Jean-Marc wrote: "On a more personal note, I was wondering if you could tell me how long it has been since you found out your were deemed HIV+. I am a bit surprised that you saw the effects of antiretroviral therapy and still believe there is no retrovirus responsible. I am not asking for evidence to support your rational and I don't want to get sidetracked but I would be interested in knowing how you reconcile the two."

In the interest of not getting sidetracked, I am sending the answer to this question as a separate email, since the short version of the story is quite long, and the longer version of the story is enough to write a book. (In fact, I am doing so as we speak: My book is called Living Proof - Confessions of an AIDS Survivor.) I will be replying fairly soon with a discussion of the Jackson and Brandt studies, but this email is more or less solely an aside from our main debate.

I was born with what for all practical intents and purposes might be called "AIDS". I was born with the worst case of thrush the doctor had ever seen (and yes, I realize that thrush is not uncommon among babies, but as I understand it I was an exceptional case.) Throughout Kindergarten and first grade, my fingernails would develop painful, oozing infections and the nails would rot off. In my teens, a mysterious fungal infection ate a hole in my septum large enough for a man to stick his pinky through. I've been plagued by fungal infections, staph infections, upper and lower respiratory infections, multiple autoimmune disorders, multiple chemical and allergen sensitivities of exceptional severity, arthritis, Crohn's disease, athsma, spontaneous nosebleeds, boils, blisters, and styes. On top of this, two of my sisters have developed AIDS-indicator diseases in their lifetimes (toxoplasmosis and hairy-cell leukoplakia.) Both sisters are HIV-negative.

In my adult life, this was further complicated by drug abuse, stress from spending 9 years as a crackhead's enabler, malnutrition (mostly due to Crohn's disease,) 10 years of corticosteroid and other medicinal drug use, and a wide variety of other factors which further stressed my already-dysfunctional immune system.

After about 4 years with the crackhead, I decided to leave her, moving into the spare bedroom of a couple I knew, who lived with 24 cats that were typically allowed to go outside, but which they'd been forced to keep indoors due to harrassment from the landlord. And, of course, as cats will do, they voiced their displeasure with this arrangement using their bladders.

After about 5 or 6 weeks of living there, I caught a flu that had been going around, but when everyone else recovered from this flu, I only got sicker with something flu-like, but not quite the original flu. The symptoms included a spiky temperature which ranged from as low as 93-and-change all the way up to brief spikes of up to 104. I had nausea, vomiting, wasting, night sweats, hallucinations, dyspnea, loss of appetite, body aches, flu-like symptoms, chronic respiratory infection, coughing, swollen lymph nodes, and all sorts of nasty stuff. After 5 weeks of this "flu", I decided, being bisexual, that it might be AIDS, and so I went to get tested in late December 1998, and got a positive result in 1999.

Now, when you test positive as an admitted bisexual male (I've seen it to be quite different for those considered to be "low risk",) the first thing they ask is "How did you get it?" Since my last time testing negative, the only time I'd been exposed to the bodily fluids of anyone I didn't know to be HIV-negative was once when a guy whose HIV status I didn't know removed a condom and ejaculated on my buttocks. I know, I know, that's like getting pregnant from a toilet seat -- every doctor I've ever talked to has said the same thing. But take your pick, either I "got pregnant from a toilet seat" or I'm a bona fide case of immaculate infection. Prior to this, I'd consistently tested negative for years, I'd been using condoms with all but one HIV-negative partner for 4 years, and I don't mean just using them, but making damn sure I was using them correctly, up to and including putting them on myself and removing them myself afterwards, so that I could inspect them for evidence of slippage, tears or apparent leaks. This was the one and only time I'd been in any way exposed to the bodily fluids of anyone but my partner of 4-years-and-counting at the time, and she's still HIV-negative to this day, even after an additional 5 years of having unprotected vaginal and anal intercourse with me, up to and including ejaculation.

Indeed, one of the reasons I never found out the guy's HIV status is that I got pissed at him for exposing me to his bodily fluids without my consent, and I never spoke to him again -- at that point, I hadn't been exposed to anyone's bodily fluids but one in years, and I was intent on keeping it that way for her protection and mine.

Needless to say, one of my main reasons for going back to my crackhead ex after I tested positive was that she showed a preference for unprotected sex with me, and at this point I was convinced that no other woman would love me as long as I lived, due to my HIV status. And, also needless to say, this did wonders for my stress level and other factors which were contributing to my ill health.

We moved into another apartment, and by this time I was beginning to suspect mold as a contributing factor in my illness, so I asked the landlady point-blank, before signing the lease, whether mold was likely to be a problem. She looked me in the eye and lied right through her teeth, claiming that the property had been closed for renovation for the past few years, and that all the building materials had been replaced with new materials. What she didn't mention was that the entire complex had been under 5 feet of water only a few years previously, and the "renovation" had consisted mainly of spray-painting over mildew-blackened sheetrock, wood, and tile. Needless to say, I continued to get even worse.

Meanwhile, the doctor through whom I was receiving care for "HIV infection" kept looking me right in my wheezing, gaunt, emaciated, rapidly-aging face, and telling me I was healthy as a horse. When I'd first started getting my numbers done, I'd had a CD4 count of 1445 and a viral load of 68,000, and when I'd started taking meds, my viral load had gone down to non-detectable and my CD4 count shot up to over 1700.

When I'd ask my doctor about the illness I continued to have, she'd simply shrug her shoulders, and point to my "excellent" numbers on a piece of paper (and at this point I'd like to point out that if I'd been HIV-negative, there's no way that a CD4 count of over 1700 would have been considered a sign of good health.) When I continued to insist that I was sick and getting worse, she took to loudly greeting me in the public areas of the clinic, referring to me as her "miracle patient". (And at this point, I'd like to take a moment to ask the question: Which one of us was in denial here, me or her?)

After only a year of taking ARVs, my triglycerides were through the roof and my liver enzymes were showing abnormalities, so she told me to quit taking the meds -- after all, with such a high CD4 count, my immune system would keep HIV at bay all by its lonesome, and the meds were probably doing more harm than good. When I quit taking them, my viral load momentarily shot up to 17,000, then tapered off, leveling off in the low 4-digit numbers and staying there until I quit getting my numbers monitored. My CD4 count remained high until later when I began to recover my health, and as my health rebounded, my CD4 count dropped, leveling off in the 900s, where it remained until I stopped getting monitored.

After two years of treating the illness (whose very existence my doctor denied,) as an "HIV infection", I developed an atypic pneumonia so severely that I could only take extremely shallow breaths -- only like a tablespoonful of air or so at a time, and even that came with a dear price in excruciating pain. It felt like my lungs were full of sharp-edged rocks and broken glass, and to breathe or even to move was extremely painful. I went to the ER, and when the chest X-rays showed atypic pneumonia, I had them forwarded to my doctor, who for the first time in 2 years actually acknowledged that I was sick, and referred me to a respiratory specialist, who in turn referred me to an allergist, who diagnosed exceptionally severe allergies to mold, dust mite waste, and cat dander. For the entire two years, I'd been continuously exposed to extraordinarily high levels to at least two if not all three allergens simultaneously.

As I mentioned earlier, I had a lot of unprotected vaginal and anal sex with the woman I'd been with when I supposedly "got" HIV, and since I broke it off with her, I've had two other long-term relationships, one with another woman with whom I had unprotected anal and vaginal intercourse, and in my current relationship, the only difference now is that I'm not having regular anal intercourse, since she's not into that as much as the other two were. However, she's a dissident, and as such we have unprotected sex every time we have sex. None of these three women have ever been diagnosed HIV-positive, after literally thousands of sexual contacts with me. All have been tested repeatedly, with the exception of the most recent, who has only been tested once, earlier this year.

So, on the one hand, we could assume that I got infected through momentary external exposure to the bodily fluids of someone who for all I know may have been HIV-negative himself, then proceeded to have unprotected vaginal and anal intercourse thousands of times without passing it on without ever giving it to anyone. On the other hand is the possibility that when my immune system went completely haywire in late 1998 due to multiple stressors, my antibody production went into overdrive and caused me to test false-positive on a set of antibody tests designed not to correlate to the actual virus, but to autoimmune disease and/or "risk behaviors."

Of that list of over 60 different factors known to cause false positives on HIV tests, at least half a dozen definitely apply to me and have been diagnosed as such. Another half-dozen or so I suspect apply to me, but have never been specifically diagnosed (for example, I've had arthritis since childhood, and the most common form of juvenile arthritis is rheumatoid arthritis, but no doctor has ever specifically called it rheumatoid arthritis, nor have I ever been tested for it.) Then there's another half-dozen or so items that I suspect might apply (such as hypergammaglobulinemia), but neither I nor any of my doctors have bothered to seriously look into it.

Now, on the one hand, there's the ever-so-slight possibility that I got HIV from a momentary external exposure to bodily fluids of someone who may or may not have been HIV-positive to begin with, and then proceeded to do everything a man might do to pass it on, never managing to give it to anyone, or there's the entirely plausible alternative explanation that I tested false-positive due to having at least half a dozen (and maybe more than a dozen) factors known to correlate to false-positive HIV antibody tests. Both might possibly explain the facts about my health and sexual history, but only one of them plausibly does so.

This debate is far from my first rodeo, and by this point I've read far more mainstream literature, cited against me in similar debates, than I've ever read of dissident literature (and I've extensively read dissident literature.) As a result of doing more reading of a wider variety of literature than most doctors, I have begun to develop a sense of context for what I have read, and everything I'm seeing points to a model of AIDS which is very similar to one particular current mainstream hypothesis, with one significant difference: The mainstream model assumes that HIV is necessary and sufficient to cause AIDS, and I maintain that both AIDS and "HIV seropositivity" have other causes entirely.

Without going into a long diatribe about my own personal hypothesis on AIDS (you'll find that unlike mainstreamers, dissidents can rarely agree 100% amongst ourselves, and each of us has his own hypothetical model of AIDS, which may agree with the guy next to us, or significantly disagree,) let me just say that my model is essentially the immune activation model of AIDS, and actually predates that model's rise to popularity, except that I contend that AIDS is multifactoral, rather than being caused by a single virus. Outside of that, both models make essentially the same predictions: That AIDS (as characterized by CD4 lymphocytopenia and associated autoimmune collapse), is the end result of years of immune hyperactivation, characterized not by low CD4 counts, but by elevated CD4 counts. They claim this is caused by HIV and I contend otherwise, but in all other respects, my model is the immune activation model, and I've been saying that this was the mechanism of AIDS since before the term "immune activation" was even being used in the context of AIDS.

According to my model, the particles commonly referred to as "HIV" may be an opportunistic infection that only AIDS patients are susceptible to, or it may be that they're non-viral, and nothing more than analagous to the smoke from the fire of one's immune system burning itself out.

So in answer to your question, what has convinced me that the effects of retroviral therapy don't necessarily prove the existence of the putative retrovirus, is the fact that after having read a large volume of literature from a wide variety of sources, both dissident and orthodox, I have a better explanation for AIDS, which explains even this, without necessitating the existence of some shape-shifting retrovirus that can mutate rapidly and indefinitely without losing its integrity as a species, and which can hide so well that even scientists can't culture it directly from the blood of AIDS patients, but it must instead be mass-produced by means of polymerase chain reaction, chemical stimulation, and/or co-culturing with leukemia cells in a process invented by Dr. Gallo for the sole purpose of "seeing" this magical invisible virus that couldn't be directly cultured from the blood of AIDS patients.

P.S. I'm still reading the studies you've sent, and I'm about ready to respond on all but one: The reverse transcriptase article. Unfortunately, I'm getting in over my head with the terminology in that paper, not to the extent that I fully don't understand what it's saying, but probably at least to the extent that I don't fully understand it, and I'd like to make sure I'm not missing anything important before discussing it. Would you be so kind as to provide me with a bit of detailed discussion of that particular article in my native laymanese?

Gos, Thank you for sharing your story. I must compliment you on your writing. You write very well and I must say I got a chuckle out of the cats expressing their displeasure with their bladders. Out of curiosity, did you get diagnosed HIV+ using just ELISA? I know they usually confirm with other tests. I also agree with you that your doctor seemed irresponsible in her handling of your case. High T-Cell counts are usually a sign of infection of some sort and with the normal range being 700-1000 she would seem to be very much in error in presuming there was nothing wrong with you at that time. In fact, one of the first things she should have done was check for allergies or infections. But I guess it is easy for me to say this looking at it in retrospect. As for the RT paper, I'd be happy to help in any way I can. If you want a general synopsis I can do that; if you want more technical related I can do that too. Just let me know what you need. And also again, thank you for being able to admit areas of difficulty. I have a lot of respect for people who can do that. -biolad (P.S. At this point you can either call me biolad or by my real name, Jean-Marc. Up to you.)

As per the standard in the US, I was diagnosed (or misdiagnosed, take your pick,) using the ELISA/WB combination. Initially, I lit up 5 bands of the WB. And, of course, as I mentioned earlier, I've had "viral load" counts as high as 68,000, and as low as non-detectable.

Jean-Marc wrote: "I also agree with you that your doctor seemed irresponsible in her handling of your case. High T-Cell counts are usually a sign of infection of some sort and with the normal range being 700-1000 she would seem to be very much in error in presuming there was nothing wrong with you at that time. In fact, one of the first things she should have done was check for allergies or infections. But I guess it is easy for me to say this looking at it in retrospect."

Yeah, that's the thing about hindsight, iddnit? In retrospect, a lot of things make better sense now than when I was making medical choices based on bad information. In retrospect, my high CD4 count was interpreted exactly the opposite from what it should have been, and I nearly died of something suspiciously resembling AIDS as a direct result of this (and I have no doubt that if I'd died, it would have been called "AIDS.")

But that's the whole thing about this AIDS construct, in a nutshell. You may not realize it, but there are two completely different sets of standards of care for those considered to be "at risk" for AIDS, and those considered to be "low risk". This extends literally all the way back to a point before the patient is even tested for HIV.

Many doctors are reluctant to test "low risk" patients, while those considered to be at risk are tested routinely. From even before a patient is tested, this sets up a selection bias in who is tested. The reason for this is that if they tested a bunch of nuns, some would come up positive if they tested enough of them. On the other hand, if you're a member of a "risk group", you're more likely to be getting tested regularly.

First, when I tested positive, (as an openly bisexual male,) I was told that the tests are "99.X%" accurate, and so I assumed (like so many) that this meant that there was a 99.X% chance that a positive was accurate. I'd had a respiratory infection, and even though respiratory infection is one of the factors known to cause false positives, I was never advised of the possibility of a false positive. Instead, I was immediately vaccinated for everything under the sun, and put on antiretrovirals. Vaccinations, as it turns out, can also contribute to one's tendency to test false-positive, so if we assume that I was false-positive at that point, then the vaccinations probably served to "lock in" that false positive.

My ex-girlfriend was Asian-American (considered a "low-risk" race,) from a well-to-do family, and routinely lied to her doctor and said that she was in a monogamous relationship with a man who had papers to show that he was HIV-negative, and that she'd been being a good girl and using condoms etc., when in reality she was having frequent unprotected anal and vaginal intercourse with a papered HIV-positive (me.)

So, long story short, she should have been considered "high risk", but instead she was considered "low risk", due to racial profiling and a few choice lies she'd told her doctor. I, on the other hand, probably should have in reality been considered "low risk", given how I supposedly "got" HIV, but I was considered "high risk" instead, strictly because I admitted being a bisexual male.

Now, she was about due for a checkup, when she developed a yeast infection, so she decided to kill two birds with one stone and see her doctor to check the yeast infection and to get her checkup done. That checkup included an HIV test, including WB, which came up positive. She was told that yeast infections can cause false positives, and her doctor wanted to treat the yeast infection first, and see her back in a month for a re-test.

I, on the other hand, was never in any way advised of the possibility of a false positive, until more than two years into medical treatment, when I began to openly question my doctors about what I was learning about AIDS. Then, all of a sudden, I needed to re-test, but by then the damage was done -- between the vaccinations and the two unnecessary years of preventable respiratory illness, I now test positive on all 10 bands of the WB, where I only tested positive on 5 before.

The end result of all of this is that due to factors involving race, social class, sexual preference, gender, and the lies that a patient told her doctor (and lest it be inferred that I resent her lying to her doctor, let me say that she did it with my hearty encouragement,) she is now a happy, healthy HIV-negative who would otherwise have been told that she had AIDS by the current CDC definition, if she'd been of a different race, a different social class, and/or if she'd told her doctor the truth about her sex life, and she'd probably be considered an AIDS case to this day, and treated as such whenever treated by a doctor.

I, on the other hand, went to the hospital with a flu in 2003 (a particularly bad flu season nationwide, which packed hospitals to capacity all over the place,) and was treated as an AIDS patient rather than a flu patient, and when I refused to sign for HIV testing, they tested me without my consent, and not only that, but the way I found out they'd tested me is that after I got out of the hospital, I got a call from a doctor affiliated with the hospital, to tell me that I'd tested positive. I'm no lawyer, but isn't that supposed to be illegal? (To add insult to injury, as I was being discharged from the hospital, I was slipped a pamphlet on domestic violence among gay men. I'd cracked a couple of ribs in a fight some weeks earlier, and apparently they'd seen the recently-healed injuries in the X-rays, put two-and-two together and come up with an abusive gay lover to account for the injuries.)

I honestly fear for my life, should I be forced into an emergency room somewhere by illness, because I receive a very different standard of care than the general public, and I've learned by hard experience that sometimes this can be deadly in and of itself, and if you die, the doctor that killed you is gonna shrug his shoulders, blame a "drug-resistant strain" of a nonexistent virus, and then enjoy a luncheon from one of the finer local restaurants, delivered to his clinic, paid for by the pharmaceutical rep who sold the drugs that caused your "AIDS-related" stroke. (Remember what I said earlier about delivery jobs? In one job I held, "pharm rep" orders often had built-in tips in the 3-digit figures, and some of the orders cost in excess of $1000. I know about these bribes, I used to deliver them to your doctor, and I watched the pretty young pharm rep flirt with him and stroke his ego, all the while "educating" him about her company's latest product.)

...If only I'd been as smart as my ex-girlfriend, and lied to my doctor, I might be considered HIV-negative today, just like her, and my doctors would have continued looking for the real cause of my illness, rather than concentrating immediately on an HIV infection that I seriously doubt I have in the first place.

I think that both of us are beginning to develop a whole new respect for one another. As heated as this debate has gotten at times, I get the feeling that whether we ever manage to come to some agreement about the nature of AIDS, we will emerge from this debate as friends. Tickled pink ta make your acquaintance! :)