INNER CITY YOUTH MISS HIV MESSAGE 

-DENNIS LEVY

“My cyberspace friends don’t care about HIV or AIDS,” says Deniece Kinash, a young multi- racial female volunteer who does HIV outreach for Blac_ ny on the popular internet social network Myspace (200,000,000 plus members). She said by filling out a simple on-line application, she has unprecedented access  to millions of young members of the  popular cyberspace social networks like Facebook and Myspace. Creating pages that reflect each member’s individual personality is only part of the teenage fad. Finding compatible members and adding them to your friends is the other part.  Some Myspace stars have hundred of thousands of friends on their pages. Many members play on-line games like ‘Mafia Wars’(see http://www...zynga.com/games/index.php?game=mafiawars).

That is a story for another time. The point here is when you question Black youth about HIV you will see that they are not clear on how HIV is transmitted or how to use condoms to protect themselves. And many don’t care. They “tune it out,” says Deniece. This is surprising in view of the Kaiser Family Foundation report that found Blacks are six times more likely to be very concerned about becoming infected with HIV than Whites. Apparently, the  concern doesn’t mean that the Black youth are educated about HIV and AIDS.  A study  from the University of Chicago a few months back found that Black youth are not getting the HIV message. (Parker, Chi-Town Daily News, 2/2/09).

The researchers looked at seven focus groups that totaled about 50 college-age youth including Blacks, Hispanics and Whites of both sexes. They used a 30-minute public service announcement as an example of  traditional messages. Children’s Place  funded the study and  said that one of the most interesting findings was Blacks’ distrust of traditional means of disseminating HIV and AIDS awareness messages. “There’s been a disconnect between government and health institutions in the Black community.”

According to the study, many PSA’s are “bookended by sexually suggestive programming.” They were saying, ‘OK, sure, you’ve got this flash on the screen for 30 seconds ... but this [is] in a sea of music videos where people are engaging in sex’. Tack added, “You don’t see people using protection; all this stuff is glamorized, and in the middle there is a commercial telling you to protect yourself.” Some young people believe that getting tested for HIV is an admission of guilt for having sex.  While others, Black women in particular, do not feel empowered  to demand a Black man use a condom. 

To deal with the misinformation, some small community based organizations around the US have rolled out on the internet HIV awareness initiatives.  BLAC NY is pioneering this effort on myspace. Another group texts safe sex information to teenage cell phone users( see http://www.safeteens.com/). And BET Entertainment has one of the most successful safe sex Public Service message campaign in the US: “Rap It Up”(see http://www.rapituppresents.com/), President Obama’s new HIV initiative called “Act Against AIDS” and the National Black Leadership Commission on AIDS’s “National Call to Action” will address this problem with a stepped up HIV multimedia awareness initiative targeting inner city communities across the US. This is a great start  to put the HIV epidemic back on the US public radar and begin to correct the misinformation about HIV and AIDS.

More must be done. HIV awareness messages and the way they are targeted to inner city youth must be revisited. It’s time for  us to double down on HIV messages to inner city youth. Let’s put more young  Black stars giving HIV awareness messages  in heavy rotation on popular TV shows like “106 and Park” and the Black cable series like “Lincoln Heights.”

Let’s embrace the youth culture. Young people text or twitter messages on their cell phone rather than talk. The new safe sex messages must be culturally appropriate, age specific, and text or twitter friendly.  Hip Hop is still immensely popular with inner city youth.  Check out Lil Wayne’s “Get Informed, Not Infected” PSA on Youtube. Let us get internet smart about explaining to Black inner city youth how to use a condom and target some of the  HIV awareness messages to Black internet entertainment Web sites. In the words of young people,  “Lets get BZ.”

The low down on the down low. Young Gay HIV+ black men!-DENNIS LEVY

NEW YORK CITY --   The low down on the down low is the hot discussion happening on the internet about same sex marriage and young black men who are openly gay or bisexual or suspected to be gay or bisexual . Although the 'hot button' talk of same sex marriage  is the most controversial topic, I want to talk about young black gay men who are HIV+ and don't know it or know it but don't care or know it and intentionally or not pass it onto unsuspecting multiple partners, men and women. My concern is the fact that a disproportionate number of these young, black, gay men are not getting educated about HIV and safe sex . Obviously, HIV safe sex messaging targeting young black gay men is not effective. Period. 

One major  obstacle in my opinion to reaching  young, black, gay, men is the century old, entrenched homophobia in the Black community. This bias has distracted us from the  HIV health crisis among young black gay  men and focus us on there sexuality. Check out a typical comment in the black bloggerspear. "It seems like at least 75 percent of black men In Atlanta are gay and in the closet ,"  said a woman responding to a recent  blog "Why are so many black young men secretly GAY?'.  I think there is far more important issues we should be discussing like ' Do Young black gay men  really care about practicing safe sex ?'

New studies and anecdotal evidence  suggest  inner city black youth, straight or gay, don't care about the safe sex  message or they are not getting the HIV message any more. Google 'Inner Ctiy Youth Miss HIV Message'. The article speaks for itself.  In a NY Press newspaper cover article a few months ago Michael Donsky spoke about  negotiating safe sex in the gay community ("The Trouble With Safe Sex", April 15-21) Donsky spoke to a young gay man in a New York City bathhouse who had been getting tested regularly for HIV every six months since coming out at age 20 . Those tests stopped two years ago after a night of heavy drinking.  He had “bareback” sex with his best friend of 14 years, an HIV positive older man. Bareback sex is a popular  act in the gay community. It's an erotic term that means   ' a conscious lack of condoms in the face of a safe-sex message....that generates excitement'. In other words, the risk of getting HIV by not wearing a condom increases the excitement of the sex.  The consequences? Higher rates of HIV among young black gay men, Enough said?

The Center For Disease Control (CDC) has considered Receptive Anal Intercourse a  high risk behavior for HIV since the 1980s.  Black men who have sex with men (MSM) account for a disproportionate number of new cases of  HIV and AIDS . From 2001 to 2006, the number of HIV cases among young black Men who have sex with men (MSM )age 13--24 years increased 93%. The numbers speak for themselves. It is what it is..

  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's first national HIV and AIDS public awareness campaign in more than a decade kicked off last month with the 'Act Against AIDS' Campaign.The campaign included a "9 1/2 minutes" public awareness push, using the fact that a new infection takes place every 9 1/2 minutes to call the country's attention to the epidemic. While this campaign is a welcome step,  I am skeptical that many of the funded groups will deal effectively with the root causes of HIV, particularly among young black gay men. That is because none of the groups receiving funding have programs targeted specifically towards black gay men. I think some grass roots, community based organizations have the community organizing experience and messaging skills  to make a difference in the fight against HIV and AIDS among young gay black men. Lets find em and fund em.

To Be Young, Black, and a One-Man AIDS Epidemic

(Reprinted)

By Dennis Levy

January 1998

Ricky is the lookout for a South Bronx crackhouse. He looks up and down the street, past decaying buildings. Ricky's 25 and looks 35; he's an HIV-positive crack addict. A black woman in a dirty coat, about 35, approaches. "They open?" she mutters. "Yeah! They slammin', too!" The skinny black woman hurries into the building. "Bitch got some good head!" Ricky says. "I hit that last week!" A car pulls over to the corner and a white man in a blue suit, about 38, motions to Ricky. Ricky walks to the car and leans in. "Can you get me ten?" he asks, flashing a stack of bills. "No problem, G," Ricky says. He grabs the money and jets into the building. Crack customers continue to stop in front of Ricky more than one at a time and, after hearing 'it's on,' hurry into the building. First come two pretty Latino women who say they are lovers. Ricky says they'll sex any man for a hit of crack. Then a skinny, middle-aged man in a torn tee-shirt is pulled along by a 15-year-old black teenager. "Nigga' got AIDS," says Ricky, "but he hits more skins than Nushawn Williams." Williams is the young man accused last month of being a one-man AIDS epidemic who knowingly infected dozens of young women in an upstate neighborhood and left several women in the Bronx scared to death. New York City newspapers called him a murderer, psycho, and serial killer. Williams may be all those things. The unspoken and far more disturbing issue is whether or not Williams represents many more young black and Latino heterosexual men. Are some minority men knowingly spreading HIV to unsuspecting women in minority neighborhoods? Instead of heroin users sharing HIV-contaminated needles, is unprotected sex, promiscuity, and drug use among heterosexuals fueling the speeding AIDS epidemic in poor neighborhoods? Is alcohol and/or drugs the lethal combination that pushes bored black and Latino teenagers into the open arms of HIV-positive older black and Latino men?

He Made A Difference!

by Dennis Levy

January/February 2000

In September 1997, five people were invited to a roundtable to discuss the pros and cons of harm reduction versus twelve-step abstinence. My brother, Harry Levy, a thirty-year addict in recovery, was a participant. Harry was pumped up and ready, as always, to speak his mind. He believed in complete abstinence. He didn't believe a drug user could be responsible."I'm going to give a personal experience about sharing syringes," Harry began, sounding as mellow as the drug addict he once was and as knowledgeable as the AIDS activist he had become. "I think it's when I got the HIV virus. I remember being with three other people and that I was high on drugs. I used to shoot speedballs. That's heroin and cocaine," he explained.

"I remember a guy who shot dope first, passed it to the second guy, and then after he used it he passed it back to the first guy. I was on the end. The guy took the works [the hypodermic needle used to shoot drugs], threw it, and it stuck in the carpet. I pulled the syringe out of the carpet and used it. I mean, that's how responsible I was."

"What if you had ten syringes located near you? Would you have picked that one up from the carpet?" a harm reduction advocate asked.

"If somebody had offered me clean syringes, I probably would have taken them. I might have used half and I would have sold the rest," Harry said in a way that cracked everyone up in laughter.

Harry was like that. He was inflexible about some things -- like the need to abstain from drug use completely -- but he would always share a funny common experience that would bring everyone closer together.

My brother Harry died of liver cancer on September, 1999, at the age of 53. Hepatitis C was the official cause of the cancer. The toxic effects of the twin diseases of addiction and AIDS, multiplied by that of the new AIDS drugs, finally destroyed his liver. The cancer sapped his strength, his fire, but never his determination to survive. He struggled to get up from his sickbed right until the end. Finally, he fell into a coma for the last few days of his life.

It was painful for me, but this is not a story of Harry's last days. This is a tribute to Harry's triumph over drug use and AIDS. It's one man's story of living life on life's terms.

Drugs

There were ten of us kids. Harry was the second oldest. Next was me, then Dot, Rick, and so on, with a couple of years between.

Harry, Rick and I were close. When Harry was 17, he started hanging out in the streets of Cincinnati, Ohio, and experimenting with alcohol and drugs. Heroin was his drug of choice. Harry became a white-collar criminal, specializing in stolen check and credit cards to support his heroin habit. Three stays in prison sharpened his forgery skills, and he traveled across the country living off forged checks. In 1977, Harry moved to New York City because "it was the drug capital," he said. He spent years in a drug-crazed blur with nameless women.

One day in the early 1980s, Harry met a woman and fell in love. He got married and became the father of a daughter who changed his life. Harry loved his daughter, and he wanted her to be proud of him. He worked as a luxury car driver for many years.

At some point -- nobody knows exactly when -- something went wrong in Harry's life. He returned to drugs and women. He was diagnosed with HIV in 1987. Doctors put Harry on AZT, but he said the HIV drug interfered with his drug high, so he stopped using it.

In 1993, Harry came down with a disease the doctors couldn't recognize. He was hospitalized. The physician in charge said, "Mr. Levy, if you believe in God, it's time for you to pray to Him, because we have done all we can do." My grandmother, a pastor, prayed with Harry day after day, and, miraculously, he got better and eventually made a full recovery. "I wake up in the morning and just feel like, 'God, I'm glad to be alive,'" he said afterward on many occasions.

Sobriety

Harry became a member of Narcotics Anonymous and a regular at NA meetings in the Bronx. In 1997, Harry became a self-taught HIV treatment educator, with firsthand experience taking many of the new AIDS medicines. He co-founded the Black and Latino AIDS Coalition with me, and we began speaking to people living with HIV around New York City. I can testify that Harry was my strongest supporter. He stood with me regardless of the issue . . . if he agreed. We argued endlessly if we didn't agree, and many times we would stop speaking to each other for weeks. But we always got back together. Best friends as well as brothers!

Harry also wrote when the spirit moved him. He wrote one of the first articles about the silent epidemic of hepatitis C among substance users in the black and Latino communities, and he fearlessly addressed the need to educate recovering addicts in NA about HIV. Harry educated many people in the AIDS community, and it wasn't until after his death, at his tribute, that I fully discovered how he touched the lives of people.

Farewell

At Emmanuel Pentecostal Faith Church in the Bronx, Bishop Betty Middleton hosted a tribute for Harry that drew a hundred people; the small chapel couldn't hold more. One after another, ex-drug users, HIV-positive people, ex-cons, and just regular folk came forward and told stories about how Harry had touched their lives. Some credited Harry with helping them stay off drugs. Others spoke about Harry's compassion and sympathetic ear when they were confronted with a crisis. A lady with tears in her eyes remembered how Harry always listened to her no matter what time of day or night she called. Another said Harry helped her to build confidence in herself. "He taught me how to drive a car," she said. "Nobody ever believed enough in me to teach me anything except Harry!"

It was very moving to me, and a revelation. I suddenly realized that it's the small, personal things, like Harry did, that sometimes make the big difference in someone's life. We don't have to be a big star, celebrity, or millionaire to make a difference. All we need is love. It's simple. Love is the answer.

Interestingly, everyone fondly remembered Harry's 1985 beige Cadillac. It was clean. He bought the car in 1997, from money he saved by not using drugs. He never hesitated to give someone a lift or carry another one to the hospital or shopping. Harry loved that car. You could find Harry nearby if you saw his Cadillac. Last year, someone stole his Cadillac, and he never got over it.

A brother of mine in Cincinnati, who couldn't make the tribute, said he had a dream a couple of days before Harry's death. He said he was riding down a highway on a bike, and suddenly he saw a car approaching from the other side of the highway. As the car got closer, he recognized a beige Cadillac, and as it sped past him, he saw Harry at the wheel. Harry turned with a smile on his face and waved at him. As fast as my brother could turn around, Harry and his Cadillac were gone! Well, it might have been a dream my brother remembers, but I like to believe it was Harry saying goodbye.

For the record, goodbye, Harry. I'm going to miss you!

Dennis Levy is the founder and Executive Director of the Black and Latino AIDS Coalition, an alliance of black and Latino women and men infected and affected by HIV in New York City. The organization's mission is to slow the spread of HIV in minority communities. For more information e-mail Blac_NY@yahoo.com

Harriet Browne, Tap Dancer Extraordinaire and HIV activist

By Dennis Levy

November 1997

Harriet Browne was an elegant, attractive, 63-year-old black woman who I met for the first time in 1995. My brother Harry introduced her to me as someone he met at an AIDS service organization in New York City. "Quicksand" was the name she gave me. She later explained that she took the name from her style of tap dancing on sand that creates a sound like brushes on a snare drum. "That's the sound of jazz," she said. She discovered her HIV-positive status in 1991.
Harriet's life shattered many of the myths and stereotypes in the Black and Latino community about AIDS. She was not an ex-whore, prostitute, or drug addict. Quite the contrary, she was a loving single mother, grandmother, church member, world traveler, and a consummate artist who found time to teach tap and jazz dance to inner-city youth. Of course, being an ex-whore, prostitute or drug addict does not exclude a woman from being all of the things that described Harriet. Unfortunately, in their ignorance, people think only certain people can become infected with the virus.

Drugs, Disease, Denial
By Celia Farber

"We cannot say that protease inhibitors are useless. In 1996 when they started to use protease inhibitors, there is no doubt that there was a change. Before 1996, all the people who used AZT were killed. There was no benefit there. Protease inhibitors have benefits—they are antioxidants. No doubt they are poison and in the long run they kill the person, but you need proteases in the process of oxidation…these drugs are also antibiotics."

The hysteria-laden question of whether anti-HIV drugs are "life-saving," as the AIDS orthodoxy holds, or "deadly," as the HIV dissidents claim, is unanswerable in the currently available language, which was blunted and rendered incoherent by political forces as early as 1981. Language is the only interface between phenomena and our comprehension of them, and I have grown weary of being forced to use AIDS language that is itself inaccurate and loaded. First of all, lives can't really be "saved"—they can only be extended. To prove that a life has indeed been extended one must first know, with absolute certainty, that without intervention, the life would have ended. In order to know that, one must know the natural history of the disease, and then one must examine the fate of the untreated population.

The unified voice of the AIDS establishment has claimed thunderous victory for the post-1996 drug regimens that came to be known as 'cocktails,' which came into vogue about three years after death rates began declining, but nonetheless got full-trumpet credit for turning the tide.

Let me say, first, that I have been told and have reported and have imprinted upon my soul that for some people, at some stages of immune collapse, these drugs have helped, and maybe even prevented a slide into death. Roberto Giraldo, a doctor and expert in infectious and tropical diseases who crosses the world treating AIDS, tells me this is probably due to their anti-oxidant, anti-viral and anti-microbial properties. He also tells me that in his experience, severe immune deficiency—which may be a more useful term than "AIDS"—occurs only where severe depletion of vital nutrients has occurred; reversing the illness starts with restoring those nutrients.

"Biochemically speaking, people who are malnourished, whether because they are poor, or because they are drug addicts, suffer from oxidization, and lack vitamins A, B, E, zinc and selenium. This is true of all AIDS patients I have ever seen," he said via telephone. "We cannot say that protease inhibitors are useless. In 1996 when they started to use protease inhibitors, there is no doubt that there was a change. Before 1996, all the people who used AZT, they were killed. There was no benefit there. Protease inhibitors—they are also very toxic—but they have benefits—they are antioxidants. No doubt they are poison and in the long run they kill the person, but you need proteases in the process of oxidation. Besides that, these drugs are also antibiotics." Giraldo believes that AIDS is a disease "of poverty," primarily, meaning of extreme depletion of the cells, and that those who have been middle- or upper-class, who have gotten sick, depleted their bodies through drug use and prolonged exposure to toxins. "HIV by itself causes nothing," he says.

Giraldo has written and published voluminously on how to reverse the condition of severe immune suppression through intensive nutritional supplementation and orthomolecular medicine, combined with modified antibiotic and other targeted drug regimens. I am well aware of how scorned these ideas are among those who feel that they and they alone know what AIDS is, and how to "fight" it, i.e., the orthodoxy and the pro-drug activists. Since 1986, when I began reporting on AIDS, I have compensated for this scorn, ridicule and censure by quoting the Roberto Giraldos of this world—not because I know these voices are "right," but because I feel they must be represented against the relentless chorus of the new-and-better-drugs-into-all-bodies-in-all-nations crowd. I am not a doctor and have never treated an AIDS patient. I've known dozens if not hundreds of people though, in my 20 years studying this and listening to people, who have been HIV-antibody positive and stayed healthy for up to 20 years and probably more. I wish somebody was counting them, listening to them, logging them in the official history. Nobody is; they are not supposed to exist.

Each of the 26 anti-HIV drugs currently on the market, combined in infinite combinations, or "cocktails," is, by admission of the manufacturers, potentially lethal. One of the unexpected effects of Protease Inhibitors, or so-called HAART therapy (Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy) seen in recent years was a disruption of the body's fat-distribution mechanisms. This in turn (in addition to the fatty deposits on the upper neck and various parts of the body) has caused strokes and heart attacks in many patients, at the very moment when the drugs were theoretically 'working," meaning so-called surrogate markers (cd4 cells and viral load) were going the right way. The other significant danger of HAART proved to be liver and kidney failure, which, according to a study done at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, "surpassed deaths due to advanced HIV," in 2002. In 2005 the Wall Street Journal reported that, according to a Danish study, AIDS drug cocktails "may double the risk of heart attacks." In 2004, the journal AIDS reported, with characteristic lack of alarm, "All 4 classes of antiretrovirals (ARVs) and all 19 FDA approved ARVs have been directly or indirectly associated with life-threatening events and death." The paper was titled "Grade 4 Events Are as Important as AIDS Events in the Era of HAART," and "grade 4 events" referred to "serious or life-threatening events."

The conclusion: More than twice as many people (675) had a drug-related (grade 4) life-threatening event as an "AIDS event" (332). The most common causes of grade 4 events (drug toxicities) were "liver related." The greatest risk of death was not an AIDS "event" but a drug event—heart attacks ("cardiovascular events"). The authors wrote: "Our finding is that the rate of grade 4 events is greater than the rate of AIDS events, and that the risk of death associated with these grade 4 events was very high for many events. Thus the incidence of AIDS fails to capture most of the morbidity experienced by patients with HIV infection prescribed HAART." (Italics mine) In plain English, AIDS drugs cause AIDS and death far more effectively than "AIDS" itself.

Any triumph or victory claimed by the AIDS lobby for these drugs must be measured against a phenomenon they continue to deny exists, namely the untold number of people who are, to use their language, "living with HIV." This includes those invisible, uncounted, unloved people who are HIV-antibody positive, taking no drugs, not getting sick, not dying at a faster rate than HIV negatives. This begs the question of whether HIV causes AIDS. Currently, we have one camp—which I will call the "orthodoxy"—that argues that although current HIV drugs have frightful side effects and are difficult to take, they have nonetheless reversed a tide of death, which was seen throughout the 1980s and into the mid 1990s in people who were diagnosed with severe immune dysfunction. This camp, since it views AIDS as "HIV disease," meaning caused singularly by HIV, concentrates its efforts to "fight AIDS," on high tech drugs that in various ways are meant to disable HIV in the blood. They are extremely mechanistic in their view of the human body and the immune system. It's all numbers.

The much-maligned contraries camp, which I will call the "dissidents," have argued since the early 1980s that AIDS has multiple causes, and that its resolution should be rooted in a direct address to all these root causes. These include a cessation of recreational drug use, avoidance (when possible) of the most toxic anti-HIV drugs, a strong focus on reversing malnutrition, (particularly in Africa) and a treatment approach that treats the specific opportunistic infection a person manifests, with the state of the art treatment for that infection.

PCP pneumonia, for example, is utterly treatable, yet thousands of people died in the 1980s of it. Why? Because fighting AIDS meant "attacking" HIV, period. Never the specific diseases; never the underlying causes—only the virus. David Ho, Time's Person of the Year, sported a button at a conference that summed up this ideology. The button said, "It's the virus, stupid."

How that came to be the dominant scientific religion is a subject of infinite complexity and tragedy. The virus (which is actually a retrovirus, of a class that was never thought to be pathogenic prior to 1984, and which we all harbor shards of in our germline) provided an absolute measure, a clear delineation, a battleground, and above all, a focus for a gigantic industry, as well as an international corporation called AIDS Inc. The natural and true history of AIDS is only beginning to be told, or rather, retold. When AIDS Began: San Francisco and The Making of An Epidemic (Routledge) by Michelle Cochrane traces the earliest intersection between what was being observed, those who were doing the observing, and how the "truth" fared in the process. Cochrane weaves a rigorously detailed semantic, medical, and sociological examination of the first cases as they were charted and described by the San Francisco Department of Public Health in 1981. She explodes the myth of the first cases of AIDS having appeared, as the New York Times famously phrased it, in "previously healthy," and even upwardly mobile, gay men, and shows that quite the contrary, the first nine cases were in men who had a range of immune assaults. All were recreational drug users, many were IV drug users, and some were even homeless. They suffered from diseases that had been seen in IV drug users since the 1930s, primarily fungal infections and lung diseases. That they were "gay," was perhaps the least significant detail. Because the federal research effort ($36 billion so far) has been 100 percent HIV-centric, and because AIDS was presumed to be sexually transmitted as opposed to "acquired," we are essentially 20 years behind in our intelligence gathering on AIDS. One of the most astonishing things about the politics of AIDS is the way in which the left repudiated any explanations of disease causation that could be predicted by poverty and social marginalization.

One of the hallmarks of the AIDS orthodoxy's language is that coiled within each word and phrase is the answer, as well as the shaming of the question itself. George Orwell (in 1984) described the orthodox style as, "…at once military and pedantic," characterized by a trick of "…asking questions and then promptly answering them." Anti-HIV drugs, for example, are always called "life-saving drugs." Why not just call them "drugs" and allow their merits to be debated? Because at the root of the AIDS orthodoxy is a relentless urge to control all thought on AIDS.

All people who question any facet of orthodox AIDS theory are "murderously irresponsible," and dripping with the psychic blood of millions. In this gladiatorial atmosphere, it is a wonder anybody speaks out at all. If only we could agree that most people are not, by nature, homicidal, and that dissenting views are productive to a search for truth, we might get somewhere. But I know, as surely as I know anything, that my opponent in these pages will have characterized my position as "denialist." I am not denying anything. People have died of AIDS and the matter at hand is what they died from. A retroviral infection? A host of immuno-compromising factors? An absence of AIDS drugs—or indeed, the AIDS drugs themselves?

In 1984, when the US government announced at a press conference that one of its scientists—Robert Gallo—had found the "probable cause of AIDS," the official theory held that HIV caused AIDS by eating CD4 cells at a rapid clip. HIV was said to cause AIDS in a year or two, at best. Today, this theory has morphed into a range of possibilities; HIV causes AIDS in 10 to 15 years, in most people, but a small minority, so-called "long-term non-progressors," might be spared due to a genetic fluke.

To my mind, if we are to stick to the orthodoxy's own measure, one cannot begin to speak of "saving" life until one has surpassed these ten or fifteen years. In the 1980s, AZT was claimed, with the same high dudgeon by the same orthodoxy, to "save" lives, yet few survived for more than a year on the earliest AZT regimens. The word "denial" comes to mind.

When people make dramatic claims for current drug regimens, the death rates they are actually comparing are not drugs vs. no drugs, but rather extremely toxic drugs of the early years compared to less toxic drugs of today. The earliest AIDS cases, marked by Kaposi's Sarcoma, were treated with chemotherapy (1981 to 1986) followed by AZT monotherapy in doses ranging from 1800 milligrams to 500 milligrams (1986 to 1989) followed by combinations of AZT, ddi, ddc and d4t (1989 to 1996) followed by protease inhibitors in various combinations, from 1996 to the present day. The one era I have no question resulted in deaths from the treatment itself, is the early AZT era, (circa 1986 to 1989) particularly when the common dosage was 1200 to 1800 milligrams. A German AIDS physician named Klaus Koehnlein told me in 2000, "We killed a whole generation of AIDS patients with AZT."

My friend Richard Berkowitz, author of Stayin Alive: The Invention of Safe Sex, A Personal History (Westview), said: "Every friend I had that went on AZT in those early years is dead." He says that they lasted on average nine months on the drug. HIV positive since the early 1980s, Berkowitz credits his survival to two things: 1) having avoided AZT, and 2) safe sex.

What he means by "safe sex," a concept and term he himself developed and coined, together with the late activist Michael Callen, is far more complex than mere condom use. Drawing on the pioneering observations and warnings of Dr. Joseph Sonnabend, it involves an avoidance of many STDs and parasitic infections, coupled with a belief in life rather than a belief in the death sentence of HIV. Berkowitz has also mitigated my repudiation of cocktail therapy by stressing that a moderate regimen pulled him back from the brink of death a few years ago.

Paul King, a Brit who runs a dissident website called Dissident Action Group in the U.S., counters the establishment's claim that dissenting views on AIDS, HIV and drug regimens are still "fringe."

"From the very beginning in the 1980s, the AIDS dissident movement faced a level of censorship unrivaled since the anti birth control information Comstock Law of the early 20th century," he said in an email. "Every day," King claims, "almost without exception, we attract another PhD or doctor and now have well over 4,000 doctors and scientists endorsing our views."

"The public has had enough of exaggerated stories of epidemics that never materialize and [that diminish] personal freedom."

An Investigative Journey into a reckless and contaminated Medical Industry

(Quotes from a 2008 review of the book 'Fear Of The Invisible' by Dr.
Roberto Giraldo)


"This book takes its readers on a journey into the very heart of the hunt for viruses – to the key experiments performed to prove that these invisibly small particles cause diseases that often were previously blamed on toxins or bacteria. It sheds light on the extraordinary assumptions underlying much of "this research into viruses – and the resulting vaccines and antiviral medicines.
"

"The author, an investigative journalist who researched and produced investigative films for the BBC, American and Australian television, was asked by parents with children severely ill after vaccination to discover if the medical authorities were hiding anything from them. She agreed, but had no idea how long this search would take or how it would change her ideas. She expected at best to uncover a small degree of contamination.
"

"On the ensuing decade-long journey of discovery, she found top government scientists report alarmingly, at meetings between scientists, that it is impossible to purify vaccines. They stated that the childhood vaccines of today are contaminated with viruses from chickens, humans and monkeys, with RNA and DNA fragments, with "cellular degradation products," and possibly "oncogenes and prions.
"

"She reports US biowarfare researchers tried to create new agents to destroy human immune systems – and reported working on a bacterium to make it a hospital superbug. Did they manage to create HIV? She thought it unlikely as military personnel were not AIDS first victims. Besides there was a more likely alternative. A senior professor told her the vaccine program was so contaminated and chimps were used in vaccine manufacturing so widely, that HIV could easily have spread in a vaccine without any need for military intervention. She then set out to find why HIV spread so far and so fast. Was it in a vaccine? She needed to know more about HIV so went to the foundation research widely held today to have found this virus and proved it caused AIDS.


"She was then rocked to discover that this key HIV research was investigated for scientific fraud by powerful US scientific institutions and by Congress. Why is this not widely known? These reported major errors in this research, with some errors so serious that the inquiries said they made it impossible to repeat these experiments and verify them! She reveals the evidence unearthed – reproducing key documents so the reader can assess them for themselves. This is explosive material.
"



Liam Scheff Reviews Janine Roberts "Fear Of The Invisible".




"AIDS is a sex disease, and has one cause. SARS is the terror itself, unmasked. Bird flu will sweep human existence off the seven continents. Polio was conquered by vaccination, and without more vaccination, we will all succumb to a new plague, (as surely as the IRS collects taxes).
"

These are the predictions of the masters of our universe – the dispensers of existential belief in our historical era of reduction, magnification, and intellectually sterile research, promulgated from on high, by sleep–deprived, grant–minded Graduate students, flocking as sleepwalkers in white lab coats from our grand Universities, marching into the world to save us from all these horrors.


But are they? Is it true – any of it, any of what they predict, or write as history? That is a question we small people are not permitted to ask in polite company, and certainly not in print; and certainly, not on television.


"Are the predictions of the Centers for Disease Control correct? Does the World Health Organization make sense? Is today's science, true?" A journalist asking these questions, quickly finds him or herself out of the mainstream discussion, as surely as the IRS collects taxes.


And so, Janine Roberts' new book presents a problem.


The church of old used to have the good sense to ban books like "Fear of the Invisible" the existence of such books undermined their Holy authority and threated insurrection and intellectual revolt, by pointing to the gaping holes and ten thousand improbabilities and logical contusions that exist in the Holy texts (especially when one is asked to read them as literal truth). Banning and burning these folios (and their authors) was simply a necessary business practice, in a cult of belief, such as was the Inquisition Church, Mao's China or Stalin's Russia.


Or the World Health Organization?

But times have changed. The current church of scientific orthodoxy, which has grown in the footprint of the church of old, does not have to ban books or burn authors in the flesh; we're more clever and superficially humane in our treatment of today's Galileos and Brunos.


Today's heretics are burnt in effigy – in word. They find themselves derided and attacked, without an offer to respond, in the peculiar, small–minded, paradigmatic and highly illiberal Holy texts of our era – the New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet, Nature Medicine, JAMA, and their mouthpieces to the public, The New York Times, PBS, Newsweek, NPR, FOX and CNN.


If this sounds like a misapprehension, or a paranoid fantasy to you, please accept my invitation to read Ms.
Roberts remarkable book, even a chapter of it, and watch what happens as your mind expands with charged particles of comprehension, as the blanket of belief that we've been told is irrefutable truth, comes into view, and the ten thousand tawdry holes in its canvas give way to the blazing light of epiphany:

"Ah–ha," you will find yourself saying. "That, finally, makes sense.
"

AIDS, Bird Flu, Polio, SARS – these are the promised plagues of our time – but they have been misunderstood and misrepresented so completely and forcibly by our trusted, benevolent, care–taking scientific authorities, that only time will tell if the complex truths that underlie these brand names for poverty, pollution and chemical toxicity, will ever be widely understood. If you wish to get ahead of the curve, I strongly recommend Ms. Roberts book.


Especially pleasing to the curious–minded are the excavations of hidden history – or history that was hidden in plain sight – that she performs for us. Among her archaeological findings is the buried trail of deceit and decrepitude that is the published and venerated work of one poor, unfortunate Robert Gallo, a man who had the mal chance to be an egotistical wretch, pushing intellectually bankrupt but socially seductive work, in the wrong place, at precisely the wrong time in our history.


Or perhaps, the right place and the right time, to push one illiterate catastrophe of a hypothesis, like an 11th Commandment in a secular age, to the forefront of our era. The work Janine does in excavating Dr. Gallo's truths, from his massive fictions, is alone worth the price of admission.


Will this book be burned? It will be attacked in electronic print, wherever it is reviewed, by those uncourageous few who have turned our redoubtable sciences into a maze of self–limiting, paradigm–bound–and–strangled science fictions; it will be slandered by those unwilling to consider how our intellectual past affects our present; it will be libeled by those who don't bother to check the limits of their inherited world–view.


But for the rest of us, or those most curious among us, who can manage to give ourselves permission to color outside the lines, a book like this gives a rare and wonderful opportunity – it's a chance to take a journey beyond the dark canvas of today's dogmas, and peer into tomorrow's wider, more humane, more correct understanding of the rather grand world we are so very fortunate to live in.

The Secret Origin of AIDS in America:
Facts, Fallacies and Conspiracy Theories

In 2006 the AIDS epidemic will be a quarter-century old. Officially starting in June 1981 as a mysterious and fatal disease exclusively found in several dozen young white gay men from New York City and Los Angeles, the disease has now killed 20 million people with 40 million more currently infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), widely accepted as the sole cause of AIDS. One million Americans are now infected with HIV; and almost half of the new cases are African-American.

By Alan Cantwell, MD

The disease was first uncovered in homosexual men from Manhattan. "Gay cancer," in the form of Kaposi's sarcoma skin tumors, was the most striking telltale sign; and drugs, promiscuity, and anal sex were all thought to play a role in the unprecedented suppression of the immune system. It was soon obvious that the disease was not limited to gays: the mysterious agent was in the national blood supply, and an epidemic of AIDS was also uncovered in Central Africa.

In April 1984 Robert Gallo of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) announced his discovery of HIV as the cause of AIDS. Subsequently, Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris filed a lawsuit claiming he had first discovered the AIDS virus at Pasteur, and that Gallo had stolen the French virus after it was sent to his lab for study.
Twenty-five years later, the origin of AIDS still remains a mystery. The disease is widely believed to have originated in Africa when a primate (monkey) virus "jumped species" to first infect Black Africans. However, it is important to note that this belief is theory, not proven fact.

Montagnier has wisely cautioned that it is extremely important to distinguish between the ancestral origin of HIV and the actual beginning of the AIDS epidemic. The animal virus ancestor of HIV may indeed be centuries old, but it is obvious that the epidemic itself is new.

The epidemic did not begin in Africa. The first AIDS cases were uncovered in Manhattan in 1979. At that time there were no reported African cases. In fact, the AIDS epidemic in Africa did not begin until the autumn of 1982 at the earliest.

How was HIV introduced exclusively into the gay community in the late 1970s? The exclusive introduction of HIV into the homosexual population of New York City is an unprecedented event in the history of medicine. This biologic phenomenon has never been fully explained scientifically. There is certainly no evidence to indicate white gay men were the only people exposed to sexual contact with Africans, particularly at a time when the epidemic did not exist in Africa. Furthermore, it is biologically impossible for a purported sexually-transmitted and blood borne "virus out of Africa" to infect only young, white, healthy men in Manhattan! Yet, the impossible did happen. Despite these facts, we are repeatedly told that AIDS began in Africa, even though the American epidemic began before the African epidemic.

The mixing of AIDS facts and fallacies has long been apparent to researchers like myself who are convinced that HIV did not come from Mother Nature and "species jumping", but was most likely introduced via contaminated vaccine experiments exclusively targeting the Black African and the American Gay community.

Before exploring the man-made theory of AIDS, it is important to note a small but highly vocal group who believes the cause of AIDS is still unknown, that the AIDS blood test is worthless, and that HIV is a harmless virus that is not sexually transmitted. This group, headed by retrovirologist Peter Duesberg and other well-credential scientific "dissidents", believes AIDS is a toxic and nutritional syndrome. They blame AIDS on recreational drug use among gays - and poverty and malnutrition in Africa for the disease.

As a medical doctor and AIDS and cancer researcher, I am certainly not in accord with this group, but they have been quite successful politically, influencing world leaders like President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, much to the chagrin of the World Health Organization. For more information, go to www.google.com and type-in "VirusMyth" or "The Perth Group".

Genetic Engineering and the AIDS Epidemic
There is a close connection between the rise of genetic engineering and mixing of viruses in the early 1970s and the outbreak of HIV in the late 1970s. This connection persists in the form of the many unprecedented "emerging diseases" caused by "new viruses" that continue up to the present time.

In 1970 the discovery of a cell enzyme, called "reverse transcriptase" by Howard Temin and David Baltimore, allowed molecular biologists to detect so-called retroviruses in some animal cancers. It was soon recognized that retroviruses could be found normally in the genes of many animal cells, and that scientists could manipulated these viruses to produce detrimental effects on the immune system. In "species jumping" laboratory experiments, many viruses were transferred between different animal species and were also adapted to human cells.

As part of President Richard Nixon's "War on Cancer, " genetic engineering of viruses became an integral part of the now largely forgotten Special Virus Cancer Program, conducted under the auspices of the NCI. Nixon also transferred part of the Army's biological warfare unit at Fort Detrick, Maryland, over to the NCI, thereby allowing secret biowarfare experimentation to be carried out under cover of bona fide cancer research.

All this virus transfer and molecular manipulation was a biologic disaster waiting to happen. What would happen if one of these highly dangerous genetic creations escaped from the laboratory into the public sector? This culminated in a historic conference entitled "Biohazards in Biological Research" held at Asilomar, near Pacific Grove in California in 1973. Despite the biologic dangers, it was decided to continue this research.

By the late-1970s the War against Cancer and the Virus Cancer Program proved a bust with no cancer-causing retroviruses found in humans. The Program was winding down in 1978, at the exact time when government scientists were also enrolling thousands of gay men in New York City to serve as guinea pigs in the hepatitis B experiment that took place that same year at the New York Blood Center in Manhattan. In 1979 the first cases of AIDS in gay men were reported from Manhattan. Coincidence? I think not.

Five years later, Gallo, who had worked for the Virus Cancer Program (VCP), "discovered" the retrovirus that causes AIDS; and Duesberg, who also worked for the VCP, continues to declare that HIV is harmless.

Is there a connection between the laboratory manipulation of primate retroviruses in the 1970s and the outbreak of AIDS? Or did Mother Nature conveniently pick that exact time to jump monkey genes into gay men to spectacularly revive the science of retrovirology and the careers of virologists like Gallo?

The Gay Vaccine Experiment
The earliest AIDS cases in America can be clearly traced back to the time period when the hepatitis B experiment began at the New York Blood Center. The Center began injecting gay men with multiple doses of the experimental vaccine in November 1978. The inoculations ended in October 1979, less than two years before the official start of the epidemic. Most importantly, the vaccine was developed in chimpanzees - the primate now thought to contain the "ancestor" virus of HIV. Also downplayed is the Center's pre-AIDS connection to primate research in Africa and also to a primate center in the New York City area. The final experimental vaccine was also made by Merck and the NIH from the pooled serum specimens of countless gay men who carried the hepatitis B virus in their blood.

The New York Blood Center (NYBC) is the largest independent blood supplier and distributor in the USA. In 1970, Alfred M Prince, M.D., head of the NYBC Laboratory of Virology, began his hepatitis research with chimps housed at LEMSIP (the Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery) in downstate Tuxedo, NY. Until disbanded in 1997, LEMSIP supplied New York area scientists with primates and primate parts for transplantation and virus research.

Founded in 1965, LEMSIP was affiliated with New York University Medical Center, where the first cases of AIDS-associated Kaposi's sarcoma were discovered in 1979. NYU Medical Center researchers were also heavily involved in the development of the experimental hepatitis B vaccine, and the Center received government grants and contracts connected with biological warfare research beginning in 1969, according to Dr. Leonard Horowitz, author of Emerging Viruses: AIDS and Ebola [1996].

In 1974 Prince, with the support of Aaron Kellner, President of the NYBC, moved the chimp hepatitis research to a new primate center called Vilab II in Robertsfield, Liberia, in Africa. Chimps were captured from various parts of West Africa and brought to VILAB. The lab also prides itself by releasing "rehabilitated" chimps back into the wild. One cannot help but wonder if some of the purported "ancestors" of HIV in the African bush have their origin in chimpanzees held in African primate labs for vaccine and medical experimentation.

The hepatitis B experiment, which inoculated over 1,000 healthy gay men, was a huge success with 96% of the men developing antibodies again the hepatitis virus. This high rate of success could not have been achieved if the men were immunosuppressed, because immunosuppressed people do not easily form antibodies to the vaccine. The experiment was followed by similar hepatitis B experiments using gay men in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Denver and St. Louis, beginning in March 1980 and ending in October 1981, the same year the epidemic became official.

In the mid-1980s the many blood specimens donated by the gay Manhattan men during the experiment were retrospectively examined for HIV infection by researchers at the NYBC. It was determined that 6% of the specimens donated between 1978-1979 were positive for HIV. By 1984 (the end of the study period) over 40% of the men tested positive for HIV.

The final fate of all the men in the experiment has never been revealed. However, the blood donated by these men are the oldest HIV-positive blood tests on record in the United States. The full story of this experiment and its aftermath are contained in my two books on man-made AIDS: AIDS and the Doctors of Death [1988], and Queer Blood [1993]. For details, google: "gay hepatitis B experiment." One fact is obvious: There was no AIDS in America until the exact year the government began experimenting with gay men.

There is also a suppressed connection between the outbreak of AIDS in Africa and the widespread vaccine programs conducted by the World Health Organization (WHO) in the 1970s in Central Africa, particularly the smallpox eradication program. On May 11, 1987, London Times science writer Pearce Wright suggested the smallpox vaccine program could have awakened a "dormant" AIDS virus infection in Africa. Gallo was quoted as saying," The link between the WHO program and the epidemic is an interesting and important hypothesis. I cannot say that it actually happened, but I have been saying for some years that the use of live vaccines, such as that used for smallpox, can activate a dormant infection such as HIV."

This explosive story linking AIDS to African vaccines was suppressed and never appeared in the controlled major American media. The genocidal and depopulation implications of this suppressed story can be found on the Internet by googling "WHO Murdered Africa", by William Campbell Douglas, M.D.

Vaccines, Species Jumping, and HIV
There are inherent dangers in vaccine production because vaccines are made on living cells. Contamination with bacteria and viruses are constant problems during the manufacturing process. Laboratory additives used to feed the cell cultures (such as fetal bovine [cow] serum) may also be a source of microbial contamination. Some researchers believe living and killed viruses injected into the body can combine with other viruses normally present in the body, resulting in disease-causing "recombinants." Vaccines can also contain viral particles, as well as newly recognized tiny bacteria known as "nanobacteria." Half the 2004 flu vaccine supply was destroyed due to contamination with disease-causing bacteria. The dangers of vaccines are downplayed in an attempt to assure the public that vaccines are safe.

We are repeatedly told that HIV is the first primate virus to "jump species" and produce an epidemic in humans. But, in truth, the AIDS epidemic is the second instance in which a monkey virus has been transferred to humans via vaccines.

Rarely-publicized is the fact that a cancer-causing monkey virus jumped species a half century ago when contaminated polio vaccines were injected into millions of people, including half the U.S. population of that era. In the early 1960s it was discovered that some lots of polio vaccine manufactured on rhesus monkey kidney cells during the period 1955 to 1963 were contaminated with a monkey virus called SV40 (Simian virus 40). This primate virus was proven to cause cancer in experimental animals. However, to this day, health officials still insist there is no proof that SV40 causes human cancer.

Despite the lack of government interest, genetic and immunologic studies of SV40 by independent researchers over the past decade indicate this virus is clearly associated with rapidly-fatal cancers of the lung (mesothelioma), bone marrow cancer (multiple myeloma), brain tumors in children, and other forms of cancer.

A Washington Times report (September 21, 2003) states, "Some of the polio vaccine given to millions of American children from 1962 until 2000 could have been contaminated with a monkey virus that shows up in some cancers, according to documents and testimony to be delivered to a House committee Wednesday. The vaccine manufacturer said such claims 'don't have any validity,' and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) agrees." (See the website: www.sv40cancer.com)

For anyone who still believes vaccine makers and health officials always act in your best interest, I would highly recommend a recently published book titled The Virus and the Vaccine: The True Story of a Cancer-Causing Monkey Virus, Contaminated Polio Vaccine, and the Millions of Americans Exposed, by Debbie Bookchin and Jim Schumacher.

Medical Experimentation and Bio Warfare
The idea of man-made AIDS is often considered a paranoid belief. Why would scientists introduce a virus to kill millions of people? AIDS experts routinely blame primates and human sexuality for the origin and spread of HIV, but they never consider the possibility that HIV could have originated in an animal cancer virus laboratory.

The sad truth is that governments and the military do indeed experiment on unsuspecting citizens. (Google: secret medical experimentation) And Iraqi bioweapons of mass destruction was one of the reasons used to justify the current invasion of Iraq.

It is clear that AIDS started as a "gay disease." However, yet another downplayed fact is that the HIV "strain" in America is different from the HIV strains found in Africa.

Harvard virologist Max Essex claims the American HIV strain spreads more easily via anal sex; whereas the African strains spread more efficiently via vaginal sex. (Google: Max Essex + HIV strain) This could explain why the American epidemic spreads primarily through homosexual activity and anal sex , while in Africa it is primarily heterosexual and spreads through vaginal sex. The "different" HIV strain in America is further evidence that "American AIDS" did not originate in Africa.

The Relationship between AIDS and Cancer

The relationship between AIDS and cancer is also downplayed, along with the connection between the Special Virus Cancer Program and the ensuing outbreak of HIV. In Gallo's book he readily admits to a relationship between AIDS and cancer, noting that, "many people with AIDS develop one or more cancers." There is now no doubt that HIV can lead to an increased incidence of cancer, particularly Kaposi's sarcoma, Hodgkin's disease, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and cervical cancer.

The purpose of the Virus Cancer Program was two-fold. First, to discover a virus in humans that could cause a form of cancer. Second, to develop immunosuppressive laboratory viruses useful in "making" cancer in experimental animals.

When Gallo discovered HIV in 1984, he called it a cancer-causing "leukemia/lymphoma" virus. The name was quickly changed to a "lymphotropic" virus, thus obscuring the relationship between the new "gay disease" and cancer. Virologists were quickly convinced that the virus came from primates, and both Gallo and Essex heavily promoted the readily accepted African green monkey origin of HIV. A decade later, chimpanzees (rather than monkeys) became the more favored origin. The primate origin of HIV was further obscured by titling the virus as a "human immunodeficiency virus" (HIV) , rather than calling it "primate immunodeficiency virus" (or PIV) in humans.

Is HIV the sole cause of AIDS?
As noted, HIV is believed to be the sole cause of AIDS, although a few AIDS dissidents believe HIV is harmless. Generally disregarded by both groups is the matter of the origin of Kaposi's sarcoma, the "gay cancer" associated with AIDS.

In 1994 it was reported that KS is actually caused by a new "herpes-8" virus. KS cases were first discovered in the late nineteenth century; and before AIDS it was a rare form of cancer. Before AIDS, KS was a non-transmissible disease that was never seen in young American men. The finding of a new KS virus indicates that two different viruses were simultaneously introduced into gay men when AIDS began in the late 1970s. No rational explanation has been put forth for this bizarre occurrence; and how this "new" virus could cause a gay epidemic of KS has never been explained satisfactorily. Further complicating the "sole cause" of AIDS scenario is the recent discovery of tiny bacterial forms known as "mycoplasma." Luc Montagnier believes these microbes are important infectious "co-factors" in the development of AIDS, although most AIDS researchers ignore mycoplasma.

The "Cancer Microbe" link to AIDS
Although the precise cause of cancer is unknown, there is a century of microbial research linking certain tuberculosis-like bacteria to cancer. This research is ignored as medical heresy, but my own reported cancer studies indicate that "acid-fast" bacteria indeed exist in common forms of cancer and in Kaposi's sarcoma. (Google: alan cantwell + Kaposi's sarcoma)

I have written extensively about these bacteria in, AIDS; The Mystery & the Solution(1984), The Cancer Microbe (1990), and Four Women Against Cancer (2005). Cancer bacteria have characteristics of both bacteria and viruses. There are also similarities to mycoplasma and to newly-discovered nanobacteria, currently considered to be the smallest forms of life and known to contaminate commercial vaccines. Nanobacteria are ubiquitous and may be involved in the pathology of many diseases currently considered of unknown cause.
Cancer microbe research has been ignored in AIDS and KS. However, Lawrence Broxmeyer, M.D., in AIDS: What the Discoverers of HIV Never Admitted (2003), concludes that the real cause of AIDS is not HIV, but actually tuberculosis-like bacteria. He thinks Gallo and Montagnier found a retrovirus because that was the only thing they were looking for.

Unlike Broxmeyer, I believe HIV came out of animal cancer research and dangerous vaccine and biological warfare experimentation - and that HIV made its way into vaccines injected into African Blacks and American Gays. If unrecognized cancer microbes are proven to be an unrecognized infectious factor in cancer and AIDS, as I believe they are, this would certainly add to the dangers of genetic engineering of cancer viruses and new bio-warfare agents.

I believe HIV is essential to produce the immunodeficiency characteristic of AIDS, but I consider HIV plus unrecognized "cancer bacteria" to be the causes of AIDS.

The Origin of Gallo's HIV virus
Could HIV be related to reported virus-like forms of cancer bacteria? A careful reading of how Gallo "isolated" HIV indicates possible derivation from cancerous cells harboring unrecognized bacteria.

Unlike most bacteria which can be grown on artificial laboratory culture media, viruses need living cells to grow and survive. Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Crewdson provides a detailed analysis of the discovery of HIV in, Science Fictions: A Scientific Mystery, A Massive Cover-Up, and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo [2002], a highly unflattering portrait of Gallo and an account of the lawsuit initiated by the Pasteur Institute, accusing Gallo of stealing the AIDS virus.
According to Crewdson, HIV was finally isolated in Gallo's lab by isolating the virus in pooled blood T-cells from ten patients with AIDS. From that brew, the virus was cultured in larger amounts for commercial purposes by growing HIV .. lines" derived from the white blood cells (T-cells) of patients with lymphoma cancer. This particular strain of HIV became the basis for Gallo's patented HIV blood test and the resulting lawsuit.

Montagnier claimed that he first discovered HIV at Pasteur and when he sent the virus to Gallo's lab for testing, he believes Gallo stole the virus and made it his own discovery. Gallo repeatedly declared his virus was not the French virus.

It was eventually proven that Montagnier's virus somehow made its way into Gallo's HIV culture. Just as everyone's fingerprints are different, so too is every HIV virus. Gallo's virus was molecularly identical to Montagnier's in every respect. With the intervention of President Ronald Reagan and the French Premier, the lawsuit was settled out of court in 1987, with the two researchers agreeing to split the royalties from the AIDS blood test.

Despite all this, the scientific controversy continued, resulting in additional investigations by the National Academy of Sciences and the NIH Office of Scientific Integrity. In 1991, Gallo finally conceded that Montagnier's virus had most likely contaminated his laboratory and that his AIDS patented blood test was indeed based on the Pasteur virus. In 1992, the National Academy of Sciences' panel completed its investigation, producing a report critical of Gallo.

All these scientific irregularities surrounding the precise lab origin of HIV point to serious problems in virology. For example, for several years Gallo was unable or unwilling to admit his virus was identical to Montagnier's virus, even though they proved to as identical as any two HIV virus strains could be. Furthermore, the controversy proves how easily virus laboratories can be contaminated by "outside" viruses.

One of the contentions of the man-made theory of AIDS is that the experimental hepatitis B vaccine was contaminated with an immunosuppressive AIDS-causing agent and/or the Kaposi's sarcoma virus. This theory is condemned as conspiracy theory. Certainly the vaccine was unlike any other in that it was made from the blood of gay men who were hepatitis B virus carriers. During the gay experiment at the NYBC there was concern that something was wrong with the vaccine and that it might be contaminated. According to June Goodfield's Quest for the Killers, p 86, "This was no theoretical fear, contamination having been suspected in one batch made by the National Institutes of Health, though never in Merck's."

Four years before AIDS in 1975, Gallo also reported a "human virus" (HL-23) that subsequently proved to be three contaminating laboratory cancer-causing primate viruses (gibbon ape virus, simian sarcoma virus, and baboon endogenous virus). Gallo claims he has no idea how these animal viruses contaminated his lab. In 1986 Essex also reported a "new AIDS virus" that eventually turned out to be a monkey virus traced back to his own lab. Despite these contaminations, Gallo and Essex both blamed AIDS on monkeys in the jungle and heavily promoted the "out of Africa" origin of American AIDS.

After AIDS began there were instances where a strain of HIV isolated from a particular AIDS patient inadvertently contaminated HIV specimens from other AIDS patients - and where HIV strains sent to other laboratories accidentally contaminated additional specimens.

For years Montagnier insisted that Gallo's virus was isolated from a French patient named Brugiere. In 1991 the two foremost AIDS experts were astonished to learn that Gallo's strain of HIV actually belonged to a patient named Laillier. Unbeknownst to Montagnier, the "Bru" culture had somehow contaminated the "Lai" culture at the Pasteur lab.

Is AIDS Genocide against Gays and Blacks?
Why is there a blackout of the man-made theory of AIDS in the scientific literature and in the corporate-controlled media? Although some evidence is presented here, it is a fraction of the documentation presented in my two books on the man-made epidemic, and in books by Dr. Leonard Horowitz, and Professor Robert E Lee, and in Dr. Robert Strecker's video "The Strecker Memorandum", and in other sources. (Google, "man-made origin of AIDS" for 445 citations.)

I do not believe the exclusive introduction of HIV into the most hated minority in America was caused by monkeys in the African bush, particularly when AIDS appeared immediately after the gay experiment. Why are primates in the African wild blamed when tens of thousands of captive primates in virus labs all over the world have been injected with infectious viruses and cancerous tissue for more than a century.

Why were African Blacks targeted? Many Africans and African-Americans believe AIDS is an experiment to rid the world of Black people, as part of a government-sanctioned world depopulation program.

American gays were the perfect target to test a new retrovirus. A largely homophobic public would easily accept HIV infection in gays, due to their purported promiscuity and drug use. Few people would believe the U.S. government would secretly test biologic agents on its civilians, although there is a well-documented history of secret unethical experimentation extending back to the Cold War of the 1950s which includes the government's horrendous "radiation experiments."

I cannot explain the silence and apathy on these issues from the Black and the Gay communities. People don't seem to care much about genocide unless their own group is affected; and even so, most people are in denial and don't want to know about man-made AIDS. Many AIDS activists simply dismiss the man-made theory as a "distraction" which interferes with HIV testing and treatment, and the search for a cure.

The Secret History of AIDS
The history of AIDS has been deliberately white-washed to obscure its man-made origin. Knowledge of HIV and other retroviruses came directly out of the little-known and secret Special Virus Cancer Program of the 1970s. More than one virus was introduced into American gays in the late 1970s, and mycoplasma and "cancer bacteria" are additional infectious agents that have been ignored in proclaiming HIV as the "sole cause of AIDS."

Secret bio-warfare research co-mingled with bona fide cancer research at the NCI in the decade before AIDS, and that association continues up to the present time. AIDS in America erupted when government researchers began experimenting with gays, using an experimental vaccine developed in primates - the animals purported to contain the "ancestor virus" of HIV. AIDS in America did not come from Africa. HIV occurred exclusively in the gay community because the virus was put there by the "hand of man."

Mother Nature wisely separated the species but, in the decade before AIDS , genetic researchers repeatedly violated the "species barrier" by transferring cancer-causing viruses between various animal species, ostensibly to improve our health.
The man-made theory of AIDS is not based on conspiracy theory. The theory warrants a full scientific investigation - and the secret history of HIV and AIDS needs to come out of the closet.

® 2005 Alan Cantwell, MD, writes frequently about the origin of AIDS and cancer. He is the author of AIDS and the Doctors of Death, Queer Blood, The Cancer Microbe, and a new 2005 book, Four Women Against Cancer, all published by Aries Rising Press, PO Box 29532, Los Angeles, CA 90029.

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Michael Ellner

Since 1982 tens of thousands of people have come to HEAL meetings in New York City to get an alternative view and approach to health and healing. HEAL provided the necessary resources to help them evaluate their actual health risks, and access alternative healthcare providers if they decided to use an alternative approach.

The 'AIDS Zone' is a mass trance that creates an imaginary hyper-desperation and helplessness in all who unknowingly slip into it. When participating and making choices within the Zone it is itself, in my opinion, the most dangerous and under-rated risk for developing AIDS-indicator diseases. For most people, primarily people who have tested 'positive', whenever discussing or even thinking about HIV or AIDS they do so unaware of their trance logic. The most important thing HEAL offers people is a way out of the trance; a way out of the Zone.

Could you be in the AIDS Zone? Take this simple test:

• Are you always afraid of getting sick and dying?

• Are you taking T-cell counts?

• Are you taking any conventional anti-HIV treatments?

• Are you taking any alternative anti-HIV treatments?

• Are you concerned about your viral load?

• Do you think every symptom and minor health problem is the beginning of the end?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions you are unknowingly operating with the Zone. This is dangerous because desperate people always make desperate choices.

Unfortunately, escaping from the AIDS Zone is not enough. When choosing a healthcare provider one is wise to ensure that the practitioner you are considering is not him/herself stuck in the AIDS Zone. In the late eighties, a new breed of alternative and holistic practitioners began offering their services within the western allopathic context of treating 'HIV disease'. When HEAL talks about taking an alternative or holistic approach to maintaining or rebuilding health we are talking about practitioners who design a personalized protocol based on their patients' or clients' individual needs. This approach has been disregarded by these 'new' practitioners who instead treat 'HIV infection'. We recommend that people replace these practitioners with someone who practices classical alternative (or holistic) medicine, someone who views them as people with health problems and imbalances, rather than people with HIV or AIDS. Although many of these new 'alternative HIV' practitioners are well intentioned, they are best avoided and HEAL advises people to avoid any and all practitioners who treat "HIV infection." The task is to address genuine health risks and any problems people are actually experiencing.

We also recommend that people with or at risk for AIDS indicator diseases be aware of the special health risks that come with being viewed as being infected with HIV, which include: intense chronic fear and social isolation, relentless programming to get sick and die, and the fact that in far too many cases every problem they have will be blamed on HIV.

So before considering what kind of help you need it is important to calmly evaluate your health outside of the Zone. Because the tests for both HIV antibodies and the HI-Virus are simply not scientifically valid (1) , if you haven't taken an HIV test – don't!

If you have already tested so-called 'HIV positive' it is best to consider all the risks associated with getting a false positive result and address the risks themselves. HEAL considers all positive results to be false positives in lieu of viral isolation. At most a positive result is, outside the Zone, a marker for possible serious health risks, and not the death sentence one gets within the Zone. As there is no specific evidence which demonstrates HIV has been properly isolated one may not think of oneself as HIV positive.

In order to help people better evaluate their prospective practitioner I offer you the Ellner test:

A. If you are otherwise healthy and have simply tested positive you must look the prospective practitioner in the eye and say: I am 'HIV positive' and am told that I'm at risk for AIDS. Do you think it is possible for me to live a long and healthy life? If the practitioner says anything but yes, find another practitioner!

B. If you have one or more AIDS indicator diseases or conditions, the test is a little different. In addition to eye contact, you must physically make contact with the doctor and say: I have 'AIDS'. Do you think it is possible for me to regain my health and live a long healthy life? If the practitioner says anything but yes run for your life! Then calmly find another practitioner.

In certain situations conventional medical care can be and is lifesaving. But, to do with 'AIDS', only in the context of actual diseases, i.e. the 'opportunistic' diseases themselves. In all other cases I believe AIDS specialists (both conventional and alternative) who are helping you wage a war against HIV can only hurt you and ultimately shorten your life.

Remember, educate yourself and then question, challenge and fire any and all healthcare providers who want to treat you inside the AIDS Zone.
healaids.com

NEW YORK CITY.-For years Black AIDS experts have said AIDS among Black people is a 'health crisis'. Now, a new report from the Black AIDS Institute says 'more Black Americans are infected with HIV than the total populations of people living with HIV in seven of the 15 countries served by PEPFAR (President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief). Phil Wilson, CEO of the Black AIDS Institute and one of the authors of the report said '"Were Black America a separate country, it would elicit major concern and extensive assistance from the U.S. government. Instead, the national response to AIDS among Black Americans has been lethargic and often neglectful."

Some within the Black community have expressed 'shock' and 'disbelieve' after reading 'Left Behind! Black America: A Neglected Priority in the Global AIDS Epidemic' Rev. Al Sharpton, founder and CEO of the National Action Network (NAN) said "U.S. policy makers seem to be much more interested in the epidemic in Botswana than the epidemic in Louisiana. This is an unnecessary and deadly choice. Both need urgent attention." In areas of the United States such as Detroit, Newark, New York, Washington D.C. and the Deep South, HIV levels among segments of the Black community approach those of many severely affected countries in Africa. For example, HIV prevalence among middle-aged Black men in Manhattan is almost as high as overall prevalence in South Africa, home to the world's largest population of people living with HIV.

The report underlines the crisis among Black women. Black women in the US for little understood reasons have for years been the population most at risk for HIV. "Black women are particularly affected by the domestic AIDS response and attention to their needs is inadequate. Lives are lost as a result," said Dr. Helene Gayle, President/CEO of CARE. Most AIDS activists agree. They have rallied unsuccessfully since the late 90s for more prevention programs targeting Black women. The situation has gotten worse. "Nothing short of a mass Black mobilization will be sufficient to turn around the AIDS epidemic in Black America," noted Wilson.

"The AIDS pandemic, including the epidemic right here at home, is a worldwide crisis. That is why we must ensure it is addressed it in a truly global way," said Barbara Lee, member of Congress from California and a co-author of the legislation that created PEPFAR. The position of the two Presidential candidates on HIV in Black America is unclear. However, the Democratic presumptive Presidential Candidate Barack Obama has supported HIV Prevention targeting the Black Community in the past.