Wednesday, November 14, 2007

AIDS denialism

I've been waiting for this article to go on-line for a while now so that I could link to it (as I've just done.)

Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) has killed more than twenty-five million people and remains a major threat to humankind (UNAIDS 2006). The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) causes AIDS by undermining the immune system, eventually resulting in death (Simon et al. 2006). Although no cure has been discovered, scientific advances have resulted in the development of antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV (Brocklehurst 2006) and to extend the lives of AIDS patients (Smit et al. 2006). HIV has been isolated and photographed, and its genome has been fully described. Yet a group of AIDS denialists in Australia (the so-called Perth Group) insists that HIV does not exist—recently testifying to this effect in an Australian court in defense of Andre Parenzee, an HIV-positive man charged with having unprotected sex with several women and infecting one of them with HIV. Other AIDS denialists accept the existence of HIV but, following Peter Duesberg (a molecular biologist at the University of California), believe it to be harmless. What unites them all is the unshakable belief that the existing canon of AIDS science is wrong and that AIDS deaths are caused by malnutrition, narcotics, and ARV drugs themselves.
Read the rest to see how pseudoscience puts lives in danger.

1 comment:

magx01 said...

Ugh. All of this anti science, pseudoscientific denialism is really getting me into a state of despair.

How did we get into this mess? I guess scientists, scientific journals and schools, etc, need to start employing full time PR firms to counter this nonsense, becsase it seems as though this antiscience shit has really ramped up as of late, and they were caught unawares.