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 이름:궁금
2002/5/29(수)
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 2000년도의 인터뷰
david rasnick 이라고 에이즈를 19년동안 공부한 사람이 센프란시스코 신문하고 한 인터뷰입니다,,
비교적 최신이고 대화 내용이 비교적 쉬워서 대충 읽으실수 있을것 같네요,,,,
From the San Francisco Herald October 2000 www.sfherald.com home
SCIENCE & MEDICINE
Out of Africa ----- By Gene Mahoney
Recently, South African president Thabo Mbeki sought out AIDS dissident David Rasnick to offer alternative views regarding his nation's epidemic. Here's an all too brief interview I had with the scientist at his Silicon Valley home.
GENE MAHONEY: So tell us about yourself.
DAVID RASNICK: I have a Ph.D. in chemistry from Georgia Tech and I've been in the pharmaceutical industry since 1978. I've developed enzyme inhibitors for tissue destroying diseases like arthritis, cancer, emphysema, parasitic diseases, and I've studied AIDS for 19 years. I've written about it in technical journals.
GM: Nineteen years ago did you think that HIV caused AIDS?
DR: Nineteen years ago HIV didn't even exist. It was 16 years ago, in 1984, that HIV was unleashed upon the world, at a press conference by Robert Gallo. Gallo used to be a member of the National Institutes of Health. He was one of the world's leading retrovirologists and he'd been working on the virus-cancer hypothesis since the '70s and had to find viruses that caused cancers. He didn't find any. He tried to find something else useful or significant about retroviruses and that led to his claim that a retrovirus caused AIDS. Gallo's retrovirus, as we all know now, is called HIV--Human Immunodeficiency Virus. It is no such thing. It does not cause immunodeficiency.
If HIV did cause AIDS it would be one of the smartest viruses you could imagine, because it knows whether you're male or female, gay or straight, white or black, it even knows what zip code you live in and what country you live in. For example, in the United States eight out of nine AIDS cases are men. In San Francisco 99 out of 100 are men. Two-thirds of AIDS cases in the USA and Europe are gay men. So that's a smart virus, and somehow that virus knows to cause Kaposi's sarcoma in gay men and not in hemophiliacs, not in pediatric AIDS cases, not in IV, blood transfusion or so forth. So it's a very smart virus.
You can either accept that, as the HIV establishment does, or you can be a little skeptical, as [UC Berkeley retrovirologist] Peter Duesberg, I, and the so-called dissidents are, that maybe that's not quite the cause of AIDS. Peter Duesberg and I are convinced that AIDS in the US and Europe is the clinical manifestation of the drug epidemic in both places. In Africa it's a completely different situation. It's so different that the WHO [World Health Organization] and other organizations, in 1985, had
to come up with a different definition of AIDS in Africa because it didn't look anything like AIDS in the US and Europe. The Bangui definition came from a little town in Africa called Bangui.
In fact, I'm pretty sure right now there's no such thing as an AIDS epidemic in Africa, from my previous two trips last May and this July. The reason I say that in brief is that we've looked and looked and asked people, the government ministers, we asked the director of the medical research council in South Africa, the Centers for Disease Control in the US--everybody we could ask, "What are the numbers of AIDS cases in South Africa and how many AIDS deaths?" No answer at all. Zero. To this date we do not have an answer to that, and in fact, I don't think there is any
such thing as AIDS going on in South Africa. It's just the same old things that Africans have been suffering and dying from for generations due to poverty, malnutrition, poor sanitation, bad water, that sort of thing. We're calling it AIDS now, instead of by the old-fashioned names that were more honest.
GM: I think most people don't realize there isn't a disease called AIDS
per se, like cancer or leukemia. AIDS is a collection of, what is it up
to now… 30 diseases?
DR: 30 some odd, depending where you want to go.
GM: But even that's very arbitrary, too.
DR: It's very arbitrary. There are at least four definitions of AIDS in the United States the CDC [Centers for Disease Control] has come up with, and there's no such thing as an AIDS disease. All of the so-called AIDS defining diseases are known and old diseases.
For example, dementia, diarrhea, Kaposi's sarcoma, cervical cancer, pneumonia, all these sorts of things, are only called AIDS if you have antibodies to HIV, then they're called AIDS. In the absence of those antibodies you have the old name of whatever the disease was. HIV itself has no symptoms. If you get a typical infectious disease like chicken pox, smallpox, or the flu or whatever, the symptoms go hand in hand with the causative agent. You know exactly what it is.
The chicken pox virus doesn't cause dementia, it causes the chicken pox. The flu virus doesn't cause cervical cancer, it causes the flu. HIV has no symptoms of its own. Once a person becomes so-called antibody positive to HIV, ten years down the road they can expect to get diarrhea, dementia, you name it. So this whole idea as AIDS as a disease, there's no such thing.
As a matter of fact the name itself speaks to what it is. It's called Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. It means an immune deficiency that is acquired in some way. It is a syndrome. A syndrome is, think of alcoholism. Alcoholism is a syndrome. We know the cause. It's drinking too much. But it can have a spectrum of consequences that aren't necessarily going to show up in each individual. In some people alcoholism affects their central nervous system, some people it affects their liver, they get cirrhosis, some people have gastrointestinal problems. There are all sorts of things that can be a consequence of alcoholism. Generally syndromes are a consequence of some sort of environmental influence; cigarette smoking, alcoholism, that sort of
thing.
Infectious diseases are typically not syndromes. They're very well defined, and you have very precise symptoms that are attributed to infectious diseases. With syndromes that's not true. Anytime you have a syndrome it's almost certainly not due to an infectious agent. So that's what AIDS is. It's not a disease, and HIV is an Orwellian deception. It's not an immune deficiency virus. It's just one of thousands of
retroviruses.
First of all, you can't even find it in a human being. No one has even obtained infectious HIV from a human being. That's why the tests look for antibodies to HIV. HIV itself, at least the proteins of it, are produced in laboratories. For example, they mix a person's blood with those proteins and see if there's a binding reaction of some sort. If there is, depending on its strength or whatever, you're claimed to be HIV-positive.
Normally an antibody reaction--except for AIDS, AIDS is the only exception -- if you have antibodies to the so-called putative cause of the disease, whatever it is, then you're considered immune, and you're safe. That's the whole principle of vaccination. That's why you have a little scar on your shoulder from smallpox vaccine. People from around the world are happy to be around you. Because they know that not only are you not likely to get smallpox because you're vaccinated from it, you're also not able to transmit it to other people because you're immune from it. Same is true with the measles, the mumps, and the chicken pox… once you've ever had it you're immune to it. And if you were to check for antibodies to that in a person you would find them, because you are immune to it and that's a good thing.
HIV is the only exception. If you have antibodies to HIV that is a death sentence. Ten years from now, as I said before, you're going to come down with AIDS defining diseases and die. Which isn't true. The vast majority of HIV-positive people, well over 90% worldwide, are perfectly healthy. There's only a total of, the WHO reports, a little over 2 million AIDS deaths, total worldwide And yet they tell us there are over 30 some odd million HIV-positive people are still alive and living their lives
happily on this planet.
GM: There's been a big push about giving the people of Africa AIDS drugs.Is there still as much of a push about AIDS drugs in the US as there used to be?
DR: Oh yeah. AIDS peaked in the US in 1992, according to the CDC's own publications. We've had 700 some odd thousand AIDS cases in the US total. That's living and dead.
GM: What about HIV-positives who are--
DR: No, I'm not talking about HIV-positives. I'm talking about AIDS cases
as documented the past 19 years.
GM: Having those diseases.
DR: Well as of 1993 you don't even have to have a disease to be a full-blown AIDS case. You have two laboratory tests fewer than 200 CD4 cells per microliter of blood, and have antibodies to HIV, and have no other symptoms. No indication of illness other than laboratory tests and you're a full-blown AIDS case. Well over 60% of all new AIDS cases in the USA have no symptoms of the illness, but yet they're full-blown AIDS cases by the 1993 definition. And that's been true for over 50% of the AIDS cases in the past 4 or 5 years, having no symptoms of the disease.
So based on whatever criteria the CDC chooses, even that very bizarre '93 definition of including healthy people as full-blown AIDS cases just on the basis of two laboratory tests, even including these tens of thousands of healthy people, there is still a grand total of one million Americans in 19 years total who are listed as AIDS cases. A little over 700,000 in fact. Curiously, even in Africa the total number of AIDS
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