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AIDS: The HIV Myth by Jad Adams, Macmillan, pp 244, Pounds sterling
12.95

THE PUBLICATION of this book is an unfortunate event. Jad Adams claims
that AIDS is not caused by infection with HIV. What does cause AIDS, says
Adams, is something he isn’t obliged to work out. It could be ‘lifestyle’
or ‘anything’; anything, that is, except the virus now firmly established
through an urgent programme of medical research as the infectious agent
causing AIDS. The claim that HIV is not the cause of AIDS is neither new
nor Adams’s own. As a nonscientist (who admits that he does not ‘pretend
to objectivity’) Adams relies almost entirely on the arguments against HIV
previously advanced by the Berkeley biochemist, Peter Duesberg.

That Duesberg’s criticisms have repeatedly and effectively been refuted
deters Adams not at all. His reporting is staggeringly inaccurate, scientifically
inept, and continually blighted by the misinterpretation or distortion of
the minimal scientific sources that he has consulted. He has constructed
his book in such remarkable ignorance of so much widely available recent
research and information on AIDS and immunology that it is very hard to
believe that his ignorance is not deliberate.

None of this would matter particularly were it not that a British publisher
of erstwhile high repute, Macmillan (Macmillan Journals are the publishers
of Nature) has put its imprimatur on the book; or were it not that the Royal
Television Society, in its wisdom of matters medical, placed its imprimatur
of the award of the ‘Best International Current Affairs Documentary’ for
1987 on a film Adams made on the subject. Screened by Channel 4 in the series
‘Despatches’ late in 1987, the film was, Adams now admits, ‘not balanced’.

This book follows in exactly the same vein. Macmillan admits that it
did not have Adams’s manuscript checked for accuracy before publication,
and ignored a warning received from an expert working for another Macmillan
pubication, Nursing Times. Adams himself did none of the necessary fact-checking.
In direct consequence, grotesque and dangerous errors abound.

The Adams/Duesberg claims have already done serious harm. AIDS is a
debilitating and still-lethal disease afflicting an increasing number of
otherwise healthy adults. The primary sales target for this book are the
tens of thousands of people in Britain who have personally, directly or
indirectly, to deal with problems of HIV infection and/or AIDS. For them
and their carers, scientific and medical information is a much-sought lifeline,
and a guide on which they are likely to base literally life-and-death decisions.
Such a situation places considerable responsibility on the shoulders of
any serious author or publisher.

Disregard the evidence about the nature of HIV, and you urge HIV and
AIDS patients to distrust entirely the basis on which they now receive medical
care. Already, this effect of Adams’s work has brought one of Britain’s
most renowned AIDS physicians, Charles Farthing, to condemn his efforts
as ‘evil’. So on what scientific basis does Adams (and behind him, Duesberg)
advance the argument that HIV does not cause AIDS? This critical passage
spans only 24 pages, less than 10 per cent of the text. Adams offers two
primary arguments against the HIV/AIDS theory. First, he asserts that the
virus itself cannot be shown to be present in many AIDS patients. Secondly,
he claims that neither in the US nor anywhere else are AIDS patients even
tested for HIV antibodies. ‘There is no check for HIV,’ he writes, because
‘it is so fully accepted as a matter of faith that HIV causes AIDS, no supporting
information is required’. In summary, Adams says, ‘so few AIDS patients
now receive even an antibody test that we cannot be sure what they are carrying.
Virtually anything could be causing their disease.’

These contentions are all absurdly wrong, as the author would have found
out had he once bothered to contact any of the world’s major centres for
AIDS treatment.

Adams’s claim that HIV virus cannot easily be recovered from most people
with AIDS is several years out of date. The claim that most patients are
never tested for HIV antibodies is completely spurious.

‘Paradoxically’, Adams asserts, ‘people with a low level of antibodies
to HIV are considered to be at low risk from AIDS.’ But this is no paradox,
just another error. The 1984 paper Adams cites in support of this claim
states the opposite to be true. People with ‘advanced AIDS’ have ‘significantly
lower’ levels of HIV antibodies than ‘newly-diagnosed’ cases. The paper
on which Adams relies does report finding ‘a high incidence’ of HIV antibodies
among patients at risk of developing AIDS (that is many of them had been
found to have antibodies). The author has become confused and reports this
as meaning ‘a high level’ of concentration of antibodies in their blood.
In publicity material, Macmillan has given high prominence to this error.

The book also asserts that homosexual men are ‘immune-suppressed’ because
of their sexual practices. Adams alludes to reports that in some gay men,
the normal ratio of helper cells to killer cells in the immune system has
been found to be inverted as compared to similar heterosexual men. But the
studies referred to by Adams were all completed before 1985. When HIV tests
became more available, researchers found that the inversion applied only
to gay men who were HIV antibody positive. Gay men, who were antibody negative
were found to have the same immune system parameters as heterosexual men.

The ‘paradox’ which he and Duesberg see as central to their argument
is that even in ‘full-blown’ AIDS the level of HIV in the blood is but a
fraction of what can be found in some other virus-caused diseases. The rate
of destruction of the key T4 ‘helper’ white blood cells by HIV is a million
times too slow to cause any effect, they suggest. Most bizarrely of all,
they say that HIV has too few genes and ‘the wrong structure’ to cause a
fatal disease.

Each of these claims is either false or irrelevant. Low levels of viruses
in the blood are characteristic of retroviruses; and high concentrations
of viruses (viral titres) are never necessary where autoimmune phenomena
are likely to play a large role in the development of a disease. Tests for
the active HIV infection of T cells in the blood are not tests for the level
of infection in other tissues, particularly lymph nodes. There is no ‘paradox’
that very few of a patient’s T4 helper cells can be found expressing HIV
at any one time, because any that do are likely immediately to be destroyed
by the immune system of which they are part. Adams’s claim that HIV has
‘too few genes’ to be pathogenic does not even merit serious attention.

Another repeated assertion is that ‘in all other diseases the virus
titre becomes active and rises in those . . . who are going to get the disease.
Not so with HIV’. Actually, it’s precisely so with HIV. Pioneering work
during 1986 and 1987 identified the re-appearance of HIV antigen in the
blood of someone who was HIV-antibody positive as indicating the early onset
of AIDS. Over the past 18 months, the level of concentration of antigens
has become established as a key laboratory marker of whether anti-AIDS drugs
are effective. Of all this research, as well as the many ‘cohort studies’
(which are now following the long-term development of HIV disease) the author
has kept readers in ignorance.

To explain why the entire scientific world disagrees with him and Duesberg,
Adams perjoratively brands his opponents as members of a homogeneous ‘AIDS
estabishment’, whose scientific prestige and personal prosperity now depend
on maintaining the HIV myth. Extensive quotations from Paul Feyerabend about
the nature of scientific discovery decorate the book, but fail to disguise
the author’s basic ignorance of science and scientific method. There are
periodic allusions to the author’s concern for those afflicted by AIDS,
but these fail to mask his often-stated view that ‘AIDS is a behavioural
disease’. Such a claim is not merely offensive to AIDS sufferers; it flies
in the face of the well-established patterns of transmission via blood and
its products to transfusion recipients, haemophiliacs, and their partners.

Adams claims that everyone who gets AIDS is behaviourally to blame.
Even babies, he has contended, had engaged in ‘a form of behaviour’ by being
in the womb of an HIV-infected mother. Health-care workers who are victims
of needlestick injuries are also to blame.

In his preface, Adams writes: ‘I see no need to apologise for the subjective
style in which this book is written.’ As news reports in New Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ have
already indicated (28 April), Adams has made it clear that he sees no need
to apologise for getting his key facts wrong.

But Macmillan, the publisher, is in a different position. It has belligerently
refused to check the accuracy of the book. Appeals to do so have repeatedly
been rejected. It is now many weeks since Macmillan became aware of the
book’s major errors. It is difficult to contemplate any motive, other than
arrogance or greed, which can make a serious publisher so recklessly indifferent
to accuracy in reporting.

Duncan Campbell is associate editor of New Statesman and Society. An
author and broadcaster, he wrote the television series Secret Society.