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Durban Declaration Rebuttal

Commentary

I am pleased that my letter has been of assistance to you. I have some other information which might be of interest. One of the HIV orthodoxy that President Mbeki included in his panel, and one of the signers of the Durban declararion is Professor Barry Schoub, head of the department of Virology at the University of Witwatersrand. He is also the author of a well regarded book, (by the orthodoxy at least) entitled: AIDS and HIV in Perspective. Cambridge University Press, 2nd edition, 1999.

It is claimed by the orthodoxy that HIV can be isolated from everyone or almost everyone with AIDS. Yet this 'almost all' figure is rarely quantified. As you have pointed out in the appendices, what HIV researchers mean by isolation or detection of HIV is not true isolation or detection at all. Rather they observe Syncitia, or large multinucleated cells forming in the culture and then conclude that HIV must have done it. Or they observe that the synthetic RNA primer AndT15 has been reversed transcribed into DNA (often only after several weeks of trying), and assume that HIV must have done it.

Yet when these dubious "isolation experiments" are performed, what is the success rate? Here is a comment from Schoub in the above book, from page 68.

"The ability to isolate and propagate HIV has improved enormously over the years. Initially the isolation rate for known positive human material was in the order of 10-20%. This has now increased to 80% or even higher."

Later in the same work, he puts the isolation rate from people with AIDS at over 90% in the "best laboratories" and somewhat less for other labs.

So here we have one of the signatories of the Durban declaration, who insists that the Koch postulates have been met for HIV, including the first which says that the "putative cause must be isolated from every case of the disease" admitting that, even using very loose criteria for isolation, in 1999, HIV could still not be isolated from 10-20% of people with AIDS. How does this square with the claim that the first Koch postulate has been satisfied? Even worse, why did they insist all those years ago that HIV was the cause of AIDS, when it could "only be isolated from 10-20% of known positive human material"?

What the HIV orthodoxy do not seem to comprehend, judging from the text of the Durban declaration, is that the Koch postulates cannot be fulfilled by stitching together a serious of unrelated cases and asserting that case 1 fulfilled postulate 1, case 2 fulfilled postulate 2 and case 3 fulfilled postulate 3. The Koch postulates must be satisified as a unity. This means that one must isolate and purify the supposed cause from every case of the disease. According to Schoub's book, HIV fails this for AIDS. The purified agent must be injected into a suitable animal host and shown to induce the disease. This has never been done, and in the only animal model, that of the Chimpanzee, HIV causes no disease at all. From the new diseased host, the cause must then be isolated once more and the procedure repeated. Again, this has not been done.

The 3 laboratory workers who the Durban declaration seems to believe fulfill postulate 3, have, to my knowledge at least, never been properly described in any peer reviewed journal. The claim that HIV DNA was sequenced from them and shown to be identical to the original HIV DNA is extremely odd, since, as you point out, no two identical HIV DNA's have ever been found anywhere. My suspicion is that they were able to extract a short DNA sequence from each of the subjects, and these were relatively similar to the same sequence in the clone. My reason for this belief is that in 1996, Salimen, Carr and Burke et al, Genotyping of HIV-1 in: Human Retroviruses and AIDS compendium on Line http://hiv-web.lanl.gov 30-34 write:

"it remains impractical to obtain full length genomic sequences of HIV-1 isolates as a routine genotyping method, due to the low abundance of HIV-1 proviral DNA in clinical samples and virus cutltures on PBMC substrate, and due to the relative inefficiency of the polymerase chain reaction when amplicons become large."

They further assert that most genomic comparisons are based on only 2-30% of the HIV-1 genome.

Unless the data to support this claim - description of patient history and treatment, descriptions of viral isolation and cloning procedures etc -- is presented, then it cannot be taken seriously.

Regards
Mark

Mark Craddock PhD
Senior Research Associate
School of Mathematical Sciences
University of Technology Sydney
Australia.

TORONTO

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