HIV/AIDS - And Cancer: © By Peter Barry Chowka (February 1, 2005) January 15, 2005 was the fifteenth anniversary of a provocative, highly public debate about HIV, AIDS, and cancer. On January 15, 1990, this writer appeared on The Tom Leykis Show, at the time the top-rated afternoon drive time radio talk program in Los Angeles on 50,000 watt clear channel station KFI AM 640. For two hours, live on the air, I debated the other in-studio guest, Michael S. Gottlieb, M.D., on the subject "Is the War on AIDS Becoming Another [Failed] War on Cancer?" Gottlieb enjoys considerable caché in the field of AIDS research and treatment. In 1981, at age 32 as an assistant professor of medicine at UCLA, Gottlieb was the lead author of the first report to be published in the scientific literature on the appearance of the condition that would later be called "AIDS" [see note 1 below]. In the mid-1980s, by then in private practice, Gottlieb treated actor Rock Hudson for AIDS. Hudson's announcement that he had AIDS shortly before his death in 1985 helped to catapult the condition to national prominence. In 1985, Gottlieb co-founded the high profile and influential American Foundation for AIDS Research, amFar, with actress Elizabeth Taylor.
On the air in Los Angeles that afternoon in January 1990, with calls from listeners punctuating the discussion, Gottlieb defended AIDS and medical orthodoxy and seemed surprised as I pointed out many disturbing parallels between the decrepit War on Cancer (which had been underway officially since President Richard M. Nixon signed legislation funding it in December 1971) and what by 1990 was often referred to as the "War" on AIDS. Although Gottlieb and I remained on polite terms during the radio program, with host Leykis keeping things moving along, the topic was incendiary. The leading cause of death Thirty-three years after its inception, the U.S. War on Cancer seemed to suffer another defeat in January 2005 when it was announced that, for the first time in history, cancer has become the leading cause of death in the United States, finally overtaking coronary heart disease. The news made headlines around the country. But the medical Establishment was largely successful at giving this ignominious report a positive spin, something like: "We've done such a good job at cutting deaths from heart disease that the annual number of cancer deaths has now actually inched ahead of those from coronary heart disease." As one wire service story reported, for example, "The good news [sic] is that deaths from both are falling, but improvement has been more dramatic for heart disease." In the past, such assertions by the U.S. federal health agencies and the private charity the American Cancer Society, which was responsible for generating the statistical report that has now established cancer as killer number one, would have been challenged by some experts in the arcane field of biostatistics. Once upon a time, serious scientific articles were even published in leading scientific journals, taking such rosy claims of progress in the cancer war to task. In 2005, however, sad to say, nary a discouraging word was heard. Rx for HIV/AIDS By the mid-1990s, classes of new, and old, powerful, and toxic, drugs, many of them used in combinations, were reportedly providing hope for people with HIV/AIDS. According to amFAR's official history, in 1995 "A clinical trial establishes dual combination therapy with AZT and other nucleoside analogues as a standard approach for HIV treatment" and "The FDA approves the first protease inhibitor (saquinavir)." In 1996, "The FDA approves the first non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor (nevirapine). . . Reports from the XI International Conference on AIDS in Vancouver, Canada, indicate that new combination therapies that include a protease inhibitor are extending the lives of some HIV/AIDS patients." In 1997, in amFar's view, "AIDS patients continue to live longer thanks to the new anti-HIV therapies, dubbed drug cocktails." Despite the unceasing onslaught, over almost a quarter century now, of consistent, partly line, pro-HIV/AIDS propaganda in the medical-pharmaceutical, political, and mainstream media Establishments, a persistent, and credible, minority of scientists, clinicians, and critics, including Peter Duesberg, Ph.D., has dissented - about both the validity of the HIV-AIDS "hypothesis" to begin with and the drug treatments that supposedly extend the lives of PWAs (people with AIDS). In December 2004, several investigative articles by the Associated Press raised serious questions about nevirapine, a drug commonly prescribed to treat HIV-AIDS singly and as part of anti-HIV/AIDS "cocktails." In particular, documents unearthed by the AP suggested that officials of the U.S. government knew about, ignored, and covered up nevirapine's dangers when the drug was used in U.S.-sponsored experimental treatment programs in Uganda starting in the late 1990s. Last month, Reuters added to the context with an article which contended that "a study aimed at showing whether a single dose of an AIDS drug could prevent mothers from passing the virus to their newborns was so sloppily run that it should be disregarded, a fired oversight expert said." The drug trial "was the main basis for using a single dose of the drug. . . nevirapine to prevent mother-to-child transmission of the AIDS virus." The potentially damaging reporting by the AP and Reuters has received little attention to date. These and other adverse reports, however, should be taken seriously as the federal government and medical powers-that-be moved quickly last month to establish new policies that expand recommending drug treatments beyond people who test positive for the presence of HIV antibodies, including pregnant women, to individuals who may have "knowingly put themselves at risk" (for exposure to HIV/AIDS). In a bylined article last fall, Gottlieb appeared to temper his usual past enthusiasm for the medical party line: "Everybody knows that HAART [an acronym for AIDS combination drug therapy]. . . has made HIV more manageable, and leads to longer and possibly even normal lifespans. So when someone cops to having died of AIDS, readers of his/her obit might assume that they were unlucky and failed to respond favorably to the medicine, or even that they failed to take it properly. But reasonable people know that treatments for any illness don't work for everybody, yet the person with HIV who dies despite HAART may feel ashamed for having 'failed' treatment and decide not to disclose it in their obituary. "The disappearance of AIDS as a cause of death in the mainstream media is harmful in several ways. It is a cover-up, one that perpetuates the illusion which Americans are all too willing to embrace, namely that the AIDS epidemic in the US is behind us, and that at some point it will be okay to let Ryan White programs fall by the wayside and to shortchange or limit access to ADAP programs. The fact is that roughly one million in the US are still struggling with an HIV diagnosis and desperately need public support. "The other harm is the creation of an illusion among young people at risk that the virus is no longer lethal, and that contracting HIV is not going to kill them. Yes, treatments are better, yet once someone is HIV-infected, there is no turning back the clock. In 2004 men and women still do die of HIV despite advances in treatment and there is no reason to sweep that fact under the rug."
Note 1. Gottlieb was the lead author with several colleagues at UCLA of a report on five cases of homosexual men with Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, a rare form of pneumonia usually found only in severely immunosuppressed patients. The report was published in the June 5, 1981, issue of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR).
In the fall of 1996, after the XI International AIDS Conference mentioned above, I was interviewed for a San Diego print publication, The Nature of Health. Recently, I came upon the text of the interview and it seemed like a opportune time to publish it for the first time online and for a national and international audience.
BETWEEN THE LINES The XI International AIDS Conference and the War on AIDS An Interview with Peter Barry Chowka copyright 1996 by Peter Barry Chowka. All rights reserved.
Original 1996 Introduction In 1987, investigative journalist Peter Barry Chowka was one of the first observers to publicly question the conduct of the then relatively new, official "war" on AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome). In a speech that summer in Los Angeles, and in several subsequent magazine articles (including a feature story in East West Journal published in January 1988), Chowka challenged the medical Establishment's strategy of treating AIDS with toxic drugs based on its highly subjective and questionable analysis of the deadly condition. Chowka kept up the critique. In January 1990, for two hours on the top-rated Tom Leykis Show on KFI Radio in Los Angeles, Chowka debated Michael Gottlieb, MD on the subject "Is the War on AIDS Becoming Another War on Cancer?". . . During the 1980s, Gottlieb had become a vigorous defender of the government's AIDS war, in particular the use of the toxic drug AZT on people with HIV/AIDS. The Los Angeles radio debate was a flashpoint in the emerging controversies surrounding the effectiveness of AZT. Now, in the wake of the very high profile XI International AIDS Conference in Vancouver, Canada in July 1996, Chowka turns his attention to the latest significant shift in strategy in conventional medicine's ongoing anti-HIV/AIDS effort -- and to the media's complicity in continuing to sell it to the American people. Question: The media has just given a tremendous amount of attention to the latest International AIDS Conference in Vancouver. The word coming out of the conference seems to be positive. What's your view? PETER BARRY CHOWKA: Like most medical conferences, but even more so in this case, the XI International AIDS Conference was primarily a political event. That's because the root of big medicine is economics and economics is ultimately political. The hype, or "spin," on behalf of the AIDS conference began several weeks before the meeting even opened. Most of the major media in the U.S. and abroad -- including the New York Times, CNN, the broadcast networks, the newsmagazines -- as well as the scientific journals, like the AMA Journal, published lengthy, swooning, pre-conference articles asserting that finally there was significant new "hope" in the decade-and-a-half-long "war" on AIDS. This optimism was based on preliminary results from clinical trials in which combinations of drugs were used to treat people with HIV and AIDS; and also, from the introduction of a new class of drugs called protease inhibitors. There was also a dramatic shift in the party line relating to the overall theory of HIV/AIDS treatment -- away from the earlier strategies of trying to "cure" HIV/AIDS with drugs or "prevent" it by developing vaccines and more towards treating HIV/AIDS like a chronic disease, such as diabetes, which can be "managed" without curing it. On the surface, such optimism may seem warranted -- especially after more than a decade of the doom and gloom that have characterized conventional AIDS treatment as well as all of the previous international AIDS conferences. But looking below the surface, or "between the lines," as one needs to do in assessing medical developments, the optimism and hope are fundamentally flawed and false. Even many conventional observers of the scene pointed out that the new combination pharmaceutical drug treatments for HIV/AIDS are prohibitively expensive, in many cases costing $200,000 a year per patient! With almost one million Americans testing positive for HIV today, our society simply cannot support that kind of expenditure. The situation is already becoming grave. For instance, as the Associated Press reported on August 4, 1996, "State after state is running low on money to buy the newest, most potent AIDS drugs for thousands of low-income Americans, leaving many patients facing a possible rationing of medicine." More to the point, though, critics note that the new combination HIV/AIDS drugs in themselves are toxic, unproven, and potentially harmful. In that sense they are reminiscent of AZT, the first drug approved for AIDS in 1987. AZT was developed as a cancer chemotherapy drug in the 1960s but was found to be too toxic and immunosuppressive for use on humans; so it was simply put on the shelf. In the mid-1980s, with the medical Establishment increasingly desperate for something -- anything -- to use against HIV/AIDS, AZT was tested on people who were HIV positive and put into widespread use, although subsequent studies have found that AZT does not lengthen the lives of people with HIV/AIDS and probably makes the situation worse. This whole "new" 1996 AIDS "combination-drug/new hope" strategy reminds me of a near-identical scenario in the earlier "war" on cancer. In the 1970s it was becoming obvious that chemotherapy drugs tended not to work on cancer. So the generals of the cancer war devised a combination drug plan. That shift, resulting in a few blips of transient positive response in patients who were given anticancer drugs in combination, bought the cancer war generals another decade of time before they were forced to throw in the towel on chemotherapy and begin to develop truly new areas like diet and nutraceuticals. I believe the fact that the AIDS war in this and many other ways parallels the cancer war is no accident Both wars were designed by the same individuals working in government and for the drug companies. The blueprint worked for cancer, it was reasoned, so why not try it on AIDS? A review of mainstream media coverage sheds some light here. A 1958 cover story in Life magazine was titled "Fresh Hope on Cancer We're on the Brink of Breakthroughs." The cancer survival rate has improved only marginally since then. Yet, as if thirty-six years had not gone by, a 1994 Time cover heralded "Hope in the War Against Cancer." Echoing these spins, the theme of the 1996 International AIDS Conference was "One World. One Hope. One Day at a Time." Q: What's the real bottom line here? Why would physicians and researchers working on AIDS concoct "strategies" instead of trying to solve the problem? CHOWKA: The answer is both simple and complicated and gets to the heart of the dilemma we face in modern medicine The fact is that treating disease is consistently more profitable than preventing or truly curing it. That "bottom line" helps to explain why American medicine costs over $1 trillion a year and yet so many people are suffering and so many citizens have so little access to vital medical care. In terms of cancer, the fact is that there are more people making a living from conventional cancer research and treatment than are dying from the disease on an annual basis -- and 600,000 Americans will die of cancer this year, which gives you some idea of the financial stakes of the cancer business, of the de facto necessity of ultimately maintaining the medical status quo. In terms of AIDS, we have in reality an extension of an ongoing broader "war" against all chronic degenerative disease, being fought in this case on a different front "HIV/AIDS." There are now billions of dollars being made or being counted on being made by drug companies who are wedded to the HIV/AIDS drug-treatment strategy, just as they were previously to the cancer-chemotherapy-treatment strategy. There are also billions at stake in developing and marketing tests for positive status for HIV -- the virus that purportedly causes AIDS. Fifteen years after AIDS appeared on the scene, scores of thousands of scientists, clinicians, researchers, caregivers, and bureaucrats have now been enlisted -- they are the "soldiers" -- in the AIDS "war." A recent survey put the number of HIV/AIDS organizations in this country at over 40,000 -- including charities, not-for-profit foundations, and volunteer service organizations. This unprecedented superstructure, firmly entrenched at both the local and national levels, is in addition to the drug companies, universities, medical supply companies, hospitals, hospices, publications, Wall Street investment firms, and federal agencies that in one way or another profit from or depend on no-win "wars" against diseases like HIV/AIDS. This enormous, ultimately self-serving Establishment, with the public and private sectors firmly intertwined, is unswerving in its commitment to the party line as propounded by the AIDS war generals. And as in any war, "the first casualty is truth." The mainstream media, which in some other areas of life tends to take an independent or more probing view, typically kow tows and plays lap dog to the medical and AIDS Establishments. There are many reasons for this phenomenon, including practical, economic, and even "psycho-social" necessities, real or imagined. The causes notwithstanding, the result is an historically pliant press which tends to pass on to the public -- largely undigested -- the self-serving press releases of "Medicine, Inc." that forever tout "progress," "hope," "imminent breakthroughs," etc. Q: What kind of research and scientific papers were actually presented at the Vancouver conference? CHOWKA: Incredibly, there were over 5,000 individual scientific reports presented at the conference, chosen from many thousands more that were submitted. The conference itself was attended by over 15,000 physicians, researchers, journalists, policy makers, and observers. Virtually all of the papers were predicated on the assumption that HIV -- the so-called Human Immunodeficiency Virus -- causes AIDS. But a number of leading scientists the world over, beginning in 1987 with renowned University of California at Berkeley molecular biologist Peter Duesberg, Ph.D., have questioned the "HIV hypothesis," as they call it. Significantly, HIV was identified as the sole cause of AIDS in April 1984, three years after the epidemic was first reported -- not at a scientific conference but at a press conference in the nation's capital. HIV was said by the politicians at the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Health and Human Services to be the cause of AIDS before any significant and replicable studies on this theory had actually been published in the scientific literature -- the usual route a new scientific idea is required to take on the route toward acceptance. As has been well documented, modern science and the medical journals are extremely problematic and conflicted in terms of finding the truth to begin with, but this 1984 scenario that established the HIV/AIDS connection was truly unprecedented. The tenuous science behind it notwithstanding, virtually overnight in April 1984, HIV was "it." And along with HIV came a convenient scenario within which the radical dysfunction of the human immune system that characterizes "AIDS" could be viewed. More importantly, this scenario brought to the fore a profitable way to fit that immune dysfunction that was affecting a growing number of people into the dominant conventional medical drug-treatment model. It comes as no surprise that the big drug companies are largely behind and/or are continually advancing the HIV/AIDS scenario, because they stand to make billions on HIV/AIDS tests and treatments. The critical, "dissident" point of view that challenges HIV as the sole cause of AIDS, as represented by Duesberg and others, is available to some extent in the scientific literature, in the popular press, and on the Internet -- if you know where to look for it. But it has been so successfully marginalized if not almost totally suppressed from the beginning, without being, in my view, ever adequately addressed by the medical powers that be, that it's been made almost completely irrelevant. In fact, the list of well qualified HIV/AIDS "dissenters" is a long one, including not only Duesberg but many other highly credentialed MDs, PhDs, and journalists around the world. They have all been largely ignored. The ultimate casualties of this squelching of important scientific debate are the hundreds of thousands of people with HIV/AIDS who are subjected to expensive, toxic treatments that, to this point, have ultimately failed to work. Q: There are often reports of people with AIDS who avoid toxic, conventional drug treatments and instead choose alternative, holistic options. Was there anything at the 1996 International AIDS conference about alternative medicine? CHOWKA: There was, although these reports were largely buried under the sheer weight of the much larger number of conventional drug presentations. But several received some noteworthy coverage. For example, both Reuters and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported on a paper presented in Vancouver about the progress of HIV/AIDS research at Bastyr University in Seattle, an accredited school of naturopathic and natural medicine. In 1994, Bastyr received a $920,000 federal grant to set up a center to evaluate alternative treatments for HIV/AIDS. The Bastyr researchers have identified and are collecting data on more than 170 alternative therapies used by people with HIV/AIDS and are preparing to study which of the therapies actually work. To facilitate the study, Bastyr has enlisted 2,000 people with HIV/AIDS who are using alternative techniques, ranging from herbs to spiritual healing. Another significant study presented at the AIDS conference, by a consortium including the Rand Corporation, UCSD, UCLA, and the U.S. Agency for Health Care Policy and Research, found that an amazing seventy six percent of a representative sample of people who tested positive for HIV "had recently used some type of alternative treatment, 44 percent without telling their medical provider." The study also reported that "fourteen percent used these therapies in lieu of traditional [conventional] treatments" and interestingly that "those who substituted alternatives for conventional treatments were more optimistic." Another study, later reported on in Antiviral Weekly, found that forty-two percent of HIV positive women in Vancouver, Canada use alternative therapies. These and similar studies at the conference received some limited attention beyond the conference, but in my view they should have been among the lead stories in the media -- which of course they were not. Q: Were any studies presented about the effectiveness of alternative treatments for HIV/AIDS? CHOWKA: Yes, a number of them. Many were from Africa and Third World countries where traditional healers and herbal medicine are popular and widely available. One study from Uganda on local herbal remedies asserted that they "outperform western drugs," being "equal to or better than western medicines in treating AIDS-associated chronic diarrhea." Another study noted that medicinal plants used by native Bolivian healers contain "HIV integrase inhibitors" -- "potent new anti-HIV compounds." Two studies from France showed positive results in the evaluation of all-natural boxwood evergreen tree extract in the treatment of HIV infected patients. Another study of HIV individuals over an eight year period by researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore found that micronutrient intake, specifically vitamin B supplements, improved the patients' survival. Q: So do you see reason for hope and optimism in the future for people with HIV/AIDS? CHOWKA: Already there's a small light at the end of the tunnel and, inevitably, things will change for the better. I predict that the current focus on HIV as well as expensive, toxic drug treatments will ultimately give way to a more reasoned, holistic, or at least complementary, approach. This is what has happened historically over time in the case of every other major disease and chronic medical condition in the West, from cancer and cardiovascular disease to women's health issues. But it may be a long haul in terms of HIV/AIDS. For one thing, the questionable HIV hypothesis has been effectively promoted and almost totally institutionalized, buttressed by billions of dollars worth of public and private money and profits and a huge and still growing conventional HIV/AIDS Establishment. It is now extremely difficult to challenge this interlocked edifice. The AIDS Establishment is also very canny at devising effective new public relations strategies -- forever snatching "victory from the jaws of defeat." The current one they are working with, the "new hope/brink-of-breakthroughs" spin, is a tried and true approach, perfected as I noted earlier over the course of decades in the conventional war on cancer. It's amazing and dispiriting to consider the extent that this kind of false "hope," that is forever held out by the medical powers-that-be to individuals with cancer, HIV/AIDS, etc., can fool so many people. Eventually, as the body count and the suffering on the part of people with AIDS grows, however, the current strategies will be discarded. Already, in fact, as confirmed by credible reports at the Vancouver conference, a large majority of people with HIV/AIDS are quietly seeking more options and turning to a wide variety of alternative and complementary therapies, despite their vigorous dismissal or disapproval by the HIV/AIDS "experts." We see in health as in everything else that it's just not possible to "fool all of the people all of the time" -- especially people acutely suffering from AIDS and/or at the hands of the conventional medical Establishment. For me, this is where the real hope lies In practitioners, researchers, and well-informed consumers of alternative medicine reaching critical mass and finally bringing some real light and hope, as well as a healing peace, to the largely bogus conventional "war" on AIDS.
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