THE KAMIKAZE CELL

As Duesberg and Eleopulos point out, HIV is one of some 100 to 150 latent retroviruses in humans, all with the same genetic structure. In the early 1980s, both Robert Gallo from the US’s National Cancer Institute and Luc Montagnier from the Pasteur Institute individually isolated a retrovirus from homosexual patients believed to have AIDS. According to the original Gallo/Montagnier theory, this retrovirus that is, a virus whose own RNA (short genetic code instructing each cell how to reproduce) is transmuted by a particular enzyme (reverse transcriptase) into DNA, the long double helix of complete coded cell information. According to the single-cause theorists, HIV can “break into” an immune system T-cell and attach itself to the cell’s DNA, feeding off it. Once the cell replicates, the virus itself replicates, too. Once a patient has full-blown AIDs, the virus supposedly will have devoured these cells, leaving the body without defence to any sort of disease.

With all the grant holes in this theory, the AIDS “revisionists,” including co-discoverer of HIV Montagnier, have attempted to salvage the HIV hypothesis with the proposition that HIV needs one of a number of co-factors, such as mycoplasma and other viruses to induce cell death. Or in some way unique to the history of infectious disease, HIV can talk the immune system into reacting against itself or committing suicide.Duesberg points out, many retroviruses exist in every cell, not simply a few, as HIV does. And most of the AIDS risk groups have a high number of antibodies to many human parasites, which have been accumulated through high-risk behaviour (such as drug use), contaminated transfusions or high promiscuity. He and Eleni Eleopolos propose that HIV may be an undistinguished “innocent microbial passenger”. Hence, although HIV may be perinatally transmitted to babies it could be harmless.