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My Friend, Christine Maggiore
The death of alternative AIDS activist Christine Maggiore came as a shock to me, not only because for 17 years she'd offered herself as living proof that a so-called "HIV-positive" diagnosis was not necessarily fatal but, more importantly, because she'd been a close personal friend for 15 years. Her death does not change any of the scientific facts that make the idea that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS not only wrong, but ridiculous; though supporters of the mainstream view of AIDS are exploiting it for propaganda, what it really underscores is the need for more basic research to document whether "HIV-positive" people who take the highly toxic AIDS medications actually live longer, healthier lives than those who don't.
My Friend Christine
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN, Editor
Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
“None of what’s happened to me and to my family has shaken what I know to be correct and true about science and medicine, and my experiences.”
— Christine Maggiore, ABC Prime Time Live, aired December 8, 2005
I got the call on December 29, 2008, two days after it happened. The caller identified himself as Paul Lineback and said he was with Reappraising AIDS, an international organization of scientists and lay people who question the mainstream view that the so-called Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) is the sole cause of AIDS. He told me he’d seen an item on the Los Angeles Times Web site that announced that 52-year-old Christine Maggiore, founder of the Alive & Well AIDS Alternatives organization in Los Angeles, a pillar of the alternative AIDS movement and someone I regarded as a personal friend, had died. The information the Times had published to its site came, ironically enough, from the office of the Los Angeles County Coroner, which had been sued by Maggiore and her husband, Robin Scovill, for publicly attributing the May 2005 death of their daughter Eliza Jane to AIDS.
When I got Paul Lineback’s call I couldn’t help but flash back to another phone call I’d got nearly four years earlier, when Fred Cline, alternative AIDS activist from San Francisco who was also close to Christine, told me Eliza Jane had died. I wasn’t sure whether or not it was true — so many rumors get spread so quickly, especially in the online age — so I called Christine’s number. I got a clearly harried woman who was working as her volunteer assistant, who put off my request to speak to Christine directly and finally told me, in a predictably exasperated tone of voice, “Don’t you realize she just lost her daughter?”
Oh my god it’s true it isn’t just one of those stupid rumors you hear on the Internet it really happened oh my god I’m so sorry … That’s about how my thoughts ran when I finally got the confirmation of Eliza Jane’s death in 2005. Christine herself eventually returned my call, and of course she was in tears — and at the same time oddly apologetic that I hadn’t been on the list of people she or her assistant had called directly. I babbled some of the inane attempts at comfort you speak when a friend has just gone through a terrible tragedy and you know the blow has been so hard that nothing you say is likely to comfort them, but you try your damnedest anyway and hope the words you’re barely able to stammer out offer some small degree of solace.
I first heard of Christine Maggiore in 1993 and first met her a year later. I interviewed her for the first of her two Zenger’s cover stories in 1995 and brought her down to San Diego to speak to our own alternative AIDS organization, the Association to Re-Evaluate AIDS (ATRA, later known as H.E.A.L.-San Diego) in the large auditorium of Craftsmen’s Hall — now the San Diego Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Community Center. She told a story of how her life had been perfectly normal — she’d been an aspiring young businesswoman in Los Angeles preparing for a career in marketing and running an import-export business based on contacts in her family’s native country, Italy — when she’d gone for a routine exam with a new gynecologist who believed that all her patients should be tested for antibodies to HIV.
Maggiore’s world turned upside down when her test turned out positive. After all, she wasn’t a member of any of the identifiable AIDS risk groups. She wasn’t a Gay man, an injection drug user or a hemophiliac. In fact, when she first tested HIV-positive she was feeling better than she had in years because she’d just come off the thyroid medication she’d been put on by a doctor who’d misdiagnosed her. Nonetheless, at first she accepted the medical death sentence of an “HIV-positive” diagnosis and high-tailed it over to AIDS Project Los Angeles, where — she grimly noted later — the first service she was offered was help in drafting her will.
Throwing herself into AIDS volunteer work, she signed as a speaker for AIDS Project Los Angeles — where she was quite popular because, not being in one of the standard risk groups, she was a living illustration of the idea that “everyone can get AIDS” — and the Shanti Foundation. She was one of 14 board members of a group of HIV-positive women called Women at Risk — and she noted five years later that by then 11 of the co-founders had died and the only ones who were still alive were her and the two others who had refused the highly toxic “treatment” regimens then being offered to people with HIV and AIDS.
Her acceptance of the mainstream view of AIDS started to unravel when one of her doctors, telling her she didn’t fit the “profile” of a person with AIDS, suggested she take another HIV antibody test. This one came back negative. She underwent a succession of further tests that came back with a bewildering profusion of contradictory results — positive, negative, “indeterminate” and “seroequivocal” — the last two meaning that the people reading her test results couldn’t decide from the band patterns on her Western Blot test strips whether she was positive or negative.
That’s a far more common problem with the test than most people know. The HIV antibody test is regularly claimed to be 99-plus percent “accurate,” but the only experiments on which that claim is based were comparisons of different brands of antibody tests against each other. No one has ever checked the accuracy of the antibody tests against the only scientifically credible “gold standard” — actual isolation of live, infectious HIV from a living patient — because no one has ever actually isolated live, infectious HIV from a living patient. The researches Luc Montagnier and Françoise Barre-Sinoussi conducted at the Institut Pasteur in Paris in 1983, for which they won the 2008 Nobel Prize for supposedly “discovering” HIV, only came up with bits of protein and genetic material which Montagnier and Barre-Sinoussi conjectured were pieces of a new virus. Montagnier admitted on French TV in 1997 that he never isolated the virus — and neither has anyone else.
What’s more, the test is surprisingly ambiguous, given the finality of the medical judgments issued to this day to people who test “HIV-positive.” There are at least 11 different criteria for reading it used in the world today, including at least five that are accepted in the U.S. — so a test that is positive in one lab can be negative in another and seroequivocal or indeterminate in a third, Christine Johnson, a former associate of Christine Maggiore’s and herself an alternative AIDS activist in L.A., went through the scientific literature and documented 64 possible causes of a false-positive reading on the HIV antibody test, including such common infectious as hepatitis, herpes, flu, malaria, cholera and lupus, as well as certain vaccinations and even pregnancy — especially in women who’d been pregnant before.
Christine Maggore would learn all this information, and it would change her life. She heard of Peter Duesberg, the controversial professor of microbiology and cell biology at UC Berkeley and the first science to challenge publicly the assertion that HIV caused AIDS, and sought him out. Originally she thought he was a medical doctor (he’s a Ph.D.) and tried to make an appointment. When she heard his information, her first impulse was to bring it to her superiors at AIDS Project Los Angeles, thinking they would welcome the possibility that AIDS might be more complicated than they believed — and taught — it was, and that an “HIV-positive” test result might not be a death sentence after all. Instead, at one APLA meeting she was denounced for advancing “dangerous information.”
Maggiore’s growing awareness of the case against HIV as the cause of AIDS, and the adverse reaction within mainstream AIDS organizations of any questioning of the HIV = AIDS dogma, propelled her out of mainstream AIDS activism and into the alternative movement. In 1995 she organized a Los Angeles branch of H.E.A.L. — an international network of alternative AIDS organizations (the initials stand for Health, Education, AIDS Liaison and the first chapter was founded in New York in 1984) — and started holding meetings, proudly and cheekily advertising her programs as “dangerous information.” In 1999 she took her organization out of the H.E.A.L. network and renamed it Alive & Well, and in 2000 she became the first — and, to this day, the only — alternative AIDS activist to have a table at the official international AIDS conference.
While devoting herself so totally to alternative AIDS activism that it literally became her career, she also met Robin Scovill, a filmmaker 13 years her junior, and had her first child, Charlie. Learning the hard way about how pregnant “HIV-positive” women were treated — she gave birth at home with a midwife because no hospital would accept her unless she agreed to take anti-HIV medications intravenously during labor — she later started an organization called Mothers Opposing Mandatory Medicine (MOMM) and told other “HIV-positive” mothers how they could escape being exposed to the cell-killing “anti-HIV” drug AZT during their pregnancies. When she became pregnant with her second child, Eliza Jane, she was photographed for the cover of Mothering magazine with her midriff exposed and a “No AZT” sign painted across it.
Maggiore also wrote a book summing up the case against HIV as the cause of AIDS, against the standard anti-HIV medications and against the HIV antibody test. She called it What If Everything You Thought You Knew About AIDS Was Wrong? and published three editions; a fourth was scheduled for release when she died. The first one had no author’s name on the cover because she didn’t want to pose as an authority on the issue — she wanted the attention to be on the scientists and researchers she cited as sources — but she was told by booksellers and prospective buyers that she needed to sign the book to accept responsibility for its contents. It became a sort of Bible for the alternative AIDS movement, the book we passed to friends and acquaintances as the first step on their AIDS re-education before we referred them to the more formidable tomes by Duesberg and other alternative scientists.
In the mid-2000’s, Maggiore began to cut back on her alternative AIDS activities. She started a business that had nothing to do with AIDS or activism and inched towards a more normal life. Then her daughter Eliza Jane died in May 2005. Maggiore and her consultant, toxicologist Dr. Mohammed Ali Al-Bayati, insisted that the three-year-old girl had died of an allergic reaction to the antibiotic amoxicillin, which a doctor had prescribed for an ear infection. The authorities, led by Los Angeles County senior medical examiner Dr. James K. Ribe, insisted — without having tested Eliza Jane’s blood for HIV antibodies — that she died from Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, an opportunistic infection associated with AIDS. Maggiore spent the next year not only grief-stricken but terrorized by threats of prosecution for felony child endangerment and even manslaughter — and though the Los Angeles County district attorney eventually decided not to prosecute, Maggiore still found herself pilloried by mainstream AIDS activists and media outlets.
Her reaction was just what those of us who knew her would expect. Feisty, indomitable and determined to channel her grief into productive activism, she started yet another organization, Justice for Eliza Jane, using the Internet to organize support and expose alleged misdiagnoses from Dr. Ribe’s office on so-called “shaken-baby syndrome” and other dubious medical concepts. In 2008 she re-started the monthly Alive & Well meetings and also launched a podcast called “How Positive Are You?” in association with David Crowe, president of the Reappraising AIDS Society of Alberta, Canada, and had recorded 11 episodes at the time of her death — including interviews with Gay men, social workers and others who had studied the evidence, as she had, and concluded that HIV could not possibly be the sole cause of AIDS.
The mainstream’s reaction was also about what those of us in the alternative AIDS movement could expect. Though Maggiore and her husband had been cleared by the L.A. district attorney’s office, at least three TV programs offered fictional stories loosely (or not so loosely) based on her case in which she either got prosecuted, died or both. The last one that aired during her lifetime was a Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode called “Retro,” an ugly story in which the characters based on Maggiore and her pediatrician were pilloried and ultimately brought to justice. Maggiore, who despite constant rebuffs had never given up hope that someday mainstream and alternative AIDS activists could sit down and meet as equals working towards a solution to the AIDS problem, invited one of the show’s medical advisers, Dr. Jocelyn Dee, and she and Crowe interviewed her on what would turn out to be the last episode of “How Positive Are You?”
I heard this program in early December 2008 and was so profoundly moved that I called Christine and asked her for permission to transcribe the interview and publish it in Zenger’s. When we spoke on the phone, less than two weeks before her death, her voice sounded clear, bright and energetic, as it always had whenever we talked. She eagerly gave me permission to publish the show (half of it ran in the previous issue of Zenger’s and the rest appears in this issue), and I signed off with no idea that Christine would soon die. When the Los Angeles Times published a print article on Christine’s death on December 30, it stated that she had died of pneumonia and said that unnamed “friends” had told the Times that she’d gone through a holistic “cleansing” about a month before and that she’d never really recovered from the death of her daughter.
The Times piece — interestingly, published as a news story rather than an obituary — was remarkably fair for a mainstream media outlet that previously had had no patience with anyone challenging the HIV/AIDS model. Brian Carter, Christine’s associate in Alive & Well in her later years, said the movement would survive her: “There is an outstanding number of prominent rethinkers, independent thinkers, doctors, scientists [and] lawyers who question AIDS causation.”
“Why did she remain basically healthy from 1992 until just before her death?” said David Crowe. “I think it’s certain that people who promote the establishment view of AIDS will declare that she died of AIDS and will attempt to use this to bring people back in line. But you can only learn so much from an unfortunate death.”
It’s true that Christine’s P.R. strategy of using herself and her family as exemplars of the possibility of living a healthy life despite an “HIV-positive” diagnosis was inherently risky. It’s also true, as Crowe commented in 2003 on the death of another alternative AIDS activist, Rob Johnston (a cancer patient who likely died of the side effects of chemotherapy), that no matter what an “HIV-positive” person dies of, the medical establishment will try to label it as “AIDS.” (Indeed, in the 1980’s clients of AIDS Foundation San Diego told me a joke that, if an “HIV-positive” person broke his or her leg, the medical chart would read, “HIV-related fracture in leg.”)
“Every time an AIDS reappraiser dies, people are anxious to know whether it was AIDS.” Crowe wrote. “Those who support the dominant paradigm are hopeful that, if it was, it will cause all the other ‘denialists’ to smarten up and get on drug therapy right away. Dissidents, on the other hand, often still have a sense of insecurity. Every time one of their number dies of AIDS they are forced to confront the possibility that they have been living a delusion. Somehow one person dying from symptoms that would not be called AIDS in HIV-negative people is ‘proof’ that the HIV-positive person really was killed by the virus.”
Nonetheless — as Christine Maggiore herself noted in the quote from her 2005 ABC Prime Time Live interview which I used as an epigram to this article — none of the deaths of prominent alternative AIDS activists (including H.E.A.L.-San Diego member Sandi Lenfestey, who passed away two weeks after Maggiore) change one whit the scientific logic that indicates that the HIV model of AIDS is not only wrong, but ridiculous. HIV is still a virus that has never been proven even to exist according to the strictest rules of virology, and even if it exists it certainly hasn’t been proved to cause a disease — as Dr. Dee admitted to Maggiore and Crowe in their podcast interview. Though the medical establishment has been proclaiming for a quarter-century that HIV causes AIDS, they still haven’t come up with a coherent explanation of how (its “pathogenesis,” to use the scientific term).
Supporters of the HIV/AIDS model don’t have an explanation for why many people get an “HIV-positive” test result and live for years with no medications and no health complications at all — they just write them off as “long-term non-progressors” (which once led Christine to ask why she had to get sick in order to “progress”) and hint at genetic explanations with no evidence to back them up — just as we on the alternative side don’t have a coherent explanation for why people who do take modern AIDS medications sometimes have dramatic improvements in health and live for years. AIDS mainstreamers are beginning to concede the horrific side effects of the HIV meds — from disfiguring body-fat redistribution to toxic liver failure — which alternative scientists like Dr. David Rasnick were warning about since 1996 (when I interviewed him on the subject).
In a sympathetic article despite her own proclaimed belief in the HIV/AIDS model, Connie Howard of the Edmonton, Canada magazine VUE put her finger on it when she wrote, “It’s time for research that compares outcomes of those who choose AIDS drugs and those who don’t.” The mainstream has consistently rejected calls for such research on the ground that it would be “unethical” to withhold drugs from a control group, and when organizations like Alive & Well and H.E.A.L. have offered to provide control groups from our members who have already decided voluntarily not to take the drugs, we’ve been turned down because — as one mainstream researcher put it — we’re a “self-selected sample” because the people who aren’t on the drugs tend to be healthier than the people who are.
Without that kind of research, the battle over whether AIDS drugs “work” — and whether, by working, they validate the HIV/AIDS model (it’s possible that they could be having some other positive pharmacological effect, unrelated to HIV, on the people who do survive and prosper on them) — devolves into a series of dueling anecdotes. No doubt Christine Maggiore was all too aware that if something happened to her health and she died prematurely, she’d be pressed into service by the mainstream as a cautionary example; after all, that had already happened with her daughter. But my sadness at seeing Christine’s name invoked to support a cause she abhorred is far, far less than the deep sorrow I feel at having lost a good and loyal friend.
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN, Editor
Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
“None of what’s happened to me and to my family has shaken what I know to be correct and true about science and medicine, and my experiences.”
— Christine Maggiore, ABC Prime Time Live, aired December 8, 2005
I got the call on December 29, 2008, two days after it happened. The caller identified himself as Paul Lineback and said he was with Reappraising AIDS, an international organization of scientists and lay people who question the mainstream view that the so-called Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) is the sole cause of AIDS. He told me he’d seen an item on the Los Angeles Times Web site that announced that 52-year-old Christine Maggiore, founder of the Alive & Well AIDS Alternatives organization in Los Angeles, a pillar of the alternative AIDS movement and someone I regarded as a personal friend, had died. The information the Times had published to its site came, ironically enough, from the office of the Los Angeles County Coroner, which had been sued by Maggiore and her husband, Robin Scovill, for publicly attributing the May 2005 death of their daughter Eliza Jane to AIDS.
When I got Paul Lineback’s call I couldn’t help but flash back to another phone call I’d got nearly four years earlier, when Fred Cline, alternative AIDS activist from San Francisco who was also close to Christine, told me Eliza Jane had died. I wasn’t sure whether or not it was true — so many rumors get spread so quickly, especially in the online age — so I called Christine’s number. I got a clearly harried woman who was working as her volunteer assistant, who put off my request to speak to Christine directly and finally told me, in a predictably exasperated tone of voice, “Don’t you realize she just lost her daughter?”
Oh my god it’s true it isn’t just one of those stupid rumors you hear on the Internet it really happened oh my god I’m so sorry … That’s about how my thoughts ran when I finally got the confirmation of Eliza Jane’s death in 2005. Christine herself eventually returned my call, and of course she was in tears — and at the same time oddly apologetic that I hadn’t been on the list of people she or her assistant had called directly. I babbled some of the inane attempts at comfort you speak when a friend has just gone through a terrible tragedy and you know the blow has been so hard that nothing you say is likely to comfort them, but you try your damnedest anyway and hope the words you’re barely able to stammer out offer some small degree of solace.
I first heard of Christine Maggiore in 1993 and first met her a year later. I interviewed her for the first of her two Zenger’s cover stories in 1995 and brought her down to San Diego to speak to our own alternative AIDS organization, the Association to Re-Evaluate AIDS (ATRA, later known as H.E.A.L.-San Diego) in the large auditorium of Craftsmen’s Hall — now the San Diego Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Community Center. She told a story of how her life had been perfectly normal — she’d been an aspiring young businesswoman in Los Angeles preparing for a career in marketing and running an import-export business based on contacts in her family’s native country, Italy — when she’d gone for a routine exam with a new gynecologist who believed that all her patients should be tested for antibodies to HIV.
Maggiore’s world turned upside down when her test turned out positive. After all, she wasn’t a member of any of the identifiable AIDS risk groups. She wasn’t a Gay man, an injection drug user or a hemophiliac. In fact, when she first tested HIV-positive she was feeling better than she had in years because she’d just come off the thyroid medication she’d been put on by a doctor who’d misdiagnosed her. Nonetheless, at first she accepted the medical death sentence of an “HIV-positive” diagnosis and high-tailed it over to AIDS Project Los Angeles, where — she grimly noted later — the first service she was offered was help in drafting her will.
Throwing herself into AIDS volunteer work, she signed as a speaker for AIDS Project Los Angeles — where she was quite popular because, not being in one of the standard risk groups, she was a living illustration of the idea that “everyone can get AIDS” — and the Shanti Foundation. She was one of 14 board members of a group of HIV-positive women called Women at Risk — and she noted five years later that by then 11 of the co-founders had died and the only ones who were still alive were her and the two others who had refused the highly toxic “treatment” regimens then being offered to people with HIV and AIDS.
Her acceptance of the mainstream view of AIDS started to unravel when one of her doctors, telling her she didn’t fit the “profile” of a person with AIDS, suggested she take another HIV antibody test. This one came back negative. She underwent a succession of further tests that came back with a bewildering profusion of contradictory results — positive, negative, “indeterminate” and “seroequivocal” — the last two meaning that the people reading her test results couldn’t decide from the band patterns on her Western Blot test strips whether she was positive or negative.
That’s a far more common problem with the test than most people know. The HIV antibody test is regularly claimed to be 99-plus percent “accurate,” but the only experiments on which that claim is based were comparisons of different brands of antibody tests against each other. No one has ever checked the accuracy of the antibody tests against the only scientifically credible “gold standard” — actual isolation of live, infectious HIV from a living patient — because no one has ever actually isolated live, infectious HIV from a living patient. The researches Luc Montagnier and Françoise Barre-Sinoussi conducted at the Institut Pasteur in Paris in 1983, for which they won the 2008 Nobel Prize for supposedly “discovering” HIV, only came up with bits of protein and genetic material which Montagnier and Barre-Sinoussi conjectured were pieces of a new virus. Montagnier admitted on French TV in 1997 that he never isolated the virus — and neither has anyone else.
What’s more, the test is surprisingly ambiguous, given the finality of the medical judgments issued to this day to people who test “HIV-positive.” There are at least 11 different criteria for reading it used in the world today, including at least five that are accepted in the U.S. — so a test that is positive in one lab can be negative in another and seroequivocal or indeterminate in a third, Christine Johnson, a former associate of Christine Maggiore’s and herself an alternative AIDS activist in L.A., went through the scientific literature and documented 64 possible causes of a false-positive reading on the HIV antibody test, including such common infectious as hepatitis, herpes, flu, malaria, cholera and lupus, as well as certain vaccinations and even pregnancy — especially in women who’d been pregnant before.
Christine Maggore would learn all this information, and it would change her life. She heard of Peter Duesberg, the controversial professor of microbiology and cell biology at UC Berkeley and the first science to challenge publicly the assertion that HIV caused AIDS, and sought him out. Originally she thought he was a medical doctor (he’s a Ph.D.) and tried to make an appointment. When she heard his information, her first impulse was to bring it to her superiors at AIDS Project Los Angeles, thinking they would welcome the possibility that AIDS might be more complicated than they believed — and taught — it was, and that an “HIV-positive” test result might not be a death sentence after all. Instead, at one APLA meeting she was denounced for advancing “dangerous information.”
Maggiore’s growing awareness of the case against HIV as the cause of AIDS, and the adverse reaction within mainstream AIDS organizations of any questioning of the HIV = AIDS dogma, propelled her out of mainstream AIDS activism and into the alternative movement. In 1995 she organized a Los Angeles branch of H.E.A.L. — an international network of alternative AIDS organizations (the initials stand for Health, Education, AIDS Liaison and the first chapter was founded in New York in 1984) — and started holding meetings, proudly and cheekily advertising her programs as “dangerous information.” In 1999 she took her organization out of the H.E.A.L. network and renamed it Alive & Well, and in 2000 she became the first — and, to this day, the only — alternative AIDS activist to have a table at the official international AIDS conference.
While devoting herself so totally to alternative AIDS activism that it literally became her career, she also met Robin Scovill, a filmmaker 13 years her junior, and had her first child, Charlie. Learning the hard way about how pregnant “HIV-positive” women were treated — she gave birth at home with a midwife because no hospital would accept her unless she agreed to take anti-HIV medications intravenously during labor — she later started an organization called Mothers Opposing Mandatory Medicine (MOMM) and told other “HIV-positive” mothers how they could escape being exposed to the cell-killing “anti-HIV” drug AZT during their pregnancies. When she became pregnant with her second child, Eliza Jane, she was photographed for the cover of Mothering magazine with her midriff exposed and a “No AZT” sign painted across it.
Maggiore also wrote a book summing up the case against HIV as the cause of AIDS, against the standard anti-HIV medications and against the HIV antibody test. She called it What If Everything You Thought You Knew About AIDS Was Wrong? and published three editions; a fourth was scheduled for release when she died. The first one had no author’s name on the cover because she didn’t want to pose as an authority on the issue — she wanted the attention to be on the scientists and researchers she cited as sources — but she was told by booksellers and prospective buyers that she needed to sign the book to accept responsibility for its contents. It became a sort of Bible for the alternative AIDS movement, the book we passed to friends and acquaintances as the first step on their AIDS re-education before we referred them to the more formidable tomes by Duesberg and other alternative scientists.
In the mid-2000’s, Maggiore began to cut back on her alternative AIDS activities. She started a business that had nothing to do with AIDS or activism and inched towards a more normal life. Then her daughter Eliza Jane died in May 2005. Maggiore and her consultant, toxicologist Dr. Mohammed Ali Al-Bayati, insisted that the three-year-old girl had died of an allergic reaction to the antibiotic amoxicillin, which a doctor had prescribed for an ear infection. The authorities, led by Los Angeles County senior medical examiner Dr. James K. Ribe, insisted — without having tested Eliza Jane’s blood for HIV antibodies — that she died from Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, an opportunistic infection associated with AIDS. Maggiore spent the next year not only grief-stricken but terrorized by threats of prosecution for felony child endangerment and even manslaughter — and though the Los Angeles County district attorney eventually decided not to prosecute, Maggiore still found herself pilloried by mainstream AIDS activists and media outlets.
Her reaction was just what those of us who knew her would expect. Feisty, indomitable and determined to channel her grief into productive activism, she started yet another organization, Justice for Eliza Jane, using the Internet to organize support and expose alleged misdiagnoses from Dr. Ribe’s office on so-called “shaken-baby syndrome” and other dubious medical concepts. In 2008 she re-started the monthly Alive & Well meetings and also launched a podcast called “How Positive Are You?” in association with David Crowe, president of the Reappraising AIDS Society of Alberta, Canada, and had recorded 11 episodes at the time of her death — including interviews with Gay men, social workers and others who had studied the evidence, as she had, and concluded that HIV could not possibly be the sole cause of AIDS.
The mainstream’s reaction was also about what those of us in the alternative AIDS movement could expect. Though Maggiore and her husband had been cleared by the L.A. district attorney’s office, at least three TV programs offered fictional stories loosely (or not so loosely) based on her case in which she either got prosecuted, died or both. The last one that aired during her lifetime was a Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode called “Retro,” an ugly story in which the characters based on Maggiore and her pediatrician were pilloried and ultimately brought to justice. Maggiore, who despite constant rebuffs had never given up hope that someday mainstream and alternative AIDS activists could sit down and meet as equals working towards a solution to the AIDS problem, invited one of the show’s medical advisers, Dr. Jocelyn Dee, and she and Crowe interviewed her on what would turn out to be the last episode of “How Positive Are You?”
I heard this program in early December 2008 and was so profoundly moved that I called Christine and asked her for permission to transcribe the interview and publish it in Zenger’s. When we spoke on the phone, less than two weeks before her death, her voice sounded clear, bright and energetic, as it always had whenever we talked. She eagerly gave me permission to publish the show (half of it ran in the previous issue of Zenger’s and the rest appears in this issue), and I signed off with no idea that Christine would soon die. When the Los Angeles Times published a print article on Christine’s death on December 30, it stated that she had died of pneumonia and said that unnamed “friends” had told the Times that she’d gone through a holistic “cleansing” about a month before and that she’d never really recovered from the death of her daughter.
The Times piece — interestingly, published as a news story rather than an obituary — was remarkably fair for a mainstream media outlet that previously had had no patience with anyone challenging the HIV/AIDS model. Brian Carter, Christine’s associate in Alive & Well in her later years, said the movement would survive her: “There is an outstanding number of prominent rethinkers, independent thinkers, doctors, scientists [and] lawyers who question AIDS causation.”
“Why did she remain basically healthy from 1992 until just before her death?” said David Crowe. “I think it’s certain that people who promote the establishment view of AIDS will declare that she died of AIDS and will attempt to use this to bring people back in line. But you can only learn so much from an unfortunate death.”
It’s true that Christine’s P.R. strategy of using herself and her family as exemplars of the possibility of living a healthy life despite an “HIV-positive” diagnosis was inherently risky. It’s also true, as Crowe commented in 2003 on the death of another alternative AIDS activist, Rob Johnston (a cancer patient who likely died of the side effects of chemotherapy), that no matter what an “HIV-positive” person dies of, the medical establishment will try to label it as “AIDS.” (Indeed, in the 1980’s clients of AIDS Foundation San Diego told me a joke that, if an “HIV-positive” person broke his or her leg, the medical chart would read, “HIV-related fracture in leg.”)
“Every time an AIDS reappraiser dies, people are anxious to know whether it was AIDS.” Crowe wrote. “Those who support the dominant paradigm are hopeful that, if it was, it will cause all the other ‘denialists’ to smarten up and get on drug therapy right away. Dissidents, on the other hand, often still have a sense of insecurity. Every time one of their number dies of AIDS they are forced to confront the possibility that they have been living a delusion. Somehow one person dying from symptoms that would not be called AIDS in HIV-negative people is ‘proof’ that the HIV-positive person really was killed by the virus.”
Nonetheless — as Christine Maggiore herself noted in the quote from her 2005 ABC Prime Time Live interview which I used as an epigram to this article — none of the deaths of prominent alternative AIDS activists (including H.E.A.L.-San Diego member Sandi Lenfestey, who passed away two weeks after Maggiore) change one whit the scientific logic that indicates that the HIV model of AIDS is not only wrong, but ridiculous. HIV is still a virus that has never been proven even to exist according to the strictest rules of virology, and even if it exists it certainly hasn’t been proved to cause a disease — as Dr. Dee admitted to Maggiore and Crowe in their podcast interview. Though the medical establishment has been proclaiming for a quarter-century that HIV causes AIDS, they still haven’t come up with a coherent explanation of how (its “pathogenesis,” to use the scientific term).
Supporters of the HIV/AIDS model don’t have an explanation for why many people get an “HIV-positive” test result and live for years with no medications and no health complications at all — they just write them off as “long-term non-progressors” (which once led Christine to ask why she had to get sick in order to “progress”) and hint at genetic explanations with no evidence to back them up — just as we on the alternative side don’t have a coherent explanation for why people who do take modern AIDS medications sometimes have dramatic improvements in health and live for years. AIDS mainstreamers are beginning to concede the horrific side effects of the HIV meds — from disfiguring body-fat redistribution to toxic liver failure — which alternative scientists like Dr. David Rasnick were warning about since 1996 (when I interviewed him on the subject).
In a sympathetic article despite her own proclaimed belief in the HIV/AIDS model, Connie Howard of the Edmonton, Canada magazine VUE put her finger on it when she wrote, “It’s time for research that compares outcomes of those who choose AIDS drugs and those who don’t.” The mainstream has consistently rejected calls for such research on the ground that it would be “unethical” to withhold drugs from a control group, and when organizations like Alive & Well and H.E.A.L. have offered to provide control groups from our members who have already decided voluntarily not to take the drugs, we’ve been turned down because — as one mainstream researcher put it — we’re a “self-selected sample” because the people who aren’t on the drugs tend to be healthier than the people who are.
Without that kind of research, the battle over whether AIDS drugs “work” — and whether, by working, they validate the HIV/AIDS model (it’s possible that they could be having some other positive pharmacological effect, unrelated to HIV, on the people who do survive and prosper on them) — devolves into a series of dueling anecdotes. No doubt Christine Maggiore was all too aware that if something happened to her health and she died prematurely, she’d be pressed into service by the mainstream as a cautionary example; after all, that had already happened with her daughter. But my sadness at seeing Christine’s name invoked to support a cause she abhorred is far, far less than the deep sorrow I feel at having lost a good and loyal friend.
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How much stress can one person undergo before they succumb? Christine spent the last 3 1/2 years of her life under unimaginable stress, first from losing her daughter, then from a year-long investigation, and then once the investigation had exonerated her, she still had to contend with being publicly slandered, and seeing her enemies' death wishes against her expressed in (melo)dramatized form on TV shows like Law & Order: Special Victims' Unit.
I cannot think of any situation in modern life comparable to what Christine endured, unless you go all the way back to the Salem Witch Trials and the practice of trial by ordeal. Except, of course, that if an accused witch died at her accusers' hands she was exonerated, where Christine was condemned if she lived and condemned if she died.
Christine's critics will tell you that she was killed by HIV. Don't you believe it -- she was murdered, and the murder weapons were the mass media and the misuse of the California legal system by disingenuous persons in pursuit of an agenda.
--- Gos
She slayed the AIDS Monster for many thousands of people who were open minded enough to listen, do their own research and to think.
peace
The final coroner's report on EJ found she died of anaphylactic shock to an amoxicillan reaction, not to pneumonia.
As one site put it, if Christine and her family and associates were so hell bent on proving that HIV is not the cause of AIDS and whether HIV even exists than her survivors that are in her support OWE it to the rest of society to explain her cause of death. Anything less is a COVER UP!!
As to the cause of death for Christine, everyone’s still waiting on the coroner’s report, and whatever she died of, I believe she would want the world to know. She didn’t believe HIV would kill her, but she also didn’t believe, ever, in altering the facts to fit an agenda.
Maggiore's physician in the weeks prior to her death was Ilona Abraham, MD, of Encino, California. Abraham graduated from Semmelweis Medical School in Budapest, Hungary, in 1967. She has an extensive history of malpractice cases and disciplinary actions, and no expertise in HIV (see http://www.casewatch.org/board/med/abraham/complaint.shtml). Abraham practices bogus "anti-aging" medicine, and treats her patients with untested and unproven treatments such as chelation and homeopathy. Abraham supported Maggiore's denialism and clearly misdiagnosed and mistreated her.
Maggiore's daughter, Eliza Jane Scovill, also died of AIDS when she was 3. This cause of death, following an autopsy, was recorded on the child's death certificate. Eliza Jane had no known risk of HIV exposure other than perinatal transmission from her mother. Maggiore's husband, Robin Scovill, reached an out-of-court settlement last week in a case he and Maggiore had brought against the Coronor's office. While the suit was represented publicly as a challenge to the finding that Eliza Jane died from HIV/AIDS, the paltry $15,000 settlement addressed privacy violations rather than cause of death.
No autopsy was performed on Maggiore's body, and she was cremated. Presumably, her family made these decisions. AIDS denialists often claim that they are victims of conspiracies and cover-ups. But they have been anything but transparent in the way they have handled the horrible and unnecessary death from HIV/AIDS of Christine Maggiore.
Christine Maggiore's name has been added to AIDStruth.org's list of Denialists who have Died of AIDS. The list itself is a tribute to her life's work."
No I did not write that upper quote, but I can direct you as to who wrote it: http://www.positivelypositive.ca
Theres a few comments I want to address in his quote. First infact unlike Connie's comment to my last blog no they will not have anymore information on Christine's death as clearly no autopsy was performed and the body was cremated. I not only read this from positivelypositive.ca but I spoke with David Crowe (unfamiliar? go to http://www.aras.ab.ca) who knew Christine Maggiore, well not sure, but certainly as business collegeaues and fellow activists, and he also confirmed no autopsy and cremation, however he made it sound sudden. You do not need to be a doctor to figure out these symptoms her doctor was treating her for would not have come on suddenly.
As I further investigated into the life and career of Christine Maggiore it is EVIDENT in many places it was infact late stages of AIDS related pneumonia (PCP) that killed her dear innocent daughter, and as the comment says, theres no other opportunity for Eliza Jane to have contracted the deadly virus but through her HIV infected mother. What more evidence do you people need? It was written on her death certificate. Not to mention the 15000 settlement was not given as to what it claimed, but merely for privacy issues....I guess it's privacy that the HIV/AIDS community and the rest of society have no real explanation as to why she died, just what she was suffering from prior to her death. Puleaaasssseeee!!!! As I said in an earlier blog nothing more and nothing less than a COVER UP! Someone who would make such a hard stand for 16 yrs would clearly want people to know what she died of, especially if it was so sudden and at such a young age.
As for her doctor's care, the quote says it all, I don't really need to address that one now do I? Go follow the link as to her medical career and malpractices and it will make you shudder.
It is clear from Christine's work, in her diagnosis 16 yrs ago and her sudden untimely death she was living in denial......denial to the point of putting her own child's life at risk. Do you know that without treatment 75% of children breastfed to mothers will be infected with the virus? That percentage drops to 2% with ARV's. So using the excuse her son is negative is nothing more and nothing less than a cop out. Using the excuse she lived 16 yrs in good health is yet another excuse. I have investigated and in my findings it's not at all uncommon for some people to live as long as 16 yrs with no ill effects from HIV, however the numbers are small, about 10%, and as I looked closer its within that time to a couple years thereafter that an individual will begin to develop AIDS related illnesses and die shortly thereafter without some form of ARV. It is clear with the series of infections Christine was fighting she had full blown AIDS.
It's interesting that when you look into the list of "denialists" it states that Christine Maggiore was one of the last remaining denialists. Others had died or decided to change their views and accept the lifesaving medication. It's also interesting when you look at the doctors and researchers that embrace the notion HIV and AIDS do not exist none of them have HIV. Hmmmmm......no more comment to that one.
In my quest for answers I am left angry and saddened. Saddened for those that are HIV and looking for answers only to be led astray and than grasping for their lives when they begin to develop the effects of prolonged untreated HIV. I am saddened at how powerful denialism can be, it sure goes to show believe something strong enough and it will become true. But let me tell you, what this site and many others address is CLEARLY denialism and psuedo science and that is where my anger sets in. That you would hide behind what you call and show as emapthy and true concern for HIV/AIDS inflicted individuals only to reject solid scientific evidence that infact HIV is very real and it DOES cause AIDS. It's one thing to do a scientific test on your own life, but when you preach it to thousands of others as gospel truth, thats morally WRONG!! Thats the epidemic, that as long as people believe this garbage HIV and AIDS will continue to run rampad. And unneccessarily exposing your child to AIDS and than when they die to use some cop out that it was a allergic reaction and make the public believe that your lawsuit is somehow to disprove the medical allegations when in reality it's nothing more than a "hush hush" settlement, well that borders on dillusional. Not to mention also morally WRONG!
Time for truth to stand up in the eyes of denialism. I don't believe for one second any of these individuals who support their idea are bad people, they're people who have been clearly misguided, misinformed, and refuse to awknowlege their diagnosis to what is clearly a proven virus.
When something’s not really working, doesn’t it make sense to go back to the drawing board and consider that we may have got it at least partially wrong?
CD4 Counts Decline Despite Nutritional Recovery in HIV-Infected Zambian Children With Severe Malnutrition
Posted 26 January, 2009 - 13:06
New research
New research in Zambia further undermines the idea that AIDS in Africa is caused by malnutrition. Severe malnutrition did not reduce the CD4 counts of children without HIV. HIV-infected children with severe malnutrition may respond well to nutritional rehabilitation, despite low CD4 counts, but nearly all require early antiretroviral therapy to prevent disease progression.
CD4 Counts Decline Despite Nutritional Recovery in HIV-Infected Zambian Children With Severe Malnutrition.
Hughes SM, Amadi B, Mwiya M, Nkamba H, Mulundu G, Tomkins A, Goldblatt D.
OBJECTIVE. The objective of this study was to establish the contribution that severe malnutrition makes to CD4 lymphopenia in HIV-infected and uninfected children and to determine the changes in CD4 count during nutritional rehabilitation. METHODS. Fifty-six children with severe malnutrition and with and without HIV infection were recruited from a pediatric ward in Lusaka for measurement of CD4 counts on admission, on discharge, and at final nutritional recovery. RESULTS. HIV-uninfected children with severe malnutrition had normal CD4 counts. In contrast, CD4 counts in HIV-infected children with severe malnutrition were reduced, more so in those without edema compared with those with edema. Mean CD4 count of HIV-infected SM children fell despite nutritional recovery so that at the time of full nutritional recovery, >85% of HIV-infected children required antiretroviral therapy. CONCLUSIONS. Severe malnutrition did not reduce the CD4 counts of children without HIV. HIV-infected children with severe malnutrition may respond well to nutritional rehabilitation, despite low CD4 counts, but nearly all require early antiretroviral therapy to prevent disease progression.
PMID: 19124582 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Do you know that without treatment 75% of children breastfed to mothers will be infected with the virus? That percentage drops to 2% with ARV's. So using the excuse her son is negative is nothing more and nothing less than a cop out.
I did not address why her husband is negative but I figured that was obvious. It has been proven time and again that an HIV- heterosexual female is at FAR more risk than an HIV- heterosexual male from contracting HIV. That doesn't take rocket science or to be a doctor to figure out....it's the same with gay men and what position they take sexually, it's why lesbian women are at extremely low risk. Do we get it now, Connie?
Interesting that you now admit Christine was immuno compromised. In all your rants you deny adamantly just as Christine did while still alive that anything was wrong with her or her daughter. Have you been shoved into a corner and don't have any way of getting out?! Do look back on your earlier blogs....it's the first time you address or anyone addresses here or on any other denialist site that Christine was immuno compromised.
Re: CD4 Counts Decline Despite Nutritional Recovery in HIV-Infected Zambian Children With Severe Malnutrition—it is true that CD4 counts don’t automatically come up with improved nutrition. But there’s also this, from a release by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases: “’In both studies, the volunteers who received IL-2 and antiretrovirals experienced notable, sustained increases in CD4+ T cell counts, as anticipated,’ notes NIAID Director Anthony S. Fauci, M.D. ‘Unfortunately, these increases did not translate into reduced risks of HIV-associated opportunistic diseases or death when compared with the risks in volunteers who were taking only antiretrovirals.’” …doesn’t that kind of imply that CD4 counts are only part of the picture? Just asking…
Re: mother-child transmission: surely you’re aware that other studies have yielded a much different picture, and that given the toxicity of anti-transmission drugs it’s a highly controversial issue?
Re: “In all your rants you deny that anything was wrong with her or her daughter”…huh? What rant? What I said is that it isn’t true that PCP is found only in HIV-positive people. And I said that all immuno-compromised people are at risk for PCP, but that HIV isn’t anywhere near the only thing that compromises immune function.
Anyhow, I’m tired of dialoguing with you, you don't seem very nice about this, so I’m going to exit this discussion. Thanks for your input.
You are only accusing me of being "not very nice" because contrary to what you say you display all the charecteristics of a denialist and someone who embraces psuedo science.
Daughter dies at 3 of AIDS related pnemumonia, mother dies 3 yrs after from opportunistic infections due to AIDS....coincidence? I think not...my goal here is to show people HIV+ or negative to be careful with what information you gather, it can cost you your life.....it cost both Christine and her daughter's, and it was PREVENTABLE!! It nearly cost me my own life, I will do everything I can to urge people to view the hard facts as cruel as they may seem.
Christine didn't just deny HIV doesn't exist, she didn't only deny the benefits of using ARV, she encouraged people to do the same, she encouraged people to engage in unsafe sex, which is the leading cause of HIV/AIDS.......
Enough said. Hard to say much when the evidence is staring you in the face, now isn't it?
The legacy of AIDS denialism is seen in the same desperation of other people who were led by denialism to feel good only to be shattered as they fell ill. Here are a few such stories accessed at the AIDS Myth Exposed Message Board.
Hi! I need some serious advise in dealing with a serious and very persistent fungal infection that has made things very difficult for me. Before you ask me to seek a naturopath/alternative healer, let me tell you that I have done that three times and have taken herbal remedies worth over thousands of dollars and too many to count in number.Nothing has been able to get rid of my systemic infection. I have followed the diet for over one and a half year, tried IV hyrdogen peroxide, taken OTC remedies, homeopathic remedies (all under different practitioners) but nothing can get rid of this infection. It has affected every part of my health and body including my mental state
I have been a dissident for seven years. I am now being pressured to take an antiretroviral called Atripla starting next week. If anyone might have some advice for me on this topic I welcome it. As a dissident, I stopped having my surrogate markers checked several years ago and because I seemed to be enjoying good health I did not feel it was necessary. Last month I went to the doctor complaining of headaches sinus problems and general malaise which had been plaguing me since November of last year. Because I was supposed to leave on a trip the next week I wanted to get myself well. I was given a CAT scan and put in the hospital after the CAT scan revealed lesions on my brain attributable to Toxoplasmosis. I was in the hospital a week and I am only now returning to work after an absence of three weeks. My family came to see me in the hospital and I was able to avoid the AIDS issue somehow. Strangely enough I was HIV negative two years ago on a test. Anyway, my surrogate markers were 25 for CD4 count and 185,000 for viral load. According to my partner and my doctors, if I had been monitoring my numbers all of the could have been avoided. I do feel somewhat sheepish about what happened to me. I am now left with wondering what to do. I truly never thought that I would end up with an AIDS diagnosis in the hospital.
I copied these quotes of people for the same reason Christine explained in her book "What if Everything You thought You knew about AIDS WAS WRONG?" her quote at the beginning "Message from the Author"....."I believe these personal accounts supplement the referenced data, and for some readers may be more meaningful than all the biomedical and epidemiological facts"
And a quote from Christine Maggiore herself, only a week before she died. Never one to lose from what I can tell about reading about her she denied to the bitter end, in her own words:
Regarding my health, I finally figured out what’s going on…but it got really scary. Here’s the scoop I just sent a friend:I have been through the absolute worst health nightmare ever. The cleanse, while definitely bringing about some profound benefits, left me feeling weak and dehydrated. I lost my appetite almost completely about 10 days ago and for some weird reason could only tolerate hot tea and hot chicken broth. I had been in touch with the cleanse doc who said all was typical, uncomfortable but typical. Not one to quit, I kept going. Then I started to have trouble breathing, I was feeling winded after the most simple task like making the bed. This last Sunday, I stopped being able to sleep at all. So finally, genius that I am, I made an appointment to see my MD who is really smart and very well versed in natural health care and not at all into the HIV paradigm.I could only get in to see her yesterday. She said I was totally dehydrated and having a reaction to the herbs in the cleanse which she thought were suspicious. I asked her to check my lungs and she said they sounded clear. I told her I thought I should have a chest Xray anyway, just to be sure, but she was skeptical because I hadn’t had a cold, flu, cough or fever. But I insisted so she wrote me up to go to a radiology place that would give an immediate reading. By then I felt so ill I had to ask my neighbor to drive me and thank god he was there with me because I never would have made it to the radiologist without his help. As it turned out, the Xray showed a very serious case of bi-lateral bronchial pneumonia. The doctor immediately gave me IV rehydration, IV natural cortisone, and IV antibiotic. She said if I did not improve by the next day, I would have to go to the hospital which I argued would give me worse treatment, lousy food and maybe a MRS infection as a parting gift. I went back again today, had more IV treatments and she said if I can make it through the weekend without having to go to the hospital, she will be very happy. She also said I’m pretty tough to have had such severe pneumonia and keep going. I have three natural cortisone treatments I am to take everyday, and today I started with another antibiotic called Z pack which is different from the one used in the IV. It’s a little scary because she asked me if I am allergic to the antibiotics she’s giving me but I’ve never taken them, so I don’t know. She stayed next to me during the IV antibiotic to make sure I was not going into reaction which sort of made me feel like I might be having a reaction! But I didn’t and I slept for the first time since Sunday last night.My appetite is getting back to normal and I am on total bed rest for two weeks. I can’t imagine doing otherwise.
Apparently that comment was posted by Celia Farber only to be retracted a week later, as the moderator of the site says, silence speaks VOLUMES.....check the site out if you want: "Denying AIDS and other Oddities".....as he says it's not really important whether she died of AIDS or not, whats important is the message she managed to send to thousands of people and that message was FALSE!
PS (It's interesting this is now my third or is it fourth blog. Since my last noone has bothered to respond or come in with some sort of defense. My last entry was made what, 2 or 3 days ago? Hmmmmm......again silence speaks VOLUMES. It's kinda like when you go to turn a light on, the denialist would sooner stay in the dark, or maybe its that some of you are stunned at the info being provided and are left speachless, whatever the cause of silence is as I said before and I will say again, if I can even help one person from buying into psuedo science and putting their life at risk than my mission has been accomplished
Answering the AIDS Denialists: CD4 (T-Cell) Counts, and Viral Load
AIDS TREATMENT NEWS Issue #341, April 21, 2000
Bruce Mirken
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The self-styled "AIDS dissidents," groups and individuals advocating the view that HIV does not cause AIDS, and often urging people with HIV to reject medical care, have raised their profile in recent months, ratcheting up their advocacy in the U.S. and attempting to influence the health policies of foreign governments. Although these forces sometimes accept the need to treat opportunistic infections, most reject the vast majority of conventional HIV/AIDS treatment, especially use of drugs to combat HIV. This article is part of a series in which AIDS TREATMENT NEWS examines key arguments put forth by the "dissidents"--perhaps more accurately termed "AIDS denialists," because most deny that AIDS is a genuine epidemic and many deny that the term "AIDS" even describes a real medical condition.
The AIDS denialist movement is not unified (for example, some groups say that HIV is a harmless virus, while others say HIV does not exist), so the summary here of some of their arguments is necessarily only a sketch. More detailed descriptions can be found in the references listed below.
Answering Denialist Views on CD4 (T-Cell) Tests
One consistent thread running through the denialist literature is the assertion that AIDS medicine has made a serious mistake by relying on laboratory markers such as CD4 cell counts, and viral load as measured by techniques such as polymerase chain reaction (PCR). These markers are criticized as unreliable at best and a devious effort to hide the failure of HIV/AIDS science at worst. One recently-formed group, ACT UP Hollywood (not connected with long-standing ACT UP chapters in New York, Philadelphia and elsewhere), argues that "all HIV and viral load tests as well as T-cell counts need to be banned immediately because they are useless indicators of a person's health."(1)
The arguments against use of CD4 center around two broad issues. One is the natural variability in CD4 counts, which can be lower than average for reasons not related to AIDS.(2,3) The other is whether or not CD4 numbers actually correlate with clinical prognosis. In her book WHAT IF EVERYTHING YOU THOUGHT YOU KNEW ABOUT AIDS WAS WRONG?, Christine Maggiore, founder of Los Angeles-based Alive and Well AIDS Alternatives, writes, "A number of studies found in the biomedical literature show that low T cell counts do not correlate with compromised immunity, and that normal ranges for T cells in HIV negative persons can vary from 300 to 2,000."(3) Some denialists cite the famous Concorde study of early versus deferred use of AZT monotherapy--in which an AZT-induced boost in CD4 counts did not translate to improved survival--as proof that, as one writer put it, "there was absolutely no correlation between CD4 T-cell counts and clinical health."(4)
The denialist argument appears to be built upon a narrow and highly selective reading of the data. For example one of the sources Maggiore cites as proof for the above statement that low CD4 counts can occur without HIV, a Transfusion Safety Study Group report at the 9th International AIDS Conference, specifically notes that HIV-negative individuals with two or more CD4 counts below 300 were rare, and that both those with known and unknown causes of immune suppression "differ from the retrovirus immunodeficiency pattern" in a number of key parameters, including CD4 percentage and CD4/CD8 ratio.(5)
In other words, transient low CD4 counts seen in other circumstances do not equal AIDS and bear little resemblance to what is typically seen in HIV-infected individuals. What the denialists regularly ignore is that while unusually low CD4 counts can occur for a variety of reasons, numerous large, long-term cohort studies have demonstrated a distinct pattern associated with HIV infection: A statistically significant CD4 decline commonly begins around the time of seroconversion and gradually becomes more severe over time, eventually leading to increased susceptibility to opportunistic infections. This has been observed in cohorts of gay men, transfusion recipients and hemophiliacs. In these cohorts a decline in CD4 count has been consistently and strongly associated with the development of AIDS-defining illnesses.(6)
Also neglected in denialist discussions of CD4 is the large body of evidence associating specific opportunistic infections with lowered CD4 counts. For example, in the Pulmonary Complications of HIV Study, an 1,182-person cohort, 79 percent of cases of pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) occurred in individuals with CD4 counts below 100 and 95 percent occurred in patients whose CD4 count was below 200.(7) The Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study (MACS) has also reported a "greatly increased risk" of PCP when CD4 counts drop below 200.(8) Numerous other studies have found similar associations between lowered CD4 counts and increased risk of PCP and other opportunistic infections.(6,9,10) Such findings formed the basis for long-standing recommendations regarding opportunistic infection prophylaxis (using drugs to prevent these infections). Other research relevant to this discussion is covered in the section on viral load, below.
Regarding the effect of treatment-induced increases in CD4 on clinical prognosis, the small increases seen in Concorde indeed did not correlate with improved long-term outcome. But numerous other studies do show a strong correlation with lowered risk of AIDS-defining opportunistic infections or death, particularly with larger, HAART-induced CD4 increases. In the U.S.-government trial ACTG 320 (which compared AZT plus 3TC vs. AZT plus 3TC plus indinavir [Crixivan(R)]), the indinavir group had a mean CD4 increase roughly three times that of the AZT/3TC only group, and half as many AIDS- defining events.(11) In a meta-analysis (combined analysis) of seven (mostly pre-HAART) antiretroviral studies, researchers found that "having either a reduction in HIV-1 RNA level or an increase in CD4+ lymphocyte count, or both, was associated with a delay in clinical disease progression."(12) Overall, a large body of evidence involving both treated and untreated patients shows a clear correlation between low or declining CD4 counts and increased risk of opportunistic infections or death.(13,14)
The denialist view of CD4 counts is used to call into question the 1993 revision of the CDC's AIDS case definition, which added a CD4 count of 200 or lower as an AIDS-defining condition. In Maggiore's words, it "allows HIV-positives with no symptoms or illness to be diagnosed with AIDS. Since 1993, more than half of all newly diagnosed AIDS cases are counted among people who are not sick."(3) The mass of evidence showing that HIV-infected individuals with CD4 counts below 200 are at overwhelmingly increased risk for life-threatening infections is simply ignored.
And on Viral Load
Maggiore states in her book that "low levels of viral load have not been correlated with good health, with absence of illness or high T-cell counts, while high viral loads do not correspond with low T-cells or sickness."(3) In a recent newspaper column she also complains that viral load tests are not FDA-approved for diagnosis of HIV infection, and notes, "Viral loads are found in people who test HIV-negative."(15) Denialist objection to viral load testing is bolstered by the fact that Kary Mullis, who won a Nobel prize for developing the basic technique of PCR, is a supporter of their cause and has questioned the use of his technique to quantify virus.(3)
In a 1996 article published in the denialist journal REAPPRAISING AIDS, authors Christine Johnson and Paul Philpott demonstrate their scorn for viral load measurements in the title of their discussion, "Viral Load of Crap." Focusing on the 1995 Ho and Shaw NATURE papers on viral dynamics, they write:
"Ho and Shaw's technique looks for HIV RNA, the genetic material found in the viral core. They assume that since each HIV contains two HIV RNAs, there must be one HIV for every two HIV RNAs they count. But the large amount of HIV RNA they report is found only after sending blood samples through polymerase chain reactions (PCR). PCR is the 'DNA fingerprinting' technology which takes tiny numbers of genetic molecules (RNA or DNA) and turns them into huge quantities." What these tests find, they argue, is meaningless: "Some of these are HIVs that have been neutralized by antibodies, some are defective HIVs (those that did not form correctly) and some are free-floating HIV RNA. Though none of these entities has any pathological capacity, the viral load technique confuses them with whole, infectious virus, the only kind that has any biological significance."(16)
This essay is typical of the denialist analysis of viral load, illustrating both its strengths and weaknesses. Like much of the movement's literature, they discuss only PCR and not the other technologies used to quantify viral load, mistakenly stating that Ho used PCR when in fact he used bDNA (branched DNA)--a different process marketed by a different company.(17,18)
Philpott and Johnson effectively lay out the theoretical reasons why PCR-based viral load tests might produce a misleading result. Indeed, company researchers and the FDA have acknowledged potential causes of error and variation in viral load results, and a potential margin of error in these assays of roughly threefold.(18,19) Thus, when the FDA approved the Roche Amplicor HIV-1 Monitor (a PCR-based assay), it required the labeling to indicate that the test can accurately detect a three-fold or greater change in HIV RNA for patients with a viral load of 1000 copies or greater and a six-fold or greater change for patients whose viral load is below 1000.(19) (Although Maggiore is correct in saying that the FDA has not approved PCR for diagnosing HIV infection, she neglects to mention that the agency did approve it "to assess patient prognosis... or to monitor the effect of antiviral therapy").
Strikingly, Philpott and Johnson stick entirely to theory and do not address the key question of whether or not viral load measurements predict the likelihood of disease progression or death in the real world. A very large body of evidence indicates they do, some of which was available prior to their dismissal of the tests as a "Viral Load of Crap." The mass of confirming data--from ongoing cohort studies as well as antiretroviral trials--that has accumulated since then is rarely acknowledged in denialist writings.
Beginning in 1995 John Mellors and colleagues published a series of articles detailing MACS cohort data showing a strong correlation between baseline viral load and subsequent disease progression.20,21,22 Using stored blood samples from patients' early study visits, Mellors examined the rates of AIDS-defining events and deaths in relation to viral load levels measured using bDNA. In a 1604-patient sample, only 0.9 percent of those whose baseline viral load was 500 copies or lower died of AIDS within six years, while 69.5 percent of those whose viral load was greater than 30,000 copies died. "Plasma viral load was the single best predictor of outcome," Mellors wrote, "followed by CD4+ lymphocyte counts [T-cell counts] and neopterin levels, beta2-microglobulin levels, and thrush or fever. We observed a strong association between viral load and the subsequent rate of decline in CD4+ lymphocyte counts."(22)
Similarly strong associations between viral load levels and clinical outcome have been reported in numerous other cohort studies, including the 1170-patient EuroSIDA cohort(23) and the Multicenter Hemophilia Cohort Study,(24) among others. In the hemophilia cohort, "each log(10) increase in baseline viral load was associated with a five-fold increase in risk for AIDS-related illness during the first six months of follow-up." The predictive value of viral load was independent of that of CD4 count.
One particularly interesting study looked at viral load in gay men in the Baltimore MACS cohort and injection drug users in the Baltimore "AIDS Link to Intravenous Experiences" (ALIVE) cohort. Rather than measuring plasma HIV-RNA in the usual way, using PCR or bDNA, this study looked at cell- associated infectious viral load using the quantitative microculture assay. This method "quantifies the biologically functional and infectious cell-associated HIV-1 by measuring the amount of HIV infected cells capable of infecting donor cells from an uninfected person in culture."(25) Looking at the risk of AIDS-defining infections, non-AIDS-defining bacterial infections, and death, the researchers found that "higher levels of infectious viral load were significantly related to increased hazards for all three outcomes," with little difference between the gay men and the intravenous drug users. After adjusting for CD4 level and numerous other factors, viral load was strongly predictive of risk of progression to AIDS.
The association between viral load (measured using bDNA or PCR) and clinical progression has been seen consistently in HIV treatment trials, including the meta-analysis of seven studies discussed above,(12) in which "each 10-fold decrease in HIV-1 RNA was associated with a 51 percent reduction in progression risk." In both the pivotal trial of ritonavir(26) and ACTG 320,(11) patients randomly assigned to the protease inhibitor arm showed significantly better suppression of viral load and significantly reduced AIDS-defining events.
After reviewing the available data, including numerous studies not listed here, the expert panel convened by the Department of Health and Human Services to determine HIV treatment guidelines recommended using both CD4 and viral load in conjunction with the clinical condition of the patient to guide therapeutic decision-making. The panel noted, "Multiple analyses in over 5,000 patients who participated in approximately 18 trials with viral load monitoring showed a statistically significant dose-response type association between decreases in plasma viremia and improved clinical outcome."(27)
Discussion of this data is notably absent even in current denialist literature. Maggiore's recent column,(15) for example, cites one article from 1993(28)--very early in the development of these assays--as "studies showing that viral load test results do not correlate with illness, with wellness, with T-cell counts or even the finding of virus by co-culture." This is at best a dubious interpretation of this study, and Maggiore fails to discuss any of the more recent evidence showing precisely the opposite. Evidence cited of viral loads found in HIV-negative people turns out to be a handful of anomalous cases, several of which involve false- negative antibody tests in people who clearly had AIDS.(29)
Evaluating the Evidence
No lab test or surrogate marker is perfect. All have innate limitations, natural variation, and a chance of error, and as a result HIV/AIDS researchers and treatment activists alike have cautioned that physicians must always remember they are treating patients, not lab values.
The limitations of CD4 and viral load tests, both real and theoretical, have been exhaustively described by the denialists. But their declarations that these tests are meaningless are based on a skewed, highly selective reading of the data that simply omits anything which might contradict their views. The overwhelming preponderance of evidence strongly indicates that both CD4 and viral load measurements can provide useful and important information that doctors and patients can use to evaluate progress and make treatment decisions.
For More Information
Many of the denialist Web sites and books are accessible through the references below.
Unfortunately, the medical mainstream has usually not bothered to answer these views--so persons with sincere questions have heard only one side. This is changing. Meanwhile, the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has prepared a page of links to publications with evidence that HIV causes AIDS, http://www.niaid.nih.gov/spotlight/hiv00/default.htm . Also, see http://www.aegis.org/topics/aids_debate.html .
References
1. ACT UP Hollywood home page, http://www.outspoken.org/actuphollywood/index.html
2. Strausberg, John. THE AIDS HERETICS. New York Press. March 9, 2000; 13: 10.
3. Maggiore, Christine. WHAT IF EVERYTHING YOU THOUGHT YOU KNEW ABOUT AIDS WAS WRONG (4th Edition, 2000). American Foundation for AIDS Alternatives, Studio City, California.
4. Conlan, Mark Gabrish. Interview: John Lauritsen. ZENGER'S. April 1997.
5. Mosley, James. Idiopathic CD4+ Lymphocytopenia: Other Lymphocyte Changes. IX International Conference on AIDS, Berlin, 1993, abstract #WS-A25-5.
6. Stein, Daniel S, Korvick, Joyce A. and Vermund, Sten H. CD4+ Lymphocyte Cell Enumeration for Prediction of Clinical Course of Human Immunodeficiency Virus Disease, a Review. JOURNAL OF INFECTIOUS DISEASES, 1992; 165: 352-363.
7. Stansell, J.D., and others. Predictors of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia in HIV-infected persons. Pulmonary Complications of AIDS Study Group. AMERICAN JOURNAL OF RESPIRATORY AND CRITICAL CARE MEDICINE. January 1997; 155:1, 60-66.
8. Phair, J., and others. The risk of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia among men infected with human immunodeficiency virus type 1. Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study Group. NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE. January 1990; 322:3, 161-165.
9. Nightingale, SD, and others. Incidence of Mycobacterium avium-intracellulare complex bacteremia in human immunodeficiency virus-positive patients. JOURNAL OF INFECTIOUS DISEASES. June 1992; 165: 6, 1082-1085.
10. Spaide, R.F., Gaissinger, A., and Podhorzer, J.R. Risk factors for cotton-wool spots and for cytomegalovirus retinitis in patients with human immunodeficiency virus infection OPHTHALMOLOGY. December 1995; 102:12, 1860-1864.
11. Hammer, S., and others. A controlled trial of two nucleoside analogues plus indinavir in persons with human immunodeficiency virus infection and CD4 cell counts of 200 per cubic milliliter or less. NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE. 1997; 337: 725-733.
12. Marschner, I. C., and others. Use of Changes in Plasma Levels of Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 RNA to Assess the Clinical Benefit of Antiretroviral Therapy. JOURNAL OF INFECTIOUS DISEASES. 1998; 177: 40-47.
13. Smith, D.K., and others. Causes and rates of death among HIV-infected women 1993-1998: The contribution of illicit drug use and suboptimal HAART use. 7th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, San Francisco, January 30-February 2, 2000, abstract #682.
14. O'Brien, William A., and others. Changes in plasma HIV RNA level and CD4+ lymphocyte counts predict both response to antiretroviral therapy and therapeutic failure. ANNALS OF INTERNAL MEDICINE. 1997; 126: 939-945.
15. Maggiore, Christine, Questioning AIDS, Q & A. MAGNUS. March/April, 2000.
16. Johnson, Christine and Philpott, Paul. Viral Load of Crap. REAPPRAISING AIDS. October, 1996.
17. Ho, D.D., and others. Rapid turnover of plasma virions and CD4 lymphocytes in HIV-1 infection. NATURE. January 12, 1995; 373: 123-126.
18. Todd, J. Performance Characteristics for the quantitation of plasma HIV-1 RNA using the branched DNA signal amplification technology. JOURNAL OF ACQUIRED IMMUNE DEFICIENCY SYNDROMES AND HUMAN RETROVIROLOGY. 1995; 10: supplement 2, S35-44.
19. Food and Drug Administration, letter to Roche Molecular Systems, March 2, 1999.
20. Mellors, J., and others. Quantitation of HIV-1 RNA in plasma predicts outcome after seroconversion. ANNALS OF INTERNAL MEDICINE. 1995; 122: 573-579.
21. Mellors, J., and others. Prognosis in HIV-1 infection predicted by the quantity of virus in plasma. SCIENCE. May 24, 1996; 272: 1167-1170.
22. Mellors, J., and others. Plasma viral load and CD4+ lymphocytes as prognostic markers in HIV-1 infection. ANNALS OF INTERNAL MEDICINE. 1997; 126: 946-954.
23. Miller, V., and others. Association of viral load, CD4 cell count, and treatment with clinical progression in HIV patients with very low CD4 cell counts: The EuroSIDA cohort. 7th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, San Francisco, January 30-February 2, 2000, abstract #454.
24. Engels, E., and others. Plasma HIV-1 viral load in patients with hemophilia and late-stage HIV disease: A measure of current immune suppression. ANNALS OF INTERNAL MEDICINE. 1999; 131:256-264.
25. Lyles, C.M., and others. Cell-associated infectious HIV-1 load as a predictor of clinical progression and survival among HIV-1 infected injection drug users and homosexual men. EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF EPIDEMIOLOGY. 1999, 15:99-108.
26. Cameron, D.W., and others. Randomized placebo-controlled trial of ritonavir in advanced HIV-1 disease. THE LANCET. February 21, 1998; 321: 543-549.
27. Panel on Clinical Practices for Treatment of HIV Infection. GUIDELINES FOR THE USE OF ANTIRETROVIRAL AGENTS IN HIV-INFECTED ADULTS AND ADOLESCENTS. January 28, 2000. (This document is available at http://www.hivatis.org .)
28. Piatak, M, and others. High levels of HIV-1 in plasma during all stages of infection determined by competitive PCR. SCIENCE. March 1993; 259: 1749-1753.
29. Sullivan, P.S., and others. Persistently negative HIV-1 antibody enzyme immunoassay results for patients with HIV-1 infection and AIDS: serologic, clinical and virologic results. Seronegative AIDS Clinical Study Group. AIDS. January 1999; 12:1, 89-96.
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http://z10.invisionfree.com/The_Unhived_Mind_II/index.php?showtopic=7003&st=15#entry1794736
Young, otherwise healthy, prominent denialists died before Christine and continue to die in droves. Yet HIV has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Then what a fricken coincidence!
"The mainstream has consistently rejected calls for such research on the ground that it would be “unethical” to withhold drugs from a control group, and when organizations like Alive & Well and H.E.A.L. have offered to provide control groups from our members who have already decided voluntarily not to take the drugs, we’ve been turned down because — as one mainstream researcher put it — we’re a “self-selected sample” because the people who aren’t on the drugs tend to be healthier than the people who are."
The very same argument has been stated by the CDC and big pharma regarding testing vaccined vs. un-vaccinated, saying it's unethical since kids need to be vaccinated. Seriously.....when you don't follow the herd, people just malign you, attack you, and just make life hell for you. I feel for her and I am saddened at the loss of her life.
The thought occurred to me that Christine was one of the very same “good guys” that Hicks was talking about.
What is a ride, if not a construct of human hands, which is designed to scare you silly and get your money?
What is AIDS, but a construct of human minds, designed to scare you out of your wits and get your money?
They put Christine on the AIDS ride in 1992, and at first she thought it was real, but after she’d been on the ride for a while she began to question, “Is AIDS real, or is it just a ride?” And people like Peter Duesberg helped her to remember, and inspired her message to the world: “Don’t worry, and don’t be afraid to love — *EVER* — because AIDS is just a ride.”
And for this, they killed her.
Oh, sure — they claim that she was killed by HIV, but I knew Christine in her last years, and I watched a murder at the hands of an angry mob who psychologically tortured an innocent bereaved murder until she collapsed, lifeless.
…Meanwhile, the worst thing that happened to George W. Bush in the same year is that someone threw a shoe at him.
We always kill the good guys, and let the demons run amok.
Bill Hicks’ comedy and Christine’s life and death inspired me to write a song. I hope that those who still carry Christine alive in their hearts will enjoy it:
http://nerosopeningact.bandcamp.com/track/amok
In the excellent report on the causes of Christine Maggiore's death, reputed Toxicologist & Pathologist Dr. Mohammed Ali Al-Bayati had clearly proved that Christine Maggiore had died because of the wrong combinations and large toxic doses of antibiotics, antiviral drugs, corticosteriods and intravenous calcium given to her for 9 days from December 18 to December 27 in 2008.
She had died of acute renal and cardiac failure, pulmonary congestion and pulmonary edema.
(Al-Bayati's site: http://www.toxi-health.com)
As a Nutritionist, I know that even the daily ORAL ingestion of large doses of calcium salts (EXCEPT dibasic calcium phosphate) can cause a DEPRESSED breathing syndrome, as in one type of ASTHMA. That causes deficiency of oxygen, which adversely affects the efficiency of the lungs and the heart in providing adequate oxygen to the whole body. As they do not themselves get enough oxygen, the lungs and the heart too become diseased like other parts of the body.
It is necessary for the human body to maintain a proper balance between calcium and phosphate, not just for the health of bones, but also for NORMAL respiration! For good health and survival, one's body should be able to maintain a proper balance between all the nutrients and other biochemicals, just as in the case of calcium and phosphate.
Ashok T Jaisinghani
http://www.wonder-cures.com
http://www.nutritionist-no-1.com
How can the peddlers of extremely toxic Anti-Retro-Viral drugs (ARVs) claim that the presence of antibodies in AIDS patients proves the progression and worseniing of the "disease", which is actually a syndrome that cannot be caused by any single type of virus or retrovirus.
The presence of antibodies indicates the body's response to fight the disease. Why do any smart guys use the ARVs to destroy the very antibodies that are fighting the disease?
The extremely toxic ARVs can only make the patients more sick and to die many years earlier. The promoters of the HIV theory have perverted Allopathy and made it stand on its head. They will only destroy Allopathy and bury it very soon.
I am nearly 72 years old. I have NOT used any allopathic or non-allopathic drugs to treat myself for any disease in the last 46 years. I have even been able to control the symptoms of AIDS, whenever they have occurred in me during the last 33 years, by using ONLY the suitable combinations of vitamins, minerals and other essential nutrients. Can the medical scientists believe me? Let them read the articles on my websites to verify my claims.
Ashok T Jaisinghani.
http://www.wonder-cures.com
http://www.top-nut.com