Long-term survivors or "non-progressors"

By Peter Duesberg and David Rasnick
Excerpt from The Drug-AIDS Hypothesis

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-progressors".

The first mainstream paper on long-term survivors described a healthy male homosexual blood donor and five blood recipients who by 1992 had survived HIV for 10 to 12 years. 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 HIV .

According to the drug hypothesis the non-progressors should be HIV-positive people who have stopped using or never used recreational drugs or AZT. Indeed, the HIV-researchers David Ho et al. inadvertantly provided the key to long-term survival: "none had received antiretroviral therapy". Likewise, Alvaro Munoz reported that not one of the long-term survivors of the largest federally funded study of male homosexuals at risk for AIDS, the MAC study, had used AZT. 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 discontinued after a short traumatic, but reversible experience.

Independent scientists document that in addition to abstaining from antiviral drugs long-term survivors are those who have given up or never taken recreational drugs. Timothy Hand, from the Ogelthorpe University in Atlanta GA, adds much weight to this view:

While healthy, ‘non-progressing’ HIV carriers are considered rare (and doomed), they may in fact vastly outnumber the sick and dying. This is certainly implied by the ubiquitous estimate of HIV prevalence in America of one million. Long-term AIDS survival is now a hot topic in the literature, and anecdotal reports as well as numerous scientific studies suggest that most long-term survivors have shunned antiviral drugs. This point is often understated in these studies, and is not made in the titles or abstracts. In David Baltimore’s editorial on 2 of these studies, avoidance of antivirals was not mentioned at all. Needless to say, none of these studies was funded by a pharmaceutical firm.

Interestingly, nearly all of these studies suggest a protective role of cytotoxic CD8+ T-cells and/or natural killer cells in healthy survivors. Many focus on the importance of maintaining cell-mediated immunity, rather than on “killing HIV”. Thus HIV infection per se seems to entail little danger, unless it is followed by antiviral therapy..

Similar observations have been made by the late homosexual AIDS activist Michael Callen:In researching his 1990 bookSurviving AIDS, Callen interviewed nearly fifty people who had lived for many years not just after being pronounced HIV-positive, but after an AIDS diagnosis. He found that only four had ever used AZT; three of those had since died, and one was dying of AZT-induced lymphoma. But the overwhelming majority of long-term survivors had somehow managed to resist the enormous pressure to take AZT.

The pressure did not just come from doctors, Callen told the Amsterdam meeting, but from a certain segment of AIDS activism that seemed driven by a ‘drugs-into-bodies’ mentality. ‘I feel many AIDS activist friends who are in the forefront of this frenzy are very misleading to people with AIDS, who are frightened and desperate. They only seem to talk about two possible outcomes of taking experimental drugs: one is that it works and one that it does not work. There is a third, apparently much more common possibility, which is that you will be worse off than if you did nothing at all. And nobody likes to talk about that because it is so unpleasant’. He had seen the devastation wreaked by AZT, watching with horror as friends with AIDS ‘turn the colour of boiled ham from AZT poisoning, endure the melting away of their muscles, become transfusion dependent, and experience drug-induced psychosis’. Yet his perception of a person diagnosed with AIDS in 1992 was that ‘they would sell their grandmother into slavery to get a slot in the latest drug-of-the-month clinical trial’.

Another feature of the long-term survivors was that they rejected the predominant scientific view that HIV-positivity meant inevitable decline of the immune system towards an early death.

In December 1995The Advocate, the largest national gay magazine, published the story of Dennis Leoutsakas, a man who is HIV-positive “for at least 17 years [but] doesn’t have AIDS - and no one knows why”. According to the article, “most HIV researchers have insisted that HIV infection will, in almost every case, eventually lead to AIDS” - a belief underscored by their preferred term for nonprogressors:slow progressors.

Wearing his HIV blinkers the author of the article fails to see the formula for Leoutsakas’ “slow progression”: “ Leoutsakas, 47: A former IV-drug user who last shared a needle in 1978 ... first tested positive in 1987. He has a T-cell count ... between 650 and 950. In addition, Leoutsakas has had none of the opportunistic infections that define AIDS - no pneumonia, no Kaposi’s sarcoma, no fungal infections, nada. Leoutsakas says doctors have attempted to explain his case by theorizing that, like the Australians, he is infected with a weakened form of HIV - but it’s really just speculation.” ... “Leoutsakas has no theory of his own - and no special formula for his well-being. He’s never taken AZT or any other antiretroviral drugs.” No more IV-drugs, no antiretroviral drugs - but “no formula for his well-being”!

And in October 1996 even an orthodox professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco taught his medical students the secret of long-term survival with HIV: “I have a large population of people who have chosen not to take any antivirals since I’ve been following them since the very beginning... They’ve watched all of their friends go on the antiretroviral bandwagon and die, so they’ve chose to remain naive to therapy. More and more, however, are now succumbing to pressure that protease inhibitors are it ... We are in the middle of the honeymoon period, and whether or not this is going to be an enduring marriage is unclear to me at this time, so I’m advising my patients if they still have time, to wait.”

Unknowingly the vast majority of HIV-positives are long-term survivors! Worldwide, they number 17 million, including 1 million HIV-positive, healthy Americans and 0.5 million HIV-positive, healthy Europeans. Most of these must have been HIV-positive for at least 10 years now because the numbers of the HIV-positive Americans and Europeans have not changed during the period 1984 to 1988 when the epidemic of HIV-testing began in the respective countries.

Since no more than 6% of the 17 million people worldwide with antibodies to HIV have developed AIDS over the last 7 to 10 years, the risk of AIDS to an HIV-carrier is less than 1% per year. However, even this low figure is not corrected for the normal occurence of the 30 AIDS-defining diseases in HIV-free controls. There is not a single controlled study in the vast AIDS literature proving that HIV-positive people who are not drug users have a higher morbidity or mortality than HIV-free controls.

To save the reputation of the “deadly virus” in the face of long-term survivors, orthodox HIV researchers have already posted warnings that “regrettably ... the proportion of individuals who might demonstrate such a benign course is very small”. Others have postulated rare HIV attenuating mutations without providing functional evidence. Gallo et al. went even further by postulating human mutants, who fall victim of HIV because they lack “major HIV-suppressive factors”. According to Gallo’s hypothesis most American homosexuals, hemophiliacs and intravenous drug users are mutants!

Quoted from section:
6.8. Non-correlations between HIV and AIDS. (with references)

You may also want to consider:
7.8. Hiding evidence that AZT accelerates death, eleven examples.

The Drug-AIDS Hypothesis
By Peter Duesberg(a) and David Rasnick(b)
a) Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, 229 Stanley Hall, UC Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720, phone 510.642.6549, FAX 510.643.6455, email: duesberg@uclink4.berkeley.edu
b) Resident AIDS investigator at UC Berkeley, 229 Stanley Hall, UC Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720, phone (510) 642-6549, fax (415) 826-1241, email: rasnick@mindspring.com

The Drug-AIDS Hypothesis