HIV--Still the No. 1 Suspect by Far
Science advances in strange ways. Within the lifetime of many reading these words, the notion that the continents have migrated around the globe was considered scientifically risible. Today, the once-heretical concepts of continental drift and plate tectonics form the prevailing paradigm of modern geology, the explanation for why California is what it is, geologically speaking at least.
So, though unlikely, the notion that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) does not cause AIDS at least merits discussion, if only to rule it out. The question has turned a normally obscure scientific meeting scheduled for San Francisco this month into something of a dilemma for those devoted both to free scientific inquiry and to the public health.
An HIV skeptic, Charles Geshekter, an economic historian of Africa at CSU Chico, organized an AIDS panel for the annual meeting of the Pacific division of the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science. He invited 10 other skeptics to speak at a June 21 session.
Concerned that the panel was stacked, and responding to worries of the California Department of Public Health, the regional and national leaders of the AAAS insisted on adding four speakers who adhere to the overwhelming majority view of researchers that HIV infection compromises the immune system and unleashes AIDS. (They acted rather clumsily; Geshekter says he learned of these concerns and the program additions only by reading the press.)
The challenge to HIV has incubated in the dark vacuum of ignorance about the cause and spread of AIDS. Ten years after the virus was identified, no cure, truly effective therapy or vaccine is in sight. The mechanism of its destruction is not understood. And an AIDS research Establishment that has often appeared to be more interested in acclaim and money than cures and compassion has not helped.
One skeptic, Peter Duesberg, a UC Berkeley cell biologist who is on the June 21 panel, argues that HIV is a “harmless virus” and that AIDS may be a non-infectious condition caused by long-term use of recreational drugs among homosexuals in America and Europe. African AIDS, he argues, is a separate epidemic caused by malnutrition, parasites and poor sanitation.
Such notions are rejected by nearly all leading AIDS researchers and clinicians. They fear that people will let down their guard against the blood- and semen-borne virus. Already, there are reports that many homosexuals are dropping safe sex habits, out of fatalism, survivor guilt or youthful abandon.
The history of science shows gadflies and heretics have been essential to eroding long-accepted erroneous constructs. But discord over HIV is no excuse for avoiding obvious health precautions. Medicine has yet to prove how smoking causes lung cancer, but only the reckless smoke. Similarly, let no one dismiss the virus out of unfounded hopes that it is not the fearsome agent it seems to be.
