Conventional Wisdom: Words from the Mainstream

By Christine Maggiore
From the book “What if everything you thought about AIDS was wrong?”
HEAL Toronto

Word 1

"There is no definitive peer-reviewed scientific literature on the long term efficacy of protease inhibitors, yet it would be criminal not to use them."

--Dr. Charles Carpenter, Director, International Health Institute,
Brown University, Rolling Stone, March 6, 1997

Word 2

"Important safety information: About 5% (5 in 100) of patients who take ZIAGEN have a serious allergic reaction that may result in death. If you have skin rash or two of the FOLLOWING SYMPTOMS, STOP TAKING ZIAGEN AND CALL YOUR DOCTOR IMMEDIATELY: fever, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea or abdominal pain, severe tiredness, achiness, or generally ill feeling...

"The most common side effects of ZIAGEN are skin rashes...fever...nausea, vomiting...diarrhea...abdominal pain...tiredness...muscle and joint pain, generally ill feeling...Most of these side effects do not cause people to stop taking ZIAGEN."

--Glaxo-Wellcome ad for the anti-HIV drug ZIAGEN, March 1999

Word 3

"If the virus doesn't get you, the drugs you take will."

--Steve Gendin, Contributing Editor, POZ magazine, January 1999

Word 4

"One of the major barriers to effectively treating HIV is that most people do not feel sick at the time they are offered anti-HIV medications. In fact, it is only after starting the medications that they begin to feel sick."

--Dr. Lori Swick, The Toronto Star, September 24, 1999

Word 5

"Here we are, knocking down handfuls of drugs that nobody really knows a lot about...and as research keeps coming up with newer and better medications that we also don't know very much about, we'll take them anyway. We're knocking down chemicals that are totally, completely foreign to almost everyone, including nature...but with a little luck, a positive outlook, and good nutrition, health improvement will happen."

--Jennifer Jensen, RD (deceased), Nutritional advisor for the AIDS
organization Being Alive, Women Alive Newsletter, September 1997

Word 6

"Some new AIDS drugs are beginning to produce serious toxic conditions in patients: an increased prevalence of premature heart disease, a serious form of obesity known as lipodystrophy, and liver disease. What we have is a tremendous improvement over what we used to have, but we must find ways to reduce life-threatening toxicity. That's why the search for a cure for AIDS, however unlikely, should not be given up."

--Dr. Joep Lange, AIDS treatment specialist,
The Globe and Mail, May 4, 1999

Word 7

"Failures are occurring right and left...They aren't dying of traditionally defined AIDS illnesses. I don't know what they're dying of...but they're just wasting and dying. While we are making good guesses, they are just guesses. We don't know what we are doing."

--Dr. Michael Saag, AIDS researcher, University of Alabama
at Birmingham, Esquire magazine, April 1999

Word 8

"When there wasn't effective [AIDS] treatment, money being wasted didn't matter so much."

--Michael Weinstein, founder of the $45 million nonprofit
AIDS organization AIDS Health Care Foundation,
The Wall Street Journal, December 20, 1996

Word 9

"If the spread of HIV continues, by 2001 there could be ten billion people infected hypothetically...however the population of the world is only five billion. Could we be facing the threat of extinction during our lifetime?"

--Theresa Crenshaw, President's AIDS Commission, 1987,
SPIN magazine, June 1995

Word 10

"Remember the APLA position: HIV is a necessary but not sufficient cause of AIDS."

--Lee Klosinski, Education Division, AIDS Project Los Angeles,
memo to Speaker's Bureau volunteers, April 1993

Word 11

"Question for Class Discussion: You have just read some of the evidence for and against HIV being the cause of AIDS. Assuming you agree with the vast majority of HIV/AIDS investigators worldwide, that HIV does cause AIDS, do you think there comes a time at which dissenters forfeit their right to make claims on other people's time and trouble by the poverty of their arguments and by the wasted effort and exasperation they have caused?"

--AIDS Update 1999, a college textbook by Gerald J. Stein, PhD,
Prentice Hall Inc.

Word 12

"We don't know what the long-term effects of AZT use during pregnancy might be, but so far we have seen virtually no adverse effects in the short term...Not one single tumor. Not one...I mean [the children] have cancers, lymphomas, and other problems like that...but there's no reason to link those cancers to AZT."

--Dr. Ellen Cooper, Principal researcher of the Women and Infants
Transmission Study, Mothering magazine, September/October 1998

Word 13

"I know we've seen some webbed fingers...but these birth defects are cosmetic and don't interfere with life."

--Mary Caffrey, Nurse-practitioner, Pediatric Division of the
University of San Diego Medical Center, on AZT-generated
birth defects, Zenger's, Issue 63, September 1999

Word 14

"We are still very confused about the mechanisms that lead to CD4 T cell depletion, but at least now we are confused at a higher level of understanding."

--Dr. Paul Johnson, Harvard Medical School, Science magazine, May 1997

Word 15

"Sometimes we virologists have a virus in search of a disease."

--Dr. Robert Gallo, Virus Hunting, Basic Books, 1991

Word 16

"An AIDS vaccine should be ready for testing in about two years."

--Margaret Heckler, Head of Health and Human Services, April 24, 1984

Word 17

"Newark and New Jersey have begun casting their nets for test subjects for the world's first full-scale clinical trials of an AIDS vaccine. AIDSVax is a genetically engineered drug...that triggers [HIV] antibodies that may enable a person to better protect himself as soon as he is exposed to the real virus, before the immune system is devastated. Dr. Krim of AmFar said 'AIDSVax is worth a try. And even if it is ineffective, it will be a good rehearsal on how to recruit for and test other vaccines.'"

--The New York Times, June 8, 1999

Word 18

"The patients who have done the best are those who have lived long enough to realize that my previous advice was incorrect."

--Brian Gazzard, MD lecturing at the 12th World AIDS Conference,
Geneva, Switzerland, 1998