Term Paper on "HIV and AIDS"

Term Paper 9 pages (3160 words) Sources: 4 Style: APA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

AIDS/HIV

What PURPOSE does CONTINUED theorizing and research about HIV and AIDS serve according to Robert Root Bernstein?

When Robert Root Bernstein first wrote his book Rethinking AIDS in 1993, long before the existence of the life-prolonging current 'cocktail' of retroviral drugs, a diagnosis of AIDS or HIV-positive status was widely considered a death sentence in the scientific and medical community. Despite this common cultural perception, however, Bernstein noted that many HIV positive persons continued to remain healthy, despite their infected status. They were regarded as medical curiosities more than representative case studies. Bernstein thinks that such an attitude demonstrates the narrow-minded attitude about AIDS and the HIV virus within the medical community. The early assumption that AIDS and HIV were inexorably intertwined lead to a kind of groupthink in the minds of AIDS researchers.

Bernstein, although he is on the fringes of the medical establishment in his beliefs does not claim to have any singular answer as to the best way to cure AIDS. However, he does believe that continuing to question accepted notions, such as the relationship between the HIV virus and the full-blown autoimmune deficiency that is the hallmark of AIDS is necessary to provide a lasting solution to the AIDS epidemic, which stretches across the globe. He thinks that questioning the causal link between AIDS and HIV is a better way to gain more insight into the perplexing condition of immune deficiency syndromes in general, of which AIDS is only one.

It should be noted that Bernstein does not believe that HIV does not exist. However, he believes that rather than HIV automatically leading to AIDS, it is merely a culprit in compromising the immune system of the suffering individual. For example, a person may develop AIDS because he or she is an IV drug user, has a weakened immune system to hemophilia, malnutrition (common in Africa), or, more controversially, promiscuous anal sex. This last claim seems least persuasive, while the rest of the contributing factors seem more likely. (However, the fact that AIDS spread so rapidly among young, healthy homosexual men in the United States seems to render Bernstein's claim somewhat problematic.)

Bernstein provides some convincing evidence, however, that AIDS and HIV have had a checkered diagnostic history. It is now widely acknowledged that the spread of AIDS or what came to be regarded as AIDS-related symptoms like Karcopsi's sarcoma amongst the drug using populations of the inner cities, organ transplant patients, and older people, was initially ignored because AIDS was too quickly defined as a disease of gay men. But Bernstein points out that as AIDS became associated with HIV, anyone with the HIV virus came to be regarded as a possible AIDS patient, an association which he believes was just as specious as assuming that a new immune deficiency disorder could only occur in gay men.

As scientific orthodoxy took old, other patients without the HIV virus with the exact, or very similar types of immune suppression disorders, even in persons unlikely to exhibit such a deficiency, were not classified as AIDS patients. The assumption about the cause of AIDS clouded scientific judgment. Although there may be a frequent association between AIDS and HIV, Bernstein says that commonality does not imply causality. Bernstein's research suggests it is important to think of AIDS as one of many immune deficiency disorders that can strike the body, and HIV as one of many ways in which a person's immune system can be compromised. Finally, absent of other factors, a healthy person might be able to live, untreated with HIV for many years.

What PURPOSE does CONTINUED theorizing and research about HIV and AIDS serve according to Peter Duesberg?

Peter Duesberg, like Robert Root Bernstein, is another denier in the argument against the commonly accepted association of AIDS and HIV. Duesberg believes that HIV may be a virus that compromises the immune system in an unhealthy person, but that it does not always lead to the development of AIDS. Duesberg states that AIDS may be associated with HIV, but that HIV does not cause a patient to develop AIDS. Additionally, Duesberg notes that AIDS has not behaved like a conventional viral epidemic.

In response to the question of why AIDS infected apparently healthy gay men, in an interview with Charles Bremmer, Duesberg noted that the most frequent early victims of the AIDS epidemic in America were gay men who abused drugs like 'poppers.' He believes such drug use was a factor in compromising their immune system. Then, as the apparent epidemic spread to less promiscuous gay men, when they were infected with HIV they were given the drug AZT, a powerful treatment to supposedly cure AIDS that damaged their immune system and enabled rather than controlled the development of a complete autoimmune disorder. Rather than HIV causing AIDS, HIV was simply a weakening factor in an otherwise healthy person, until the prescription of AZT destroyed the health of the individual.

Duesberg also notes that even conventional AIDS researchers, faced with the long lives of many infected persons, acknowledge that there must be an additional factor present within the sufferer's body besides the HIV virus to create the full-blown AIDS syndrome. Duesberg gloats that the so-called co-factorial hypothesis of developing AIDS is a semantic method of admitting that modern science is still baffled by AIDS and that the association between HIV and AIDS is breaking down. AIDS lobbyists in Congress and the AIDS treatment industry within the field of medical treatment, according to Duesberg, have a political and financial interest in sustaining the association between HIV and AIDS in a way that flies in the face of medical truth. Freeing the American public from this inaccurate association is one of Duesberg's primary motives in continuing his research.

To support his claims, Duesberg points out that many people have died from a complete shut down of their immune system, as is characteristic of full-blown AIDS from complications primarily associated only with the recent AIDS epidemic like Karcopsi's sarcoma without ever having HIV. Also, there are great discrepancies in the epidemiological spread of AIDS. In the developed world, AIDS has remained highly concentrated in certain populations like gay men and IV drug users, presumably with suppressed immune syndromes. The most common non-drug using, heterosexual patients are organ transplant recipients and hemophiliacs -- again with suppressed immune syndromes. There are also certain perplexing aspects of the epidemic, such as the fact that while women are more likely to have HIV, men with HIV are more likely to manifest the full blown AIDS syndrome.

In Africa, there are many more heterosexual victims, but often these persons are victims of malnutrition or other disorders common to the region, another factor that can compromise the immune syndrome. The gender breakdown of sufferers is also different. None of these indicators, Duesberg says, are characteristic of an epidemic spawned by a single virus like HIV. Finally, why does AIDS lie dormant in the body for so long of so many people? Duesberg says this is also not characteristic of most viruses. By continuing to research AIDS and to leave a question open as to how and why it spreads, Duesberg hopes to end the use of drugs that cause terrible side effects and are used to pre-treat the condition in persons with HIV, and which he believes actually increase the risk of developing AIDS because they compromise the immune system. He also hopes to better help populations, such as Africa, which may be facing a different form of the epidemic, which he thinks might actually be confused with long-standing illnesses common to the region.

What PURPOSE does CONTINUED theorizing and research about HIV and AIDS serve according to Gary Null?

Gary Null, unlike Robert Root Bernstein and Peter Duesberg, who are both medical researchers at widely respected universities, has slightly less secure medical credentials, although he quotes both of these experts at length in putting forth his own scientific theories about how and why the myth of AIDS began. Null is a health and nutrition expert who questions whether HIV or AIDS as a discrete illness exists at all. He states that the virus has never been classified and identified, and may simply be a series of small particles that are not a stable, unique classifiable virus.

However, Null covers his bases in making his argument. He states that even if HIV did exist, it is quite possible that HIV is a harmless, noninfectious retrovirus, but because it has not been studied enough, no one really knows. According to Null, modern science simply accepted the existence of HIV as a fact, and then accepted the link between HIV and the development of AIDS as an illness. Null frequently cites the blindness of medical research as a detriment, rather than a facilitator of human health. For example, like Duesberg, Null blames the medical establishment's HIV / AIDS association for killing rather than saving people. However, instead of seeing the deaths caused by AIDS as the likely result… READ MORE

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