Reflectorites
Below are web article links, headlines and/or paragraphs for the period 28
January - 31 January, with my comments in square brackets.
I apologise to those who are not interested in the HIV/AIDS issue - there
were just a lot of HIV/AIDS news articles in that period. In case this is of
no interest to some, I have moved all the HIV/AIDS material to the end of
the post, and that's where any future HIV/AIDS articles will always be.
I should also explain that I am not yet convinced of the Duesberg claim
that HIV does not cause AIDS. But from my background as a Hospital
Administrator in the late 1980's-early 1990's when AIDS first reached
Australia, there were a couple of Public Health doctors at HIV/AIDS
briefing sessions I attended who were outspokenly critical of the
connection between HIV and AIDS, and also of the propaganda put out by
the `gay lobby' (their exact words). But they were ordered by the `powers
that be' to keep their controversial opinions to themselves.
So my attitude is one of a `devil's advocate'. I am looking at the HIV/AIDS
issue as a sceptic would, without necessarily being one. I must admit it
does start to look shaky when one adjusts one's mental spectacles and
starts to consider whether the central assumption of the HIV/AIDS
industry is flawed and that money and politics has created a
pseudoscientific juggernaut which no one has the courage to stop. For web
articles claiming that that is the case, follow the links off my Phil Johnson
#2 web page at http://www.iinet.net.au/~sejones/pjurls02.html#hivaids
If it is true that millions of lives have been lost prematurely and miserably,
and billions of dollars has been wasted which could have been put to better
health use, then this will be the greatest scandal of science - *ever*! That is
why I consider this issue on-topic.
Steve
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http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/01/30/reviews/000130.30conwayt.html
The New York Times ... January 30, 2000 Where Are We Headed? Robert
Wright argues that human history does indeed have a purpose. ... By
SIMON CONWAY MORRIS. NONZERO The Logic of Human Destiny.
By Robert Wright.. ... To believe the universe is embedded in a teleological
matrix -- an overarching design that houses an implicit and eventual end
point, with the human race having a transcendental destiny ... is widely
regarded as a quaint delusion, of relevance only to religious fanatics ... and
the mad. And yet here is Robert Wright, who patently falls into none of
these categories, arguing that human history is not "one damn thing after
another," but has a direction, purpose and, by implication, a goal.... Yet the
implications of the teleological program are not carried to their logical
conclusion. For all its boldness and chutzpah, "Nonzero" suffers from a
failure of nerve. Wright seems reluctant even to consider that inherent in
the universe are not only quarks and quasars but a moral architecture that it
could be argued is the source of our teleological instinct.... Wright wages a
vigorous attack on the basic tenets held by Stephen Jay Gould, whose view
of evolution as little more than a contingent muddle is in hopeless disarray.
... when we move into the realm of animate matter -bacteria, cellular slime
molds, and, most notably, human beings -the situation strikes me as
different. The more closely we examine the drift of biological evolution
and, especially, the drift of human history, the more there seems to be a
point to it all. ... That we are a product of evolution, however, does not
reduce us to sleepwalkers. Free will gives us choice and responsibility. To
imagine that human destiny is entirely mundane may be one of the most
peculiar errors of the moderns. Throughout "Nonzero" stalks the ghost of
Teilhard de Chardin, but were this gentle and intelligent Jesuit to have seen
this book, I think his face might have darkened. Still, we are offered the
choice. Wright has taken us to the westernmost harbor. The boat is ready
for departure. The master stands on the quayside; there is one spare place.
Dare we accept the invitation?. ... [Here we have one of the world's leading
paleontologists, who reportedly has become a Christian, supporting a
teleological (i.e. designed) interpretation of natural and human history! And
who is the "Master" inviting us step off "the westernmost harbor" (ie. to
cross over to the New World?) and into the "boat" in which there is only
"one spare place"? Teilhard de Chardin? What's the "dare" in that? Or
could the Master be Christ?!]
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000130/sc/environment_apes_1.html
... Yahoo! ... January 30 ... Time Running Out for Africa's Great Apes By
Ed Stoddard JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (Reuters) - When
renowned ape researcher Jane Goodall came to Tanzania 40 years ago, she
could climb to a hilltop and see nothing but rain forest and chimpanzee
habitat stretching to the horizon. Today, the home of her ground-breaking
studies into chimpanzee behavior is only a tiny piece of its old size, about
ten miles long and three miles deep, surrounded by cleared land and
eroding soil....Give it just 10 to 20 years and it will be too late...they (the
Great Apes) are disappearing even as we speak," she told Reuters.
...Goodall said one of the chimpanzee's greatest liabilities was its inability
to adapt to new habitats. Unlike baboons, which can thrive in most of
Africa's ecosystems, chimpanzees cannot survive outside the rain forest.
The same holds true for their cousins, the gorillas and the orang-utans of
southeast Asia. "Chimpanzees and other Great Apes have a very
conservative nature," she said. ... [The contrast between the nature of
humans and their alleged nearest living relatives is striking. Man is an
inveterate adventurer and risk-taker, who has adapted to every part of the
globe. But the apes can only survive in very specialised ecosystems.]
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000128/sc/science_suicide_1.html
... Yahoo! ... January 28 ... Canada Team Finds Genetic Link to
Suicide By David Ljunggren OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canadian
doctors said on Friday they had discovered a genetic mutation
which increased the chance of suicide and predicted that a test to
identify those at high risk of killing themselves could be available by
2002. The results of a 10-year study by a team at the Royal Ottawa
Hospital into why depressed people kill themselves are a clear sign
that suicide is a largely genetic phenomenon and not related, as
often thought, to weakness of character. There are enormous
implications to the findings. Creation of a successful test may lead
to more careful treatment of depressed patients who carry the
mutation but may raise fears that those with the marker could be
discriminated against. The team found that depressed people with
a mutation in the gene encoding for a serotonin 2A receptor -- a
message-carrying chemical linked to mood -- were more than twice
as likely to commit suicide than those without the mutation. ... [I
would be surprised if it is as clear-cut as this. Social factors are
surely the major factor in suicide. The key might be in how
"depressed people" is defined. One would also need to know how
many people without the mutation commit sucide and how many
people with the mutation don't suffer from depression.]
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000128/sc/health_freeze_2.html
... Yahoo! ... January 28 ... Norwegian Returns to Life After Severe
Hypothermia By Patricia Reaney LONDON (Reuters) - A Norwegian
woman whose body temperature dropped to 56.7 degrees in a skiing
accident was brought back to life after she was thawed, doctors said
Friday.... "She was clinically dead for a couple of hours," said Gilbert, one
of dozens of doctors who has treated her since the accident last May. ...
Gilbert said the icy water cooled her body to the point where her heart had
stopped. It also cooled her brain enough so it could sustain a long period
without oxygen supply. ... The woman has no recollection of the accident.
... " [Interesting from a mind-body perspective. If she was "clinically dead"
then presumably she was brain dead? Her lack of memory indicates that her
brain was completely dead, assuming the mind cannot work and lay down
memory traces if the brain is dead. Yet she was able to be brought back to
life and remember who she was before the accident. So what is the
difference between her being alive and irrecoverably dead? Is it her body
and brain being in otherwise perfect working order and being able to be
restarted like a machine? Or is it also her immaterial spirit still being able to
continue to function through a brain in otherwise perfect working order?
Maybe this can never be resolved one way or the other?]
HIV/AIDS issues:
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000131/sc/aids_drugs_2.html
... Yahoo! ... Monday January 31 ... Researchers Looking to New
Generation HIV Drugs By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Frustrated by the virus's ability to mutate
and evade current drugs, and impatient with the slow progress of work to
develop an AIDS vaccine, researchers are looking to a new generation of
HIV drugs to help keep patients alive a while longer. ... The fusion
inhibitors stop the virus from getting into the cells it infects, and a class
known as integrase inhibitors stop it from hijacking the genes of its victims'
cells. They offer a new way to block the deadly virus, which infects 16,000
people every day around the world and which is rapidly learning to resist
the current strong cocktails designed to keep it suppressed.... "Their
greatest role will probably be in what we call salvage therapy," Ho added --
meaning treating people whose virus evades the current drugs they are
taking. ... Schooley said even if all these compounds succeed, the virus will
probably eventually develop resistance to them all. "The virus has gone to
great lengths over its evolution to develop multiple entry mechanisms,"
Schooley said. [More on this same story posted last week. One gets the
impression that they don't really believe these new drugs will work either.
Here we have more drugs to "salvage" those for whom earlier drugs didn't
work. And if they don't work, there is always the ready-made unfalsifiable
excuse that ", the virus will probably eventually develop resistance to them
all". Whatever the health pros and cons, one fact is certain that this is a
gold-mine for the drug companies! If the drugs were doing more harm than
good, would anyone dare call a stop to the whole juggernaut to find out?
One can imagine the powerful lobbyist forces which would spring into
action at any such suggestion - an alliance of drug companies making
billions out of HIV/AIDS and scientific experts who have bet their
reputation on this line of diagnosis and treatment. If they were wrong and
millions of people have died unnecessarily, who could even *think* it, let
alone admit it?]
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000131/sc/aids_gender_1.html ...
Yahoo! ... Monday January 31 ... Studies Find AIDS Differs in Men And
Women By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent SAN
FRANCISCO (Reuters) - It may be, as one researcher says, "blindingly
obvious," but women are different from men and AIDS researchers are just
beginning to realize it. They have found that women's bodies seem better
able to naturally hold down the AIDS virus, but this does not seem to do
them any good as they become sick and die at the same rates as men. ...
"Women appear to be progressing to AIDS at the same rate as men do,"
Dr. Thomas Quinn, an AIDS researcher at Johns Hopkins University in
Baltimore, said in an interview. "But it is at half the viral load the men
have." Viral load is a measure of how much virus is circulating in the
blood, and it is routinely used to measure how serious a person's HIV
infection is. "Until last year, everything was done in gay men. Now that
women are infected, we see they are biologically different," Quinn said.
"Ding-ding!" ... [That HIV is not a reliable indicator of AIDS seems like
more evidence of a weak causal link between the two. The fact that after
10-15 years and billions of dollars spent on HIV/AIDS, researchers
overlooked such an obvious factor as "women...are biologically
different...`Dingding!'", does not inspire confidence that they know what
they are doing, to put it mildly!]
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000130/sc/aids_circumcision_1.html ...
Yahoo! ... January 30 ... Circumcision May Protect Men From HIV, Study
Finds By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent SAN
FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Circumcision may somehow protect men from
sexual transmission of the AIDS virus, researchers said on Sunday, but they
admitted they do not have a clue why. A study in Uganda aimed at
examining how couples infect one another found two things seemed to
protect people -being older and being circumcised. "Acquisition of HIV did
not occur in any of the circumcised men," Dr. Thomas Quinn of Johns
Hopkins University in Baltimore, who led the study, told the 7th
Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, a meeting of
AIDS researchers. ... Quinn's team, working with 15,000 people in the
Rakai district of Uganda... was one of the first to actually go out and test
the idea where HIV is raging the worst. More than 23 million people in
sub-Saharan Africa are infected with HIV. ... He noted that in his team's
study, only Muslims were circumcised. ... [Quinn does not draw the
obvious conclusion that a strict moral code may be the best protection
against HIV!]
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000130/sc/aids_vaccines_1.html ...
Yahoo! ... Sunday January 30 ... Lower Sights for AIDS Vaccine, Experts
Say By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent SAN
FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Researchers struggling to develop an AIDS
vaccine may have to lower their sights a bit and accept a vaccine that does
not completely prevent infection, the head of the new U.S. federal AIDS
vaccine center said... while drug cocktails can help keep some people
healthy, they do not work for everyone and in any case are only available in
industrialized countries. A vaccine is the only answer to the global
epidemic. ... Nabel said the failures had discouraged both industry and
academic researchers from trying for a vaccine. "But in fact there has been
significant progress in terms of finding out what doesn't work, and
potential of what may work," he said. ... [A frank admission that after 10-
15 years, billions of dollars (mainly in the pockets of drug companies!) and
millions of deaths, AIDS researchers haven't got very far. Maybe Peter
Duesberg (a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of
California at Berkeley) is right after all, that HIV is not the cause of AIDS
but merely a passenger virus. But he is right in this: "The most urgent and
growing problem facing the HIV-AIDS hypothesis is its total failure in
terms of public health benefits. Despite enormous efforts over the last 10
years, costing the US taxpayer alone $4 billion, no vaccine has been
developed, no AIDS patient has been cured, no prevention has slowed the
spread of AIDS. These are the hallmarks of a flawed hypothesis"
http://www.virusmyth.com/aids/data/pdaifo93.htm]
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000128/sc/britain_hiv_1.html ...
Yahoo! ... Friday January 28 ... UK's HIV Diagnoses Highest in Decade
LONDON (Reuters) - More heterosexual people than gays were infected
with the HIV virus in Britain last year for the first time since the AIDS
epidemic began in the early 1980s, a report said on Friday. ... Initiatives
like antenatal HIV screening have increased the number of people being
tested and new diagnoses. Overall, gay men remained the single largest
group becoming infected with HIV. ... The figures also showed that a
steady decline in deaths from AIDS since 1995 has leveled out.... It could
also reflect people who have become resistant to anti-AIDS drugs ... It is
important to remember, however, that HIV-associated deaths have been
reduced to a third of what they were in the mid-1990s," Nicoll said....
More than 2.6 million people worldwide died from AIDS in 1999, the
highest number in any year since the epidemic began in the early 1980s,
according to figures released by UNAIDS, the U.N. agency charged with
combating the spread of the HIV virus. ... [The incongruity between HIV
increasing and AIDS decreasing over the long term is not noticed. If HIV
really caused AIDS, surely HIV and AIDS would both have to over the
long-term increase of decrease together? Note the unfalsifiable excuses: if
HIV increases it is claimed that more people are being tested. If the drugs
don't work it is because the patients are "resistant to anti-AIDS drugs"!]
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000128/sc/aids_drug_1.html ...
Yahoo! ... January 28 ... New AIDS Drug Working Well in Patients
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An experimental HIV drug that stops the
virus from infecting cells is working in severely ill patients and seems to be
boosting their immune systems, the company that makes the drug said on
Friday. The drug, T-20, is the first of a new class called fusion inhibitors.
Made by Durham, North Carolina-based Trimeris Inc. (NasdaqNM:TRMS
- news) in partnership with F. Hoffmann-La Roche (ROCZg.S), the drug
has been tested on several dozen patients for eight months. Dr. Sam
Hopkins, senior vice president of medical affairs at Trimeris, said the 32-
week data from the Phase II trial showed the drug was lowering the
amount of virus circulating in patients' bodies and was also helping immune
system cells known as CD4 T-cells recover. ... Trimeris will be presenting
information about the trial at a meeting of HIV experts in San Francisco
that begins on Sunday. There is strong interest in finding new classes of
HIV drugs that work well because patients are starting to show resistance
to the current cocktails of medicines. ... Hopkins said about one-third of
the 71 patients originally enrolled in the trial had dropped out. Two died
and the rest were mostly too ill to continue, he said. "You are dealing with
an extremely advanced patient population," he said. ... [Is this the way a
HIV/AIDS drug makes it to market? First, because your original drug
doesn't work, blame the patients for showing "resistance to the current
cocktails of medicines ". Second pick "71 patients " who are "severely ill"
already. Administer the drug over "eight months". Of the two-thirds left
who did not die or drop out because they "were mostly too ill to continue
", discover some " lowering [of] the amount of virus circulating in patients'
bodies' and "helping immune system cells" to "recover". These could be the
ones with better natural immunity and presumably they are still taking other
drugs too? Assume the improvement is because of your drug. There is no
double-blind control group to say otherwise. Third take it to a 'meeting of
HIV experts" who will agree with you because they are committed to the
same idea that HIV causes AIDS and if they vote for your drug, they will
vote for your drug? And finally pressurise the Government Drug Authority
which has already let so many similar drugs go through they can't reject
yours without blowing the cover of the whole operation. So. how would they
ever know if these drugs were worthless?]
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Stephen E. (Steve) Jones ,--_|\ Email: sejones@iinet.net.au
3 Hawker Avenue / Oz \ Web: http://www.iinet.net.au/~sejones
Warwick 6024 -> *_,--\_/ Phone: +61 8 9448 7439
Perth, Western Australia v "Test everything." (1 Thess. 5:21)
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