CDC says HAART is to blaim - TheBody.com's Bulletin Boards

Lots of ex-"dissidents" or I would call them "denialists" cause all they are doing is denying something that most knowledeable people know is ture. Anyway many are dead or currently on medications: OF course the new recruits are fine...but if they are positive it takes 10 years to have a symptom, something they ignore and just claim that they are fine...their ignorance is alarming.

http://www.sfbg.com/News/34/17/hiv.html

Bad science

They once thought HIV was harmless. Now,
they say, AIDS has forced them to reconsider.

By Bruce Mirken

FOR YEARS SAN Franciscans have heard
from a small but vocal group of activists who
claim that HIV is harmless. AIDS, these
dissenters say, is caused not by a virus but by
"lifestyle factors" – chiefly recreational and
medical drug use. The medical establishment,
they say, is either misguided or murderous for
advocating the use of toxic anti-HIV drugs.

The "AIDS dissident" movement has been
around for well over a decade. For the most
part, it has remained on the fringe, wearing
the disdain of mainstream scientists and AIDS
activists as a badge of pride.

But in the last year, the movement has been
challenged from within – by former believers
who, in keeping with dissident orthodoxy,
had scorned and avoided recently developed
AIDS therapies.

Now some of them have themselves gotten
sick with AIDS. They say their belief that HIV
couldn't hurt them put their lives and the lives
of their lovers at risk. One even goes so far as
to compare his former movement to a cult.

Medical mistake

Ever since HIV was identified as the cause of
AIDS in the mid '80s, some have cast doubt
on the connection. Early HIV skeptics
included pioneering New York AIDS activist
Michael Callen and his doctor, Joseph
Sonnabend. In the late 1980s, Prof. Peter
Duesberg, a prominent UC Berkeley
virologist, began arguing that HIV could not
cause AIDS.

Although such theories have been consistently
rejected by mainstream science, they have
nevertheless spawned an energetic movement
that has been highly visible in the Bay Area.
Members of ACT UP San Francisco – a
renegade group that long ago split from the
rest of the AIDS activist movement, including
ACT UP Golden Gate – plaster the Castro
with stickers bearing slogans like "Don't Buy
the HIV Lie." And last spring, an L.A.-based
group called Alive and Well ran a series of
full-page ads in Bay Area papers, including
the Bay Guardian. The ads called AIDS "not a
sexually transmitted epidemic but a tragic
medical mistake" and argued that rather than
HIV, "well-known non-contagious factors are
what make people sick."

Until last January, Sean Current was an ardent
member of the dissident movement. In the
early 1990s, as a staffer at a Massachusetts
group for HIV-positive people, he brought
Duesberg to speak at a meeting. Later he
traveled around the country speaking at
meetings of Health Education AIDS Liaison
(HEAL), a network of HIV skeptics. He
introduced himself as "someone who was
HIV-positive for a long time and had never
been sick" despite shunning anti-HIV drugs –
living proof that HIV was harmless.

"I accepted completely as truth that the
dissidents were right and that we had been
misled," Current, who now lives in San
Diego, recalls. Because he had used
recreational drugs only rarely and in the
distant past and never took anti-retrovirals
except for a five-week stint on AZT in 1990,
Current believed he was not at risk for AIDS.
And because he believed that HIV was
harmless, he was certain that he and his lover
Sebastien, who was HIV-negative when they
met, did not need to always practice safe sex.

About two years ago, Current developed a
Kaposi's sarcoma lesion and began
experiencing fungal infections and other
problems commonly seen in AIDS patients.
His belief in dissident theories kept him from
seeing what was happening.

"I knew what a K.S. lesion was," he says,
"but where I was coming from I couldn't
believe that's what it was."

The turning point came when Current had
trouble breathing and was diagnosed as
having K.S. in his lungs. He turned to other
dissidents for advice and, receiving nothing he
considered an adequate answer, sought
conventional treatment. In October he began
highly active anti-retroviral therapy (HAART)
– taking a combination of drugs to attack his
HIV.

"After two weeks of HAART and the chemo,
my lesions had all flattened out and I could
breathe again," Current says. "I feel much,
much better. Within the first month my energy
level increased."

Now Sebastien has begun to suffer some of
the same symptoms Current experienced.
Current says his lover never used drugs and
has none of the behavioral risk factors the
dissidents claim cause AIDS – but they did at
times have unprotected sex.

"I brought Peter Duesberg into my home, my
town, to speak," Current says with obvious
pain. "I had just met Sebastien and I
introduced him to Peter, and over a few
months Sebastien became a believer. I have to
live with that."

Reasonable doubt

One of the people Current met while speaking
at HEAL meetings was Egan, a Seattle 28-
year-old who asked that his last name not be
used for family reasons. Egan, who tested
positive for HIV in March 1996, says he
quickly became an "ultra-dissident" after
attending a HEAL meeting that fall.

But the next year, after two HEAL members
died, Egan began to have doubts. When
Current got sick and yet another HEAL
member he knew died, those doubts
accelerated.

"This was the third person in a year that had
died in a small dissident circle," Egan says.
"Being gay, I know a lot of people with HIV
and AIDS. I had never personally known
anybody outside of the HEAL or dissident
groups who had died." He began to suspect
that what dissidents scorn as "the orthodoxy"
had a better handle on what was happening to
his friends than the dissidents did.

In 1998 Egan began experiencing his own
health problems, including the same kind of
fungal infections Current suffered. His CD4
count – a measure of the strength of the
immune system that orthodox HIV medicine
considers crucial – had plunged below 200,
officially qualifying him for an AIDS
diagnosis. He, too, went on a three-drug
HAART cocktail.

"Within five weeks I noticed a dramatic
change for the better in my health and energy,
and my blood work reflected this," Egan says.
"I bet the dissidents could find some way to
explain this – they always do – but to me it
made perfect sense: the meds were helping me
get better, at least for the short term."

Closed minds

When they began discussing their experiences
with fellow dissidents, Current and Egan say,
they were often met with hostility and scorn –
especially when they suggested HIV might be
playing some role in their illness. When
Current began circulating e-mails asking for
ideas, Alex Russell, assistant editor of the
British dissident journal Continuum, advised
him that "you are not 'HIV positive,' nor is
your partner; nor is anyone worldwide. Give
up your 'HIV' status-identity and get a life."

After a number of what he considered
unproductive exchanges with prominent
dissidents, Current penned a furious
description of the movement's reaction to the
"inconvenience" of people such as himself: "a)
Debunk the guy's credibility. b) Find several
arbitrary factors that may perhaps be present
in his life to attribute this decline in health to.
c) Chastise him for not following a more
wholesome lifestyle (any dissidents out there
want to order a pizza?) d) Harangue him for
any medical choices he might make that
counter the party line. e) Then claim they
don't have all the answers and that the
dissidents are not missionaries."

Very few dissidents, Current says, have
actually tried to engage him in a meaningful
dialogue about his experiences. Similarly,
when Egan started raising questions in HEAL
Seattle, "it wasn't a hostile environment by
any means, but it certainly didn't seem like a
lot of the dissident information was up for
examination either." Leaders tended to scoff,
he recalls, while some rank-and-file members
"were more open to differing opinions, which
I thought was the whole purpose of the
dissident movement."

Christine Maggiore is the director of Alive and
Well, the dissident group that placed the San
Francisco ads. She vehemently disputes the
notion that the dissident movement – or at
least her branch of it – is dogmatic and closed-
minded. "The ads were not a decree, but
rather a call for consideration of alternative
perspectives on HIV and AIDS," she told us.
"The information was presented as a point of
departure for examination and dialogue."

Maggiore describes herself as having been
HIV-positive and healthy without medication
for a decade – much like Current a few years
ago. She says her views are "always open to
discussion." But Current's experiences have
not altered her rejection of most HIV science,
including the standard HIV antibody test.
"Sean's experience of illness does not
convince me that registering positive on a
nonspecific test for proteins that may be
associated with past exposure to a retrovirus
with no cell-killing mechanisms is the reason
he now has Kaposi's sarcoma," she says.

Her group, Maggiore insists, "is about the
right to self-determination in health matters.
It's not a belief system that a person adopts as
a matter of faith when they feel well."

But when another former dissident compared
the movement to a cult, Maggiore blasted him
with the kind of personal attack Current
criticizes.

In an interview with me for a recent article that
appeared online, North Bay business owner
Bill McCormick (who asked to be given a
pseudonym because his straight clients don't
know he is HIV-positive) said he ignored his
gradually worsening health until he was
hospitalized with Pneumocystis carinii
pneumonia. Even then, he said, he resisted
treatment because of his dissident beliefs.

McCormick said he "was in complete denial,
as you are when you're in a cult," and
compared the experience to that of being a
Scientologist, which he was years before. His
health, too, has improved dramatically since
he began anti-HIV treatment.

Maggiore responded with a letter blasting
McCormick as "an ill and cranky ex-
Scientologist, ... a troubled ex-straight guy
who thought he found salvation in our
literature, who desperately sought any scheme
or treatment he believed might undo his
positive diagnosis, who suffered with
constant infections brought on by unprotected
sex, who ignored his mounting health
problems."

McCormick, who has had a number of hostile
responses from the dissident camp, says
simply, "I don't care. I've checked out. Let
'em do what they want to do. I find it
amusing." (See below)

Neither Egan nor Current is willing to go quite
as far as McCormick. Both now consider
themselves on the fence as far as the role of
HIV in AIDS, and both say that at times
they've seen too much rigidity in both camps.
They also worry about the long-term toxicities
of the drugs they now take.

"There are days when I feel I don't know if all
that has happened to me is related to HIV, and
there are days when it's the only thing that
makes sense," Current muses. "I don't have a
loyalty to either side. What I'm doing with
standard treatments seems to be working."

Post Extras: Remind Me!