How can all HIV positive diagnoses be false positives?

Published: 07 May 2009 | Written by Mike Hersee | Print | Hits: 11918

What should happen when public health issues arise, versus what actually did happen with AIDS

This issue goes to the heart of the problem with HIV/AIDS and really highlights the fundamental problem with medical science as a whole at present, especially with the regular threat of world-wide, life-threatening epidemics such as bird-flu, SARS, swine-flu, or next month's pandemic-du-jour.

What happens in principle is that some apparent pattern of ill-health amongst a number of people is noticed by health officials, which raises the question, "What could the cause of this be?" When a number of people who have something in common with each other (eg, they live in the same geographical area, work in the same place, have been part of a network of people among whom there may have been a sexual connection) get a similar set of symptoms, it suggests there may be some factor in the community that could be affecting multiple people simultaneously.

A pattern of illness among people could have several types of cause. It could be toxicological, nutritional, or infectious, for instance. Unfortunately, human beings seem to gravitate automatically to believing in infectious causes, and this is what happened with Scurvy, Pellagra, Beri-Beri, and SMON as examples. These were caused either by a nutritional deficiency or toxin but believed by medical professionals for quite some while to be infectious, long after the evidence was available that they were not.

This is also what happened with AIDS, but additionally there were sociological and economic reasons to motivate organisations such as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to blame it on an infectious cause. In fact, given other health factors affecting every single group of people regarded as being at higher risk for being diagnosed with AIDS, it was criminally negligent - or just deliberately criminal - to find the flimsiest of excuses for focussing solely on infectious causes and to justify ignoring blatantly obvious toxicological and nutritional factors in the hunt for the cause of what was originally called ‘Gay Related Immuno-Deficiency'[1].

On 23^rd April 1984, at the Robert-Gallo-initiated press conference where the ‘probable cause of AIDS' was announced, most people assumed he had actually found that the alleged retrovirus he called HTLV III had been shown to be infectious between humans and caused immune system destruction. In the years that followed the row with the Pasteur Institute over whose mixture had been used to produce what was claimed to be the AIDS virus and the multiple investigations into goings-on in Gallo's laboratory ignored the most fundamental issue: That neither Luc Montagnier nor Robert Gallo had ever actually found this virus in human beings. Instead they had needed to bio-chemically torture cells into emitting particles that were then claimed to be the cause of AIDS.

Subsequently, Luc Montagnier has flip-flopped backwards and forwards about the role of the putative HIV in AIDS, and admitted in a video-recorded interview in 1997 that he had never actually purified a retrovirus and that he believed Robert Gallo never had either[2]. More recently, closer examination by British investigative journalist Janine Roberts of documents released into the public domain by the various investigations into scientific misconduct in Robert Gallo's laboratory showed that he had not even come close to showing that his particles caused AIDS. This has resulted in an international group of lawyers and scientists writing to Science demanding Gallo's original paper be retracted on the grounds of manifest fraud[3].

Real versus imaginary infectious, immune-system-destroying retroviruses

That an infectious, immune-system-destroying retrovirus has never been isolated from a single human being is still the case today, now over 25 years after the original claim, not even from one who is dying of conditions classified as AIDS or who has a high ‘viral load'. Furthermore, the official process for ‘culturing HIV' from the US government Department of AIDS manual, when used with cells that are known to have never been exposed to what is regarded as HIV, will produce the same particles as cells from people AIDS researchers believe have HIV, according to a highly-respected and fairly prominent researcher who does not want to be publicly identified.

In other words, you can't find HIV in people who supposedly are infected with it, but you can produce ‘HIV' from the cells of people who don't have it. What is called ‘HIV' is really non-specific laboratory phenomena that have never been shown to have a causal connection with immune system suppression in living human beings. This is Dr David Rasnick's simple explanation of what is called ‘isolation' of HIV:

The ultimate test that the establishment offers is what's called a co-culture technique where you take a sample of the individual's blood cells, white blood cells. You cannot find HIV now in this sample. All you have are these blood cells. But then you culture these cells with some special cells that Robert Gallo generated some years ago. You have to throw in some powerful chemicals, phytohemagglutinin or IL-2, for example, to force these cells to do anything. The idea is to wake up the patient's cells to start producing RNA; and then this RNA will be coated in a protein, and possibly then there will be viral particles produced in the medium. These viral particles now will go infect the other cells that you added, and then you will amplify by a period of time the replication of these viral particles in the laboratory, what we call in vitro. Now, these particles did not exist in the patient, in the human being, the person that you got this sample from. You created them in the laboratory. And by creating these virus particles in the laboratory, people say they have isolated HIV from a human being. They have not done any such thing.

- Dr David Rasnick, ‘The Other Side of AIDS'[4]

The reason Dr Rasnick says ‘created' rather than ‘found' is because it is well-known that all human being have at least 1% of their DNA or more that can create viral particles when cells are placed in conditions of great stress - these are usually called ‘HERV's, or Human Endogenous RetroVirus. Barbara McLintock won the 1983 Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology for showing that cells can also rearrange their own genes depending on the type of stress they are placed under, therefore particles produced from cells under stress as described by Dr Rasnick will not necessarily be an exact extract of the cells' original DNA as it may have already been rearranged by the cell.

Therefore, the fact that the genetic code from one of these synthesised ‘viral' particles may not exactly match any section within the cell it originated from does not imply it is originally an exogenous infectious retrovirus. The fact that it will integrate with neighbouring cells in these circumstances is known to occur with HERVs too, which have never been shown to cause any illness. There are other explanations as to why cells produce particles containing RNA that then integrate with neighbouring cells[5].

Also, the fact that particles produced in a culture being shown integrating into a neighbouring cell is not proof that these particles would successfully survive in the outside world, or that it ever would have been created in a living person in the first place. There is not anywhere any scientific literature any published evidence that withstands scrutiny, that shows any retrovirus of any type has ever been successfully transferred from one person to another, by any means.

And so, if you can't find HIV directly in human beings, there is no Gold Standard by which to determine if HIV tests are actually reliably detecting HIV or not. In fact, all the phenomena by which various types of HIV tests are alleged to have been validated, have also been documented to be caused by other known processes and are therefore non-specific anyway. Therefore no HIV test has ever been properly validated. There really could not be a more serious and fundamental flaw in HIV/AIDS science than this, it's as basic as it gets. If you're asking, "How on earth could this state of affairs come about?", that really requires an in-depth sociological explanation which is outside the scope of this article.

Diagnostic tests in principle

By way of comparison, I think it's appropriate to take a more modern look at witch-hunting during The Inquisition in the Middle Ages. Across Europe, many thousands of people were burnt at the stake for being witches, or else died during the diagnostic procedure, which was of course torture. The question is though, how accurate was torture as a method for diagnosing the presence of a witch? When you're trying to find if something is present or not, you can do it one of two ways: either empirical proof of the thing you're looking for or a simplified diagnostic test.

For example, the ultimate test of whether a woman was pregnant or not is whether or not a baby is produced at the end of the process. That is empirical proof of pregnancy and you don't need any other evidence than that, but it has a couple of disadvantage as a diagnostic technique: It is not proof that someone was not pregnant earlier, and you have to wait until the baby is getting close to being born and can feel it moving around to know that it's not, for example, a tumour. So a diagnostic test that is an indirect marker can be very useful in being able to predict at an earlier stage whether the tested condition is present or not.

Another reason is cost: purifying, characterising and identifying the cause of a particular type of infection can be a time-consuming, slow, and inherently expensive procedure. Therefore, any alternative diagnostic method that detects some indirect marker for a particular type of infection - as long as it is reliable - can be very useful.

Any kind of diagnostic test has to at some stage be compared to the Gold Standard of the presence or absence of that particular thing, and is commonly documented in a chart like this:

Condition being tested: X	True Positive (n=500)	True Negative (n=500)
Diagnostic test kit positive	A: 500	B: 0
Diagnostic test kit negative	C: 0	D: 500

Suppose that 500 people proven to have condition X (the Gold Standard) were found and 500 people proven to not have it were used as negative controls, then ideally your diagnostic test kit results would have 500 in both A and D, and zero in both B and C. ie, all the positive diagnoses would be true positives, and all the negative diagnoses would be true negatives. In the real world it is often not quite like that there may be some positive diagnoses that were actually false positives and / or some negative diagnoses that were false negatives.

Many diagnostic tests are based on some threshold value being reached within the diagnostic process and a decision is usually made to ‘tune' the test depending on what it is being used for - ie, is it more important to pick up every single genuine positive with the increased likelihood of a few more false positive diagnoses (high sensitivity is important), or is it more important to make sure every positive diagnosis is genuine, with the increased risk of some positive cases being diagnosed as negative? (high specificity is important)

Originally HIV tests were intended to protect the blood supply (because they believed that the cause of conditions classified as AIDS had been shown to be this single allegedly infectious agent, which it hadn't). For that purpose the tests were made to be highly sensitive, which meant that they would produce more false positives, by their standards.

But to return to our witchcraft example, in order to assess the specificity of torture as a diagnostic test for witchcraft, we first need to get people who we know are witches - because we've seen them flying on their broomsticks, for instance - and some women who are negative controls because they've been unable to make broomsticks fly even when threatened at gunpoint, let's say. Only when we have these two groups can we then use our diagnostic test - torture to extract confessions - to ascertain its specificity. Or in other words, to find out what proportion of women put to death due to their confessions as witches were actually false positive diagnoses.

No validity of diagnostic tests for witches, or HIV

To the best of my knowledge, there has still been no evidence that any woman has ever flown on a broomstick in reality, and therefore any claimed specificity of torture as a useful diagnostic test for witchcraft is purely guesswork. I think most people today would acknowledge that the confessions of witchcraft under torture during the inquisition were probably false positives - all of them - and that therefore lots of people were therefore unfairly burnt at the stake, ignoring for a moment the pain and death inflicted in many cases by the diagnostic test itself.

Likewise, these particles claimed to be HIV produced only as a result of biochemical torture of cells in the laboratory have also not been found in ordinary living human beings, and therefore the specificity of any HIV test in relation to its connection to an allegedly infectious immune-system-destroying retrovirus is purely a fantasy figure, but a fantasy figure with devastating consequences. Thus, if they can't find any examples of the things they are supposed to be diagnosing, it is not only possible, it is entirely plausible, that all HIV positive diagnoses are also false.

And to back this up, even patent-holding former HIV test designer Dr Rodney Richards, after he came to the conclusion that the standard biological materials on which even his own HIV tests were based did not originate from a genuine infectious entity said,

"Millions of people take tests that are referred to as HIV tests. However, the idea that there is a laboratory test that can determine whether or not a person is infected with the virus is simply an illusion"

- Dr Rodney Richards, ‘The Other Side of AIDS'

Extended implications

The implications of there being a yawning crevasse between the notion of an infectious immune-system-destroying retrovirus and the solely-laboratory-derived phenomena that are claimed to be HIV goes much further than simply invalidating HIV tests. In all scientific literature that is used to justify the use of AIDS drugs in, for example, allegedly preventing mother-to-child-transmission of the putative HIV, are all based on claims that HIV tests or laboratory phenomena are valid. These are normally hidden in presuppositions, which means you have to watch out for certain words. So here is our short hit list of words and phrases that need to be challenged whenever they occur for clarification of the evidence that supports the use of that word:

'HIV' in almost any context

'positive' when referring to being diagnosed as HIV positive

'diagnosis' when referred to an HIV diagnosis

'confirmed / confirmation' when referring to HIV diagnoses

'Infection / infected' when referring to HIV infection

'isolated / isolation' when referring to claimed HIV isolation

'cloned' when referring to HIV cloning - you have to start with something that has been properly isolated first before you can consider cloning to be valid

'transmitted / transmission' for example, when referring to claimed HIV transmission from mother to child, this is presupposing that the diagnostic tests are valid and are ignoring that the phenomena claimed to be HIV have other explanations.

'phylogenetic / clade / sub-group' - these are used to claim that an individual's HIV is part of a particular branch of an HIV phylogenetic tree, which by presupposition implies that HIV must exist to have been characterised. But a phylogenetic tree is essentially an imaginary notion that can be assigned to anything. You could build a realistic-looking phylogenetic tree out of a set of 1000 random numbers from a range of 1-1,000,000, but it would be completely meaningless.

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