AIDS: 'No Gold Standard' For HIV Testing

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According to the scientific literature, there is no "gold standard" for HIV tests. Liam Scheff, who has exposed how children are removed from their parents' care and forcibly drugged with highly toxic anti-retrovirals insists that testing for HIV does not mean a thing. A "positive" test result could merely "confirm that you are pregnant or have used drugs or alcohol, or that you’ve been vaccinated; that you have a cold, liver disease, arthritis, or are stressed, poor, hungry or tired."

A recent TV ad campaign for "HIV testing" is built around the slogan Knowing is Beautiful. But what does that mean, when the tests that allow us to know do not establish with certainty whether we are infected, and indeed when the virus that is supposed to cause AIDS cannot be found in many of the unfortunate individuals who have a compromised immune system? It means that our bodies may react to a number of stress situations and that what is measured by the tests is not the presence of a virus but the fact that our immune system is under stress.

Yet, in an apparent attack of medical insanity we fill AIDS patients with medications designed to "kill the virus" and end up killing the patient.

Neville Hodgkinson, a journalist from the UK, has eloquently dissected the practice in his article "AIDS: Scientific or Viral Catastrophe?":

"Despite more than $100 billion spent on AIDS by US taxpayers alone, scientists have not been able to ascertain how HIV causes the AIDS syndrome. Predictions about the course of the epidemic have proved inaccurate. While millions are said to be infected and dying in Africa, AIDS deaths have fallen in Europe and the USA and now total fewer than 250 a year in the UK, which has a population of nearly 60 million. Claims that cocktails of antiviral drugs are responsible for a decline in Western AIDS are unsupported by clear evidence. Genetic and chemical signals produced by disordered immune cells may have been misinterpreted as evidence of the presence of a lethal virus. There is vast over-diagnosis of AIDS and "HIV disease" in Africa and other countries where malnutrition and grossly impoverished living circumstances, with associated infections, are the real killers."

Yet, according to Liam Scheff's latest update published in the New York Press, there are currently 41 trials recruiting for HIV-positive infants, children and young adults in New York, with the same drugs and vaccines, in the same combinations - AZT, NNRTIs (the nevirapine type) and protease inhibitors - as reported last June. Fourteen of those studies are recruiting at Columbia Presbyterian, ICC's parent hospital.

Here are copies of these latest articles "The Hidden Face of HIV" and "STILL ON TRIAL" that continue to relate the harrowing story of children subjected to an incredible regimen including surgically implanted gastric tubes for those who "don't like to take their drugs" in the name of "scientific medicine":

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The Hidden Face of HIV – Part 1
Mon, 3 Jan 2005

(Original on GNN.TV) 

By Liam Scheff
“Knowing is Beautiful”

As a journalist who writes about AIDS, I am endlessly amazed by the difference between the public and the private face of HIV; between what the public is told and what’s explained in the medical literature. The public face of HIV is well-known: HIV is a sexually transmitted virus that particularly preys on gay men, African Americans, drug users, and just about all of Africa, although we’re all at risk. We’re encouraged to be tested, because, as the MTV ads say, “knowing is beautiful.” We also know that AIDS drugs are all that’s stopping the entire African continent from falling into the sea.

The medical literature spells it out differently – quite differently. The journals that review HIV tests, drugs and patients, as well as the instructional material from medical schools, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and HIV test manufacturers will agree with the public perception in the large print. But when you get past the titles, they’ll tell you, unabashedly, that HIV tests are not standardized; that they’re arbitrarily interpreted; that HIV is not required for AIDS; and finally, that the term HIV does not describe a single entity, but instead describes a collection of non-specific, cross-reactive cellular material.

That’s quite a difference.

The popular view of AIDS is held up by concerned people desperate to help the millions of Africans stricken with AIDS, the same disease that first afflicted young gay American men in the 1980s. The medical literature differs on this point. It says that that AIDS in Africa has always been diagnosed differently than AIDS in the U.S.

In 1985, the World Health Organization called a meeting in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, to define African AIDS. The meeting was presided over by CDC official Joseph McCormick. He wrote about in his book “Level 4 Virus hunters of the CDC,” saying, “If I could get everyone at the WHO meeting in Bangui to agree on a single, simple definition of what an AIDS case was in Africa, then, imperfect as the definition might be, we could actually start counting the cases…” The results – African AIDS would be defined by physical symptoms: fever, diarrhea, weight loss and coughing or itching. (“AIDS in Africa: an epidemiological paradigm.” Science, 1986)

In Sub-Saharan African about 60 percent of the population lives and dies without safe drinking water, adequate food or basic sanitation. A September, 2003 report in the Ugandan Daily “New Vision” outlined the situation in Kampala, a city of approximately 1.3 million inhabitants, which, like most tropical countries, experiences seasonal flooding. The report describes “heaps of unclaimed garbage” among the crowded houses in the flood zones and “countless pools of water [that] provide a breeding ground for mosquitoes and create a dirty environment that favors cholera.”

“[L]atrines are built above water streams. During rains the area residents usually open a hole to release feces from the latrines. The rain then washes away the feces to streams, from where the [area residents] fetch water. However, not many people have access to toilet facilities. Some defecate in polythene bags, which they throw into the stream.” They call these, “flying toilets.’’

The state-run Ugandan National Water and Sewerage Corporation states that currently 55% of Kampala is provided with treated water, and only 8% with sewage reclamation.

Most rural villages are without any sanitary water source. People wash clothes, bathe and dump untreated waste up and downstream from where water is drawn. Watering holes are shared with animal populations, which drink, bathe, urinate and defecate at the water source. Unmanaged human waste pollutes water with infectious and often deadly bacteria. Stagnant water breeds mosquitoes, which bring malaria. Infectious diarrhea, dysentery, cholera, TB, malaria and famine are the top killers in Africa. But in 1985, they became AIDS.

The public service announcements that run on VH1 and MTV, informing us of the millions of infected, always fail to mention this. I don’t know what we’re supposed to do with the information that 40 million people are dying and nothing can be done. I wonder why we wouldn’t be interested in building wells and providing clean water and sewage systems for Africans. Given our great concern, it would seem foolish not to immediately begin the “clean water for Africa” campaign. But I’ve never heard such a thing mentioned.

The UN recommendations for Africa actually demand the opposite –“billions of dollars” taken out of “social funds, education and health projects, infrastructure [and] rural development” and “redirected” into sex education (UNAIDS, 1999). No clean water, but plenty of condoms.

I have, however, felt the push to get AIDS drugs to Africans. Drugs like AZT and Nevirapine, which are supposed to stop the spread of HIV, especially in pregnant women. AZT and Nevirapine also terminate life. The medical literature and warning labels list the side effects: blood cell destruction, birth defects, bone-marrow death, spontaneous abortion, organ failure, and fatal skin rot. The package inserts also state that the drugs don’t “stop HIV or prevent AIDS illnesses.”

The companies that make these drugs take advantage of the public perception that HIV is measured in individual African AIDS patients, and that African AIDS – water-borne illness and poverty – can be cured by AZT and Nevirapine. That’s good capitalism, but it’s bad medicine.

Currently MTV, Black Entertainment Television and VH1 are running advertisements of handsome young couples, black and white, touching, caressing, sensually, warming up to love-making. The camera moves over their bodies, hands, necks, mouth, back, legs and arms – and we see a small butterfly bandage over their inner elbow, where they’ve given blood for an HIV test. The announcer says, “Knowing is beautiful.” Get tested.

A September, 2004 San Francisco Chronicle article considered the “beauty” of testing. It told the story of 59 year-old veteran Jim Malone, who’d been told in 1996 that he was HIV positive. His health was diagnosed as “very poor.” He was classified as, “permanently disabled and unable to work or participate in any stressful situation whatsoever.” Malone said, “When I wasn’t able to eat, when I was sick, my in-home health care nurse would say, ‘Well, Jim, it goes with your condition.’ That’s the way I thought,” he said.

In 2004, his doctor sent him a note to tell him he was actually negative. He had tested positive at one hospital, and negative at another. Nobody asked why the second test was more accurate than the first (that was the protocol at the Veteran’s Hospital). Having been falsely diagnosed and spending nearly a decade waiting, expecting to die, Malone said, “I would tell people to get not just one HIV test, but multiple tests. I would say test, test and retest.”

In the article, AIDS experts assured the public that the story was “extraordinarily rare.” But the medical literature differs significantly.

In 1985, at the beginning of HIV testing, it was known that “68% to 89% of all repeatedly reactive ELISA (HIV antibody) tests [were] likely to represent false positive results.” (NEJM – New England Journal of Medicine. 312; 1985).

In 1992, the Lancet reported that for 66 true positives, there were 30,000 false positives. And in pregnant women, “there were 8,000 false positives for 6 confirmations.” (Lancet 339; 1992)

In September 2000, the Archives of Family Medicine stated that the more women we test, the greater “the proportion of false-positive and ambiguous (i