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Earl Aagaard’s opinions about everything that interests him. Og also enjoys gardening, travel, reading, woodbutchery, and lots of other stuff.

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THERE ARE LOTS OF QUESTIONS ABOUT HIV AND AIDS

And a brief squib in a recent New Scientist magazine highlights an important one, even though it neglects to ask it explicitly.

But CD4 counts can vary a lot naturally so if you follow the WHO guidelines to the letter, then some people started on anti-retrovirals would not even be infected with HIV, he concludes.

World Health Organization guidelines recommend starting anti-retroviral drugs when someone’s CD4 cell count has fallen below 350 cells per microlitre, an indicator of HIV infection, or for people with symptoms of AIDS whose CD4 count has dropped to below 200. Brian Williams of the WHO and his colleagues studied HIV-positive and HIV-negative populations in eight African countries including Ethiopia, South Africa, Uganda and Zambia. They found that between 3 and 5 per cent of HIV-negative people had CD4 counts below 350.

Does this not make you sit up straighter? Anti-retroviral drugs are highly toxic, and the 2002 AIDS Conference noted that the #1 cause of death among those with AIDS in the U.S. was liver failure from the drugs they were taking. But now we’re being told that the WHO guidelines regarding an important “indicator of HIV infection” have no basis in our scientific knowledge of the immune systems of healthy people!

But that’s not all.

What’s more, when people with low pre-infection cell counts did contract HIV, and received anti-retrovirals, they survived for about nine years - the same as people with high counts (Journal of Infectious Diseases, vol 194, p 1450).

So here we learn that people with low CD4 counts - presumably indicative of bad immune function - survived at the same rate as people with higher counts, who SHOULD have been more immuno-competent, and therefore capable of longer survival.

What if CD4 counts vary among healthy people? Or what if the CD4 count for a healthy person varies over time—whether daily, monthly, yearly, or just in response to environmental conditions? Does anyone know this? Why not? In what other situation, with what other “disease”, could we see this kind of ignorance underlying the administration of “medicines” that are so devastating to many who take them? One more quote: