Virtually all of the scientific community has taken a germ theory view of AIDS and accepted the theory that the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) is capable of causing a syndrome of ever advancing immune suppression from which you will eventually die.

However, a few lone heretics, such as leading University of California professor of molecular biology Peter Duesberg and Australian biophysicist Eleni Papadopulos Eleopulos have offered exhaustively referenced argument that HIV infection does not lead to AIDS and that the test is so inaccurate that it shouldn't be used. They have been vilified for their troubles, and Duesberg, named an outstanding Investigator by the American Cancer Institute, has had government funding withdrawn.

If they are only half right, the implications are indeed chilling. By rallying around the HIV theory, we may be erroneously lumping together under the umbrella term "AIDS" some 25 disparate, previously identified diseases acquired by a number of non contagious means (see box, p 2). This, coupled with the evidence about the inaccuracy of the tests, means that we could be misdiagnosing as HIV positive many thousands of basically healthy people and subjecting them to highly toxic, potentially lethal drugs, the side effects of which are now indistinguishable from what we consider AIDS related illness.

In a 76 page paper, which Duesberg published in Britain (Pharmacology and Therapeutics; 1992; 55: 201-77), he systematically takes apart the theory that AIDS is caused by an infectious virus and that HIV is capable of the wholesale destruction claimed. Co-discoverer of HIV Robert Gallo and others have based their theory of the HIV AIDS link on purely circumstantial evidence: that HIV seems to be present in all patients who have AIDS. Nevertheless, as long ago as 1989, Luc Montagnier, the French co-discoverer of HIV, admitted: "HIV is not capable of causing the destruction to the immune system which is seen in people with AIDS."

Duesberg quotes the Institute of Medicine's statistics which show that no more than about 50 per cent of American AIDS patients have antibodies against HIV. Furthermore, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta has confirmed the existence of cases reported of "T-lymphocyte depletion in persons without evident HIV infection" (JAMA, 9 September 1992).

Every direct measurement of AIDS is incompatible with all the classical criteria for infectious disease, says Duesberg. First of all, very few cells are actually infected with HIV the average is only one in 1500 to 8000 white blood cells in AIDS patients. In fact, many healthy HIV carriers have 40 times more HIV infected white blood cells than in AIDS patients. "Since on average only 0.1 per cent (1 out of 500 to 3000) of T-cells are ever infected by HIV in AIDS patients, but at least three per cent of all T-cells are regenerated. . . during the two days it takes a retrovirus to infect a cell. . . HIV could never kill enough T-cells to cause immunodeficiency," writes Duesberg. "Thus, even if HIV killed every infected T-cell. . . it could deplete T-cells only at 1/30 of their normal rate of regeneration. . . . " The odds of this desultory rate of annihilation being able to topple your immune system, he says, "would be the same as those of a bicycle rider trying to catch up with a jet airplane."