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On the 24th anniversary of the day a human retrovirus was named in a press conference, called by the Centers for Disease Control as "the probable cause of Aids" an international group of scientists says it is time to re-assess that belief.
Being diagnosed HIV-positive is a traumatic experience - emotionally, mentally and physically - HelpForHIV
In the 70s we had Richard Nixon's and Jimmy Carter's War on Cancer, an all-out well financed research program that sought to establish a viral cause and to find a cure for the Big C. Despite much work and huge amounts of money poured into the program, no such virus was found and - famously - no cure either. Much of this research centered on the so-called lentivirus or retrovirus family - a class of virus that turned out to be a harmless byproduct of the human metabolism, rather than a cause of any disease.
As the cancer research program folded for lack of results, a new focus was needed and a new direction of research. The announcement by Robert Gallo that a new virus, later named HIV or human immunodeficiency virus, was implicated in AIDS, gave that new focus and direction. But now, 24 years later, the hypothesis of HIV as "the probable cause of Aids" as Gallo had called it, shows signs of failure.
Not all patients have the virus. As a matter of fact, no clear and clean isolation of the virus was ever published in a scientific journal. The distribution of Aids does not match what one would expect from an infectious disease, no cure has been found and no vaccine is in sight either.
Scientists are defecting from the HIV=AIDS hypothesis, but there is great momentum in the money that funds research. As was the case with cancer, the only cause being looked into is a viral cause, because the only acceptable remedy is pharmaceutical. Other research has been terminated.
The cracks in the viral Aids paradigm are many and re-examination is needed. Here is the announcement of Rethinking Aids...
Continue reading "Rethinking Aids Day - Scientists Call for New Thinking on HIV"
posted by Sepp Hasslberger on Wednesday April 23 2008
updated on Friday April 25 2008
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On 15 January, Reuters reported about a European scientific Committee report stating that Amalgams pose no health risk to the human nervous system.
Mercury vapor escaping from extracted tooth subjected to heat (from this video)
The report was prepared by the Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks (SCENIHR) which is made up of external experts. According to Ulla Danielsen, a Danish journalist, the committee consists of seven members, four of which are dentists and have declared to have connections with the dental industry.
The report is available in PDF format from the EU Committe's website.
SCENIHR recognises that dental amalgam is an effective restorative material and, from the perspectives of longevity, the mechanical performance and health economics, may be considered the material of choice for some restorations in posterior teeth, including replacement therapy for existing amalgam fillings. However, because dental amalgam is neither tooth-coloured nor adhesive to remaining tooth tissues, its use has been decreasing in recent years and the alternative tooth-coloured filling materials have become increasingly more popular.
This rather upbeat assessment of mercury dental fillings however seems to be contradicted by what is generally known about the toxicity of the highly volatile metal, which the Committee acknowledges with the following words:
Mercury is the major metallic element used in dental amalgam. It is recognized that mercury in general does constitute a toxicological hazard, with reasonably well defined characteristics for the major forms of exposure, involving elemental mercury, organic and inorganic mercury compounds. It is accepted that the reduction in use of mercury in human activity would be beneficial both for the decrease in indirect human exposure and environmental considerations.
The report is clearly industry-friendly and - contrary to what the Committee's name would seem to indicate - is leaving the "emerging health risks" of mercury unexplored. This has led to protests by a number of scientists, medical doctors and associations including the French association "No to dental mercury", Vera Stejskal, Professor of Immunology at the University of Stockholm, Sweden, the International Academy of Oral Medicine & Toxicology, Dr. Joachim Mutter of the Institute for Environmental Medicine in Freiburg, Germany, the Swedish Chemicals Agency (KEM) and the European Academy for Environmental Medicine in Würzburg, Germany.
It also is worthy of note that the report appears to be completely out of tune with the European Commission's strategy to gradually eliminate mercury from the environment by reducing production and instituting strict controls on how mercury must be eliminated. The EU has a toxic hazards strategy to eliminate mercury, but according to the SCENIHR report there is nothing wrong with putting the poison in people's mouths. That just doesn't make any sense!
A public protest asking that the EU report be withdrawn and that a new expert group consisting of both competent and impartial experts be appointed to rewrite it, is available at the website of the Luxembourg based association AKUT.
You can sign the protest on this page.
Danish journalist Ulla Danielsen has more to say...
Continue reading "EU Scientific Committee: Mercury in dental fillings 'no danger'"
posted by Sepp Hasslberger on Thursday April 3 2008
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Psychiatry is looking for biological mechanisms to explain what it defines as "mental illness" to justify biological treatments, such as electroshock and mind bending pharmaceutical drugs. One of the more recent trends is to look for genes as a cause of aberrant behavior.
No such luck, says Vince Boehm, who maintains a specialized mailing list, in a recent communication. The search for a genetic cause is failing, according to author Dr Jay Joseph, and even psychiatry's own researchers admit as much. Here's what Vince says:
Well, I've got some horrible news for the true believers out there. Don't blame mom and dad.
Genetics is a cherished "article of faith" in mental illness theory. I've often wondered how this "bedrock of science" went unchallenged. After all, this search for simplistic answers to a complex problem has been going on for the past 100 years, for thousands of papers and books, actually, without coming up with any straight answers.
The genetics hypothesis has been used for decades by drug makers and their "grass roots"(AstroTurf®) advocacy groups to answer the inevitable causation problem. Causation is an unanswerable question. Blame heredity and just leave it at that. The state supported public mental health systems add the mantra of genetics to their litany of disinformation to enforce compliance.
This question bothered me until I met Dr. Jay Joseph in the fall of 2003 at the MindFreedom hunger strike.
Dr. Jay Joseph
I was astounded. Up to that time, the hypothesis had gone unquestioned. It was considered to be unassailable scientific truth, with almost religious overtones.
Joseph exposed how the researchers had perverted science. He detailed the shenanigans that went on behind the scenes to justify the conclusions of the studies cited.
Surely one cannot deny that these things do "run in families". However the answer here cannot be purely genetics. One must consider the multitude of other factors that make up the human psyche. Socioeconomics, ideology, trauma, drug marketing, politics, cultural issues, and a desperate search for answers, any answers, all play a role. Environment is a much stronger argument than genes, per se.
Straight answers to even the simplest questions on this topic are hard to come by.
Dr. Joseph's second book on genetics, The Missing Gene: Psychiatry, Heredity, And the Fruitless Search for Genes (Paperback), rebuts the evidence cited in support of genetic theories. He shows that family, twin, and adoption studies are plagued by researcher bias, unsound methodology, and a reliance on unsupported theoretical assumptions. Basically, he reviews more than a century's worth of psuedoscientific flotsam and jetsam in this book.
An example is the famous "Danish Twins Study" (Kety). Seymour Kety was the first scientific director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). This study was terribly flawed, but still cited as Holy Grail proof that schizophrenia is hereditary.
Of the 18 Kety "schizophrenics" only one had a hospital diagnosis. The rest were "diagnosed" in a series of five minute door step interviews by a cadre of grad students. They had to expand their sample to paternal siblings to get their conclusion. (Joseph, Missing Gene).
Kety's fatal error was accepting "latent schizophrenia", or schizophrenia without psychosis, as a valid diagnosis of schizophrenia.
Merely having unusual notions, like a strong belief in a lucky number, or having a minority sexual orientation might earn a person a schizophrenia label in those days. While the latent schizophrenia concept was accepted when the work on Kety was done in the early `70s, latent schizophrenia was rejected by DSM-III in 1980.
So just 4 years after Kety was published, most of his "schizophrenics" weren't schizophrenic any more.
Today psychosis is a pre-requisite for a schizophrenia label. Fourteen of the eighteen alleged Kety "schizophrenics" were labeled as latent schizophrenics. The remaining four were distributed throughout one large, dysfunctional extended family. (Breggin). This, in itself, is a strong argument for environmental causes rather than pure genetics.
A note about scientific method
Scientific method is a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. It is based on gathering observable, empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning. A scientific method consists of the collection of data through observation and experimentation, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses.
Among other facets shared by the various fields of inquiry is the conviction that the process must be objective to reduce a biased interpretation of the results. Another basic expectation is to document, archive and share all data and methodology so it is available for careful scrutiny by other scientists, thereby allowing other researchers the opportunity to verify results by attempting to reproduce them.
Peer review, the mandate of scientists of equal status to assess, test, and either rebut or affirm any given hypothesis is the true life blood of the scientific method.
Peer review in this field is nonexistent. Replication of results not even considered. This funny business lends itself well to my Dodo Theory.
In Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland at a certain point in the proceedings a number of characters become wet. In order to dry themselves, the Dodo decided to issue a con
