(no subject)

[proximoception]

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

Comments

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

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.