DrDuke's Journal

Someone in the HIV group has been questioning how it can be possible to know that HIV causes AIDS, when so many people such as Peter Duesberg have alternative hypotheses about it. He asked me why I came to DailyStrength and some other questions, and I gave a detailed reply. I thought it would be worth putting that in my journal in case other people care.

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No, I am not paid by DailyStrength, I came here voluntarily. I came here, and I have stuck around to help, for a couple of reasons. I am an HIV researcher, and although I work in a rather high tech area of vaccine design I know that until a safe and affordable vaccine can be delivered to the world the single best mechanism of preventing the spread of this virus is accurate information. There are organizations of people, such as Peter Duesberg's Rethinking AIDS group who are actively spreading misinformation about HIV, but more commonly there are people who just do not understand how HIV is and is not spread.

A diagnosis of being infected with HIV, or being HIV seropositive, is not a "dead end". Only the "AIDS dissidents" use the "HIV = AIDS" equation. No virus harms everyone it infects (with rabies being a near exception). On top of that, since 1996 or so HIV infection in the developed world has become very treatable for the percentage of infected people who eventually require treatment.

Everyone should investigate all avenues of information about everything, not just medical advice but also financial advice, mental health advice, religious advice, etc. They should also keep in mind that not all advice is good advice, and that free advice is not necessarily better than advice you pay for. People also need to understand the difference between opinions or beliefs, and data or evidence. One person may say Chevys are better than Fords for example when giving advice about cars, but that is not the same as being able to show you the per car repair records for the Ford Broncos and the Chevy Blazers built between 1995 and 1998.

I started studying biology in 1977 with the plan of becoming a wildlife biologist. I got interested in computers and molecular genetics in the early 1980s because both DNA sequencing and personal computers were becoming available at that time. The combination was uncovering a vast wilderness of information about biology and life. It was, and continues to be, a very exciting line of research. After getting my BS I worked in environmental chemistry a bit, and then in molecular genetics for a few years, before returning to school for a PhD.

After I got my PhD I took a job in HIV epidemiology. I had nightmares every night in those early years, reading paper after paper about the average time from diagnosis to death, about infants infected with HIV at birth or through breastfeeding, and about the spread of the virus from Africa into Thailand, India, China, Russia, Brazil and other places. For someone who grew up thinking of biology and life as beauty, it was very depressing to be studying what was arguably the ugliest organism on earth from the viewpoint of the human suffering it caused. But I stuck with it because I knew that it would take a lot of work to bring this pandemic under control and put an end to the suffering.

The first treatments for HIV infection proved to be essentially worthless. They would knock the virus down for somewhere between a week and 2 months, but the virus evolved so quickly that it would become resistant to any single drug. Not until combinations of drugs (the so called HAART) became available in the late 1990s did we begin to see patients living normal lives after having PCP or other symptoms of severe immune deficiency.

The people who actively spread misinformation about HIV being harmless, or HIV not existing, are just one source of misinformation on HIV and AIDS. I won't even bother to list these other sources of misinformation here, they are all very disturbing to think about.
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