Duesberg's Alternative Aids Hypothesis

I've always been interested in alternative AIDS explanations. Mainly due to Public Enemy's Fear of a Black Planet album [I think] that mentioned the possibility of AIDS as a bioweapon. Developed, if I remember correctly, at Fort Detrick, Maryland. A disease that overwhelmingly targeted drug users, homosexuals and minorities seemed just too wonky to have developed by happenstance. Living in the Reagan Era, well, let's just say it didn't seem implausible. Obviously in no position to judge the scientific merits myself, but it's fascinating.

A Modern-Day Copernicus: Peter H. Duesberg by Donald W. Miller, Jr., MD:

"His principle work on HIV/AIDS is Inventing the AIDS Virus, published in 1996. In this book, and in other papers he has written on the subject, Duesberg systematically dismantles, piece by piece, the germ theory of AIDS. This theory/hypothesis has two parts: 1) HIV causes AIDS, and 2) HIV is sexually transmitted.

With regard to sexual transmission, only 1 in 1,000 unprotected sexual contacts transmit HIV. One in 275 U.S. citizens has antibodies to this virus. Therefore, an uninfected person would need to have 275,000 random unprotected sexual contacts in order to acquire sexually transmitted HIV. Prostitutes do not get AIDS, unless they are drug addicts; and wives of HIV-positive hemophiliacs do not contract AIDS from their husbands. Proponents of the HIV/AIDS hypothesis ignore these facts. The dire heterosexual AIDS epidemic predicted to occur in the U.S., Canada, and Europe twenty years ago has not happened, and the disease remains confined to the original two main risk groups – gay men (66 percent of all AIDS cases) and intravenous drug users, male and female (32 percent). The other 2 percent are hemophiliacs and babies born to mothers who used intravenous drugs during pregnancy.

...AIDS appeared in young gay men in the early 1980s following an explosion of recreational drug use that began twenty years earlier in the 1960s. Male homosexuals are the highest users of recreational drugs. AZT, given to people who are HIV-positive, first used in 1987, is another cause of AIDS. As Duesberg and coauthors show in this paper, a chemical (noninfectious) basis for AIDS is supported by a lot of important data. One fact is this, which government spokespersons and the media do not report: HIV-positive people treated with antiretroviral drugs have a four to five times higher annual mortality rate compared to HIV-positive people who refuse treatment with these drugs – 6.6–8.7 percent vs. 1.4 percent. Duesberg writes, "AIDS is stabilized, even cured, if patients stop using recreational drugs or AZT – regardless of the presence of HIV. The drug hypothesis predicts that AIDS is an entirely preventable and in part curable disease.""