AIDS in the US, early period : interview with Michael Ellner, president, HEAL

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients,  August-Sept, 2005  by Marcus A. Cohen

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The viewpoint has been so firm that HIV is the only cause and will
result in disease in every patient, that anyone who challenges that is
regarded as "politically incorrect"; I don't think--as a matter of
public policy--we gain by that, because it limits debate and discussion
and forces drug development on attacking the virus rather than
attempting to correct the disorder of the immune system, which is
central to the disease.
--Dr. Arthur Gottlieb, Chair, Department of Microbiology & Immunology,
Tulane University School of Medicine

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

When the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) first reported AIDS in 1981 (5 cases), it associated all patients with the use of recreational drugs, noting that gay men seemed most at risk.

In 1983, Dr. Luc Montagnier, a researcher at the Pasteur Institute, Paris, discovered a virus in a gay man, which appeared to be connected with an immune-deficient condition known as lymphadenopathy. Montagnier named the virus LAV (lymphadenopathy associated virus), and sent a specimen to the laboratory of Dr. Robert Gallo at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The next year, Dr. Gallo announced that he had "discovered" a virus which he believed to be the infectious agent in the human-to-human transmission of AIDS. Later independent studies indicated that Gallo's virus and Montagnier's LAV were the same strain.

Immediately, the Secretary of the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) proclaimed the new virus the cause of AIDS, and the medical research and clinical establishments swung into line behind HHS, dogmatically shutting off research on different plausible causes.

In 1987, the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) approved Azidothymidine (AZT) to treat AIDS. Some 20 years earlier, AZT had been tested at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), where it had proven unacceptably toxic; but subsequent tests showed it effective in interrupting DNA synthesis of Gallo's virus, known by this time as Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), blocking reproduction of HIV.

Peter Duesburg, PhD, a professor of molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley, an authority on cancer and retroviruses (HIV is a retrovirus), published the first major scientific refutation of HIV as the cause of AIDS in Cancer Research in 1987. (Duesburg's refutations--he's extensively published further on this subject--remain the most comprehensive.) Heavy use of recreational drugs and highly toxic antiretroviral treatments like AZT, he hypothesized (in a 1989 paper), were much likelier causes.

Since then, other distinguished scientists have supported Duesburg's challenge to entrenched beliefs about the causation and treatment of AIDS, notably: Walter Gilbert, PhD, professor of molecular biology, Harvard University, who won a Nobel Prize in 1980 for DNA sequencing; and Kary Mullis, PhD, a biochemist who won a Nobel Prize in 1993 for developing the polymerase chain reaction test (PCR, used to find evidence of HIV, among other things).

This column is based on a joint interview I conducted with two health-care professionals involved in studying AIDS during its emergence in the US: Michael Ellner, a well-credentialed medical hypnotist, ordained interfaith minister, and long-time president of HEAL (Health Education AIDS Liaison, an organization advocating non-toxic therapies for AIDS); and Roberto Giraldo, MD, an immunologist specializing in infectious and tropical diseases, who has served in recent years as an official adviser on AIDS to South African president Thabo Mbeki.

I interviewed Rev. Ellner (the title he prefers) for his observations on the social and political behavior of the gay population in New York City; he saw hundreds of men diagnosed with HIV at the onset of AIDS, and this experience set him solidly in the dissident camp on causation and treatment.

Dr. Giraldo, born and educated in Colombia, South America, had studied nutritional deficiencies and toxic conditions inducing breakdowns in immune response from the mid-1960s; this research has taken him around the world. I wanted his medical, global perspective on AIDS in its emergent period. In the mid-1970s, Giraldo plunged into an intense study of gay behavior, predicting that toxicity from the abuse of recreational drugs among the US gay community would lead in a key way to complete immune collapse in many men.

Michael Ellner first concerned himself about AIDS in 1981; he heard whispers about an acquaintance having a gay cancer [Kaposi's Sarcoma--KS], and the way that people talked about this man reminded him of his childhood, when adults would fearfully whisper "the C word." Then, Ellner heard that his acquaintance had a "gay pneumonia," and the mention of this too was steeped in fear. Finally, he heard that the man was dying in complete isolation, because no one wanted to admit he was gay.... He didn't want to embarrass his family, so he didn't tell anyone he was sick.