Læknaneminn - 01.04.1997, Síða 116

Peter Duesberg and David Rasnick
4) Anemia, wasting, lymphoma and high mortality of
AZT recipients. Anemia, leukopenia, lymphoma, pan-
cytopenia, diarrhea, weight loss, hair loss, impotence
26, muscle atrophy, dementia, hepatitis m, and pneu-
mocystis pneumonia 201 are specific AIDS diseases typ-
ical of those prescribed AZT and other DNA chain ter-
minators. They are all predictable consequences of the
termination of DNA synthesis (see 4.).
Indeed, compared to untreated controls AZT recipi-
ents have 50-times more often lymphoma 19S, die either
2.4-times more often 204 or 25% more often 16°, or live
only 2 years instead of 3 with AIDS with the above dis-
eases 203 (see 4.1., 7.8.). And babies treated with AZT
before birth develop birth defects or are aborted, and
those treated after birth experience “a negative effect on
growth” 205 (see 4., 7.8.).
6.7. Not all drug users develop AIDS. The drug
hypothesis predicts that drug diseases only occur after
a pathogenic threshold of drug toxicity has been accu-
mulated over a lifetime. Short term users of drugs at
recreational doses will experience either no diseases or
reversible diseases.
In adults it takes about 10 years of injecting or oral
use of heroin, cocaine and amphetamines to develop
tuberculosis, bronchitis, pneumonia, irreversible or
hardly reversible weight loss, and other drug-induced
diseases lls’l2o. 122,rpj-le tjme ]ag from initiating a
habit of inhaling nitrites to acquire Kaposi’s sarcoma
has also been determined to be 7 to 10 years 26'%'113,13S.
Clearly, irreversible damage is achieved much faster in
a developing fetus than in a fully developed adult.
Since most recreational drug users give up drugs for
personal, economic, and health reasons before they
experience serious medical consequences, only a frac-
tion will develop drug diseases 126. Thus the 500,000
individuals annually delivered to hospitals for
reversible drug diseases, and the 50,000 to 75,000 for
irreversible AIDS diseases 51 are only a small fraction
of the over 20 million American illict drug users.
Likewise, the 600-800 annual American AIDS babies
3 are only a small fraction of the 221,000 that are born
to American mothers who use drugs during pregnancy
51 (see 3.).
In addition, only a fraction of the 220,000 HIV-pos-
itive persons on daily prescriptions of AZT and other
anti-HIV drugs, that, like AZT, are designed to kill
human cells, are annually converted to AIDS patients
. The annual percentage of healthy AZT-recipients
developing AIDS is not published, but can be estimat-
ed at 25 to 35% considering that out of 220,000 on
AZT between 50,000 and 75,000 Americans each year
develop AIDS (Fig. 1).
Thus the American AIDS patients are those 50,000
to 75,000 of the 20 million recreational drug users and
the 220,000 AZT recipients who have achieved the
highest lifetime doses of toxicity - just like the lung
cancer and emphysema patients reflect the highest life-
time tobacco dose among the 50 million smokers in
the US 247.
6.8. Non-correlations between HIV and AIDS. The
drug hypothesis predicts (a) HIV without AIDS, (b)
AIDS before HIV, and (c) AIDS without HIV. Each
of these predictions is confirmed.
1) Long-term survivors or ”non-progressors”. In view of
the appearance of growing numbers of HIV carriers
who are healthy even 15 years after infection, the HIV
orthodoxy has created a new category of HIV carriers,
termed long-term survivors or “long-term non-pro-
gressors” 248. The first mainstream paper on long-term
survivors described a healthy male homosexual blood
donor and five blood recipients who by 1992 had sur-
vived HIV for 10 to 12 years 249. The HIV orthodoxy
has therefore proposed that the existence of the non-
progressors is due to non-virulent, mutant strains of
HIV and that such viruses would be ideal vaccine
strains. However, these optimistic proposals were not
backed up by functional evidence for non-virulent
{-[JY 248.250^
According to the drug hypothesis the non-progres-
sors should be HlV-positive people who have stopped
using or never used recreational drugs or AZT. Indeed,
the HlV-researchers David Ho et al. inadvertantly pro-
vided the key to long-term survival: ”none had received
antiretroviral therapy” 251. Likewise, Alvaro Munoz
reported that not one of the long-term survivors of the
Iargest federally funded study of male homosexuals at
risk for AIDS, the MAC study, had used AZT 252.
Another orthodox HIV study acknowledged “only
38% of the HLP [healthy long-term HIV-positives]
had ever used zidovudine or other nucleoside analogues
compared with 94% progressors”. Clearly the wording
“had ever used” implies that AZT had been discontin-
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