AIDS! The creeping murderer that sends chills up our spines! According to the United nations, 60 million people have died from it in the last two decades since it was discovered. In the next two decades another 68 million people worldwide will die of Aids.

But wait. How do they know what will happen in the future? On what do they base these predictions? Did they accommodate the natural curve of epidemics, which always die down, whether treatments and/or vaccines exist or not? Do we really have an Aids epidemic at all? What is Aids, who has it, how is that determined, and what do the medicines do? What interests influence reporting on the "Aids tragedy"? These questions are posed by few people, and answered by even fewer.

The standard medically established story is known well enough: Aids is a disease you get from the hiv virus. This virus rides into your body on white corpuscles in contaminated blood, semen, and (human) milk. The disease is spreading like wildfire. If you're hiv+, you have to take a cocktail of antiretroviral drugs to live longer. 

Not everybody is convinced. One of the most ardent opponents of the current hiv-aids theory is the discoverer of the virus, Peter Duesberg. According to him, hiv, like other retroviruses, is harmless, and not the cause of aids. Yet other dissident scientists posit that the virus has never been isolated, and thus not proven to exist at all.

So what makes all those people diagnosed with Aids sick? It is not coincidental that Aids occurs overwhelmingly among people who use various types of drugs, say Aids dissidents. Drugs, including the cocktails prescribed to Aids patients, adversely affect the immune system.

Amsterdam Medical Center physician Marc van der Valk confirms that the cocktails cause complications (source*). His research points to deviant distribution of body fat, high cholesterol levels, insulin resistance, and diseases of the heart and circulatory system, among others. Yet he is not a dissident, questioning the established medical paradigm. In his view, the antiretroviral drugs are beneficial, regardless of the bodily havoc they create. Before they were developed, people who were hiv+ died of Aids, he asserts.

California Aids dissident Christine Maggiore thinks otherwise. Fifteen years ago she was found to be hiv+ after a routine test. Deeply shocked, she quit her job and dedicated her time to Aids campaigning. But along the way, doubt crept in. She felt fine and did not belong to a high-risk group. Was there really something wrong with her? When she started asking critical questions, she found herself less welcome among Aids campaigners. In the Netherlands, a sub-group of members of the HIV-Association who did not take antiretroviral drugs, were likewise politely shown to the door.

What we aren't told when we're tested for hiv, Maggiore points out, is that like medicines, these tests have package inserts. The inserts state that the test cannot definitely determine the presence or absence of hiv. They only provide an indication. False positives can be invoked by all sorts of innocuous conditions such as colds and pregnancy. This might explain the "miraculous" spontaneous cures sometimes reported, that so astound doctors. Maggiore herself, although still testing positive, is perfectly healthy, and by now the mother of two equally healthy children, while many of her cocktail-taking ex-colleagues from the Aids campaigns have passed away.

Yet it cannot be denied that some people are very ill indeed when first diagnosed hiv+. Aids dissidents ascribe these illnesses to the renaming game. Diseases that have been with us since time immemorial, such as fungi, pneumonia, certain types of cancer, and tuberculosis, are labeled "Aids" when an hiv test turns out positive. When the test turns out negative, these diseases keep their old names.

So is everything we hear about Aids a hoax? Aids dissidents believe it is. They  note the stupendous earnings of the pharmaceutical companies, and their extensive political power. There's also a lot of prestige to be had. Physicians and scientists are under tremendous professional pressure to defend the established Aids paradigm. Dissenting opinions, even from top scientists, are ignored, particularly as no medical journal can afford to offend the pharmaceutical companies whose advertisements sustain it.

If the experts are divided, what are simple souls to think about hiv and Aids? Each of us will have to decide that for himself. It remains in any case advisable to use abstinence or condoms and clean hypodermic needles, whether Aids exists or not. Unfortunately, there are plenty of other dangerous diseases that are all too real.

*University of Amsterdam magazine Folia, year 57, 12-9-2003 p14-15