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SOUTHERN VOICE OCTOBER21/1993
THE HNS HIV PROGRAM
A comprehensive Irrogram of services that responds to the diverse needs of the HIV individual.
▼ Psychological Services
Personalized counseling by gay
licensed clinical social workers
helps meet the emotional, psy
chological, and family needs
specific to the HIV individual.
▼ Pharmacy Services
Clinically trained pharmacists are
continually updated to advanced
protocols in delivering HIV
pharmacy services.
▼ Nursing Services
Sensitive to the special needs of
the PWA, the registered nurses
have a minimum five years
clinical experience in I.V. therapy
or related field.
▼ Caring, Committed, and Concerned about the community.
Jtfl
HIMS'
ADVANCED INFUSION THERAPIES
1'800-872-4467
426-4933
West
put time on your
Accelerated Benefits o! Washington*
will purchase your existing
life insurance tor cash.
• We process your
| request quickly and at
no cost to you. • Our ap-
| plication process is simple.
• Payment is made immed
iately and in full. • All in
quiries are held in the strictest confidence. • You use your pay
ment any way you want. • You have ready access to an es
crow account holding your money. There are no restric-
; tions. • We will consider any size individual or group
f policy. • Your accelerated benefits counsellor will
: give you prompt, personalized service. We
welcome the opportunity to work . \
with federal employees. \
i: .. ‘member NAPWA and NAVSO
If you or someone close to you is seriously ill,
call Carol Cunard at 1-800-227-8447 for more information.
False prophet
Since 1987, Peter Duesberg, professor
of molecular biology at the University of
California at Berkeley, has made something
of a second career out of proclaiming that
HIV does not cause AIDS. Along the way,
he has acquired a vocal following within the
gay community.
Duesbcrg’s biggest media booster has
been Spin magazine, which devoted 10 pages
in its September issue to an interview with
the controversial scientist, conducted by pub
lisher/editor Bob Guccione Jr. It is an ex
haustively detailed, utterly astonishing inter
view, so riddled with half-truths, distortions
and out-and-out falsehoods that one is left to
conclude that the man is either a fool (highly
unlikely) or a pathological liar.
In a nutshell, Duesberg claims that HIV
is a completely harmless vims that just hap
pens to turn up in people with AIDS. The
real culprit, he says, is drugs—whether rec
reational ones such as cocaine, amphetamines
or poppers, or pharmaceuticals, especially
AZT.
The Centers for Disease Control and Pre
vention list roughly 30 percent of U.S. ADS
cases as being people with some history of
injection drug use. Most of the rest are gay
or bisexual men. So, to make his case stick,
Duesberg must argue that all gay men with
AIDS are drug users. “The homosexuals who
get AIDS had hundreds, if not thousands, of
sexual contacts,” the good professor tells us.
“That is not achieved with your conven
tional testosterone. It is achieved with chemi
cals. . .They inhale poppers, they use amphet
amines, they take Quaaludes, they take amyl
nitrate, they take cocaine as aphrodisiacs.”
Deusberg’s argument, that nobody could
have that much sex without using drugs,
betrays his breathtaking ignorance of the gay
community. But just in case readers don’t
buy it, he brings out his backup culprit—
AZT. The drug used to treat HIV infection,
he says, is actually causing the symptoms
we call AIDS.
Here the misinformation starts flying
thick and fast. “Every six hours, your HIV
positive person takes 250 milligrams of
AZT...just for having the vims,” he says,
and the dmg, not the vims, makes people
lose weight, sicken and die. Duesberg not
only gets the dose wrong, he conveniently
forgets that AZT has never been recom
mended for people whose immune systems
are intact, but only for those with CD4 counts
of 500 or lower—meaning that something
else has already damaged Iheir immune sys
tems.
Duesberg backs his claim that AZT is
the culprit with no data whatsoever, just a
string of meaningless stories. Arthur Ashe
took the stuff and he died, didn’t he? Nureyev
took it too, and isn’t he dead too?
Regular readers know that this reporter
is no fan of AZT, but the reason Duesberg
cites no data is that none exists. In the most
damning major AZT study so far, the Brit
ish/French Concorde trial announced last
spring, the patients who took AZT before
showing any symptoms lived as long as those
who didn’t. In other words, the stuff may not
have helped people, but it didn’t kill them
cither.
Sometimes Duesberg is forced to ignore
facts that arc staring him in the face. A key
pan of his argument is that cpidcmiologi-
cally, AIDS is not behaving like an infec
tious disease because an infectious disease
should affect roughly equally numbers of
men and women, while AIDS in the United
States and Europe has hit far more men.
Asked why the proportion of women is in
creasing, Duesberg claims that no such thing
is happening, that “it has been 10 percent for
quite a while now.”
Not quite. The CDC’s statistics show a
gradual but absolutely steady rise in the per
centage of female cases—from close to zero
at the start of the epidemic to 14.2 percent of
newly-diagnosed cases in 1992. The good
professor never attempts to question the
CDC’s methodology or refute its numbers.
He simply lies about what the numbers say.
But why, interviewer Guccione asks, has
the increase in gay male AIDS cases de
clined since safer sex became solidly estab
lished in the gay community? Again,
Duesberg just claims that it hasn’t happened.
“AIDS has continued to increase despite the
safe sex campaign,” he says. “The only thing
they claim is decreasing is HIV infection,
but AIDS continues to increase every year.”
Wrong again. The rate of increase of
AIDS cases among gay men has been slowly
tapering off for years, and in 1992—nine
years after safe-sex campaigns got started in
earnest—the number of new gay male AIDS
cases actually decreased for the first time
ever, which is just what you’d expect if safe
sex was having an impact. Overall, the
gradual shift in the demographics of AIDS is
exactly what you would predict from a dis
ease that is sexually transmitted, dial got its
first foothold among gay men and which
takes as long as 10 years after infection to
make itself apparent.
Duesberg is similarly loose with the facts
when discussing the vims itself. Researchers
generally agree that HIV causes much of die
immune damage seen in AIDS patients by
indirect means. Rather than invading and
killing CD4 cells one by one, the virus sets
off a chain of events that result in CD4 cell
death and other disrcguladon of the immune
system. Duesberg dismisses this, declaring
flatly that “viruses...cannot work at a dis
tance.”
But he ignores that fact that some kinds
of damage caused by HIV “from a distance”
have already been identified. As neurologist
Elyse Singer explained to AIDS Treatment
News earlier this year, certain HIV proteins,
such as gpl20, “can be toxic to neurons in a
variety of ways,” leading to nerve cell dam
age without the cells themselves being in
fected. The vims also stimulates production
of certain chemicals, known as cytokines,
which, when excessive levels are maintained
for too long, can work all sorts of mischief.
Later, discussing the effects of different
strains of the vims, the professor tells us,
“We have yet to see a single case where an
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