

Always be suspicious of a bang! But there's a statistical point. Disease testing needs tuning between false negatives and false positives. Since in AIDS a false negative is a disaster, false positives are very frequent. Since most positives produced by a test on the general population would be false (if 1% have HIV and you have a 10% false positive rate, then 11 out of a hundred random people would get a positive test but only one would have HIV), you have to do a lot of backup testing on them. But the upside is that false negatives are extremely rare. I just skimmed the pdf, but it seems addressed to people who don't know this. And its writers are members of the South African presidential advisory committee, which means they're supporting Mbeki in denying that HIV causes AIDS.

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